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 Health & Beauty | April 2005 
Cocaine Policy: American Impasse
 Alain Délétroz - Le Monde
| | Anti-drug policies are at an impasse. |
Among the wars America is conducting, one in particular seems doomed to fail: that against coca production in the Andes. In spite of the thousands of victims of the Columbian conflict, more than 3 billion dollars spent by Washington on its Columbia policy and on the new Andean anti-drug initiative, the cocaine markets in the United States and Europe are flourishing.
The level of supply in the United States has not gone down, and prices are even slightly lower. That alone should invite legislators to bestow a more critical look on what's happening in the Andean region and to immediately correct certain aspects of the anti-drug policy.
It's important, first of all, to distinguish between the dynamics of coca production in Columbia on the one hand, and in Peru and Bolivia on the other. The latter two countries practice traditional production for local consumption. Since time immemorial, the inhabitants have cultivated this bush, the leaves of which they consume in tea form or by chewing as a stimulant to help in the heavy work they do at altitudes of 3,000 to 4,000 meters.
The coca leaf is sacred to the indigenous regions of these countries. It is an integral part of traditional rituals, the central element of the "custom" offered to every person who enters a home. Infused or chewed, the leaf is obviously not hallucinogenic. Its effects are those of a simple stimulant, comparable to those of coffee.
Bolivia and Peru cannot purely and simply prohibit production without running the risk of destabilizing their institutions, which are already weak.
The peoples involved perceive the fight against coca production as a new injustice. Among the poorest people on the planet, should they be deprived of a central element of their culture because the leisure classes in Europe and the United States destroy themselves by turning coca into a hallucinogen? Bolivia has resolved the problem by according a certain number of acres for legal production. Peru has created a state agency for the purchase and management of legal production.
The Peruvian and Bolivian eradication programs have always rejected the idea of any aerial fumigation of the plantations. Nonetheless, the situation of violence and social deconstruction these programs have left behind them makes one tremble. In Bolivia, the leader of a federation of coca growers, Evo Morales, is now at the head of one of the most important political forces in the country (the MAS), and could become president of the Republic. In Peru, the coca producers, politically much less well-organized, have recently arranged a march on Lima.
The anti-drug budget the Bush administration has just presented to Congress includes cuts of 10% in aid to alternative development in Bolivia and close to 20% for the same programs in Peru.
Certainly, a significant part of the coca produced for "official" production enters into the cocaine production circuit. Yet the anti-drug policies and the way they are perceived by poor populations add oil to a fire that has already led to the resignation of one Bolivian president due to pressure from the street. It is urgent to compensate for these policies with real plans for alternative crops and to rethink how to seriously reduce demand in Europe and the United States.
In Colombia, this fight is complex in another way. Coca is not a cultural tradition at all there. It entered the country in the 1980s with the explicit goal of being transformed into cocaine. It contributed to unheard-of violence there during the era of the Medellin and Cali cartels. It is one of the central elements of the Columbian conflict, which, with 22,000 victims in 2004, remains one of the most deadly in the world.
The actors in the violence have divided the tasks among themselves. The Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) control the coca production territories, force the peasants to grow it, going so far as to organize real agricultural campaigns, supplying seed and agricultural loans. But they are unable to get their hands on the juiciest part of the traffic: the transformation of the basic paste into cocaine in clandestine laboratories.
Paramilitary groups control that part of the process. They also commercialize cocaine through the baby cartels that have succeeded the Medellin and Cali cartels. In certain regions, such as the Magdalena valley, the division of labor between the FARC and the paramilitary units even takes place without any clashes. The FARC, who occupy the summits, produce the leaves; the paramilitary, who control the river, manage their transformation and clandestine export.
The big programs for aerial spraying of herbicides on the Columbian coca fields have, certainly, contributed to reducing the surface planted by close to 50% (from 163,000 hectares in 2000 to 86,000, at the end of 2003). However the amount of cocaine reaching American markets hasn't been affected at all. The Columbian planters have demonstrated great flexibility: the plantations have spread over the entire country; the fields are smaller and smaller, mixed in with other crops, and consequently impossible to "treat" with airplanes.
Anti-drug policies are at an impasse. They're an integral part of the war in Columbia, producers of poverty and instability in Peru and Bolivia. They cost the American taxpayer dearly. There's no miracle solution, but it's time to attack demand in Europe and the United States more firmly.
The attempted experiments in the Netherlands and Switzerland and in more than thirty European cities, which consisted of treating the problem of drug consumption not only as crime, but also as a public health issue, clearly contributed to lowering demand. France and the EU should take inspiration from them. The United States Academy of Sciences should invest in a study of the results of these approaches, so that Congress can take more effective measures on American territory in this fight.
It is more and more indecent to make the producers bear the sole burden in this struggle, to stigmatize these masses of impoverished Andean peasants as criminals, all the while allowing the middle classes in our rich countries to sniff in peace. Without more inventiveness and political will to reduce demand in the consuming countries, the failures of present policies will continue to be paid for by thousands of deaths and much unrest along the whole arc of the Andes.
Alain Délétroz is Vice-President of the International Crisis Group. |
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