cannabisnews.com: U.S. Targets Poppy Fields That Flow From Colombia!





U.S. Targets Poppy Fields That Flow From Colombia!
Posted by FoM on February 22, 1999 at 06:03:14 PT

VEGA LARGA, ColombiaStanding in his small poppy field on a steep mountain slope, Adan Rodriguez watched in dismay as U.S.-supplied airplanes plunged through the narrow gorge, spraying his illegal crop with a commercial weedkiller. Helicopters buzzed nearby, door gunners at the ready.
"People came and gave me the seeds and showed me how to grow it," said the farmer, 56, wiping sweat from his brow as heavily armed counter-narcotics police walked through the field. "Then we sell the opium gum to people we don't know. But if they destroy these crops we will have nothing to live on."Such aerial assaults on illicit crops are nothing new in Colombia. But usually the target is coca, the leafy plant used to produce cocaine. Now, as heroin production surges in this Andean nation, the United States and Colombia are redirecting some of their eradication efforts toward poppies, the raw material for opium and heroin.Citing a "dramatic shift" in the U.S. heroin market, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reported last September that "Colombia-based trafficking groups have captured a significant share of the largest U.S. heroin markets, primarily located in major cities along the Eastern seaboard," including Washington, Baltimore, Boston and Philadelphia.The report added that 75 percent of the heroin seized in the United States came from Colombia, which until five years ago produced no heroin.Donnie Marshall, the DEA's acting deputy director, said in congressional testimony last year that the Colombians had expanded their share of the U.S. market by slashing the price of heroin from about $150,000 a kilogram [2.2 pounds] to $90,000 a kilogram and greatly increasing the product's purity.The drop in price made the drug more affordable, and the rise in purity -- Colombian heroin is about 80 percent pure when it hits U.S. streets, compared to 7 percent for Southeast Asian heroin -- meant the drug does not have to be injected, but can be smoked or inhaled. The combination of low price and high quality has helped drive the estimated number of heroin users in the United States from 600,000 to 810,000 in the past three years, according to Barry McCaffrey, the Clinton administration's drug policy director.Marshall said the Colombians allied themselves with New York-based drug trafficking organizations from the Dominican Republic to distribute the heroin. Some Colombian criminal organizations traffic in heroin and cocaine, forcing their wholesale clients in the United States to take and sell both drugs.Because of the trend, the Clinton administration is no longer focusing exclusively on coca-leaf cultivation and cocaine production and is shifting resources to fighting heroin at the source. The United States currently gives Colombia $289 million in annual anti-drug aid, making Colombia the largest recipient of U.S. aid in the Western Hemisphere.Since November four propeller-driven airplanes supplied by the United States have been reassigned from spraying coca farms to spraying poppy fields. Flown by Americans working for a State Department contractor, the planes are based in the city of Neiva about 140 miles southwest of the Colombian capital, Bogota.The United States also has assigned five Bell 212 helicopters to the heroin program, in part because the choppers are capable of flying at the high altitudes -- between 7,000 and 9,000 feet -- where poppies grow best. In addition, six new Blackhawk helicopters -- to be purchased by the United States for Colombia's National Police this year at a cost of $96 million -- will be used primarily in the poppy eradication effort.The stepped-up spraying campaign has been felt most keenly by the estimated 35,000 peasants who make their living growing the opium or processing it into opium "latex" -- the gum that is milked from the poppy bulb -- for the Colombian organizations, which are run largely by small cartels based in the northern Cauca Valley.Many, like Rodriguez, said they grew the crop because it yielded much more money than traditional crops such as coffee and cocoa, and because the drug traffickers provided the seed, fertilizer and a guaranteed market. Poppy yields at least two crops a year and often three; each hectare (1.54 acres) of poppies yields about $1,200 per harvest. Ordinary field workers can earn $40 a day weeding poppy fields or scoring the bulbs to extract the latex, compared with $8 a day tending legal crops.Marxist guerrillas roam freely in the area around Rodriguez's poppy field, which is about 8,000 feet above sea level and about 40 miles southeast of Neiva. The guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia protect the poppy growers and collect a 10 percent tax, roughly $45, on every kilo of opium gum that moves out of the area.Unlike cocaine, which requires large quantities of coca leaf and sophisticated laboratories to extract the drug, heroin can be produced in laboratories the size of a small kitchen. Not only does heroin production require far fewer chemicals, but the laboratories are harder to find and destroy."We don't know who the people are who buy this," Rodriguez said. "We take it down to where they tell, then they take it away. We don't know what it is used for."Capt. Lizardo Vargas of the counter-narcotics police nodded his head sympathetically and said he would not arrest the poppy growers. But he said his men had no choice but to eradicate the field and others like it."We know every time we spray we take food out of the mouths of these people," Vargas said. "But this crop makes the guerrillas stronger, it damages the environment and it kills people in other countries. We have to stop it, but we should offer alternatives to the people."Government agricultural advisers in Neiva who offer assistance in raising traditional crops said that their ranks have been slashed and that interest rates on commercial loans are so high most small farmers could not afford them.U.S. officials agreed the anti-drug program here must provide more money for alternative crops. McCaffrey said the United States is giving $15 million over three years for alternative development programs, but acknowledged that more is needed.As Vargas and Rodriguez talked, helicopters flew escort missions for the small, light , single-engine crop dusters. The danger is real. Several have been shot down in recent years by guerrillas, and several dozen helicopters have also been damaged by ground fire.Vargas, preparing to board a helicopter to leave the area, promised Rodriguez there would be credits available soon, but the promises sounded distant to the peasant."We used to be able to grow coffee here, but a plague has killed our trees," Rodriguez said. "Other crops are hard to grow. What are we supposed to do?"
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