Colombia’s production of the coca leaf may have fallen by two-thirds but that just means production has ballooned elsewhere

Despite trumpeted successes drugs war is long lost

THE UNITED Nations celebrated another pyrrhic victory this week in the long-lost war on drugs. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported that Colombian production of the coca leaf, the main ingredient in cocaine, has fallen 60 per cent in the last decade. This is good news for Colombia.

Cocaine did not cause its various conflicts, but it helped fund them and make them far more violent and unstable than they might otherwise have been.

But in terms of the wider war on drugs the news from Colombia merely represents a shift in the battlefield. The country still produced 410 tonnes of the powder in 2009, despite receiving more than $5 billion in US aid to combat production during the last decade. And as production fell there it rose elsewhere, up 55 per cent in Peru in the last decade while doubling in Bolivia during that time. It is what is called the balloon effect – squeeze production in one place and it will balloon somewhere else...more

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