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By now, the illicit drug trade, according to Vice President George Bush, head of President Reagan's South Florida Task Force, brings in about $100 billion a year. The alarming growth of some aspects of that trade was confirmed last week, when the U.S. State Department released a wide-ranging report on the global narcotics picture. According to the account, worldwide production of marijuana declined last year by more than 10%, thanks in large part to the war against drugs in Colombia, the leading exporter of marijuana to the U.S. Worldwide production of opium, the base for heroin, slipped by a similar amount, mainly because of a poor poppy harvest in Afghanistan.
But the production of cocaine, the drug that has become so fashionable in the U.S. and, increasingly, in Europe, went up last year by more than 30%, said the State Department. In Bolivia, the world's second-largest coca producer, not a single plant was destroyed in 1984, according to the report; since 1977, coca production in Bolivia has tripled. In Peru, the other principal source of coca, cultivation has also been steadily rising.
Not only is the coca business growing but it is spreading into more and more countries. The most significant new entry, said the State Department, is ) Ecuador. Last year that country registered no significant production; in 1985, according to the report, Ecuador may be harvesting as much as 15,000 tons of the leaf, which would make it the world's third-largest producer.
Brazilians too have started cultivating the leaf, in the form of an adaptable strain of the plant known as epadu. Previously, narcotics experts had been confident that coca could be grown only on open mountain slopes; epadu, however, thrives in the jungle. "The bottom line," said Democratic Congressman Dante B. Fascell of Florida, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, "is that, despite encouraging developments, particularly in Colombia, the (drug) war is being lost."
If they were needed, last week brought other sobering reminders of the increasing volume--and violence--of the drug trade. In Miami customs officials seized a $119 million 747 jet belonging to Avianca, the Colombian airline, after discovering that it was carrying more than 1,000 kilos of coke, worth $600 million on the street. The contraband was hidden in a shipment of 32 boxes of cut flowers. The incident marked the 34th time in five years that illegal drugs have been found arriving aboard an Avianca plane. Meanwhile, in the Mexican narcotics center of Guadalajara, an agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was kidnaped, apparently by drug dealers. Hours later, a Mexican who sometimes flew missions for the agency was also abducted.