PAYING THE PRICE

Can We Afford The War On Drugs?

It's often said, and proven, that politics makes strange bedfellows.
Politics also often pits members of the same party against one another.
That was the case last week in the Senate, which voted to increase aid to
South America to help our neighbors battle drugs in their countries.

President Bush had asked for $731 billion to be spread among our allies in
the drug war. The Senate Appropriations Committee's foreign operations
panel cut it to $567 million. Before the Senate vote, Sen. Bob Graham,
D-Fla., made an effort to restore the full amount to the bill. The effort
was killed and the full chamber passed the bill with the lower amount.

Graham argued that the full amount was necessary to preserve American
credibility at a time when the Bush administration is rallying world
opinion to its side to battle international terrorism. He said that
Colombia is "the global testing ground for our commitment to terrorism.
Hardly more than a year into this battle, we are beginning to sound the
trumpet of retreat and running up the white flag of surrender."

We don't know where the senator has been, but the war on drugs and our
support of efforts to stop them at their source in Colombia have been going
on for quite a bit more than a year. And paying out more than $500 million
isn't exactly "running up the white flag of surrender."

Foreign operations panel chief Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., noted that "We're
spending four times more on the Andean drug program ... than what we're
doing to stop disease - smallpox or tuberculosis, malaria, ebola, plague -
from coming into our country.

"We keep pouring money down here. We don't know where it's going. We don't
know how it's being spent. We know it's not effective. We know it hasn't
stopped drugs coming up here." And it isn't likely to, either.

What it has done is support the government in Colombia in its fight against
home-grown leftist rebels that kill an estimated 3,500 yearly, mostly
civilians. Because the war on drugs and Colombia's civil war overlap, it's
difficult, if not impossible, to ensure our aid is going to the right
places. In such conditions, the lines often blur between criminal and
military operations.

We don't want to be responsible for killings by thugs on either side.