Indications of progress in the cocaine war couldn’t come at a better time for William Bennett, the embattled drug czar who has been criticized for focusing on interdiction efforts abroad in preference to education or treatment programs at home. “I think this vindicates the notion that counterpressure against the traffickers will work,” says Bennett. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, production of cocaine in Colombia has dropped 20 percent since the government, with U.S. backing, declared war against the Medellin cartel 10 months ago. Processing labs have been destroyed, top cartel lieutenants killed or captured, rings of hired assassins broken up. In May, Colombian authorities made their biggest drug seizure ever, grabbing 16 tons of pure cocaine ready for shipment near the Peruvian border.
The cartel’s production pipeline has been so disrupted, says Bennett, that coca-growing peasants in Bolivia can’t make a profit on their product. Some farmers are even pulling out their coca bushes and planting oranges, bananas and macadamia nuts instead. Even critics of the U.S. antidrug policy are admitting they may have been wrong. “If this trend holds up over the next few months, we can say that the crackdown has had an effect,” says Peter Reuter, a drug expert at the Rand Corp. who has long questioned Bennett’s strategy.
Less heat: The price and purity changes could be just a hiccup. DEA sources and Colombian police say the Medellin drug lords are in the midst of moving their processing and shipping operations to Brazil, Ecuador and Peru, where there is less heat from local government. Cocaine price hikes might reflect temporary increases in smuggling costs, and middlemen could be using the news of drug seizures and other police actions as an excuse to further jack up prices. Police on the battlelines in U.S. cities are particularly skeptical. “It’s temporary,” says Sgt. Rudy Lovio of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Narcotics bureau. “Don’t think that cocaine is gone.”
There are other signs, though, that the coke epidemic may have peaked. Two studies by the National Institute on Drug Abuse show significant decreases both in cocaine-related deaths and emergency-room admissions during the last three months of 1989. “I think the susceptible and vulnerable populations may have become saturated,” says NIDA director, Dr. Charles Schuster. If that is indeed the case, 1990 could well be remembered as the year the tide turned in the war against cocaine.
For the first time in a decade, the wholesale price of refined cocaine has risen dramatically in the U.S.
City Price of a kilo of cocaine 6/90 6/89 Los Angeles $30,000 $14,000 Houston $22,000 $12,000 Miami $24,000 $17,000 New York $35,000 $23,000
SOURCE DEA, LA County Sheriff’s Office
