ENDING 'DRUG WAR' COULD SAVE US $150 MILLION

Let me go over my "this one has got to go" checklist one more time.
Costly? Some in Washington will disagree, but $150 million is still a
lot of money to me. Ineffective? The goal was a 50 percent reduction
in drug crop production and seven years later we have a 23 percent
increase, so I'd say "ineffective" is on target. Unethical? Even the
most stone-faced on Capitol Hill would have to admit that spraying an
untested chemical mixture over innocent civilians despite the U.N.'s
claim that there is "credible and trustworthy evidence" suggesting
human health impacts would qualify as unethical.

In 2000, President Clinton and Congress decided to try something new
in the Drug War. Colombia produced 90 percent of the cocaine consumed
in the United States and, despite years of anti-drug efforts, there
was no reduction in the flow of drugs north. Thus a $1.3 billion
dollar emergency supplemental appropriation to fight drug production
in Colombia was born. The primary tool contemplated was a
controversial chemical spray program using crop dusters to target
coca, the raw material for cocaine.

Nearly $500 million was spent on an exponential growth in the spray
program, from 43,246 hectares sprayed in 2000 to 133,496 hectares in 2008.

Yet despite spraying 2.6 million acres in Colombia from 2000 through
2007, coca production actually increased by 23 percent and today
Colombia still produces 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the
United States. Maybe there is a reason no other country in the world
employs an aerial spray program for counter-narcotics purposes.

But to suggest that this policy has simply been ineffective would
ignore the devastating impact it has had on Colombians. An untold
number of family farmers have been wrongly targeted. According to the
State Department, 7,750 of them have filed official complaints for
wrongful fumigation since 2001. Thousands who turned to coca
production to make a modest living -- experts estimate an average
coca farmer has a gross annual income of $7,000 -- responded to calls
to leave behind coca production and join alternative development
programs, only to see those new crops destroyed when the fumigation
planes mistakenly targeted them.

Colombians were told that spraying an untested chemical mixture over
farms and homes) from planes in the second-most bio-diverse country
in the world would not cause human health or environmental problems.
Today early evidence suggests that both human health and the
environment were indeed put at risk by this program.

Thousands of health complaints reported in recently sprayed
communities were corroborated when the U.N. Special Rapporteur on
Health conducted a field visit and determined that there is "credible
and trustworthy evidence" that fumigations are harmful to human health.

New reports suggest disturbing environmental impacts of the spray
program in the Amazon basin region as well. A recent scientific study
revealed that 50 percent of amphibians were killed in less than 96
hours by exposure to the spray program's chemical mixture. And the
U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime further indicated that fumigation
leads to deforestation as coca farmers move deeper into virgin forest
to avoid being sprayed. The U.N. estimates nearly 400,000 acres of
virgin forests were razed by such farmers between 2001 and 2007.

Given the horrendous decade-long track record of this
counter-narcotics spray program in Colombia -- no reduction in drug
production, wrongfully sprayed farmers combined with human health and
environmental impacts -- Congress needs to send it to the trash bin.

Cutting the bankrupt aerial spray program could save taxpayers $150
million dollars next year, still a lot of money where I'm from.