The Consumer Must Cut This Evil Chain : Drug war: Eradication punishes only the farmer, who’d grow legal export crops if they earned a fair market price.

The crime of drug use involves not just the individual consumer but an endless chain of individuals--society, the state, the human race.

The pervasiveness of this evil has no limits, and thus presents a serious threat to the national security and sovereignty of many countries. It also is a threat to the international economic system, as the multimillion profits generated from drug trafficking are channeled into legal operations, including massive investments in the world’s major stock markets.

Although it is important to continue with eradication and law-enforcement programs, we must understand that the problem is not just a struggle between cops and criminals, and cannot be resolved simply by increasing the number of weapons, policemen, aircraft, military units, prosecutions and prisons. Since 1981, while the drug-enforcement effort has quintupled, prices have fallen by three-quarters and consumption has soared astronomically.

We must look for the causes of drug abuse: What leads a person to use and abuse drugs. Is it loneliness? The desire to flee unbending social patterns? The loss of family values? Professional frustration? Or is it just fashionable?

We also must look at the other end of the spectrum and ask why extremely poor campesinos in Asia and Latin America farm the opium poppy, coca leaf, marijuana. Is it because they have a direct interest in poisoning and enslaving millions of consumers in highly industrialized countries? Or has economic injustice driven the campesinos to cultivate products for which there is a high demand in the First World?

Then we must ask: Shouldn’t we be taking steps toward reaching international economic justice, so that traditional agricultural products and raw materials produced by developing countries can be sold at fair prices and peasants don’t have to cultivate drugs to make a living? Coca emerged in the 1980s as the single most profitable export cash crop of Peru and Bolivia. The two countries produce 90% of the coca leaf processed into cocaine for the international market. Most of the rest is produced in Colombia, which controls 80% of the export trade in cocaine.

The different links in the chain do not share equally in profitability. The costs associated with the initial stages of drug production--cultivation, refining and transportation to the point of export--account for only 8% of the price in the retail market, where the most profitable activities take place. For every dollar spent on marijuana or heroin in the United States, the farmers earn between 7 and 9 cents; coca farmers earn even less, only 1 to 3 cents per dollar paid by the users.

It is not the peasants who are the criminals; the real criminals are the middlemen--those who seek to become immensely rich at the expense of the addiction of young people all over the world. It is not idle to point out that the peasants who cultivate drugs in Latin America and Asia live in extreme poverty and have resorted to farming these products because there is a greater demand for them in industrial countries than for their traditional crops. If governments eradicate coca, marijuana or poppy fields, they must offer the campesinos some realistic economic alternatives. Otherwise, the farmers will simply start anew elsewhere. Similarly, if governments attack drug consumption, they should immediately offer rehabilitation to addicts.

Ultimately, the decisive factor in bringing the drug war to a favorable end is the consumer. Drug consumption is not a disease against which we can mount eradication campaigns on an international level; it is a voluntarily acquired vice, and conquering it requires the personal action of the consumer.