TWO SIDES TO OPIUM PROBLEM

EL CONGRESO, Colombia - High in the lush Colombian mountains,
Francisco Pelaez is growing opium poppies.

For a decade, the 33-year-old farmer has cultivated the delicate
flower whose green bulb oozes sticky latex that is processed into
potent heroin wreaking havoc in much of America.

"Opium is bad for people, but what am I going to do?" asked Pelaez,
standing in a jungle clearing dotted with bright pink poppies. "If
there was something else to grow, I wouldn't touch it."

For Palaez, cultivating opium in this isolated sliver of Colombia's
Huila province is the only way to feed his wife and children. But for
the United States, it stands as a direct challenge to an aggressive
anti-narcotics program that has achieved remarkable success.

In Colombia, a huge U.S.-funded aerial fumigation program backed by
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe cut the cultivation of coca -- the
plant from which cocaine is derived -- by 21 percent in 2003.

Overall, coca production in the key Andean nations of Colombia, Peru
and Bolivia is at the lowest level since estimates began in 1986,
according to U.S. officials.

Yet experts say that sustaining the success in coca eradication will
be difficult as traffickers adopt new measures to counter the cadre of
U.S. contractors flying herbicide-spraying missions across this vast
South American nation.

The challenges are even more daunting in the effort to destroy the
opium crop in Colombia, which along with Mexico now dominates the U.S.
heroin market -- even though the two nations represent only a fraction
of worldwide production, according to law-enforcement
authorities.

John Walters, director of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control
Policy, told a U.S. congressional subcommittee in March that Colombian
opium production has "remained relatively constant" in the past five
years despite fumigation and other anti-narcotics programs.

"Colombian heroin dominates the heroin supply in the Northeast and
southern United States, while Mexican heroin predominates in the
West," Walters said.

Unlike coca, a lowland crop traditionally grown on large tracts,
Colombian opium is cultivated on plots of one acre or less, along
steep mountainsides that often are treacherous to fumigate, experts
say.

The herbicide will miss its target if the wind is too strong. Cloud
cover can sock in the mountains for days and prevent the crop dusters
from taking off.

"There are weeks that we can only fumigate one or two days," said
Colombian National Police Capt. Delfin Murillo, a veteran helicopter
pilot who flies security missions with the spray planes.

Interdiction also is difficult as traffickers smuggle the processed
heroin into the United States, 1 or 2 kilograms at a time, aboard
commercial aircraft or in trucks or automobiles.

Many traffickers wrap the heroin in latex packets and swallow them to
avoid detection. By comparison, cocaine frequently is smuggled in
multi-ton shipments aboard speedboats and other vessels.

"Think of where you can put a large shipment of heroin -- it's the
size of a bag of flour," said one U.S. Embassy official in Colombia.

Opium has long been overshadowed in Colombia by cocaine, which drug
lords such as Pablo Escobar turned into a multibillion-dollar global
enterprise.

In El Congreso, a smattering of wood shacks along a dusty mountain
road about 200 miles southwest of Bogota, community leaders say many
farmers have abandoned opium not because of fumigation but because the
price of opium latex has fallen by more than half in recent years.

Yet they warned that opium cultivation will increase sharply if the
price of latex rebounds and farmers are not provided an alternative
way to make a living.

Pelaez is not waiting for a higher price to expand his production,
which brings in several thousand dollars annually. Walking along a
soggy jungle path, the peasant stopped next to a twisted pile of
felled trees.

"I cut the trees to grow more opium," he said, gazing at the scarred
landscape. "What else can I do?"

The Chicago Tribune is a Tribune Co. newspaper.