Tripping through Colombia

We all know what damage the War on (some) Drugs has done to America.

Well, actually, most of us don't really seem to know -- or don't care
-- that our government spends $17 billion a year, tramples
constitutional rights and puts hundreds of thousands of harmless
citizens in prison each year in its war to stop the ingesting of (some)
drugs.

That's bad. But look at what America's longest war has done to the
poor 38 million souls of Colombia. As "The Drug War's Southern Front:
Colombia, Cocaine and U.S. Foreign Policy" details in the April
Reason, their whole
society has been ruined by a dirty, bloody, useless war aimed at
knocking out their drug exports. After decades of anti-drug efforts,
Colombia's entire economy is empowered by coca leaves and it still
supplies 75 percent of America's cocaine and 50 percent of its heroin
needs.

Meanwhile, as Reason writer Timothy Pratt shows in his tour of the
countryside and talks with local farmers, police and various experts,
Colombia's government officials have been corrupted, kidnapped and
killed by rich drug cartels that virtually run the country. Drug-related
violence and abductions are an everyday occurrence. Many of the
country's best-and-brightest have fled for safer countries. Three
guerrilla armies are funded in large part by taxing farmers who grow
coca and poppies.

TRENDING: Prof rejects calls to resign after rebuking his 'woke' university

American foreign policy -- which included $289 million in aid last
year and is driven by the single-issue of drug eradication and
interdiction -- has only made things worse for Colombia. Spraying poppy
fields with Roundup and jailing or killing drug bosses is still the
winning solution being pushed by the U.S., but Pratt's article and the
fact that more land is devoted to growing coca today than in 1994 prove
that it's not working.

The chaos that is Colombia is also the subject of a long piece by
Alma Guillermoprieto in the always-liberal New York Review of
Books.

Part One of a three-part series, "Our New War in Colombia" says the
Clinton administration's proposed escalation of foreign aid to Colombia
is so large it may dramatically alter the balance of terror between the
government, the guerrillas and the drug traffickers. Guillermoprieto
says some Colombians worry that the $1.6 billion U.S. aid package --
$1.3 billion of which will be used for military equipment and training
for drug interdiction -- is really an anti-guerrilla package.

Guillermoprieto spends most of her time checking the status and
strength of the rich, 30-year-old, graying left-wing guerrilla group
FARC, which she seems ideologically fond of despite the fact that it
derives half of its annual income from kidnappings. But she also shows
how coca and poppies -- growing them, selling them, protecting them,
taxing them or trying to wipe them out -- are the lifeblood of the
Colombian economy and the death of its civilized life.

If these dispatches leave you hungering for more depressing news
about the demise of Colombia, turn to "End of Days" in the April issue
of Gear. It is William Vollman's detailed, personalized account of his
journey across what Gear says is "the most dangerous, desperate place on
earth."

Gear, a men's magazine edited and published by Bob Guccione Jr.,
looks likes a sleazy throwaway on the magazine racks. But don't be
fooled by the half-naked young babes it has to run on its covers to
attract its testosterone-rich readers. Gear adds a serious edge to its
genre's requisite overload of sex, sports and gadgetry-hawking.

Besides Vollman's Colombian sojourn, this month's tough-stuff
includes John Sweeney's quick look inside the rotten life and violent
death of Arkan, the notorious Serbian war criminal who was gunned down
in Belgrade Jan. 15. Last month, Gear ran Celia Farber's piece on
AIDS that charged that Time's 1996 Man of the Year, AIDS super-doctor
David Ho, was wrong about his strategy to defeat the disease.

Farber, who worked for Guccione when he owned Spin, is an excellent
reporter who spent most of the last decade bravely challenging the
premises and conclusions of researchers and the whole AIDS medical
establishment. Her recent story contended that Ho's much-touted method
of defeating the HIV virus -- bombarding it mercilessly with a mix of
powerful new protease inhibitors and drugs like AZT -- has hurt far more
healthy HIV-positive people than it has helped.

Farber isn't mentioned in Tom Bethel's commentary in the American
Spectator debunking the AIDS epidemic in
Africa, but she should be. Bethel's "Inventing an Epidemic" covers the
same ground Farber traveled -- literally -- several years ago when she
visited hospitals and clinics across central Africa and showed that what
the Africans count as AIDS deaths do not meet the basic definition of
AIDS at all.

To have AIDS, you have to test positive for HIV. But as Bethel says,
"To diagnose AIDS in Africa, no HIV test is needed." People are dying
all over Africa, he says. But the 2 million deaths in sub-Saharan Africa
last year were because of bad water, poor sewage, poverty, dysentery,
malaria and tuberculosis, not AIDS.

In other words, they died from the same things poor people in Africa
have been dying of for millennia -- not from a heterosexually
transmitted virus, as the AIDS establishment and our national media
would have the world believe.

Covering the Big Weeklies

The Pope's trip to the Near East made the cover of
Time,
which, like its cousins Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report, seemed to
be out of good cover story ideas. Just in time for the first pitch,
Time's back-page essayist Charles Krauthammer laments in "Requiem for
the Summer Game" that the once-great game of baseball's deepest problem
isn't free-agency or three-hour games, it's silence. No one talks about
the game any more because no one cares any more.

Newsweek's cover-guide to the health,
wealth and happiness of Boomers isn't as interesting as "The Ancient
Mariners," a short puff piece emphasizing the nicer qualities of the
Vikings. It turns out that the terrors of Y1K weren't just
rape-and-plundering raiders. They were traders, artisans and
"experienced actors on the political stage." Plus, if they hadn't
invented a sail that allowed them to tack into the wind, they wouldn't
have been able to discover America.

U.S. News' "New Rules for
the New Market" is another cover-snooze. Much better is Michael Barone's
column on how blacks, Latinos and Asians in 2000 are following the same
paths to success that the Irish, the Italians and Jews took in 1900.

Says Barone, "If we have the good sense in the 21st century to follow
the precedents of the 20th -- to insist on the fundamental fairness of
society and the legitimacy of its rules, to teach children to master the
English language, to reduce the level of prejudice and discrimination,
including racial quotas and preferences -- we can expect the new
minorities to become as firmly interwoven into the fabric of American
society as the old."

Quick Reads

Brill's Content looks hard and long
at how the news media ruined the life and reputation of Richard Jewell,
the security guard falsely accused of planting the bomb at the 1996
Olympics in Atlanta.

"Just Doing Our Job: Anatomy of a Media Lynching" focuses on the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution and uses court testimony to "reveal the
mind-set that allows journalists to do real harm and never say they are
sorry." The April issue also provides an excellent, handy roundup of the
best websites in 12 categories -- finance, news, media, politics and on
to travel and other diversions.

As we await the excitement of the Bush-Gore presidential race,
National Review's April 3 issue rounds
up 14 Bush-friendly conservative writers and commentators like David
Gelernter, Peggy Noonan and Rush Limbaugh to offer advice to their great
White House hope.

Limbaugh
says "don't move to the center" and "don't champion campaign finance
reform." Jeffrey Hart says to "screw Gore by picking Colin Powell." And
NR's editor Richard Lowry tells him to "promise never again to do
Letterman."

Lastly, Oxford American, the Southern Magazine of Good Writing, is
keeping its promise to serialize a new book by its publisher, author
John Grisham, throughout the year. "A Painted House" is billed as a
literary, semi-autobiographical novel about a 7-year-old boy growing up
in Arkansas. But, with the second of six installments appearing in the
March-April issue at newsstands near you, the book's best selling point
may be what's not in it -- lawyers.