BILL AND LLOYD'S EXCELLENT DRUG WAR

Question: When is a war not a war? Answer: When the focus groups prefer the
term "balanced approach."

That's all you really need to know about how drug policy has changed since
the bad old days of Ronald Reagan's "War on Drugs." The John Wayne rhetoric
has lost its political appeal and been replaced with the soothing
vocabulary of Mr. Rogers. Beyond that, drug policy is just as vicious,
stupid and destructive as ever.

This was demonstrated twice last week, once by an American, then by one of
our own. First up was Bill Clinton, the Zen master of mendacity. In his
seven years in power, Clinton's speeches about drugs have been models of
moderation, and even his drug czar, a retired general, says he hates the
term "drug war" because it doesn't reflect the "balanced approach" he
prefers. Of course, the number of Americans arrested for drug crimes is now
at an all-time high, as is the number of Americans in prison and the size
of the federal anti-drug budget, but Clinton has never been one to let mere
facts spoil a good lie.

Last week, Clinton announced that he would give Colombia, the primary
source of drugs in the U.S., $1.3 billion to fight drug producers and
traffickers. This is on top of existing dollars going to Colombia, which
was already the third-largest recipient of American foreign aid. The latest
cheque will purchase 63 military helicopters, equip two more
counter-narcotics battalions, pay farmers who stop growing coca and poppy
plants and strengthen the judicial system.

This is part of what Colombian President Andres Pastrana calls his
"Colombia Plan," a $7.5-billion U.S. strategy that needs $3.5 billion in
foreign contributions. The Americans are making the diplomatic rounds to
get other countries to kick in.

It all sounds so "co-operative" and "balanced," it feels almost churlish to
point out that every part of this scheme has been tried and failed.

"Take my word," George Bush said in 1989, after the anti-drug budget had
already tripled under his predecessor, "this scourge will stop." To that
end, Bush energetically tackled South American drug production with a list
of policies all but identical to those funded by Clinton last week.

Bush's plan, according to a Cabinet document, would cut Latin America's
drug production in half by 1993. Four years and $2 billion U.S. later,
cocaine production had increased 15 per cent.

And it has only gone up from there. The CIA will soon release its estimate
of Colombian cocaine output in 1999 and, according to the White House
itself, it's going to be shocking: Production has tripled in one year.

So, having failed to knock down the wall by smashing their heads against
it, the U.S. and Colombia will once again bash their heads against it.

For the Colombians, that's not as insane as it sounds. Were they to desert
the drug war, the U.S. would pull their aid and isolate them diplomatically
and economically. That would mean collapse, so Colombia does what it must.

But for the Americans, this pig-headedness is even more mad than it seems.
Most of the problems the U.S. is paying to fight in Colombia are the result
of trying to suppress the drug trade in the first place. Colombia's Marxist
rebels, for one, are only as strong as they are because they make $100
million a year "taxing" the drug cartels, who can afford to pay because
prohibition vastly inflates their profits. Those profits also allow the
cartels to pay multi-million dollar bribes to corrupt judges, police and
politicians, and hire private squads to murder the few who refuse the
bribes. And on it goes. The U.S. is fighting a jungle fire by spraying
gasoline.

But we Canucks can't be too smug about this. On Friday, Foreign Affairs
Minister Lloyd Axworthy announced that Canada, too, will join the
head-bashers' conga line and fund the training of Colombian officials in
anti-trafficking, prosecution and demand-reduction techniques.

Axworthy, like Clinton, naturally couched this in snuggly rhetoric, but
make no mistake: Our contribution is part of a plan that revolves around
Blackhawk helicopters and jungle warfare.

That might be defensible if there were even the slightest chance it might
work. But there isn't. It will not cause a serious drop in the production
of Colombian cocaine, nor will it have even a minor effect on the total
cocaine that gets into Western markets.

The only sure outcome of this "balanced approach" will be even more harm to
the Colombian economy, more demolished farms and villages, more corruption,
more kidnapping, torture and murder.

It's enough to make me nostalgic for the days when a war was called a war.