More than $6 billion has been spent over the past eight years in an attempt to destroy the coca crops that keep the guerrillas and drug cartels in businessThe Daily Mail:
The habit that's costing the earth
It doesn’t matter how many bottles you recycle. If you use cocaine, you’re turning virgin rainforest into coca farms – which soon become toxic barren strips like this. Live flies into the heart of the rainforest to expose the hypocrisy of the environmentally conscious middle-class drug user
In a drone of Bell Huey turbines we clear the razor wire and sandbagged machine-gun emplacements of the base, flying low while casting a racing black shadow over the landscape. We head north-west into hostile territory. The machine gunner on my left flicks a red switch on the 7.62mm six-barrelled minigun and a green
LED shows the system is armed. Belts of dull brass bullets stretch back into the bowels of the chopper. Sitting behind an inscrutable black visor, which reflects the topography below, he begins to scan the forest and ramshackle houses nestling on riverbanks for snipers lurking in the jungle drifting 500ft beneath my feet, as the chopper blades emit a pulsating whump.
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My Comment: The drug wars will go on until it is legalized and regulated by the governments of the peoples who consume it. As for the ecological damage .... while many bemoan the damage and voice their opposition to this destruction .... I would wager that many of those who protest have also used the drugs (at least once), and see nothing wrong to legalize it.