POISONED CROPS AND A FAILED DRUG POLICY

In July 2007, Teresa Ortega stood solemnly in a field of wilting corn
and pineapple crops as tears streamed down her cheeks. She had taken
it upon herself to start a farm with 100 widows - women who lost their
husbands and children to Colombia's war and were fighting against
poverty. Together they had purchased this small farm and worked it on
the weekends to make ends meet. Now - after a plane sprayed chemicals
over their farm - all was lost.

To bureaucrats in Washington, Teresa and her friends are simply
additional collateral damage ground zero of Washington's drug war in
South America.

Between 2000 and 2007, the U.S. government spent over half a billion
dollars spraying a chemical defoliant on approximately 2.6 million
acres of land in Colombia - the world's second most bio-diverse
country - as a novel new drug control strategy.

Yet according to U.S. government figures, coca production - the raw
material for cocaine and the "target" of this fumigation - grew from
302,575 acres in 1999, the year before U.S.-backed fumigations began
in earnest, to 412,490 acres in 2007. Half a billion dollars bought
U.S. taxpayers not the promised 50 percent drop in coca production,
but rather a 36 percent increase. In a recent congressionally
commissioned report, the Government Accountability Office suggested
our goal in Colombia "was not fully achieved." Teresa would say our
policy has been a complete failure.

Yet Teresa would focus less on Washington bean counters' concerns over
the terrible cost-effectiveness ratio of fumigation and more on the
human cost. In recent years, at least 10,000 farmers have filed
reports of food crops killed by fumigations.

There is a reason that Colombia - source of 90 percent of America's
cocaine - is the only country in the world that employs aerial
chemical spraying as a drug control policy. The chemical mixture
employed in the spraying has never been tested adequately for
environmental or human health impacts. Yet people on the ground in
affected regions and a growing chorus of experts indicate that the
spray harms both. New research has shown that amphibian wildlife in
this land critical for its bio-diversity are put at substantial risk
by the spray mixture's main ingredient, glyphosate. And now the United
Nations Special Rapporteur on Health has indicated there is "credible
and trustworthy evidence" that fumigations are harmful to human health.

Almost a decade ago, U.S. policymakers promised taxpayers that a
billion-dollar investment in a new drug control strategy in Colombia
would mean reduced cocaine on our streets. By all measures - ethical,
moral and effectiveness - chemical spraying in the Amazon basin is a
failed policy. As hard as it may be for true believers in Washington,
it is time to admit our mistake and shift direction to proven drug
policies, including demand reduction and treatment. We will then need
to apologize and provide compensation to people like Teresa Ortega and
tens of thousands of Colombians who have been the collateral damage of
this failed policy.