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Imagine for a moment that China, in an effort to reduce cigarette smoking and associated health costs among its population, declared war on U.S. tobacco production. Imagine Chinese planes flying over American tobacco fields, spraying crop-killing poison that destroys not just tobacco, but all vegetation, wiping out farmers’ livelihoods, displacing millions of families, and contaminating the environment. Such an act of hostility and disregard for national sovereignty would provoke, at the very least, military aggression from the United States. Yet, unbeknownst to most Americans, for the past 20 years the U.S. has conducted just such a campaign against Colombian coca farmers.

 

I visited Colombia for the first time in January 2012 on a delegation with Witness for Peace, an organization focused on changing U.S. policy in Latin America. A public health worker, I’d signed up for the trip to understand the origins and motives of a drug trade that contributes to a violent illicit market and shatters countless lives through addiction. By the time I left Colombia, I realized that while people who suffer from drug dependence are clear casualties of the trade, the millions of Colombian small farmers poisoned and displaced by U.S. drug policy are perhaps its greatest victims.

 

With appalling addiction rates in the U.S., particularly during the crack epidemic that swept the country during the 1980s, it’s hard to blame the United States for taking an aggressive stance against drug suppliers. The problem is that most of the “suppliers” in Colombia are not swaggering kingpins who lord over drug plantations, but poor farmers who grow coca, itself a harmless plant, but which happens to be the main ingredient in cocaine, to sustain meager livelihoods and feed their families. During my trip to Colombia I not only saw the coca plant, a short, unremarkable bush, but tasted it in the form of aromatic coca tea and cookies made with coca flour. Coca is a medicinal plant often used to create flour and healing balms. The dried leaves are also chewed during some indigenous spiritual ceremonies. But when filtered through other ingredients, typically cement, gasoline and battery acid, coca leaves produce cocaine, an addictive stimulant drug.  For the past two decades, U.S. drug policy in Colombia had centered around reducing the cocaine supply by eradicating its leafy ingredient, the coca plant.