Cocaine's latest victim: 'the waters run red.' (environmental damage from cocaine production) (includes related articles on International Narcotics Control Board report and worldwide drug control)

• Author: Gatjanis, Greg

From a fixed wing aircraft, Peruvian anti-narcotic officers track a winding stream through the mountain jungles. Through the rain forest canopy, they watch for a change in the water's natural tint. "When it starts running red", one of them says, "you know you're getting close."

By most accounts the cocaine trade has claimed the environment among its latest victims. Many experts agree that cocaine production has caused extensive, even irreparable environmental damage to the Andean highlands. An innovative drug control effort shared by the United Nations and the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has not only been effective, but has revealed new linkages between illicit drug production and environmental harm.

Across four millennia, coca has been a cultural staple in the Andes. Today, scientists say the explosion of the illicit cocaine trade since the 1970s has caused widespread damage in the higher elevations of Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. Using violent land clearing methods, coca farmers have razed 10 per cent of Peru's upper jungles and have ruined vast stretches of soil. The greatest environmental harm, however, may come not from deforestation, but from the chemicals needed to refine cocaine.

The essential chemicals--mostly acids, solvents and bases--are used first to unlock the leaves' cocaine alkaloids and then to purify the drug in order to ensure higher value. Although the amount of chemical by-products discharged is uncertain, their effects are clear. One scientist estimates that 20 million litres of cocaine chemicals are dumped each year in the Colombian jungles, while in Bolivia, a leading environmental group says some 38,000 tons of toxic waste are discharged annually in the Chapare and Yungas regions.

Nowhere have cocaine chemicals caused more damage than in Peru, Consider that nearly two thirds of the world's cocaine supply originates from coca leaf grown in a 150-mile stretch of mountain jungle in the country's Upper Huallaga Valley. Because of the large amounts of water needed for processing, cocaine labs there are often built near rivers and streams. These waterways serve not only as constant water supplies, but convenient dump sites for spent chemicals.

According to one environmental expert, the rivers and streams in that Valley "are flooded year after year with vast quantities of toxic waste and pollution". More than 150 streams and rivers have suffered "irreparable harm" and have lost entire species of...