DESPITE U.S. EFFORT, COCAINE PRICE DROPS

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 United States to combat Colombia's drug industry,
the White House drug czar said.

The drug czar, John Walters, wrote Sen. Charles E. 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 United
States began collecting data, a gram of pure cocaine fetched $600.

Colombia supplies 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the U.S.
Several household and school-based surveys show that U.S. cocaine
consumption has barely budged since 2000. - AP