The Highs and Lows of Cartagena

One cannot escape the feeling that President Bush headed in the wrong direction in the effort to address the drug problem by traveling to Colombia. Rather that going there to tell foreign presidents what to do to their countries to solve our problem, it would be symbolically more precise to have them come here, where both the problem and its solution ultimately are to be found.

Sure, cocaine production in the Andean nations is part of the problem. The very fact that Bush and the presidents of Colombia, Bolivia and Peru had to huddle in a colonial fort at the heavily guarded Colombian naval academy in Cartagena vividly suggested the extent to which those three nations have serious problems with the drug cartels.

But despite all their concerns, many Latin Americans resent the heavy hand of the gringo superpower to the north; they resent the hypocrisy of being asked to divest themselves of one of their few cash-rich crops; they fail to understand the dispatching of troops and ships to waters off the Colombian coast when the real drug battlefront is the cities of America, where drug traffickers control too much territory, terrorize too many frightened Americans and hook too many future mothers and present children on cocaine.

Perhaps it might have been more effective for the President to hold the drug summit in Watts, or in Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York City, or even in Washington, D.C., not that far from the White House, where the city’s mayor was indicted on Wednesday for drug use. For the point cannot be driven home too strongly that international trafficking will not more than marginally wind down unless the lucrative market in illicit drugs is dried up by some genius combination of enforcement, education and rehabilitation.

This is not to deplore the Cartagena summit. Hardly. The very agenda items--crop substitution, increased U.S. aid, the unfortunate U.S. export of drug-processing chemicals, the use of the U.S. military in the drug war and other initiatives--were well worth discussing. But while Colombia is certainly close to the problem, it is also far away from it: The most important front is here. We won’t taste the fruits of victory in fighting drugs until we blame foreigners less for the problem and do more to clean up our own act at home.