A coca plantation in Colombia's Guaviare district. According to the antidrug advocacy group Shared Responsibility, 43 square feet of forest are cleared to produce one gram of cocaine. (NEWSCOM)
New target in Colombia’s drug war: ecofriendly US users
The Shared Responsibility program aims to educate US and European cocaine users about the environmental damage of cocaine production.
By Murray Carpenter| Contributor of The Christian Science Monitor/ July 18, 2008 edition
Murray Carpenter
Crusader: Ana Maria Caballero works for Colombia’s Shared Responsibility program.
Reporter Murray Carpenter discusses how cocaine production is destroying Colombia's forests and how that often gets overlooked.
Reporter Murray Carpenter
Bogotá, Colombia
Millions of Americans use cocaine, but few of them consider the millions of acres of forest that have been cleared by coca growers in all corners of Colombia or the blue-billed curassow, a turkey-sized bird that is losing habitat to coca farming.
Ana Maria Caballero believes that many recreational cocaine users are well-educated professionals who also recycle, drive hybrid vehicles, and buy fair-trade products, but that they just don’t understand what cocaine is doing to Colombia’s environment.
Ms. Caballero works for Shared Responsibility, the Colombian government’s effort to raise consumer awareness of cocaine’s impact on one of the world’s most biodiverse nations. The project is led by Vice President Francisco Santos Calderón, who has more than a passing interest in narco-traficking – he was once kidnapped and held for months by Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel.
Colombia’s decades-old, drug-funded, armed conflict is complicated, says Caballero, but environmental devastation is apolitical. “When you talk about deforestation, when you talk about a specific species being threatened because coca is encroaching upon its sole habitat, there’s no political argument there,” she says. “It’s absolutely black and white. You are destroying natural treasures that belong to the world.”
According to Shared Responsibility, 43 square feet of forest are cleared to produce one gram of cocaine, and coca growers have cleared an area the size of New Jersey – nearly five million acres – within Colombia over the past 20 years.
Clandestine cocaine laboratories, which use an array of toxic chemicals, pollute once-pristine waters in remote areas. And slash-and-burn clearing for coca farms is one of the country’s largest sources of air pollution. The clearing also accelerates global climate change, which is shrinking Colombia’s mountaintop glaciers.
Now coca farmers are moving further south and west, into remote areas in the upper Amazon basin and along the border with Ecuador that are havens for many rare plants and animals.
Shared Responsibility and the United Nations office on Drugs and Crime have produced a series of maps labeled “Incidence of Illicit Crops in the Habitats of Endemic Species in Danger of Extinction” that illustrate the problem. Four critically endangered magnolia species, for example, are native only to southwestern Colombia, where coca growers are clearing thousands of acres of land.
Colombia has more bird species than any other country, 1,870 at last count. But rare endemic birds – such as the gorgeted puffleg, a hummingbird discovered just three years ago in southwest Colombia – are losing habitat within their limited ranges to coca cultivation.
Alonso Quevedo, president of the Colombian bird conservation group ProAves, says that in addition to deforestation, there are secondary effects. The coca farmers open previously wild, forested areas to settlement, and others follow to hunt and log.
Shared Responsibility took its photographic exhibit to London’s Trafalgar Square in May and Alex James, bassist for the British band Blur, is a high-profile spokesman in England. But it has not yet made a splash in the United States, which consumes the vast majority of Colombian cocaine.
According to a US Embassy official in Bogotá, the United States is the top cocaine consumer in the world, and Colombia produces 90 percent of that cocaine, likely 600 tons annually. Despite aggressive US-funded eradication efforts, coca fields remain abundant. A recent United Nations report estimated that 250,000 acres of Colombian coca fields were harvested in 2007; US estimates are considerably higher.
Will the Shared Responsibility message actually change the behavior of the estimated six million Americans who use cocaine?
“It’s probably not something that would influence me,” says one environmentally minded, occasional cocaine user who did not want her name used. She says she would rather see a more holistic approach to addressing drugs in society. And she says there are some times when she wants to turn her environmental filter off. “We all have our vices,” she says, “and you don’t want to think about this.”
But Caballero believes increased awareness can cut cocaine use, and she’d like to make connections with governments, universities, and environmental organizations in the United States and elsewhere. “It’s an international problem,” Caballero says. “People don’t understand where their drugs are coming from and that they are feeding this entire process that is not only socially destructive, but very environmentally destructive.”
