U.N. AIDE WOULD FIGHT DRUGS WITH 'ALTERNATIVE DEVELOPMENT'

UNITED NATIONS -- With President Clinton and other world leaders coming
here Monday for a special session of the General Assembly on the world's
drug problems, the U.N.'s top anti-narcotics official has submitted a
two-pronged strategy that moves beyond the conventional approach of
intercepting illegal drugs and arresting traffickers.

Pino Arlacchi, the executive director of the U.N. International Drug
Control Program, proposes the ambitious target of eliminating opium poppies
and coca plants, the raw ingredients of heroin and cocaine, in 10 years as
well as substantially reducing marijuana.

To achieve this, he advocates so-called alternative development programs
that would induce opium and coca growers to switch to less profitable legal
crops by bringing roads, hospitals, schools and a better life into remote
rural areas that depend on drug crops to survive.

Additionally, Arlacchi has proposed that nations reduce the demand for
drugs by half over the next decade through prevention and treatment
programs. Neither idea is new, but Arlacchi said they had proved promising
enough to try on a broader scale.

"These two cards have not been played in full," he said in an interview.

Alternative development has sometimes been viewed as costly and
unrealistic, since opium and coca growers are reluctant to grow legal crops
that would earn less income and be harder to take to market. Middlemen make
the rounds of peasants to buy their raw opium and coca paste.

What is needed, Arlacchi said, is political authority to enforce
eradication and development involving more than crop substitution.

"We would propose an alternative way of life," he said. "They can be rich
peasants if they grow opium, but they can die if they don't have roads and
hospitals."

Peru and Colombia have tried alternative development, Arlacchi said, and
Peru has reduced its coca fields by 40 percent in two years. Bolivia has
promised to phase out its coca over the next five years, he said.

Arlacchi said the cost would run far less than potential donors like the
United States anticipate. With some programs already in place, he estimated
that alternative development would require an additional amount of less
than $250 million a year over the next decade. In comparison, the U.S.
government's annual drug control budget exceeds $16 billion.

Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the Clinton administration's anti-drug chief, said
that he agreed with demand reduction, but was not persuaded that it would
be easy to get Afghans and Burmese, who together grow 90 percent of the
world's opium, to change to other crops. But McCaffrey added in a telephone
interview from Washington, "We're supportive of Pino Arlacchi's focused
high-energy leadership."

Arlacchi, whose enthusiasm belies a tough reputation earned fighting the
Mafia in his native Italy, cited what he said were some conspicuous
successes against drug trafficking in the last decade.

"We destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the drug cartels," he said.
He said that the Medellin and Cali cocaine cartels in Colombia had been
crushed and that some Asian opium warlords surrendered by striking deals
with the military government in Burma that let them keep their freedom and
money. Thailand virtually eliminated opium production through alternative
development, he added, and Pakistan had sharply cut back opium growing as
well.