UNDERESTIMATE OF COCAINE FLOW IMPAIRS WAR ON DRUGS

Government authorities believe that they have badly underestimated the flow
of cocaine from Colombia and other drug-producing nations, a realization
that casts doubt on years of basic assumptions behind the war on drugs.

Intelligence officials are particularly alarmed over their discovery of a
new high-yield variety of coca being grown and processed in Colombia, the
No. 1 supplier of cocaine to the United States. That, together with a
growing acknowledgment that their methods for measuring narcotics
production may be seriously flawed, means that government estimates of
global drug trafficking are likely to "skyrocket" early next year, said
officials in the intelligence community.

Estimates of cocaine production in Colombia alone could triple, two
government sources said. "It's going to be big," said one senior
law-enforcement official who asked not to be identified.

The revised estimates, combined with a soon-to-be-released plan for
countering lax coordination among the various drug-intelligence agencies,
are likely to alter U.S. tactics in the drug war for years to come, sources
said.

Key policy-makers said that the estimates of worldwide drug production,
while imprecise, are critical in allocating drug-interdiction resources,
plotting strategy and influencing diplomatic relations with drug-producing
nations.

"The policymaker ought to have correct estimates of how [drugs are
flowing], patterns, where, when, so that you're not buying a bunch of Coast
Guard cutters to go to the eastern Caribbean if most of your smuggling is
on maritime craft in the eastern Pacific," Gen. Barry McCaffrey, head of
the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said in an interview.

Shortcomings:

Authorities have been working for several years to devise a better way to
track the global flow of drugs, combining their long-used satellite photos
of crop fields with new, more precise analyses of how poppy, coca and other
crops are processed into drugs for street sale.

But embarrassing shortcomings in the system became apparent last month
after U.S. and Colombian authorities broke up a major Latin American
cocaine ring. The volume of cocaine that they now believe the "Juvenal"
network was bringing into the United States -- up to 30 metric tons a month
- -- rivaled previous estimates of all cartel imports combined, officials said.

"There was just amazement that one organization would have the ability to
distribute that much cocaine a month," a law-enforcement official said.
"The whole Juvenal thing really just illustrates why we have to get our act
together in terms of reconciling these numbers."

Even before final estimates are made next year, government officials say
they already have begun trying to assess what they mean.

Some government officials believe that Latin American traffickers are
sending more cocaine to Europe than ever. Others think that growers are
stockpiling large supplies of the drug. Still others suggest that U.S.
residents are consuming more cocaine than previously feared.

But outside observers such as Mark Kleiman, director of the Drug Policy
Analysis Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, say that the
estimates are little more than guesswork used by the administration to hit
up Congress for more money. And they point to extensive surveys, emergency
room admissions and other data showing a decline in drug use in the United
States.

"More cocaine in the U.S.? Hard to believe," Kleiman said. "Where are all
the corpses?"

The scramble to get a better handle on worldwide drug flow comes at a
particularly critical time in U.S. relations with Colombia.

Anti-government rebels who control much of the narcotics trade have gained
strength in recent months, and Clinton administration officials argue that
only a major new infusion of cash to the Colombian government -- as much as
$1.5 billion -- can stop them.

A New Variety:

In Colombia, which produces 70 percent of the world's cocaine, a
combination of factors has scuttled the numbers that U.S. government
officials have used to shape anti-drug policy.

Cocaine producers there have developed an insidious variety of coca, but
U.S. intelligence agents have limited access to a key drug-growing region
that is controlled by the anti-government guerrillas. This has contributed
to U.S. authorities' flawed understanding of the region's growth and
processing methods.

For years, intelligence officials said, most of the coca grown in Colombia
was of a variety, "ipadu," whose leaves yield relatively small amounts of
cocaine. A higher-yield variety, E. coca coca, is grown in Peru and Bolivia
and sent to Colombia for processing and export.

So when satellite photos of Colombia taken late last year showed acre upon
acre of new fields of coca, U.S. intelligence officials assumed that the
Colombians were growing the same low-yield coca plants they long have
cultivated and they estimated that 165 metric tons of potential cocaine
were produced in Colombia.

But recent forays inside Colombia's cocaine-producing regions by
intelligence officials revealed that the crops are a third,
never-before-seen variety of coca that yields higher amounts of cocaine and
takes only a year -- rather than three -- to cultivate.