In Latin America, U.S. Drug ‘War’ Looks Like American Hypocrisy : Narcotics: Colombians see the Barry case as reflecting U.S. indulgence of drug use. ‘You demand that we spill our blood, yet you keep getting high.’

When a jury in Washington last month failed to convict Mayor Marion S. Barry Jr. of most of the drug charges filed against him, Colombians like myself were livid.

We don’t care if the method used by the FBI to catch him snorting cocaine was legal, moral or ethical. We don’t care if he’s white, black or yellow. We don’t care if a jury’s verdict is wholly independent of U.S. drug policy. On the surface, Colombians see the Barry verdict--one minor conviction, one acquittal and 12 deadlocks--as a reflection of U.S. indulgence of drug use. It’s a now-cliched Colombian argument: You demand that we spill our blood, yet you keep getting high.

As one top Colombian official bitterly complained, the verdict--or non-verdict--is “an expression of the tolerance and permissiveness that exists in the United States for (drug) consumption.”

But beneath the surface, the Barry affair is a symbol of U.S. hypocrisy behind its commitment to beat the drug problem. Before he was unmasked as an addict, Barry stumped his drug-soaked city, decrying substance abuse as the devil. He was a vocal supporter of the government’s “war against drugs.”

His double morality represents for Colombians the double morality of the Reagan Administration sustained by President Bush. They demand that the drug-producing nations maintain an unrealistic, inadequate and inefficient war against narco-trafficking, while in the United States consumption grows beyond all bounds.

It helps to recall that in the early 1980s, U.S. cocaine consumption was estimated at 30 tons a year. Today, after a decade of war and thousands of violent deaths in Colombia, that figure has more than doubled to 70 tons.

To successive U.S. administrators, the opinion of the producer-countries matters little. Individually and collectively, these countries have pitched alternative solutions far more realistic than the war forced on them by the United States. They have repeatedly explained that their political and economic crises block them from financing war.

But war is the only message insensitively and stubbornly sent by the United States.

At February’s drug summit in Cartagena, Andean leaders outlined to Bush the measures that could help make them more effective in controlling drug production: trade policies favorable to their countries; elimination of tariffs; greater economic aid for their ravaged economies.

Since the highly lauded summit, little has changed.

Its gravity aside, the current crisis in the Persian Gulf has, for the moment, eased pressure on the Andean nations by diverting the attentions of the U.S. war machine. Following the Panama invasion and the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the war against drugs seemed to be a viable alternative for an American military in search of a new role.

In Colombia, tension rose in January after the attempt by the United States to conduct an air and naval blockade in Colombian waters. The blockade was stopped by a vehement reaction by Colombian officials, who were joined in their alarm by other Latin leaders.

When is the United States going to understand that drugs are not a police problem but, rather, a purely economic phenomenon ruled by the laws of supply and demand? The war sustained for the past 10 years has produced nothing.

It is ridiculous to continue ignoring the simplest of facts--that this situation is nourished by the poverty of the producers and the wealth of the consumers. Drugs remain the most dynamic industry of the Andean region. Its profitability, ease of production and enormous market challenge the limited and repressive actions currently under way.

Without realizing it, Washington’s mayor has freebased Colombia’s fighting spirit. To Colombians, he is the United States: In public, decrying the evil of cocaine and in private, snorting it.

Barry’s case has encouraged Colombians to ask the question they have asked over and over for 10 years: What is the point of this bloody war?