Colombia Calls Cocaine Users "Predators Of The Rain Forest"
If you're into charlie, snow, or a few lines of snort, Colombia's Vice President Francisco Santos Calderón has a message for you: your cocaine use is a "predator of the rain forest" and a serious threat to human life.
"Every user that snorts a gram of cocaine kills 4.4 square meters of rain forest," Calderón told the Huffington Post in an interview this week. According to Calderón, 300,000 hectares of tropical rain forest are destroyed each year to make way for coca plants and the industrial chemicals needed to turn them into a value-added product.
For decades Colombia has cultivated the bulk of the world's cocaine and the latest UN figures estimate the country's share of global production at more than 60 percent. The vast majority of the coke bought and sold in the US originates in Colombia, where the clearing of land for coca crops has had a devastating impact on one of world's most bio-diverse areas.
Since the election of hard-line President Alvaro Uribe in 2002, Colombia's government has stepped up efforts to tackle the trade, preventing the sale of an estimated 377 tons of cocaine and wiping about 14 billion off global coke profits, according to the Anti-Narcotics Police.
In an attempt to highlight the environmental impacts of coke use, Calderón's office launched the Shared Responsibility project, designed to encourage consumer countries to participate in the fight against coca production.
Cocaine use in the US has decreased dramatically since the peaks of the 1990s with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reporting a further drop in the number of first time users to 906,000 people in 2007 from 977,000 in 2006.
But these figures are still significant when the scale of the environmental impact is considered and as 29-year-old former user Chris from LA argues, coke use is still an integral part of the party culture in big US cities.
Chris stopped taking coke more than a year ago but at its peak, his habit had him using two to three times every week. "It's pretty easy to get hold of... it's everywhere out here," he said.
While he was using, Chris said he was casually aware of other environmental issues--he recycled and made an effort to avoid using plastic or disposable paper and polystyrene products. According to Calderón, this is typical of the average coke user, who is likely to be a young, well-educated professional with an ironic interest in the benefits of going green.
"Cocaine use requires a disposable income and during the week many users drive hybrid cars and recycle. Then, on the weekend, he or she destroys everything they believe in," Calderón said.
Colombia's government argues that coke users do more than just destroy the environment. According to Calderón they also help fuel the violent insurgencies that have resulted in the kidnapping, displacement and deaths of thousands of Colombian civilians.
The sprawling jungle in the south of Colombia's Córdoba department is one of many fluid front lines in the government's fight against narco-trafficking rebel groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
The nearby town of Caucasia is home to one of the largest anti-narcotics operations in northern Colombia and the few farming families working remote patches of land in southern Córdoba are heavily involved in the cocaine trade.
The area seems devoid of the basic infrastructure usually associated with high-income crops and by air, no roads are visible. Just a few homesteads are scattered around small patches of cleared vegetation, a sign of cocaine cultivation and the inevitable presence of armed groups.
Thousands of hectares of coca are produced here, despite attempts by anti-narcotics troops to dramatically reduce both the cultivation of coca and the sale of crops to groups like the FARC.
"Illegal armed groups in Colombia are financed in large part by trafficking cocaine. These same groups terrorize the civilian population by planting landmines, kidnapping, and, in some parts of the country, committing murders," Vice President Calderón said.
Targeted killings are rare in southern Córdoba but according to Colonel Santamaria, who heads Caucasia's anti-narcotics teams, troops are engaged in "weekly low-level battles" with the FARC and a number of civilians and eradication workers have been injured by landmines and small explosions.
"Here the rebels cause many problems. People are losing their legs from mines and the FARC are earning money from taxes on the drug trade," Santamaria said.
The FARC's ability to earn an estimated $300 million a year from cocaine trafficking has led the Colombian government to accuse users of financing the group's activities, including the kidnapping of former hostage and presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt.
Despite the efforts of Colonel Santamaria's troops, the Colombian government has been unable to seize control of the trade, as farmers use increasingly remote jungle areas to cultivate cocaine crops at a rate hard to tackle with manual eradication and crop substitution efforts.
This has led Vice President Calderón to travel to a number of consumer countries, conducting interviews with reporters and urging politicians to help publicize the impacts of the coke trade and encourage the environmentally conscious to stop using.
Whether or not these efforts will be successful in Europe, where cocaine use has skyrocketed in recent years, remains to be seen but according to Chris, Calderón's "startling" statistics will not be enough to dissuade users in the US.
"Cocaine is a vain drug... and I think [knowledge of the impacts] isn't enough to stop people from using."
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The whole idea of cocaine just seems stupid to me.
I mean, a stimulant that's illegal and expensive? We have legal stimulants readily available to us, not quite as expensive (getting there).
"We have legal stimulants readily available to us, not quite as expensive (getting there)."
Ah, I dare say that anything legally available isn't pharmacologically similar and the effects are nowhere near comparable.
As for expense...
But besides that, the value of this piece is on level with a simplistic article writen by a naive school girl.
