Environmental casualties of the war on drugs.

C hemical control methods against illicit drug crops in producer countries have long been a fixture of the 20-year U.S. war on drugs. In 1998, President Bill Clinton unveiled *an unprecedented $16 billion antidrug initiative that induded a generous allotment for applying herbicides to crops in drug-producing nations. The U.S. initiative follows protocols outlined in the 1988 United Nations (UN) Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psycho-tropic Substances. The UN accepts herbi-cidal crop eradication programs as part of the fight against the $60 billion global trade in drugs such as heroin and cocaine, which are abused by 8 million and 13 million people respectively worldwide, according to data collected by the UN International Drug Control Programme. But the issue at hand seems to be a question of which is the worse of two evils-the effects of drug crop cultivation and production or those of chemical eradica-tion of such crops. Drug use is clearly costly to societies and individuals. The White House Office on Drug Policy estimates that 13 million people in the United States use illegal drugs. In 1992, drug use cost the U.S. medical system $98 billion, resulted in $14 billion in lost productivity, and led to $59.1 billion in judicial costs, including costs of litigation and incarceration, according to The Economic Costs ofAlcohol and Drug Abuse in the United States-1992, a report by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. This report states that approximately 36% of AIDS cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1992 were related to intravenous drug use-a phenomenon mirrored in global figures on the AIDS pandemic. The drug trade has also led to local drug abuse in producer countries. In the mid-1980s, studies issue of the Bulletin on Narcotics, noted that addiction to coca paste (an intermediary product in the extraction of the cocaine alkaloid) was occurrmg in epidemic proportions, particularly in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. These problems have continued into the 1990s, though they have not been quantified. Drug production is also environmentally cosdy. In producer countries, crops of coca, opium poppy, and marijuana have replaced native vegetation in an area covering over 1 million hectares (ha), often in protected areas such as species-rich rain forests and erosion-prone cloud forests. Additional environmental damage ensues from the cultivation and processing of these crops, which involve large volumes of pesticides, …