AUDREY'S MISSILES
A weekly newsletter dedicated to the peaceful
reform of the United States government.
THE ELEPHANT POOP SCOOP
An article in the Chicago Tribune quotes a CIA analysis as saying that
the cultivation of the opium poppy rose TWENTY- THREE PERCENT in Colombia
last year and that Colombian heroin increasingly joined cocaine in reaching
U.S. streets. As more and more illegal drugs come into this country, not
only through Mexico, but also from Cuba, Haiti, and other points South, the
United States fumbles and stumbles, searching for answers to a problem that
grows more urgent by the hour.
The situation in Colombia continues to deteriorate. According to a Utah
newspaper, suspected paramilitary gunmen executed 21 unarmed residents of a
small town in an oil and cocaine-producing region near the Venezuelan border
earlier this month. "They came and dragged the people from their homes and
massacred them right in front of their families," a reporter told the
Associated Press by telephone. "The town has completely shut down. The
people are staying in their homes." Just last month Marxist guerrillas
firing homemade missiles heavily damaged a town in southwest Colombia and
freed 92 inmates from a prison there in the largest jailbreak carried out by
rebel forces in almost two years. Not only are matters getting worse in
Colombia, but in other countries in Latin America as well. Recently, the
chairmen of the House and Senate foreign relations committees accused Mexico
of unsatisfactory cooperation with U.S. counter-narcotics efforts and said
relevant U.S. laws should be applied against that country. "The situation is
Mexico continues to deteriorate rapidly," said House International Relations
Committee chairman Benjamin Gilman, and Senate Foreign Relations Committee
chairman Jesse Helms. Our Ambassador to Mexico, Jeffrey Davidow, has
declared that the country is in the hands of narco traffickers. He further
stated that Mexican dealers are among the world's biggest drug traffickers,
and the country has become the world headquarters for the drug trade. "The
fact is that the headquarters of drug trafficking is in Mexico ..just like
the headquarters of the Mafia is in Sicily," Davidow said, speaking in
Spanish before a group of alumni from the University of Southern California
in Mexico City.
Many of the poverty stricken peoples of this earth have thought that at
last they had found a way to tap the riches of the industrialized nations,
only to become slaves themselves to the criminals engaged in the trade. Some
say legalize. Legalization would probably help right now, but the criminal
penetration is such that Congress is not even discussing the option, and we
know from the European experience that it is not a cure all. A Canadian
newspaper had this to say: "No matter how many dealers are arrested,
incarcerated or deported; no matter how many users are incarcerated,
deported, committed, treated or cremated; and no matter how tough or
compassionate laws become, there will never be any difference until the
supply is shut down at its source. I fail to understand why this is not the
main topic of conversation when we discuss the problem of hard drug use. It
is as if we have an elephant in the living room, but all we can do is discuss
the optimal pooper-scooper. In a nutshell, certain Third World countries are
the suppliers and we, the First World, particularly North America, are the
consumers. The supply will always be there, no matter how many 11-year-old
Hondurans we deport, and the suppliers will always find a way to get it to
us."
28/02/00 EL PAIS and from Drug News Digest:
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n471.a04.html,
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n359.a06.html,
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n301.a02.html, and
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n272.a02.html.
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