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COLOMBIA: Drugs rethink

COLOMBIAN DRUGS

The Financial Times, September 24, 1999

A growing sense of despair surrounds the efforts of the Colombian government to control its drugs trade. President Andrés Pastrana's bid to assemble a three-year $3.5bn international aid package shows the scale of a problem that has become intertwined with an increasingly complex and bloody civil conflict.

The new package compares with $289m in US anti-narcotics aid for the current fiscal year. But there is no guarantee that even this enormous extra effort would bring about the goal of a drug-free and peaceful Colombia. This is the time for a fundamental rethink. Over the past year, Colombia's violence has seemed to be spiralling out of control. A peace process with leftwing guerrillas, begun last year, is stumbling. The depression in business confidence has intensified Colombia's worst recession for more than 60 years. The conflict is spilling over Colombia's borders. This is further jeopardising stability in a region where the drugs trade sustains organised crime, much as prohibition of alcohol did in the US of the 1920s. Colombia produces roughly 80 per cent of the world's cocaine. The government has deployed measures ranging from the eradication of plantations of coca and opium poppy through aerial spraying to incentives for small farmers to sow other crops. But the policy is not working, because new plant

ations are sown faster than they are destroyed. Last year 28 per cent more Colombian land was sown to coca than in 1997. Indeed, the policy could be making matters still worse. The aerial spraying is driving poor farmers into the hands of leftwing guerrillas who offer to protect them. Alternative development does offer some hope. But heavy demand from US, European and, increasingly, Latin American drugs users, together with the industry's profitability, mean that drugs are still a relatively attractive option as a crop for poor peasants.

The international community must reassess the costs of its war against drugs, particularly for the politically fragile supplying countries. The full costs and benefits of the current policy and the long-term implications of continued failure should be openly debated. Ways to control drug production that bring market and price mechanisms to bear and make the industry less lucrative could be explored. For many, decriminalisation, let alone legalisation, is impossible to contemplate. But eventually this may be the only way to limit the damage. The alternative - an ever-escalating cost in money and lives - is looking increasingly unpalatable.