When it comes to tropical rainforest clear-cutting and the elimination of species, your car's not the problem. Drugs are: So far, Colombia's coca producers have destroyed 5.5 million acres of rainforest – an area larger than Wales – with slash and burn cultivation. Mr Santos said: "This destruction of the rainforest for coca production and coca plantation has gone on under the radar of the environmentalists. We hope that this will be a wake-up call. We hope that the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace will start saying 'what is this?' "
Suggestion to Mr. Santos: Don't hold your breath. Most environmeddlists seem to be users, themselves.
It's not just a Columbia issue; USA wildlife refugesare being co-opted by druggers using the spaces to grow marijuana and to produce methamphetamine, according to the head of the National Wildlife Refuge Association and chairman of the Cooperative Alliance for Refuge Enhancement.
This is a global problem, and the only way to halt the destruction would involve removing the demand. Clearly, the US War On Drugs, with its primary focus upon growers and smugglers, is never going to work. The US routinely sprays areas with broad-spectrum herbicides, which simply kills everything vegetative and results in additional slash-and-burn. Smugglers won't stop because there's so much money involved.
The focus needs to be upon the end users. One method which would certainly be applauded by the politically-correct crowd would involve intensive educational "outreach" (they love that term!) in the hope of helping them to understand that their use of drugs is bad for the environment. Of course, that won't work either.
Busting them, trying them, and then tossing them in jail won't work.
There's actually only one cost-effective approach that has any chance of working.
That approach involves adultrating significant portions of the drug supplies with lethal agents. As users kill themselves by voluntarily taking the drugs, demand will fall off. Assuming that we can agree that the most effective means of reducing the devastation involves insuring that end users die quickly after ingesting the drugs, we need to look into ways of promoting this desirable outcome.
One means might involve bioengineering. Rather than indiscriminantly killing vegetation by applying herbicides, spraying a bioengineered population of microbes that selectively target coca would certainly be more effective in reducing the pace of deforestation than present methods. It's not difficult to conceive, given the present state of genetics research, of development of a set of microbes that target coca and render the neuroactive components of the plants lethally toxic. The growers wouldn't notice anything, nor would the processors nor the smugglers. The only ones who would notice anything would be the end-users, who ideally would die within moments of ingestion.
Remove the users; remove the incentive. That, and only that, will remove the problem.