Pot times July 15, 2005
The Dubious Drug War
URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v05/n1114/a07.htmlNewshawk: Kirk
Webpage: http://www.projo.com/opinion/editorials/content/projo_20050711_eddrug.1fe18af.html
Pubdate: Mon, 11 Jul 2005
Source: Providence Journal, The (RI)
Copyright: 2005 The Providence Journal Company
Contact: letters@projo.com
Website: http://www.projo.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/352
THE DUBIOUS DRUG WAR
The pain and vast waste of the endless U.S. battle against the Latin
American drug trade continues. Although the U.S. has spent at least
$5.4 billion on its Andean Antidrug Initiative since 2000, the supply of cocaine
and heroin on U.S. streets remains plentiful and prices low.
Meanwhile, we continue to poison poor peasants' countryside with herbicides, and
civil war continues in Colombia, the heart of our theological and unwinnable
foreign "war on drugs." While U.S. and Colombian officials
assert that violence related to drug trafficking has fallen sharply in Colombia,
cocaine output has soared in Peru and Bolivia, as peasants there try to survive
by growing coca -- their one reliable cash crop.
The drug trade by definition moves around with great facility.
