Ella Baker Center Blog

The way the U.S. has fought its “War on Drugs,” much like its “War on Terror”, has severely damaged our credibility as a promoter of human rights across the United States and around the world. The U.S. has sent billions in counter-narcotics aid to support ineffective and inhumane policies, such as failed “supply-side” aerial fumigation eradication strategies in Colombia. The United Nations estimates that 383,000 Colombians are involved in coca production—the raw material for cocaine. The vast majority of these are family farmers forced to grow coca for economic reasons yet punitive eradication policies designed in Washington drive them further away from the Colombian government in a country immersed in a civil war.

At home more than two million people languish in U.S. prisons, most due to nonviolent drug offenses. The communities most harmed by these ineffective and inhumane policies are low income communities and people of color in the U.S. and Colombia. Drug demand reduction activities at home coupled with alternative development abroad, by far the most cost-effective and humane solutions to our nation’s drug problem, get short shrift. The following video highlights some of these issues. For more information go to www.witnessforpeace.org

Shoveling Water: War on Drugs, War on People is a journey to the heart of coca country where United States tax dollars have financed the aerial fumigation of 2.6 million acres of land in Colombia – the world’s second most biodiverse country. In this documentary you will see crop dusters target coca plants, the main ingredient of cocaine, with concentrated herbicide as part of the U.S. war on drugs and listen to people on the ground, hear about the impacts, and learn new ideas about how to solve this deadly problem.