COCAINE PRICES RISE AND QUALITY DECLINES, WHITE HOUSE SAYS

BOGOTA, Colombia - After years of disappointing news about the easy
availability of cocaine on American streets, the Bush administration
on Thursday said its multibillion-dollar drug war in Colombia was
showing signs of success, with the retail price of the drug in the
United States sharply higher and the level of purity lower.

From February to September, the price of a gram of cocaine rose 19
percent, to $170, while the purity level fell 15 percent, the White
House Office of National Drug Control Policy said.

White House officials said those trends were consistent with a
shortage of cocaine and validated the United States' $4 billion,
multiyear plan to wipe out cocaine drug crops in Colombia through
aerial spraying.

"These numbers confirm that the levels of interdiction, the levels of
eradication, have reduced the availability of cocaine in the United
States," John Walters, director of the White House Office of National
Drug Control Policy, said Thursday in a telephone interview from
Washington. "There's a change in availability. The policy is working."

But drug policy analysts critical of the administration's war on
drugs said the White House was drawing unrealistically rosy
conclusions from too short a period. They noted that a Rand
Corporation study for the White House in 2003 showed that as the war
on drugs had expanded since 1981, the price of cocaine had tumbled to
historic lows while purity levels had risen.

Drug policy analysts also said that like any commodity, the price of
cocaine sometimes fluctuates wildly. Yet the cocaine trade remains
intractably lucrative, they said.

"Cocaine is not like computer chips, where new technology makes it
cheaper and cheaper," said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the
Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation, an independent New York
group that says the war on drugs has been counterproductive. "A small
blip upward after so many years of decline in price and increase in
purity is essentially meaningless."

Since 2000, American officials have insisted that an aggressive push
to spray land used for Colombia's huge drug crops with glyphosate
would pay off. Hundreds of thousands of acres, many in a swath of
southern Colombia held by Marxist rebels, have been sprayed.

But this year, even after reporting that 336,000 acres of coca plants
had been sprayed in 2004, the White House acknowledged that the
amount of coca across Colombia was "statistically unchanged" from 2003.

Coca cultivation has spread to most states, growers are planting more
potent strains and the amount of cocaine Colombia produces is still
more than enough to satisfy American demand.

Right-wing paramilitary commanders have continued trafficking much of
Colombia's cocaine, fearing little from the administration of
President Alvaro Uribe, which has granted generous concessions
shielding them from serious punishment as they participate in a
government-sponsored disarmament process. Human rights groups and
some Colombian political leaders say that the paramilitaries are
evolving into a Mafia-like organization that depends on the cocaine trade.

John Walsh, who follows American drug policy for the Washington
Office on Latin America, a policy analysis group, said cocaine
trafficking regularly rebounded after difficult periods. When
Colombia dismantled the Medellin cocaine cartel in the late 1980's
and began an offensive against the Cali cartel in the mid-1990's,
"cocaine price increases, while obvious, were equally obviously
short-lived," he said. "They were quite ephemeral."

Still, the American government says the overall picture is positive:
its figures show that seizures of cocaine are way up and that cocaine
use among some sectors of the American population has declined.

The White House said the newest figures were just the start of a
positive trend. Officials say that trend took time to develop because
the traffickers had probably overproduced when the spraying effort
began and for months used stockpiles of cocaine to supply American consumers.

"We kept watching this and watching this and that started to change,"
David Murray, a drug policy analyst at the White House, said of the
price and purity figures. "Nobody is saying victory. We're just
finding a figure that's consistent with some of the other data sets we had."