Pubdate: Mon, 10 Apr 2000
Source: Sarasota HeraldTribune (FL)
Copyright: 2000 Sarasota HeraldTribune
Contact: editor.letters@heraldtrib.com
Website: http://www.newscoast.com/
Forum:
Author: Neal Peirce
Note: Neal Peirce's email address is npeirce@citistates.com .
US FL: OPED: Financing The Drug War: Congress Still Funding A Failure

FINANCING THE DRUG WAR: CONGRESS STILL FUNDING A FAILURE

America's heavily armored "war on drugs" at last count $250 billion and
still losing badly received an alarming new lease on life from the
U.S. House in late March. The Clinton administration's $1.3 billion "aid"
program, focused on Colombia, triumphed on a 262158 roll call.

Eighty percent of the money is earmarked for military uses Black Hawk and
Huey helicopters, subsidizing Colombian police operations, training and
equipping counternarcotic battalions, and interdicting cocaine and heroine
as the drugs flow from farms along the Andes.

Noting that Colombia is reputedly the source of 90 percent of the cocaine
and 65 percent of the heroin used in the United States, Speaker Dennis
Hastert proclaimed, "We can't ignore this issue."

But military aid to Colombia? Here's a land already the largest recipient
of U.S. military assistance outside the Middle East. It's been the scene
of massive drug eradication efforts since before the days of the Medellin
drug cartel. Competition for drug profits infects the long, bloodsoaked
struggle among Colombia's government and left and rightwing guerillas.
Countless thousands, many of them innocent bystanders, have been killed.

The question is: Will megaarms to Colombia even if we stop short of
Vietnamlike commitment of American troops reduce the flow of drugs into
the United States?

There's not an iota of evidence to suggest so. We've provided military aid
and backed an aggressive Colombian herbicide spraying program. Despite
that, asserts Kevin fieese, president of the Washingtonbased Common Sense
for Drug Policy, Columbia's coca product has tripled since 1992. Enough
Colombian poppy was grown in 1999 to produce eight metric tons of heroin.

On the streets of America, the "war on drugs " has left a flood of heroin
and cocaine at prices skirting historic lows, according to Criminal Justice
Policy Foundation President Eric Sterling, former counsel to the House
Subcommittee on Crime.

Plus, there's now a long chain of examples showing that when drug
production gets too dangerous or difficult in one country or location, new
trafficking and new drugs spring up elsewhere and actually increase drug
supplies.

Destruction of the TurkeyFranceU.S. supply line for heroin in the '60s
simply expanded sources in Mexico and Asia. President Nixon's first drug
war featured searching every third vehicle on the U.S.Mexico border;
traffickers just switched to boats and planes. When President Reagan used
the military to block marijuana flowing in through Florida, Colombian
traffickers moved over to less bulky cocaine and substituted supply lines
along U.S. coasts and through Mexico.

Today, notes Mark Greer of the Californiabased DrugSense group (
http://www.drugsense.org ), there are signs of expanding use of
methamphetamine domestically produced speed. Even if the Colombian drug
war actually reduces cocaine availability, he suggests, methamphetamine
will fill in as the logical replacement drug.

Can't official Washington hear? Lend an ear, for example, to retired Navy
Lt. Cmdr. Sylvester Salcedo. He was so appalled at President Clinton's
Colombian drug program that he mailed the White House his Navy and Marine
Corps Achievement Medal for "superior performance" in fighting
narcotraffickers.

After his military duty, Salcedo worked as a Spanish teacher in a lowincome
Boston neighborhood. Having seen both sides of the drug war, he's now
convinced that chances for success through military interdiction "are
ridiculous."

The militarized war on drugs scatters victims across the globe. The
Colombia drug war aid, said Rep. Maxine Waters, DCalif., "gives money to
drug traffickers who kill other drug traffickers and murder innocent
civilians."

Then in the United States, the huge profits to be gained in drug dealing
lead to turf fights and more murders. We've seen how zealous hunting down
of smalltime drug dealers criminalizes hundreds of thousands of our youth,
ruins families, packs our prisons, undermines respect for our criminal
justice system.

"It's the height of paternalism," warns Rep. Tom Campbell, RCalif., "to
say that our drug problem is due to other countries sending us drugs. It's
our problem because we demand those drugs, it's our problem because we
don't supply rehab for addicts that want to get clean."

Campbell's remarks raise the fascinating thought: What if the billions
we're spending on our drug wars could be diverted to treatment
programs programs that research shows are sensationally more effective in
reducing addiction?

And why not then move toward decriminalizing drugs, even while labeling
dangerous narcotics for what they are and mounting massive efforts (as
we've started to learn with tobacco) to discourage their use?

Prohibition never worked for alcohol; it won't for drugs. It's sad that
the Clinton administration continued most of the discredited Reagan Bush
administration drug wars.

But the most recent House vote, in which Campbell and several dozen other
Republicans were willing to join a determined group of urban Democrats in
opposing the drug war expansion in Colombia, suggests a ray of light hope
that political support is slowly building for less lethal policies toward
Latin America, and with some luck, toward our own urban neighborhoods too.