Coca Eradication.

As early as 1925, the U.S. government advocated the destruction of crops used in drug production, including coca, opium poppy, and cannabis. U.S.-sponsored drug crop eradication started in Mexico after President Nixon's war on drugs was launched in 1968. When a 1995 National Security Council report recommended that international drug control priorities shift from drug interdiction to crop eradication, the United States reinvigorated its eradication programs, much of them aimed at coca cultivation in the South American Andes, the source of most cocaine in the United States.

In 1999, Congress passed the Western Hemisphere Drug Elimination Act authorizing $2.3 billion for international counternarcotics operations--including over $246 million for eradication programs and equipment in Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru--with the aim of reducing illegal drug flows by 80% by 2001. This clearly has not achieved the intended effect: today, more cocaine at cheaper prices is entering the U.S. In August 2000, the U.S. Congress passed Plan Colombia, a $1.3-billion counterdrug effort to operate mainly in Colombia. Plan Colombia is largely a military offensive, using the Colombian army and police as U.S. proxies not only against drug crops out also against insurgents.

Coca is currently eradicated both manually and with chemical herbicides. At least for now, U.S. plans to use fungal mycoherbicides against drug plants have been discarded on the grounds that their deployment would be generally perceived as biological or biochemical warfare. In both Peru and Bolivia, where some coca cultivation is legal and recognized as having significant cultural and medicinal roles--even by the U.S. State Department--only manual eradication is permitted. Even so, there is a distinct perception amongst the peasant and Indian populations that the U.S. wishes not only to eliminate the cocaine trade but also to eliminate the benign culture of coca use as well.

Eradication programs are driven by the theory that decreasing coca production will make cocaine scarcer and more expensive and thereby decrease use. However, experience has proven this theory to be fallacious. First, when eradication programs succeed in reducing coca cultivation in one area, other farmers whose plantations survive eradication earn more for their coca, which in turn entices even more farmers to move into or expand coca cultivation. Increasingly, growers harvest more carefully, process leaves longer to extract more cocaine, and cultivate less accessible plots of land that are deeper into the jungle. In addition, cultivation is growing in other countries. In Colombia, where small amounts of coca cultivation for traditional use is legal, cultivation for cocaine has skyrocketed in the wake of U.S.-funded eradication programs in Peru and Bolivia.

Currently the U.S. is financing and coordinating Colombian police and army operations that are spraying tens of thousands of acres of coca with chemical herbicides each year. In 2000, although 128,000 acres were fumigated in Colombia, the net area under coca cultivation actually increased. Nearly one-half million acres of coca were reportedly eradicated in South America between 1985 and 1997, yet cultivation increased 87% from 295,000 to 552,000 acres.

Even if eradication is successful in wiping out coca in South America, production is almost certain to expand in other parts of the world. Coca has been cultivated in India, Indonesia, and Taiwan, as well as in Hawaii and Florida; it could be easily grown in sub-Saharan Africa.

Second, the enormous gap between coca prices in the Andean countries and black market cocaine prices in the United States means that significant fluctuations in the selling price of coca leaves in South America affect U.S. cocaine prices only temporarily. A 1993 RAND Corporation study projects that even if eradication programs were to succeed in cutting coca production by 50%, the price of cocaine on U.S. streets, after rising 150%, would return to baseline within two to three years. In 1994, RAND analyzed what the U.S. government would need to spend to reduce national cocaine consumption by just 1%. The researchers found source-country efforts (including eradication) to be the most costly drug control strategy: 23 times as expensive as drug treatment programs.

Third, there is little evidence that adjusting the price of cocaine significantly affects consumption. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the retail price of cocaine dropped from $158 per gram in 1990 to between $60 and $80 in 2001. The fact that the number of cocaine users in the U.S. has remained stable at about 1.5 million over the past decade suggests that price is not a crucial variable in predicting overall consumption.

Key Points

* Drug crop eradication has produced little effect on the price or availability of cocaine in the United States.

* Chemical and manual eradication programs have pushed growers deeper into the jungle, where they fell more virgin forest to grow their crops.

* Gains in reducing coca cultivation in one area are subverted by its resurgence in another.