Cocaine Sustains War in Rural Colombia

Eradication efforts elsewhere have pushed coca cultivation into rural El Rosario, where workers processed coca leaves recently.

From the New York Times:

PASTO, Colombia — Along with Colombia’s successes in fighting leftist rebels this year, cities like Medellín have staged remarkable recoveries. And in the upscale districts of Bogotá, the capital, it is almost possible to forget that the country remains mired in a devilishly complex four-decade-old war.

But it is a different story in the mountains of the Nariño department. Here, and elsewhere in large parts of the countryside, the violence and fear remain unrelenting, underscoring the difficulty of ending a war fueled by a drug trade that is proving immune to American-financed efforts to stop it.

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My Comment: Like prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s, in the future the U.S. will make the decision to legalize narcotics and to put restrictions that will tightly control its sale and distribution. The U.S. will also establish the necessary medical centers to take care of those addicts who will develop serious medical problems because of this availability.

Such a change in policy will only make public a problem that everyone knows exists in every American community.

This is the sad situation that we are in today. There are no good solutions, just bad choices to make. But once the U.S. and other major drug consuming nations adopt such a strategy .... that is when the narcotics trade and the many wars that it produces will be over.