DRUGS DESTROY ENVIRONMENT TOO

We know that illegal drugs do a great deal of harm -- to our bodies, our
minds and our communities.

But there's another harm associated with illegal drugs that more and more
Americans are beginning to understand: The billions of dollars Americans
spend on drugs each year are taking a horrific toll on some of the most
fragile and diverse ecosystems on the planet.

Consider the Andes and Amazonian regions of South America. In countries such
as Colombia and Peru, astonishing environmental riches abound. The Huallaga
region of Peru may be the world's richest in all forms of fauna, hosting
record numbers of species among butterflies, amphibians, reptiles, birds and
mammals. Colombia contains roughly 10 percent of the Earth's biodiversity,
second only to Brazil.

But that diversity is rapidly being destroyed. Environmental journalist
Stephanie Joyce, reporting in International Wildlife, described the scenes
she had witnessed in the Andean region: "a devastated landscape ... an
accordion of scarred red hillsides dotted with rotting tree stumps. The
forest has disappeared as far as the eye can see."

Who cut down the forest, wiped out the fragile wildlife, depleted the soil
and left behind a chemically poisoned scar that had once been rainforest?
It's a tragic story of greed and dependency. But the culprit here isn't a
rapacious corporation. It's our demand for illegal drugs.

It is time we look at the real, far-reaching consequences of our drug use
and the damage we are doing to our selves and to our world.

Our government and the host nations have tried to curtail cocaine production
by spraying coca fields with glyphosate (the chemical compound that has been
used safely by millions of Americans for years). But our spraying is not the
engine driving all this environmental destruction; it's the growing and
processing of cocaine itself. Illegal drug manufacturers, obviously, follow
no environmental or safety rules.

The United States consumes nearly 260 metric tons of cocaine every year,
grown and chemically processed in the fragile environments of South America.
The pattern of coca growing depends on the use of highly destructive "slash
and burn" agriculture. Forests are burned, coca planted and, when fields
become sterile, new fields are cleared deeper in the forest. The result has
been the destruction of nearly 6 million acres of fragile tropical forest in
the Andean region over the past 20 years. In Peru, 10 percent of the total
rain forest destruction in the past century is due to illegal drugs.

In addition, the powerful chemical agents applied by the growers further
ruin the soil. It is estimated that 600 million liters of so-called
precursor chemicals are used annually in South America for cocaine
production. Coca growers use highly poisonous herbicides and pesticides
(including paraquat) to increase yields. Processors also indiscriminately
discard enormous amounts of gasoline, kerosene, sulfuric acid, ammonia,
sodium bicarbonate, potassium carbonate, acetone, ether and lime onto the
ground and into nearby waterways.

The National Agrarian University of Peru reports that "the rivers and
streams of the Upper Huallaga Valley are literally flooded, year after year,
with vast quantities of toxic waste and pollution. Fisheries and all forms
of life are almost totally destroyed in the small streams."

The coca trade has been especially damaging in Colombia, which has lost
roughly 3 million acres of tropical rain forest. Every year processors dump
more than 370,000 tons of chemicals into the environment with jungle
laboratories sending more than 20 million liters of toxins into the nearby
tributaries that feed the Amazon and Orinoco rivers. Affected waterways are
almost entirely devoid of many species of aquatic plant and animal life.

There is a compelling human toll as well. Poor campesinos spray the fields
accompanied by their children who walk around barefoot. Their wives, many of
them nursing mothers, will clean out the spraying equipment, exposing
themselves to these highly toxic chemicals.

But cocaine from distant nations is not our only problem. Methamphetamine
labs here at home leave poisonous scars, draining the environmental cleanup
budgets of many municipalities. Each pound of meth production generates five
or six pounds of hazardous waste. Deadly laboratory byproducts are sometimes
dumped directly into water wells, spreading into domestic water and farm
irrigation systems.

Americans are a rich people, consuming a huge portion of Earth's resources.
But Americans are also an idealistic people. This week we celebrated the
idealism of Earth Day by focusing on our role as environmental stewards.
People can be educated to care about the consequences of their habits and
become more sensitive to the impact of their lifestyles on the planet.

Reducing the demand for illegal drugs is one way we can ease the pressure on
some of our most fragile natural habitats.