WE'RE FIGHTING THE DRUG WAR ON THE WRONG FRONT

COLOMBIA has received almost a billion dollars of anti-narcotics aid since
1990. U.S. tax dollars are magnificent fertilizer: coca production is
skyrocketing -- doubling since 1996 and forecast to increase another 50
percent in the next two years.

Colombia now supplies roughly three-quarters of the heroin and almost all
the cocaine consumed in the United States.

46or the Clinton administration, the obvious solution to this problem is
more U.S. tax dollars. On July 16, drug czar Barry McCaffrey proposed an
emergency billion-dollar anti-drug package for the Andean nations,
including $600 million for Colombia.

The Clinton administration subsequently indicated the aid package might go
even higher.

The United States is foisting itself deeper into a civil war that has raged
in Colombia for decades. There are approximately 200 U.S. military advisers
already on site, and U.S. personnel are now actively training the Colombia
military.

The Dallas Morning News recently noted reports that ``tens of millions of
taxpayer dollars are going into covert operations across southern Colombia
employing, among others, U.S. Special Forces, former Green Berets, Gulf War
veterans and even a few figures from covert CIA-backed operations in
Central America during the 1980s.''

The United States is providing key intelligence to the Colombian military
from U.S. intercepts of guerrilla radio messages.

Congress in 1996 prohibited any U.S. foreign aid to military organizations
with a penchant for atrocities. The Colombian army has a frightful human
rights record, but few in Congress seem to care about the administration's
open flouting of the law2E

Most U.S. anti-drug aid has paid for chemical warfare: blanketing
coca-growing areas with herbicides from crop-duster planes and helicopter
gun ships. Yet after continual escalation in the amount of spraying, the
amount of land in coca production is four times greater than what it was in
1994, and now exceeds 300 square miles.

Many farmers raising non-coca crops have been devastated by herbicides
dropped indiscriminately on their fields. The Colombian minister of health
strongly opposed the initiation of spraying in 1992.

Coca farmers have responded to the attacks in part by going deeper into the
jungles and hacking out new land for planting; environmentalists complain
that herbicide attacks are a major cause of deforestation.

Colombian environmental minister Juan Mayr publicly declared last year that
the crop spraying program has been a failure and warned, ``We can't
permanently fumigate the country.''

The Clinton administration has intensely pressured the Colombian government
to allow a much more toxic chemical (tebuthiuron, known as SPIKE 20) to be
dumped across the land, which would permit the planes to fly at much higher
altitudes, Kosovo-style.

Environmentalists warn that SPIKE 20 could poison ground water and
permanently ruin the land for agriculture. Even as the Clinton
administration decreed clean air standards strictly controlling Americans'
exposure to chemicals that pose little or no health threat, it sought to
deluge a foreign land with a toxic chemical in a way that would be
forbidden in the United States.

Increased U.S. aid will not enable the Colombian government to win a
decisive victory over the guerrillas any time soon. The Colombian military
is renown for losing almost all the major engagements it fights with the
guerrillas.

Even if the guerrillas are defeated, it's ludicrous to pretend that
Colombians will no longer have an incentive to grow coca -- as long as U.S.
laws make that crop 20 times more profitable than any other.

It is time to admit that, regardless of how many temper tantrums U.S.
politicians throw, the laws of supply and demand will trump posturing every
time.

James Bovard is an independent journalist and the author of ``Freedom in
Chains'' (St. Martin's Press, 1999). This column is adapted from an article
in the current American Spectator.