Review & Outlook

"Whose Drug Problem?"

Earlier this month the U.S. government released its annual drug use survey
and the news is, well, in '60s drugculture jargon, a bummer. More teenagers
tried heroin for the first time last year than ever before. The number of
teenagers who believe that using cocaine is risky declined to 54% in 1996
from 63% in 1994. Drug use among young adults1825 year oldsis rising.
Overall drug usage among Americans has shown no change over the past five
years.

The good newsthat there was a drop in overall teenage drug usewas
immediately challenged by a University of Michigan research group that said
its own survey showed no decrease in teenage drug use and sharp increases in
marijuana use among teenagers.

U.S. policy makers keep finding reasons why this is so that invariably point
away from America in the timehonored bureaucratic tradition of blaming
someone else. The chief villain in the case continues to be Colombia. No
matter how insatiable the demand by U.S. users, the logic in Washington's
eyes is that this is all Colombia's fault. As characterized by State
Department spokesman Nicholas Burns: "If the Colombian government is not
effective in fighting the narcotraffickers, it has a negative impact on us,
on poor kids in our cities."

This summer the U.S. Congress feverishly debated whether to send more funding
for antinarcotics military assistance to Colombiaeven though such funding
is technically cut off when a country is decertified as Colombia has been for
the past two years.

But the real problem is that cocaine users in American society are doing such
a good job of funding the bad guys in Colombia that a few more helicopters to
help the good guys is not likely to make a difference. Just look at the
place: The army is locked in a timeless struggle against exceedingly
wellarmed guerrillas, who have traded in their Marxist ideology to become
narcoentrepreneurs equipped with the best technology money can buy.

While the army fights the guerrillaswho blow up oil pipelines, rob banks
and slaughter innocent civiliansangry paramilitary groups, some out to
defend their own jungle corridors for running drugs, have joined in the
rumble. In 1996 more than 180,000 Colombians were made refugees by the
violence. Some 33,000 people were killed last year alone. In the past month
scores of peasants have been murdered and at least five mayors were
kidnapped. Colombian President Ernesto Samper's own party urged him to shut
down Congress and adopt emergency powers in order to end the violence.
Meanwhile the Colombian National Police, hoping to calm the fears of the
ohsopure Americans threatened by morally devoid Colombians, have been
scrambling to eradicate crops, lock up cartel leaders and destroy
laboratories in the jungles.

One of these days, Colombians who by and large are not enjoying the
narcochaos might like to ask Americans a few questions:

Could all of you 30something professionals in places like Manhattan, LA and
San Francisco find something to do other than suck cocaine up your noses?
Could you uppermiddleclass suburban parents find the courage to just once
deprive your obviously whackedout children of something that is destroying
their lives? And could the Baby Boom U.S. President and his wife possibly
find time routinely in their schedules to personally put some moral
leadership behind the idea that using this stuff is bad? Indeed, why has the
percentage of teenagers who regard drugs as bad or dangerous dropped straight
through the years of this Presidency?

Absent any such stirrings of personal responsibility or selfcontrol in the
U.S., it's almost comical to think of our nation's leadership sitting in a
room and thinking hard about how many more helicopters we should send down to
Colombia to keep drugs off American streets.
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