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Comments
2. onlein | 07.18.08
I agree with the comment about legalizing or decriminalizing drugs; the war on drugs is insane. But I’ve long thought that the increased awareness approach should also be used. It seems, though, that many well-educated, knowledgeable Americans use cocaine while covering their ears in an I-can’t-hear-you manner when it comes to the increased awareness message. Come on. Be adults, be menschen. Using this illegal drug supports terrorists as well as destroys the environment. If you can’t stop, get help. Then someday, if drugs are legal and produced in an environmentally friendly way, you can go back to using.
3. Charles Duwel | 07.18.08
The drug warriors must be getting desperate. If you look at it rationally - not required for drug warriors - it’s the drug WAR that is the problem. It only took folks about 10 years to figure out that the alcohol war was a disaster, with the drug war it’s 60-70 years and counting. Their failures keep causing mounting problems all over the world and they still refuse to actually think about what they are doing. It’s is fun to watch such monumental stupidity but it’s getting a little old. Time to stop. After all, what is the goal of the drug war? To make sure that people only get high and [possibly] ruin their lives with alcohol? This makes no sense to me.
Also consider that the constitution requires equal treatment by the law - if anyone cares. I happen to know the Supreme Court does not.
But then they’ve always had a problem with equal treatment by the law.
4. Pete Guither | 07.18.08
Initiatives like this one, are pretty obviously PR moves to cover up the failure of the drug war. If someone stops using cocaine to save the environment, it’s unlikely to have any impact — the likelihood of influencing enough users to make a dent in the black market profits is miniscule. The smart environmentalist cocaine user knows this. However, the environmental damage could be stopped in an instant by regulating and controlling cocaine, taking almost all the black market profits out of it, and eliminating the incentive for going into the rain forests to grow coca leaves. It’s time for the Colombian and U.S. governments to have a serious discussion about alternatives to the destruction of prohibition.
5. Kirk Muse | 07.18.08
Growers of legal products don’t grow their crops in
clandestine locations. Do tobacco growers grow the crops
in national forests or on somebody else’s land? No.
Criminalize tobacco and the situation would soon change.
6. LM | 07.19.08
It would seem that the “war on drugs” is just another facet of our nation’s preoccupation with control and its ludicrous attempt at changing habits by altering the supply side of the equation, rather than the demand aspects. It’s not just coca, by the way; I work in an academic research institution in Afghanistan, and am witnessing how US (and for that matter, UK) policy is hurting people here. I recently returned from a quick field visit to Balkh in the north, where an enforced ban on poppy cultivation during this severe drought year has brought the rural economy to its knees, prompted a large exodus of enviro-economic refugees to Iran and Pakistan, and initiated a plea from local people to Turkmenistan to allow Afghan livestock to relocate there temporarily so that the flocks can perhaps survive. Poppy is not just opium here - it provides edible oil from the crushed seeds, which are also eaten (as poppyseeds are in the US), and the presscake left over from oil extraction becomes a high-protein feed for livestock during the long, harsh Central Asian winter. So the only question remaining, really, is if next year will see poppy resurgence or anti-government insurgence. If it’s insurgence, we no doubt will label it as “Taleban,” which goes to show how little we understand about the rural economy here. Poppy is a low-risk crop in a high-risk milieu, one that - unlike illicit coca - is environmentally less onerous than alternative crops; poppy uses just 1/6 of the water that wheat needs, for example, and also absorbs much more local labor. The irony is that according to the Senlis Council, there’s a global shortage of morphine, and legalizing poppy cultivation - even if in small pilot projects for the time being - would therefore be a win-win situation.
7. FatSean | 07.19.08
Make it legal for adults to use, and let the free market drive fair-trade and sustainable cocaine production.
This woman is high! When supply is so restricted, but demand never stops, does she really think this is going to do a damn thing?
I agree with the other posters, work on getting the legality fixed and everything else will fall into place.
8. thehim | 07.19.08
I’m sorry, but the blame here goes on the governments who insist on trying to eradicate this market despite the fact that doing so has been clearly demonstrated to be both impossible and unnecessary. If cocaine was decriminalized and tightly regulated, criminals who have no concern for the environment would not be in charge of its production and you could easily protect the environment. Stop deflecting the blame onto people who have no control over the real problem.
9. erik | 07.19.08
Author, you time would be better spent speaking of the evils of the drug war. You do realize that farmers are required to go out in the middle of no where to farm this drug, correct?
If the US government didn’t “force” the Columbian government to spray obvious locationed-crops with poison, this would not be an issue.
10. Ted | 07.19.08
I found this article to be uninformed in the basics of the economic and social policy regarding coca.
