HYDE FIGHTS COLOMBIAN OPIUM

With Congress in recess, the chairman of the House International Relations
Committee issued a two-paragraph statement containing a startling
allegation. Rep. Henry Hyde contended opium production in Colombia has
revived. It supplies, he continued, ''more than 60 percent of U.S. heroin.''

Hyde followed with this mandate: ''We must eliminate all of the small,
deadly opium crop in Colombia sooner rather than later to provide
protection for our young people and to maximize use of U.S. aid in Colombia.''

For the veteran congressman from the Chicago suburbs to go public signified
that his previous private appeals to high levels of the Colombian and U.S.
governments fell on deaf ears.

Talk about needing to ''maximize'' U.S. aid suggests the $2.5 billion Plan
Colombia, while keeping leftist guerrillas at bay, has failed in its
original anti-drug mission. Hyde is implying that while the Colombian
operation is a great success, the patient is dying. The poisonous export of
heroin flows into middle-class suburbs to be ingested by America's youth.

The problem, as seen by Hyde and his experienced staff, is the neglect of
the small, extremely profitable, twice-a-year opium crops grown in
Colombia's high Andes. U.S. and Colombian officials have made an
unannounced decision to concentrate on eradicating coca plants as the
larger source of financing guerrillas. However, drug traffickers are happy
selling heroin with a U.S. street value six times higher than cocaine.

The result is a serious setback in the war against drugs, seemingly
unnoticed by a Bush administration committed to the war against terrorism.
America is awash with heroin, so pure that it need not be mainlined with a
needle, and middle-class youths think they are safe by smoking or snorting it.

Hyde started demanding action early this year. In a Feb. 3 letter to
Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe, he contended that it is possible to
attack coca and opium at the same time. He pointed out that the Colombian
National Police, in 1999 and 2000, eradicated 80 percent to 90 percent of
the opium crop.

Hyde did not receive much of a response from Colombia, and four months
later turned to the U.S. drug czar--John Walters, director of national drug
control policy. Meeting with the congressman on June 3, Walters echoed the
State Department. He called it next to impossible to locate opium fields in
the remote Andes.

That did not satisfy Hyde. On June 10, he wrote to Walters complaining that
only 1,658 hectares of opium production have been eradicated--less than 20
percent of the 10,000 hectares promised by the State Department. Hyde noted
that New York Times reporters, in a June 8 dispatch, experienced no
difficulty in finding opium fields (and photographing them in color). ''I
urge your support for a full scale DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency]-led
program to pay Colombian farmers and villagers for information on the
location of opium fields,'' Hyde urged Walters.

On July 8, the Colombian Embassy in Washington relayed to Hyde's staff the
Colombian National Police's up-to-the-minute tabulation on opium
eradication. It was still 1,658 hectares. It still is, as far as anybody
knows. That is the reason for Hyde's public statement of Aug. 8.

Just why U.S. and Colombian authorities are nonchalant about the
opium-heroin epidemic defies rational explanation. Drug czar Walters, in
response to Hyde's statement, told me, ''There was a 25 percent reduction
in opium last year. We are not reducing coca production at the expense of
opium production.''

In the seven years I have been writing about Colombia's narco-guerrillas,
U.S. policy has seemed circular. When I was in Bogota in 1996, U.S.
officials disavowed any interest in anti-guerrilla activity unless
connected to narcotics suppression. The visit to Colombia Aug. 12 by Gen.
Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, symbolized the
change of emphasis from anti-drug to anti-guerrilla. The bottom line is
that more and more heroin is pouring out of Colombia into America's streets.