COLOMBIAN PRESIDENT ALVARO URIBE'S PUSH TO BAN DRUGS UP FOR DISCUSSION

President Alvaro Uribe Has Not Given Up On His Campaign To Get
Personal Drug Use Outlawed.

BOGOTA -- Sitting in the bedroom of her home in one of Bogota's
well-heeled neighborhoods, Alicia Fajardo takes a deep toke of a
marijuana joint and exhales the thick smoke. With that breath,
Fajardo is exercising a right granted her by Colombia's Constitutional Court.

But it's a right that President Alvaro Uribe believes is wrong.

The Colombian Congress this month will begin discussing a bill
introduced by the government that would prohibit possession of any
drug and would punish addicts and drug users with mandatory clinical treatment.

The bill would overturn a 1994 Constitutional Court sentence which
ruled that prohibiting the use of drugs violated the right to "free
development of personality" set forth in Colombia's constitution.
Since then, adults can possess up to 20 grams of marijuana and one
gram of cocaine for consumption in the privacy of their homes.

DRUG-USE SURVEY

The latest drug-use survey, conducted by the Uribe administration
last year and released in February, showed 2.3 percent of Colombians
admitted using marijuana at least once in the past year, while less
than 1 percent admitted using cocaine in the last 12 months. In the
United States, 5.8 percent used marijuana and 0.8 percent used
cocaine, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health
sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Fajardo, 46, says she is a regular marijuana user and does no one any
harm with her habit.

"Why should the government interfere in my private life?" she asks.

Hundreds of defenders of personal drug use laws gathered in public
squares of three cities, waving unlit joints in the air to reaffirm
their right to possess a minimum dose. But for Uribe, outlawing drug
use has become a crusade.

Since he first began campaigning for president, Uribe vowed to outlaw
possession of drugs but in more than six years as president he has
failed to see the measure pass. He included the issue in a broad
referendum in 2003, which was defeated. On four other occasions he
has tried to push legislation through Congress outlawing possession,
but all have failed.

HYPOCRITICAL WAR

Uribe says it is a contradiction for Colombia as the world's largest
cocaine producer and exporter to claim to be waging a war on drugs --
funded with billions of dollars of U.S. aid -- while allowing domestic use.

"It's not ethical to make that effort against production, against
trafficking, against the criminals and simultaneously be permissive
at the source, which is consumption," Uribe said in a recent speech.

Fajardo says she appreciates the irony but says the internal market
does not fuel the big-time drug cartels.

"The biggest consumers are in the U.S. and Europe. What we get here
are the leftovers," she says. Even Uribe's most loyal supporters
disagree with him on the issue.

COUNTRY DIVIDED

"If [the government bill] is approved, Colombia will not be a country
free of drugs. It will be a less free country," wrote Alfredo Rangel,
a security analyst who usually supports Uribe's initiatives, in a
recent column.

Senator Armando Benedetti, as a member of Uribe's governing
coalition, has opposed every one of the president's attempts to
penalize drug use.

"The state can't try to be a father, regulating the private lives of
Colombians," he told The Miami Herald.

But Benedetti says that despite previous failures to outlaw drug use,
this time around Uribe may just get enough votes in the Congress,
since the government has changed tack slightly.

Rather than making possession a felony, under the government bill it
would be a misdemeanor and offenders would face "therapeutic courts"
comprised of judges, physicians and psychologists who would then hand
down a sentence for treatment.

"Drug users are not criminals; they are sick. The state will offer
the possibility of rehabilitation," Interior Minister Fabio Valencia
Cossio said on presenting the text of the bill.

But Benedetti notes that experiences in other parts of the world have
shown that forced treatment generally fails.

"If they are going to force treatment on drug users, they would have
to do the same for users of tobacco, alcohol and even chicharrones
(pork rinds) because the fat content in them is a public health issue."