Idiots, politicians, ignorant or corrupt law inforcement agents, and pharmaceutical companies really love to make cocaine a demon drug. Indigenous peoples of Central & South America know better, and to demonize their government
FYI - The Columbian special forces, along with American special forces only target rebel run coca fields to destroy or spray in Columbia.
They are told to ignore other coca fields.
Hmmmmm.
Coca is a natural stimulant used by indigenous peoples of the region. In its natural leaf state it is non-addictive. It is most especially useful for indigenous peoples working in high elevation. As well, former Harvard research has shown natural coca useful in insulin regulation of type II diabetics.
And like marijuana, that is the biggest reason for demonizing it--Big Pharma is always doing something to try to turn up the heat on those two drugs.
And while Big Pharma beats the demonization drum, the DEA and other government agencies [as well as other governments] sell and distribute the stuff for profit, and lock up those who buy it for a profit, and then the drugs previously confiscated are resold for profit, and the cycle starts all over again...je
So I suppose if Columbians purchase pornography that is produced in Southern California they are contributing to the moral decay of Reseda or Chatsworth California, where most porn is produced??!?
Just because there is a market for something, does not mean you have to partake in it.
Because there is a lucrative market in human trafficking, I should become involved in the industry??
Get a grip Columbia. If you feel the cocaine business is destroying your country, you are to blame.
What planet do you come from? If people didn't use cocaine there would be no market for it --ergo, user's have responsibility.
The same logic applies to driving a gas guzzler. If you drive one, you are wasting resources and polluting the environment.
If cocaine was regulated instead of prohibited there would be no black market for it -ergo, prohibition is responsible.
Project Colombia is a failure just like the war on drugs.
But the trees don't keep me skinny!!
/ sarcasm
Oh no it's not; it's prohibition that's the cause of ALL the evils Calderón is decrying.
If the US had more sensible drug laws and wasn't forcing Columbia to do it's dirty work, coca cultivation--hell, *organic* coca cultivation--would displace the coffeee crop as the nation's primary agricultural industry. Millions of peasants would be gainfully and peacefully employed, instead of eking out a precarious existance in what amounts to a war zone.
And the entire region would be at peace.
The war on drugs has done as much damage as the war on terror, and for a whole lot longer.
a well spoken and logical opinion-
blaming the addict is like blaming the victim
hopefully Obama will quit wasting US taxpayer money trying to destroy indiginous crops
only some of the people who use cocaine are addicts.
Colombia doesn't need to help the US Drug War. The reason that revolutionaries can get funding from drug growers is that Colombia's also banning cocaine; they could legalize it and collect taxes on it, and the growers wouldn't constantly be tearing down rain forests trying to hide from the government.
Sure, the world would be better off if the US ended Prohibition, stopped arresting people, and stopped funding terrorists, revolutionaries, and criminals around the world, but Colombia's at fault here too.
Jessicah Curtis: We both know the real reason the rain forest is being stripped away. Prohibition. If cocaine were legal it wouldn't be manufactured by the black market and indiscriminately grown in the rain forest. It would be produced by the Governement or Private sector and would be regulated. Prohibition does much more harm then the drug itself.
What this should indicate to the Colombian government is they are not effective in dealing with FARC and need to try something different. They need to move away from burning fields and military tactics and try to provide other opportunities for their people. People in Columbia who try to create unions are killed that's not FARC that's the government . The U.S. sends 10's of millions of dollars to their military to fight FARC which clearly is a waste of our tax dollars.
They can't. They're too exposed to US pressure vis-a-vis the drug war (an epic FAIL if ever there was one). The necessary change has to happen stateside.
He is absolutely correct! If you want to have cocaine you should be able to grow your own coca here and what you do with be your own damned business! STOP THE DRUG WAR! It only hurts people, and hasn't held back the drug market one little bit. Oh, but it is a great waste and way of laundering money!
Cocaine users are also clueless, vapid idiots who don't give a crap about the rain forest.
Nothing kills rain forest like big argi-business. Meat eaters are responsible for ten thousand times the rain forest loss that coke users are. Cows don't graze in the jungle.
8
Saying that doesn't change the fact that cocaine money is a STRONG incentive to slash and burn for the coca-buck. Eat homegrown veg, smoke homegrown, help people, be happy!
Besides turning coca leaves into cocaine only distills greed.
Capitalism, any "cash" crop, is "a STRONG incentive to slash and burn" rain forests. It's a perverse incentive.
If cocaine "distills greed", it's because it is illegal. Like any other prohibition, it fosters organized crime.
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Wow the CIA must love the fact that they get all this land for NOTHING!!!
I guess it beat giving the land on the boarders of are great National Parks, like the oil companies get.
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, coca crops are now being cultivated in remote sections of several national parks in Colombia.
For other interesting facts on the cocaine trade and Colombia, check out UNODC's 2008 'Colombia Coca Cultivation Survey'.
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