U.S. DRUG CZAR: COCAINE CHEAPER

Letter to Senator

Billions Spent to Fight It, but Colombian Drug's Purity Higher, He
Says

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Cocaine prices in the United States have dropped
and the drug's purity increased, despite years of effort and nearly $5
billion spent by the U.S. government to combat Colombia's drug
industry, the White House drug czar acknowledged in a letter to a key
senator.

The drug czar, John Walters, wrote Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, that
retail cocaine prices fell by 11 percent from February 2005 to October
2006, to about $135 per gram of pure cocaine -- hovering near the same
levels since the early 1990s. In 1981, when the U.S. government began
collecting data, a gram of pure cocaine fetched $600.

The purity of this cocaine, meanwhile, has "trended somewhat toward
former levels," as well, Walters said in the letter, citing data from
the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Colombia supplies 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United
States. Declining prices and rising purity could also suggest
weakening demand, but several household and school-based surveys show
that America's cocaine consumption has barely budged since 2000, and
demand in Europe has increased. Colombia's president, Alvaro Uribe, is
set to meet with President Bush on Wednesday to discuss U.S. support
for Plan Colombia, the anti-narcotics and counterinsurgency program
that has cost American taxpayers more than $4 billion since 2000.

Walters' letter to Grassley, the Republican co-chair of the Senate
Caucus on International Narcotics Control, was sent in January in
response to a request from the senator. It was made available to The
Associated Press by the Washington Office on Latin America, a liberal
lobby group. U.S. officials have insisted repeatedly that Plan
Colombia is reducing the drug's quality and availability to American
users.

But Grassley, in an e-mailed statement to the AP, said the new data is
"all the proof that anybody needs" that the White House drug office
"has gotten quite good at spinning the numbers, but cooking the books
doesn't help our efforts to curb cocaine and heroin production and
consumption." Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said senior U.S. Embassy
officials gave him older, more encouraging data in Bogota in March.

"We've given this program a chance to work and clearly this is not
producing the results we were promised," he said.

Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for the White House Office of National
Drug Control Policy, told the AP that Walters would not comment on the
letter but Lemaitre described it as "an accurate reflection of our
agency's thoughts on the issue."