Word: leafed
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Worldwide production of illicit opium, coca leaf and cannabis is many times the amount currently consumed by drug abusers. Some governments do not have control of the narcotics growing regions, and prospects in several countries are dampened by corruption, even government involvement in the narcotics trade...
Even harder to uproot than the coca leaf may be the widespread conviction among South Americans that cocaine is a U.S. problem. "We are putting our lives in danger to prevent drugs from entering the U.S.," complains Bolivian Under Secretary of the Interior Gustavo Sanchez. While U.S. officials claim that it is illicit production that begets consumption, many South Americans contend that the process works the other way round. "The U.S. is to blame for most of this mess," says one Panamanian official. "If there weren't the frightening demand in the States, we wouldn't even have to worry...
...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...
Under the Government program, if a farmer could not unload his leaf at auction, he could still consign it to a "pool," a farmers' cooperative that borrows money from the Government. The pool would then try to sell the tobacco. If it succeeded, the loan was repaid, but if it failed, the Government ate the difference. The cost to taxpayers was small, at least compared with other farm subsidies: $600 million total between 1938 and 1982. Yet increasingly, foes of tobacco began asking why any tax funds should go to a product that the Government itself says is a health...