Cocaine labs should be bombed: Peru's president

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Washington Post/Reuters

Cocaine labs should be bombed: Peru's president
Reuters
Monday, April 2, 2007; 8:00 PM


LIMA (Reuters) - Peru, the world's No. 2 cocaine producer, should launch air strikes and machine-gun attacks to destroy jungle drug factories and airstrips used by traffickers, President Alan Garcia said on Monday.

Garcia said a day earlier the destruction of coca crops would resume in one of the most-important cocaine-making regions in the South American country. Officials had made a deal with local farmers to halt the eradication.

"We've got to finish every last cocaine factory and every last airport. Use the A37 planes, bomb and attack these airports, these cocaine factories with machine guns," Garcia said, directing his comments to the country's interior minister, who is in charge of the police that lead the fight against drugs.

Peru is the second-largest producer of cocaine in the world after Colombia.



Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/02/AR2007040201371.html

---

Alan Garcia

[BayCityProgressive]

1. hm

is this another Columbia? They need to take care of the issues of education, healthcare, jobs, and ending poverty to reduce the demand for drugs. No amount of bombs will stop drug use.

[Codeine]

2. They could put a stop to ALL of their demand

and it wouldn't put a dent in the general global demand for the product. Peru can't stop the real demand (Europe and the USA) and the cartels and traffickers are very dangerous, so what else can they do? :shrug:

[arcos]

3. The demand for drugs comes from the US...

Colombia and Perú are mainly producers, not as much consumers.

[Jonathan50]

4. Legalization, regulation

Would stop the cartels dead in their tracks.

No black market, no violent cartels.

It's as simple as that.

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/misc/addictiv.htm

In Health, Nov/Dec 1990

"To rank today's commonly used drugs by their addictiveness, we asked experts to consider two questions: How easy is it to get hooked on these substances and how hard is it to stop using them? Although a person's vulnerability to drug also depends on individual traits -- physiology, psychology, and social and economic pressures -- these rankings reflect only the addictive potential inherent in the drug. The numbers below are relative rankings, based on the experts' scores for each substance:

100 Nicotine
99 Ice, Glass (Methamphetamine smoked)
98 Crack
93 Crystal Meth (Methamphetamine injected)
85 Valium (Diazepam)
83 Quaalude (Methaqualone)
82 Seconal (Secobarbital)
81 Alcohol
80 Heroin
78 Crank (Amphetamine taken nasally)
72 Cocaine
68 Caffeine
57 PCP (Phencyclidine)
21 Marijuana
20 Ecstasy (MDMA)
18 Psilocybin Mushrooms
18 LSD
18 Mescaline

Research by John Hastings
Relative rankings are definite, numbers given are (+/-)1%

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

5. Does anyone make...

Methaqualone anymore? I thought it was utterly wiped off the face of the earth.

[Seedersandleechers]

7. I had friends visiting from Australia and they had a prescription for it.

After doing some research I discovered it's also available in Canada..

http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/methaqualone/methaqualone_basics.shtml

[twiceshy]

6. Coca is very ingrained in the Peruvian way of life...

My wife is from Peru and she says in the highlands the native people chew coca leaves regularly. It helps with stamina and altitude sickness in some of the highest populated cities on the planet. Cocaine use in LIma and other modern cities is no more widespread than in the USA and highly frowned upon by responsible people. Penalties for drug dealing are severe.

My wife actually has a ring, silver with a coca leaf behind a glass face, that she wears often. I'm just waiting for the DEA to close in on her.

[Bacchus39]

8. coca leaves are available for sale in the "corner" stores

they are ubiquitous. tours for tourists typically involve stops at restaurants where coca tea is served.

[Peace Patriot]

9. Well, if he bombs the cocaine labs, he might be messing with some of Bush's pals--

like the rightwing paramilitary drug traffickers and murderers in Colombia, connected right up there at the top of the rightwing government--the beneficiaries of all those billions in military aid from the Bush Junta (our tax dollars).

It is the worst of all worlds, though. They won't bomb their fellow rightwing, fatcat drug traffickers. They'll just bomb the small farmers and peasants--who grow coca leaves for their personal use, or for small local trade--and push them out in favor of the thugs. The thugs will get richer, and engage in more conspiracies to topple leftist (majorityist) governments in the region (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador), trying to install fascist military juntas and rightwing governments, to draw in more US billions for the "war on drugs," and the cartels and the big traffickers will expand and prosper.

Coca leaves are the sacred plant of the Andes indians--necessary to survival in the icy climates and high altitudes. Coca leaf growing is never going to go away. But, like just about everything else in the world, when it is corporatized--industrialized, mass produced--and, particularly as it follows the ocean tankers and other routes of corporate globalization and "free trade" (global piracy)--it becomes very destructive. Forests, fish populations, labor laws, fresh water, environmental regulation, our health, our future, and the tenuous films of atmosphere and biosphere that surround us, fall before the onslaught. The big drug trade also inflicts other costs--the costs of criminalization (the prison-industrial complex), the social costs of imprisoning great swaths of the underclass for minor offenses (most never recover from the experience), the loss of resources to address real crime, the loss of resources to address poverty, and the creation of a police state. The costs of the murderous and futile US "war on drugs" are almost uncountable.

