Posted at 3:27 p.m. PDT Tuesday, July 22, 1997

Drug sales top car sales says U.N. official

Reuters

BOGOTA The international drug trade is worth more than world automobile
sales, a leading United Nations drug official said Tuesday.

Klaus Nyholm, head of the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP)
in Colombia, said the international narcotics trade is worth an estimated $400
billion dollars annually, or about eight percent of the total value of legitimate
international commerce.

``That figure surpasses the total trade in automobiles, and is about equal to the
total trade in textiles,'' Nyholm said during a conference in Bogota on the
illegal drug trade.

He said Colombia was by far the world's leading producer and distributor of
cocaine and was emerging as an important producer of heroin.

According to U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) figures, Colombia
is the source of about 80 percent of the world cocaine supply and has edged out
southeast Asia's Golden Triangle as the main supplier of heroin to the United
States.

Horacio Serpa, President Ernesto Samper's former righthand man and
shaping up as one of the leading contenders for the 1998 presidential elections,
reiterated comments that consumer countries like the United States were
failing to share the blame for international narcotics problems.

``Consumption and production are like two sides of the same coin, you can't
separate them,'' Serpa, who also addressed the conference, said. ``The United
States must recognize its responsibility and stop treating Colombia like a
pariah.''

U.S.Colombian relations reached an alltime low in May when Washington
blacklisted, or ``decertified'', Colombia for the second consecutive year for its
failure to crack down hard enough on drug trafficking.

| Mercury Center Home | Index | Feedback |
©19967 Mercury Center. The information you receive online from Mercury
Center is protected by the copyright laws
of the United States. The copyright laws prohibit any copying, redistributing,
retransmitting, or repurposing of any
copyrightprotected material.