U.S. ANTI-COCAINE EFFORT FAILS

'Plan Colombia' Produces No Effect

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA - The latest chapter in America's long war on drugs -
a six-year, $4.7 billion effort to slash Colombia's coca crop - has
left the price, quality and availability of cocaine on American
streets virtually unchanged.

The effort, begun in 2000 and known as Plan Colombia, had a specific
goal of halving Colombia's coca crop in five years. That has not
happened. Instead, drug policy experts say, coca, the essential
ingredient for cocaine, has been redistributed to smaller and
harder-to-reach plots, adding to the cost and difficulty of the drug
war.

Bush administration officials say that coca farmers are on the run,
and that the leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries who feed
on drug profits are weaker than ever. That has made Colombia,
Washington's closest ally in a tumultuous region, more stable, they
say. They argue that the plan has scored important successes, like a
spike in the price of cocaine last year.

But that claim was disputed by drug policy experts, and in fact a wide
range of them, and some politicians, are questioning the drug war's
results, as well as its assumptions.

The plan seemed simple enough. "The closer we can attack to the
source, the greater the likelihood of halting the flow of drugs
altogether," a State Department report said soon after Plan Colombia
began. "If we destroy crops or force them to remain unharvested, no
drugs will enter the system."

Yet recent data show the following results:

As much coca is cultivated today in Colombia as was grown at the
start of the large-scale aerial fumigation effort in 2000, according
to State Department figures.

Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, the leading sources of coca and cocaine,
produce more than enough cocaine to satisfy world demand, and possibly
as much tonnage as in the mid-1990s, the United Nations says.

In the United States, the government's tracking over the past
quarter-century shows that the price of cocaine has tumbled and that
purity remains high, signs that the drug is as available as ever.

Russell Crandall, a former adviser to the White House and the author
of "Driven by Drugs," a book on the drug war in the Andes, said, "If
we were to evaluate Plan Colombia by its initial overriding criteria,
the results of the drug war have been dubious at best."