-Caveat Lector- Pravda.RU:Main:More in detail 15:40 2001-08-30 ALAN BOCK: PLAN COLOMBIA GROWS Asa Hutchinson, President Bush's choice for head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, supports Plan Colombia, which was begun by the Clinton administration and has, so far, sent US$1.3 billion to the sorry government of that South American country. Nobody even pretends that the US "investment" in Colombia's 50-year civil war is likely to stem the flow of drugs and the record on this score is dispiriting, to say the least. The street price of cocaine in the United States fell 37 percent from 1990 to 1996, a period of intense eradication and interdiction activity. Even Asa Hutchinson, in response to a question from Robert Novak on CNN Saturday, could only say: "I can look you in the eye and say we need to give this a chance to work." He went on to "explain": "The intent and justification for our initiative should not be to stop the flow of drugs coming to our country. I hope that's a side benefit, but that's not the justification in my view for the Plan Colombia." So the new head of the DEA says that the United States government ought to spend money in Colombia even though he doesn't think it will quell the flow of drugs into American cities? Why should we do it, then? Hutchinson went on: "We've got to strengthen that democracy and their dependence to the narco- traffickers of the drug money is what we're trying to reduce, hopefully as a side benefit to America here." An Opportunity Missed The evidence is fairly strong that the Clinton administration didn't have a very coherent idea of what it was getting the United States into with Plan Colombia. The US committed itself to the idea largely through the extraordinary influence within the administration of Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who resigned earlier this year as head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the position generally called "drug czar." Gen. McCaffrey had such influence largely because the Clinton administration saw itself as potentially vulnerable on the issue due to the rumored proclivities of the commander-in-chief (or at least his brother); so we have a major US military initiative conceived in desperation and confusion, without serious planning. We had an administration coming into office whose presidential candidate had said during the campaign that he was committed to rethinking certain US overseas commitments, making sure that they really served US interests. Between the early portions of the campaign and the time Bush assumed office, it became more obvious than ever that Colombia's neighbors, especially Ecuador, Brazil and Venezuela, were deeply concerned about the conflict in Colombia spilling over into their territories. Instead of considering whether those concerns might be legitimate enough to cause serious rethinking, however, the Bush administration decided to buy them off and expand the incursion into the grandiose Andean Initiative, from the more modestly doomed Plan Colombia. Only Logical The problem, of course, is that there is so much money in the drug trade and such a large differential between the price of coca in the jungle and the price of refined (and cut) cocaine on American streets that eradication efforts are viewed by narco-traffickers as simply a cost of doing business. The only people who really get hurt by the eradication efforts turn out to be small peasant farmers, the most vulnerable, most innocent and least dangerous people in the entire equation. The fact that the street price in the United States has fallen during eradication efforts doesn't gainsay this factor. Because of the illegality of certain drugs, the street price of cocaine, for example, is still 10 to 20 times higher than the pharmaceutical price. The street price might fall, but that still leaves a huge margin between the cost of production, transportation and a reasonable profit margin and what the traffickers can get from addicts and other users. If the eradication campaign were to be modestly successful -- if it were to reduce production enough to raise the street price a hair or two -- the profit margins would be even larger and even more people would be lured into the trade. More Honest but More Doomed In implicit acknowledgment of the fact that even a more concerted and expensive war on coca cultivation is likely to have little or no impact on the supply of cocaine in the United States, some are starting to push for a straightforward anti-guerrilla intervention into Colombia's civil war; and one could argue that a straightforward program of aid to the present Colombia government would at least be more honest than using the War on Drugs as a cloak for military aid. But such a program would also be much more expensive, involve more US military personnel, and almost certainly lead to more US casualties. It might even lead to more resentment and hostility toward the United States, as if such hostility were not already evident enough in South America. 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