Garcia probably just wants some of that "war on drugs" booty from the US. He is corrupt as they come. The heartening thing is that politicians like him are really on the outs in Latin America. And, as has happened in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil and Nicaragua--where leftist governments have been elected--and, as will happen in Paraguay and Mexico in the next election cycles--the corrupt or the fascist will be thrown out, in Peru, as well, and the leftist movement will succeed, electorally, and begin healing the economy and the people. The premises of the Bolivarian revolution--self-determination and regional cooperation--don't include large scale US interference on any excuse, "war on drugs" or otherwise. Latin America is smartening up.

[Judi Lynn]

10. Peru To Bomb Amazon Cocaine Labs

04/03/07 - Lima, Peru
Peru To Bomb Amazon Cocaine Labs

The Peruvian President, Alan Garcia, has ordered the use of warplanes to destroy clandestine airstrips and drug laboratories in the Amazon jungle.
(snip)

Peru is the second-largest producer of cocaine in the world after Colombia.

In a characteristically dramatic speech, Mr Garcia said Peru must do away with every last jungle drug factory and secret airstrip by either bombing or machine-gunning them.
(snip)

It is clear that President Garcia wants to draw a line between himself and the actions of his minister, and his critics accuse him of talking tough in an effort to impress the US.
(snip)

Later this month, Mr Garcia will visit Washington to try to ratify a free trade agreement with the US, which had been thrown into doubt by the Democrat-led Congress.
(snip)

http://www.kltv.com/Global/story.asp?S=6317148&nav=menu117_3

[pitohui]

11. i understand his frustration

this drug, well, the crack made from it, is destroying any hope of recovery in new orleans

i don't know if bombing, defoliation, etc. is the answer but i do understand what he must be feeling and thinking when he sees the destruction done

[Peace Patriot]

13. I don't have any faith in Alan Garcia's sincerity, nor in the utterly failed and corrupt

"war on drugs." If nothing else, it just plain ISN'T WORKING. But there is so much more. The people whom Bush is in league with in Colombia--and no doubt in Peru--were drug trafficking, on a big scale--the very people billions of our tax dollars were going to, for military hardware and training in techniques of torture and murder. The whole thing is a colossal failure--from the drug devastation here, to the drug kingpins and rightwing paramilitaries there, and all the money changing hands in between.

Will we never learn? We tried this in the Prohibition era--outlawing alcohol--one of the worst policy mistakes our country ever made. It CREATED a criminal underworld, and vast government corruption. And it did absolutely nothing to stop people from drinking. And we finally had to change the law (in that case, an amendment to the Constitution). The devastation of the remedy was far worse than the ill that was being addressed. The same thing is true of drugs. If we legalize drugs, the price will plummet and we will have eliminated more than half the problem, right there, by drying up funds to the massive criminal enterprise that both drug trafficking and the "war on drugs" has become. No more profit. No more prison sentences. No more "prison-industrial complex," where 75% of the people are there for non-violent offenses. No more enhancement of drug use--especially for the young--by its attractiveness as a rebellious or a lucrative thing to do. Some people will still abuse drugs. The answer to that is mostly education, and the alleviation of poverty--not criminalizing half the population.

And I guarantee you that Alan Garcia is not going to take drugs off the streets in the U.S. I don't know as much about his cronies as I do about Uribe's in Colombia, but the politicians who speak like this--urging violence in the "war on drugs"--are generally profiting from the drug traffic, or are soliciting US/Bush military donations to bolster their power so they can rob and oppress the poor. Bush interfered in that election in Peru--to install Garcia, for this and for corporate "free trade" profiteering. And what happens when you militarize a situation is that the military then becomes corrupt, gets in league with the big drug traffickers, and the "war on drugs" resources are used to push small peasants and farmers off their land, often violently, so that the big drug kingpens can move in. It makes things worse. It is self-defeating. But when did a Bushite politician ever care about that?

[pitohui]

14. a point of logic

while i agree w. some of what you say, the reality is that the price of crack cocaine almost can't plummet any more unless they paid you to take it away, it's already cheap and yet it continues to destroy lives and fuel the destruction of families and cities, people don't quietly buy it and stay home and die without bothering anybody on the heroin model, they seemingly take more and more and more and more and while a few do die of heart disease many more continue on like this into their 40s and 50s completely destroying families and community

at this point, taking action to reduce the price of cocaine (legalization/decriminalization) doesn't seem to have much more to offer, the cheaper it gets the more people get hooked, this is still the big thing in southeast louisiana

i guess where meth is made of brake fluid and is equally cheap, meth is the cheap thing

we now know that making these drugs cheap doesn't reduce harm at all, we have too many years of experience of these drugs at very low price points

cocaine is no longer $1,000 an ounce a la the 1970s, the problems caused by cocaine are not caused by predatory pricing

they are caused by the drug existing at all

i don't see how the man can just give up and let these drug labs continue to flourish in his country, i don't know the answer, but i can clearly see that steps taken to reduce the price of coca have caused even more harm


i look at singapore and i see they are not being eaten alive by this scourge, at some point you have to acknowledge that prohibition does work in some circumstance

[ohio2007]

12. He has only been in office since July.........

from the article;

.....
I'm not going to be a straw doll or puppet of the political fears," said Garcia, who took office in July.
....

He is a marked man for death unless he is wanting an infusion of US aid by paying lip service.