Thanks to failed trade policices, drugs on rise

Juan Forero and Joshua Partlow at the Washington Post show how trade policy-facilitated commodity gluts on global supply markets are leading Andean farmers to turn toward illegal drug cultivation:

"The prices of oranges, mandarins, coffee and other products are too low, and they do not give you enough to survive," said Cocarico, 50, adding that he plans to double the size of his coca crop. "So we are obligated to plant coca."

Across the Andean region, the size of the coca crop has increased 18 percent in the past five years, a period during which the United States has spent $4 billion on anti-drug programs...

The Andean cocaine supply now exceeds the amount produced in the 1990s, when U.S. policymakers pushed anti-drug aid to the region to counter powerful Colombian cartels. In 1993, when a U.S.-supported police unit shot dead the drug lord Pablo Escobar in his home town of Medellin, the Andes produced 200 fewer tons of cocaine than it did last year.

"If you look back at the days of Escobar, the names have changed but there's as much cocaine or more cocaine coming out of the Andes as a whole as in the peak anti-Medellin war on drugs," said John Walsh of the Washington Office on Latin America, a policy group critical of U.S. anti-drug policies in the region. "We're talking almost 20 years later."

And we're set to expand these policies through NAFTA for Colombia? Give me a break, I mean a hit, well, you know what I mean...