DYING FOR THE WHITE STUFF

Of the thousand shades of green that wash the hills of tayron
national park the lightest is the coca leaf.

Seen from the air, mud trails spread like yellow veins into the
forest, each ending in burnt black scars. These clearances give way
to dense coca fields as the growers move deeper into the primary
forest, hacking and slashing as they go. Cocaine labs speckle the
high ground, hoisted on stilts and wrapped in black polythene against
the rain.

These hills that rise out of the Caribbean Sea near Santa Marta in
northern Colombia are the latest front in a losing battle to stop the
"white stuff" that's arriving in ever greater quantities into the West.

While Europeans are turning in record numbers to cocaine for
recreational purposes, Colombia's environment and its people are
paying the price. The country has been left with three million
internal refugees from drug-fuelled conflicts; a rapidly diminishing
rainforest; the worst landmine problem in the world; and indigenous
tribes driven from their homelands deep in the Amazon. Eradication
campaigns have driven the narco-traffickers deeper into the protected
national parks, where the spraying planes are barred from going.

Thirty-five years into the US-funded "War on Drugs" and supply of the
industrial world's favourite stimulant remains steady. In Bogota,
Sandro Calvani, head of the UN's Drugs and Serious Crime unit said
eradication was simply making the traffickers better at farming.

"In the past five years there's been a significant reduction in
hectarage ... But the narco-traffickers have responded by caring for
the coca plant better. They're treating them like tea plants."

The logic of Washington's war is to limit demand by choking the
supply line. Billions of Washington dollars have been spent every
year on spraying tens of thousands of hectares with herbicides but
there has been little impact on the street value of cocaine,
according to this year's US State Department narcotics report.

"This is a global problem," says Colombia's Vice-President Francisco
Santos Calderon. "On the supply and the demand sides there is a
shared responsibility."

The Latin American country that has become synonymous with the
supposedly glamorous drug is trying to tell the world that snorting a
line of coke is killing a Colombian.

Despite its relative stability - Colombia has avoided the coups and
dictatorships rife in Latin America - the country has been blighted
by four decades of internal conflict. The "white stuff" has
complicated efforts to find a peace.

Today, the fighting still rages between the right-wing government and
the leftist guerrillas, the Farc. A third force of right-wing
paramilitaries, the AUC, is in a flawed process of demobilisation
that has been heavily criticised by human rights groups. In the
background of each of these battles, paying for the weapons and
fuelling the fighting is cocaine.

Colombia's rich earth is also its curse. The mix of nutrients and
minerals allow it to grow four of the five variants of the coca plant
- - the raw material for the "dandruff of the Andes". For centuries the
indigenous people chewed its green leaves to combat everything from
toothache to altitude sickness.

That was until a German scientist, Friedrich Gaedcke isolated the
cocaine alkaloid in 1855. The new wonder drug promised a bright
future with applications ranging from soft drinks to anaesthetics.
Its fans included Sigmund Freud and Pope Leo XIII, purported to carry
a hip flask of cocaine-based Mariani wine with him. That came to an
end with a moral panic in pre-World War I America, based on the
spurious assertion of a cocaine epidemic among black Americans in the
deep south led to prohibition. Criminalisation followed.

On the streets of London, Sydney or New York "blow" might mean an
addiction; a lost job; or worse, a lost loved one. In Colombia, which
produces 80 per cent of the world's supply, it has helped to pay for
a conflict that kills as many as 3000 every year.

Colombia is home to a disproportionate percentage of the world's
biodiversity. But satellite images taken this year show that coca
plantations have cut into 13 of Colombia's 51 national reserves.

"They know we're not allowed to spray in the parks," says anti-
narcotic police's Major Fernando Lopez. In La Macarena reserve south
of Bogota the biggest manual eradication effort is under way. The
work is arduous and extremely dangerous. The military has assigned
3000 personnel to guard 70 workers. "We thought it would take 130
days to do it but after a month we have cleared just 1000ha," said
Major Lopez.

In the past three weeks alone, more than a dozen police have been
killed by guerrillas. The Farc has taken to booby-trapping coca
plants with landmines.

Turf wars between the government, cartels, guerrillas and
paramilitaries mean an epidemic of land mines.

Almost 5000 people have been killed or mutilated by these explosives
since 1990, says Luspiedad Herrera, the director of Colombia's
landmine observatory. "Many of them are made of plastic to avoid
detection and disguised as toys," she said.

This random violence and territorial conflict has driven entire
communities out of rural areas and into Colombia's chaotic cities.
Unofficial estimates put the number of displaced people at over three
million, an internal refugee crisis rivalled only by the Congo.