FLOW OF COCAINE UNDERESTIMATED

Colombian High-Yield Plants Imperil Drug War, U.S. Says

WASHINGTON -- U.S. authorities believe they have significantly
underestimated the flow of cocaine out of Colombia and other
drug-producing nations, a realization that casts doubt on years of
assumptions behind the war on drugs and that likely will change U.S.
tactics.

Drug-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 drug-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 $17.8 billion drug
war for years to come, sources said.

Estimates essential

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 policy-maker 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.

Yet the new numbers jeopardize McCaffrey's ambitious goals for cutting
narcotics supplies to the United States 25 percent by 2002 and 50
percent by 2007. Some critics of U.S. policy are already demanding an
end to the nation's war on drugs. News of higher cocaine and heroin
production, as well as an explosion in border confiscations of the
designer drug Ecstasy, could bolster their arguments that current
anti-drug strategies are failing.

Authorities have been working quietly 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.

Flow from Juvenal

``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.''

Indeed, 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.

UCLA expert's view

But outside observers such as Mark A.R. 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
Clinton 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?''

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, which 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.