MORE DOLLARS FOR HOPELESS DRUG WAR

Years ago, I had a very dear friend who began using cocaine, as
millions do. He would stay up all night and have a great time. I knew
from my college experience that most people who try that drug, despite
its potential for negative impacts on their health, do not become
addicted and do not destroy their lives with it.

Consequently, I didn't think much about it, at first.

After a while, though, it became a problem.

I didn't use it myself, and I didn't like the effect it had on his
personality. It began to push us apart. Soon it became clear he was
among the unlucky fraction that succumbs to the addictive properties
of the drug. It changed him, in frightening ways. He stayed up for
days. He began to look sickly and tense, even when he wasn't using.

The color in his flesh faded as the addiction gripped his soul. I was
still very young then. I wanted to help him, but I felt helpless.

I desperately wanted to do the right thing, but I had no idea what to
do. One could say that we as a nation have shared this feeling in our
collective conscience throughout the failed war on drugs. We have
been told for almost 20 years that the way to stop such human damage
is to fight a war on an inhuman enemy. Along the way, relatively
little has been done to treat and heal the human damage itself. Now
the Clinton administration has proposed an aid package that will take
the drug war to a new level.

It proposes to spend $1.3 billion fighting the drug war in Colombia
over the next two years.

Almost $1 billion will take the form of military aid to the Colombian
armed forces, which have by far the most abusive human rights record
in this hemisphere. It is no coincidence the Colombian military has
sent more soldiers to the U.S. Army School of the Americas than any
other Latin American military. Counting an additional $300 million
that was already spent last year, more than 80 percent of the $1.6
billion total is in military aid. Another $100 million will be spent
spraying poisonous herbicides all over the Colombian countryside in an
effort to eradicate cultivation of coca and poppy plants. Meanwhile,
less than 10 percent will be spent on the kind of crop substitution
programs that have been proven to work. Only a tiny fraction will be
spent to help reform the corrupt Colombian judicial system.

This latest brainchild comes despite mounds of evidence showing it
will do little to stem the flow of drugs. A few years ago, the Rand
Corp. released a major study showing that the least effective
expenditures in the drug war were those spent on eradication and
suppression of the source in the country of origin. The study found
the most effective dollars were those spent here in the United States,
treating and preventing the human damage caused by drug addiction.
But do we really need an arcane study to tell us this? This is simple
common sense: We should deal with our own problem here, by reducing
the demand, rather than continuing to externalize our problem by
attempting - and failing - to reduce the supply.

As long as millions of people spend billions of dollars on illegal
drugs here, many thousands of small farmers in Colombia and elsewhere
will be willing to risk retribution to grow coca or poppies and get 20
times the price they would for any other crop. This is the sort of
simple market dynamics that free traders such as our own Rep. Jim
Kolbe should readily understand. Congress should reject the
administration's expensive proposal based on this analysis alone: It
simply will not work.

But there is an even greater issue at stake here. The war on drugs
may be fought against an inhuman enemy, but its victims are indeed
human. They are the addicts, whose need for treatment centers and
health care is ignored. They are the general users, especially people
of color, whose rights are routinely violated as they are rounded up
in ever greater numbers by an increasingly repressive and racist
justice system. They are the families that are destroyed when the
providers are carted off to prison for simple possession or small-time
dealing.

They are the children who grow up in violent neighborhoods where
economic alternatives to the drug trade are few and far between. They
are Colombians, whose civil institutions are corrupted by the
distortions of billions of dollars pouring in from U.S. drug consumers
and who suffer from the violence that is fueled by so much illicit
money.

Colombians have suffered much already from a civil conflict that has
raged for years. It has displaced more than 1.5 million people, twice
the number as the Kosovo conflict. A repressive regime continues to
massacre civilians, while guerrillas kidnap for ransom and destroy
badly needed infrastructure. Drug money now fuels both sides of this
conflict. The guerrillas protect growers and tax the trade, while the
army and its surrogate paramilitaries are involved directly in
trafficking. Colombians are weary of the seemingly endless cycle of
violence, and now our government proposes to throw another $1 billion
worth of gas on this fire.

Much of the military aid will take the form of Special Forces
''counter-narcotics'' training. U.S. Army Special Forces members
themselves have admitted there is little difference between
counter-narcotics training and the sort of counterinsurgency training
that has resulted in endemic human rights abuses in El Salvador,
Guatemala, East Timor and elsewhere. In fact, the trainers are some
of the very same units that have been working with the abusive
Colombian military for years.

The results of this latest proposal are likely to be more of the same:
Drugs will continue to flow and Colombians will continue to die. A
more logical and humanitarian aid package to Colombia would emphasize
relief aid for people displaced by the violence, crop substitution
programs for poor desperate farmers and programs to strengthen
investigations into corruption and human rights abuses. Meanwhile,
the administration should pressure the Colombian regime to negotiate
in good faith with the guerrillas. A more logical and humanitarian
strategy for the $18 billion a year we spend fighting drugs would
emphasize treatment and prevention, rather than the two-thirds that is
now spent on interdiction and law enforcement.

U.S. taxpayers should consider well the nature of the Clinton
administration's aid package before deciding which way their
representatives should vote. It looks more like the Cold War than the
drug war. As for the drug war, all of us should ask ourselves this
question: How many Colombians will our tax dollars kill before we feel
as if we're doing the right thing?