Cocaine Blues: Coke-Heads Aiding Rainforest Destruction
by Sami Grover, Carrboro, NC, USA on 11.19.08
Image Credit: The Sun
Anti-Drug Campaigners Target 'Ethical' Consumers
Type “cocaine” into the search bar on TreeHugger and you won’t come up with much. That’s because cocaine use is not a very TreeHugger-like activity, right? (If you need convincing, witness Eliza's excellent post on the environmental destruction wreaked by drug-smuggling planes.) Yet the liberalization of attitudes towards drugs over the last few decades means that many people will know folks who indulge in cocaine and other ‘hard’ drugs. I’m no exception. Click below the fold for why cocaine is destroying the environment, and a video of all the disgusting things that are used to make it.
I tend to believe in live-and-let-live. I’m as likely to turn a friend in for buying a gram of cocaine as I am to call the cops when they speed on the highway. But it has always puzzled me that folks who would not touch a non-Fair Trade cappuccino; who insist on organic produce; and who argue against factory farming would support a trade rife with human rights abuses and environmental destruction (not to mention countless lives ruined by addiction). The anti-drugs lobby is clearly catching on to this moral dissonance, as witnessed by a recent speech given by the vice-president of Colombia at a conference of UK chief police officers. Here’s more from The Guardian on how green concerns may convince some drug users to think again:
Francisco Santos Calderón, the vice-president of Colombia, appealed to British users of the class A drug to consider the impact on the environment. He said that while the green agenda would not persuade addicts to give up, the middle-class social user who drove a hybrid car and was concerned about the environment might not take the drug if they knew its impact. Santos said 300,000 hectares of rainforest were destroyed each year in Colombia to clear land for coca plant cultivation, predominantly controlled by illegal groups, including the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as Farc.
Of course advocates of legalization would argue that it is prohibition, not the drug itself, which causes such destruction. But that’s a little like arguing that the law should mandate renewable energy, organics, clean coal or benign fuels – in the meantime I’ll drive, eat, use whatever I want. It remains to be seen whether this latest tactic in the fight against drugs sways any hearts, minds or noses – but it is certainly a lot more subtle, nuanced and potentially effective than the failed “Just Say No” campaigns of old.
UPDATE: And just for the LOHAS crowd - the chemicals that go into cocaine are pretty disgusting too. Scroll below and you'll see a video of just what goes into coke manufacture.
More on the Destruction of the Rainforests
Amazon Deforestation Speeds Up Once More
The 7,000km Journey that Links Amazon Destruction to McDonald’s Fast Food
Rainforest Action Network on Palm Oil
Race to REACH: Chemicals Illegal in Europe if Not Registered by 1 December
|
Five Exotic Eco Adventures Off the Beaten Path
|
Hi, Sami:
This is exactly the kind of thing I like to read on TreeHugger. To me it forms part of the green underbelly - stuff we can't stand to think about and forget to look at closely when we're considering a green lifestyle. LCAs on illegal drugs, I can't wait.
Realize that I say this not as a druggie, but as a rational environmentalist: Cocaine is not the problem. The illegality of cocaine is the problem.
Coca plants are indigenous to Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, and Colombia. In fact, they're abundant. If they were legal, people could pick the leaves in the open. They wouldn't have to carve out hidden sections of forest to grow their crops.
The main environmental damage comes from improperly stored and disposed chemicals used in the cocaine making process. These chemical drums are often stored in rivers to hide them from satellite imaging and are dumped onto the ground when officials raid the sites. These would not be problems if the drug was legal.
How about the environmental damage caused by countries being pressured to carry out US policies like Plan Colombia where millions of gallons of herbicides were sprayed across vast areas of forest with the intention of eradicating coca crops?
Maybe then we could be buying shade grown, rain forest alliance certified, fair trade, organic cocaine.
Treehugger,
Please don't republish this Drug Enforcement Agency blather. We got it. For decades, send a bunch of weapons to the right wing government of Columbia under the guise of "drug enforcement" and what do you get? State backed violence against indigenous activists and union leaders resisting US multinationals. Please, spare us.
Chad hit the nail on the head on this one.
Similar issues affect the US, but it's usually marijuana.
hike enough and you will see the mess left behind.
The drug growers care about profit, and don't care about the environment and that would probably be true if the drugs were legal or not.
If people could stop a car and walk into a field and pick up marijuana, why would they pay for it?
Sure, they can do this with tomatoes or corn, but those things don't keep as long and are cheap.
Yeah Chad, because cocaine is safe and non addictive. Weed I can see legalizing, because pot heads like to sit on the couch or drive riding lawn mowers. Crack heads, on the other hand, kill people.
As cocaine is a fairly common local anesthetic used in surgery (I had it applied to my nostrils during my turbinate surgery), some of the coca plants that are grown must be legal. Where is this done, who supervises it, and what companies are behind it? I would be really interested to know how that all works.
I used to be a druggie...and I used to sound a lot like Chad. You're not fooling anyone, Dude!
I just want to be very clear that talking about drugs with anything but legalization and regulation as the only equitable long-term solution are hopelessly misguided, misinformed, and immoral. Other positions on the issue by their very nature support a list of social and environmental ills so great that they can only be termed as crimes against humanity. The consequences of the drug war may be unintended, but they are neither unpredictable nor unavoidable.
And no one, anywhere, at any time, will EVER be dissuaded from drug use by virtue of the ecological impact of its production. It will at best be used as a largely irrelevant argument to reassert pre-existing decisions on the matter, as it is being used here.
Complaining about an oppressed people not being environmentally sound in their practices is irresponsible, short-sighted, and cruel. Shame on you who would blame the poor farmer who pollutes to avoid rotting away in prison for the remainder of his criminally short life, who is forced by economic inequalities to consort with the very worst sort of humans on earth just so he can continue to feed his family in a country that has been torn apart by war over decades. An avoidable war, a war wholly caused by the unjust drug policy of the wealthiest nations on earth.
Shame on you who support environmental devastation by supporting the drug war. You cannot be an environmentalist and support the drug war. You cannot be a humanitarian and support the drug war. It's not a matter of partisan positioning-- it's simply a matter of measurable fact, of the most elemental predictions of sociology, of basic human decency.
End of story.