MISGUIDED? $1 .7 BILLION FOR COLOMBIA IS NUTS

We're about to spend $1.7 billion to escalate the drug war in Colombia,
while here at home we have 3.6 million addicts not receiving the treatment
they need.

On Thursday, the House of Representatives will vote on an emergency aid
package initiated by the White House and enthusiastically backed by the
House Republican leadership. It's a product of the drug war's perverse
priorities and another example of the disturbing link between campaign cash
and public policy.

Let's start with the cash spread around to help grease the wheels for the
aid bonanza. The Colombian government hired Vernon Jordan's old law firm ---
Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, which he has since left - to stump for it
on The Hill.

Indeed, when the House Appropriations Committee met last week to consider
the White House proposal, a member of the committee, Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr.
D-Ill, noticed that an Akin, Gump lobbyist was in attendance. He must have
gone away happy. The committee not only approved the president's $1.2
billion request but added another $500 million.

The Colombians have other powerful allies in Washington. Most persistent has
been a collection of multinational corporations with operations in
Colombia --- including Occidental Petroleum, BP Amoco and Enron --- that has
been lobbying both Congress and the administration for a big-buck package
that would serve their business interests there.

And speaking of business interests, more than $400 million of the aid will
be spent on the purchase of 63 helicopters manufactured by two U.S.
firms --- Sikorsky Aircraft, a subsidiary of United Technology and Bell
Helicopter Textron.

In the last two election cycles, Textron and its employees donated close to
a million dollars to both Republicans and Democrats, and United Technologies
gave more than $700,000.

"It's business for us, and we are as aggressive as anybody," one Bell
Helicopter lobbyist told Legal Times, "I'm just trying, to sell
helicopters,"

Underscoring the incestuous relationship between commerce and drug policy,
Tom Umberg the architect of the administration's Colombian initiative, is
moving from the White House Office of Drug Control Policy to the law firm of
Morrison & Foster to represent Colombia and other Latin American countries
on trade issues.

Colombia is in the midst of a protracted three-way civil war, pitting the
Colombian army, which has one of the worst human-rights records in the
Western Hemisphere, against leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitary
groups, both largely funded by the drug trade.

The army will receive the largest share of the U.S. money, prompting senior
defense officials to express privately their fear that our military's
expanding role in fighting the war on drugs could draw the United States
into another Vietnam.

Maybe that's why the Clinton administration decided to introduce the
Colombian aid as part of a larger emergency-spending package, The
potentially controversial measure is bundled with proposals only a
coldhearted misanthrope would oppose.

Along with the money for Colombia, the bill includes $2.2 billion for relief
from natural disasters such as Hurricane Floyd and $854 million for military
health care.

It's an old legislative ploy designed to squelch debate and force
politicians to vote for wasteful --- or even terrible --- measures just
because they don't want to be painted as being against God, country and
disaster relief.

Jackson is one of the members who will nevertheless vote against the bill.

"It's absurd," he told me. "There wasn't even any language added tying the
aid to human-rights concerns. And (Rep.) Nancy Pelosi's (D.-San Francisco)
amendment to spend equivalent amounts of money on the demand side was
defeated during the Appropriations Committee mark-up --- even though
treatment has been proven to be 23 times more cost-effective than
eradication of crops and 11 times more cost-effective than interdiction."

The cost of the helicopters alone would provide treatment for almost 200,000
substance user's or drug-prevention services for more than 4 million
Americans.

When Richard Nixon --- hardly one to be accused of being soft on crime ---
declared a war on drugs in 1971, he directed more than 60 percent of the
funds into treatment. Now, we're down to 18 percent. This despite the fact
that drug czar Barry McCaffrey's budget is expected to rise to a proposed
$19.2 billion next year.

Since 1980, the emphasis has turned to interdiction, crop eradication,
border surveillance and punishment

It's been a misguided use of resources. But putting $1.7 billion into
Colombia, in the middle of a civil war, is more than misguided --- it's
nuts. And if it's not voted down in the House on Thursday, it needs to be
stopped in the Senate.

Arianna Huffington's e-mail address is arianna@ariannaonline.com Her new
book, "How to Overthrow the Government," is published by Harper-Collins.