Plan Columbia: Destroying Columbia to Cure Americans of Addiction

The United States remains committed to helping Colombia improve the rule of law and prevent drugs from reaching the United States through strong interdiction, eradication, and alternative development programs.

As if we didn't waste enough money as it is fighting substances which will always find a way to prevail....

Columbia has seen its fair share of politcal bullshit. For the last several decades, leftist guerilla groups have fought against the government and right wing paramilitary groups have fought guerilla armies. And everyone else gets caught between the groups often ending with civilian deaths.

This is where Plan Columbia comes in.

Supposedly, this was an initiative to end or reduce armed conflicts. Basically, the United States offered some military support to the Columbian government if we could spend a lot of money and effort fighting our cocaine issues at the source while we were at it. It was signed in by Clinton at the request of the Columbian government who would foot 65% of the bill. That still left us paying out over a billion in aid to help end Columbian strife. If that isn't bad enough....humanitarian aid failed to ever really be our main focus especially once Bush took over as President.

One of the ways we have spent the billions of dollars poured into it (and thank you George W for expanding the plan and pushing an additional 676 million into it in 2001 alone) is defoliation of coca fields--destruction of the crops which would eventually be snorted up a lot of noses.

Plane Spraying Crops in Columbia

But...

Coca crops are not the only ones we've destroyed. The fumigation of Columbia has cost vital, legitimate crops of rural farmers as well as sickness in those who have come into contact with the herbicides used. It's a disaster.

Bill Maher had this to say about Plan Columbia in his 2002 book When you ride ALONE you ride with bin Laden: What the Government SHOULD Be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism

"...it's a scheme to address our mammoth coke jones by defoliating the coa fields of Columbia. We love coke, so you get agent-oranged--sound fair? U.S. planes have thus far showered defolliant on more than 200,000 acres, killing not just coca plants but entire ecosystems: damaging legitimate crops, poisoning water supplies, killing fish and livestock, uprooting entire villages, and causing people to suffer fevers, diarrhea, allergies, and rashes...

By the way--not that you probably couldn't have guessed this about a government plan--it doesn't work. When a coca field is successfully sprayed, of course the farmers simply move their operation to another valley, like a Whack-a-Mole game...

But hey, it's got to be done, because some of the plants that grow in the southern hemisphere are just plain evil. We know that because they're not stamped with labels like Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Eli Lilly, or Pfizer. And it's vital that we understand that these souther hemisphere plants and their cultivation are to blame because the alternative is to believe that our national appetite for drugs is our own problem. And that's just crazy talk.

Like any addict, when it comes to the Drug War, the United States is in full denial. What our posturing, moralizing leadership pretends they don't know is that if it wasn't Columbian cocaine, it'd be Bolivian cocaine, and if it wasn't that it'd be homemade methadone or a forty or glue or stolen pills or pot or ecstasy. It'd be something, because the mind is a terrible place to be stuck sober. The Department of Stopping Fun can show me all the statistics in the world about how usage of a certain drug has dropped off, but what they never tell you is it's because people found something else. They always will."

It's like the bad guys in Captain Planet won this round and to make it worse, they're all narcotics agents.