There are tens of thousands of square kilometers of arable land in that region to grow this high-demand (globally) primary crop. An informed reporter would ask what is driving the crops into these ecologically-sensitive areas. That is simple- it is the multi-billion dollar policy to destroy production, forcing production of this cash crop out of perfectly good farming areas.
Also, if the production abruptly ceased, the foothold that the US military holds in South America would lose its purpose. By having an ongoing drug war, the US has a “valid” reason to keep military asset near to Venezuela.
The US government has no intent on actually ending this “conflict”, and is the primary reason these crops are that deep in the jungle.
If the coke-snorting elite in America cared about the jungle, they would pressure their government to stop spraying Round-up on the arable lands.
12. Brandon Bowers | 07.20.08
Weak. Completely ignores the fact that if cocaine were legal, farmers could purchase land on which to grow coca, just like tobacco farmers currently do.
13. dave | 07.20.08
Great points, guys — especially from Ted and name.
I’d just like to add that this article would be weak as an editorial but is pathetic and unethical as the news article it is supposed to be.
The Christian Science Monitor needs to retract this piece. If not, it deserves to lose all credibility.
The article’s reporter, apparently a high school intern for the White House, has completely bought into whatever press release she got from the office of the U.S. or Columbian drug czar.
Just because something is a green issue — which this is not — doesn’t mean a reporter shouldn’t have to do some fact checking and basic reporting.
The #1 source in this story, which is challenged in no way by the reporter and called a “Crusader” in the photo caption, works for an arm of the Columbian federal government.
Suspicious assertions are presented as fact, including:
“And slash-and-burn clearing for coca farms is one of the country’s largest sources of air pollution. The clearing also accelerates global climate change, which is shrinking Colombia’s mountaintop glaciers.”
And, as name pointed out:
“43 square feet of forest are cleared to produce one gram of cocaine”
Are you serious?
Well, if the reporter got it in a press release, I guess it has to be right.
14. S Higgins | 07.20.08
High and Middle class americans DO NOT use Cocaine. We would lose our houses if we were caught doing that. It is of no interest to us. It just not happen in my town.
15. CoyoteQ | 07.20.08
Did they ever stop to tell all of us how much forest in Canada has been cleared to mine the Nickel for the Hybrid batteries?
16. Raid | 07.20.08
Higgins, I don’t know what town you live in, but most of the powdered cocain in the U.S., is used by the middle class. Yuo can also bet your hind parts “it” does happen in your town. Don’t be so nieve.
I have to agreee with what many of the others have posted. The war on drugs is a waist of time and money. If any environmental blame is put on anyone, it’s those who support this farce on the American taxpayer. It’s time ot take the billions spent each year on this losing battle back into the American economy, as well as into drug education and rehabilitation.
All the drug war has created is a hydra. Cut one head off, several more grow in it’s place. It’s created a black market, and a high value on the product. Along with this goea greed, and greed breeds violence.
Good try Ana Maria, but your barking up the wrong tree.
17. Derek | 07.20.08
This article is one of the worst pieces of **** i have ever read. It is ignorant and in bad taste to try to fool people into thinking this is an environmental issue. It is just another example of how the “war on drugs” has failed, and is purely political issue and one of the many bad results of bad politics.
18. adude | 07.21.08
Our government should have the intelligence to use drugs to fight drugs. The cartels take in more money every year than the budgets of the FBI, DEA, and local police departments combined. Legalize weed, tax it, and use the money to fight other more harmful drugs. Our goverment is too stupid to realize all wars are economic. If someone is wealthier than you they can buy more guns, bullets, explosives, soldiers, etc. Its the same with the drug war. They have to become wealthier to fight their wealthier opponents. If legal drug dealers can take a larger percentage of the drug market than illegals, the legal side will finally have the advantage.
19. dutch girl | 07.21.08
Hello? This was written by someone in THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR. Are we really hoping for more than biased babble that merely glances on a subject rather than go in depth to offer true reporting?
(and honestly Higgins, high class people don’t use cocaine? You are an idiot.)
20. shawn | 07.22.08
End Plan Columbia. The USA spends millions in spraying herbicide on viable farm land. Coca is a bush that can grow year after year so if they stop spraying then growers would never have to clear forests.
1. ubetchaiam | 07.18.08
Ms.Cabellero ought to put her efforts into the insane ‘war on drugs’; when ‘drugs’ are illegal’ it only ads to the so called allure. One only has to look at Denmark and the usage of hash and marijuana. Though such is legal in certain areas, the majority of the population are not users or enthralled with ‘getting away with something’.
Best to legalize in a controlled, regulated manner those substances mankind seeks out to alter their experience of ‘reality’.