DRUG WAR POLITICS DEMAND THE HARD LINE AND SPENDING A BILLION OR SO

A billion dollars seems like a lot to spend for guilty
pleasure.

But that is what the Clinton administration proposes in Colombia - a
billion dollars to fight drugs this year, and another half billion in
2001.

There will be arguments in Congress, but what is really at stake is
pleasure, not politics. Americans seek pleasure, and so buy cocaine
and heroin in record amounts - but we are ashamed of what we perceive
as a weakness.

Blame the work ethic or our Puritan heritage, TV, boredom. The end
result is that even as we buy certain drugs, we make those drugs
illegal. For three decades, the United States has spent billions to
buy drugs and billions more to wage a "war" against those who sell and
use them, prompting us to arm ourselves as no modern nation ever has
in peacetime. Yet illegal drugs remain cheaper, more potent, available
and popular than ever.

Presidential elections loom, but no candidate acknowledges the utter
failure of the "war on drugs." Appearing tough on drugs remains a
political necessity. Republicans and Democrats alike share a view
encapsulated by Al Gore in a recent speech: cocaine and heroin are on
the wrong side of the "fundamental line between right and wrong in our
own minds and hearts."

True, Colombia produces most of the cocaine and heroin bought in the
United States. But Colombia may have little choice - the global
marketplace wants no more of its coffee, cattle or bananas. As Spanish
sociologist Manuel Castells has written, the cyber-empires need little
from the likes of Colombia. Criminal activity becomes one of the few
ways left to engage in the market - Castells calls it the "perverse
connection."

America's drug warriors want to kill coca and opium from the air.
State Department pilots can spray herbicide in the morning and be back
in time for cocktails, without touching toe to ground. It's like
Kosovo, only here corn and beans suffer collateral damage.

Clinton authorized the flights in 1994. By 1999, anyone with pen and
paper could see the United States was losing dramatically - the area
devoted to coca cultivation has exploded and now tops 222,000 acres
and rising.

Some argue that this is a direct result of U.S. policy. In the late
1980s, the United States cut the air routes that fed Peruvian and
Bolivian coca to Colombian refiners. Instead of giving up, traffickers
planted in Colombia and opened new areas along the border with Venezuela.

The shift of coca to Colombia also helped strengthen Colombia's
irregular armies. The leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC) and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN) make millions
off drugs. So do the right-wing civilian irregulars known as
paramilitaries who, with the acquiescence and at times open support of
the army, control much of northern Colombia, where drugs are refined
and packed for shipment.

The resulting war has converted Colombia into what one observer calls
an "archipelago of bloody little independent republics." In 1999
alone, Colombian authorities recorded more than 400 massacres carried
out for political reasons. More than 1.5 million Colombians are
internal refugees, double the number of Albanian Kosovars who fled
Serbs at the peak of their terror.

In short, the war on drugs has not only failed, it has helped push
Colombia to the brink of dissolution.

Will more cash help? The proposed plan, far from strengthening
Colombia's faltering democracy, calls for opening the floodgates of
military aid.

And for the first time, Colombia's abusive military will be our
closest allies - their criminal past is history, according to drug
warriors (a conclusion disputed by Colombian and international human
rights groups).

Fresh from massive U.S. training and equipped with the latest in
weaponry, the military will vanquish the "narco-guerrilla" threat and
eliminate illegal drugs forever.

There is, of course, no mention of the glaring fact that eradication
has already failed. Now, it will fail under a cloud of U.S. tolerance
for human rights abusers.

Colombia faces a mortal paradox. The only Colombian products that
developed countries will pay reliably and well for are cocaine and
heroin - the best customers will continue to punish it for providing
exactly what they demand.

As one congressional aide explained to me, Democrats and Republicans
agree that the American public wants to see action - not necessarily
results - on drugs. "And the best way to do that is to say you are
going to send money, a lot of money." What actually happens to the
money is apparently, at least for the moment, beside the point.