C. Lear,
With a guaranteed market, coca production would go up *initially*,
no question about it, but htere are several things to consider. First,
coca production is geographically delimited by law already and the plant
itself has a limited range it can grow in, so while produciton would
certainly expand, it can't expand that much. Second, this would be part
of an anti-drug policy. It's only the initial carrot in a carrot and
stick strategy. Third and most important, a serious buying effort (in the
billions of dollars) would represent an immense, unprecedented
interdiction and interference in the cash-flow of the narco-traffickers.
Fourth, at $10,000 a killogram-equivalent, the coca farmers would be
seeing vastly more money than they ever would from the Colombians. This
would clearly stimulate the non-coca economy. Furthermore, the program
could be designed to stimulate economy in a tailored way. Goods could be
substituted for cash strategically since the region is so isolated and
such an effort would naturally control the major roadways and rail lines.
(I think there's only one rail line from Bolivia to the coast anyway, am I
right?). Better yet, a rational credit system could be started.
Finally, after the program began buying coca as leaves or paste,
(and people got used to the money) you could start buying whole plants and
acreage. Later you could pay people to guide you to fields for
eradication. The kind of money I'm talking about makes a tremendous
impact. Thus you'd have people coming down off the mountains into the
towns with unprecedented amounts of hard currency. That has to stimulate
a local industrial economy. Understand, I'm not talking about a socialist
program for development, would that I were. I am talking about a strategy
to get people out of the coca business that people in the West could see
the logic of. I admit that the real problem is the structure of the legal
economy. If this cash and these goods can't get people into other
businesses, they'll go right back to coca. Right now, however, they're
both poor and contributing to the drug problem. At least they wouldn't be
as poor and the flow of cocaine would be dramatically interrupted for a
few years.
Demand is always going to be there and cocaine is always going to
be addictive. That's irreducible. The cocaine business is very
supply-side. Supply does in fact create its own demand. At the end of
the day you've got to get people out of that business. Right now we have
an opportunity, at the very least, to buy the drug we are trying to
interdict for less much less than the completely ineffective interdiction
is costing us and even less than consumers are paying for it anyway! Less
total money would go into the cocaine business and the interdiction would
be vastly increased.
peace
