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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070426/la-gen-colombia-drug-warWhite House letter: U.S. cocaine prices drop despite billions spent on drug war
JOSHUA GOODMAN | AP | April 26, 2007 08:29 PM EST
BOGOTA, Colombia — The street price of cocaine fell in the United States last year as purity rose, the White House drug czar said in a private letter to a key senator, seemingly contradicting U.S. claims that US$4 billion (euro2.9 billion) in aid to Colombia is stemming the flow.
The drug czar, John Walters, wrote that retail cocaine prices fell by 11 percent from February 2005 to October 2006, to about US$135 (euro99) per gram of pure cocaine. That's way below the US$600 a gram pure cocaine fetched in 1981, when the U.S. government began collecting data, and near the level it has been at since the early 1990s.
During the same period, analysis of data collected by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration showed that after a drop in 2005, levels of purity "have trended somewhat toward former levels," Walters said.
Walters made the disclosure in a January letter to Sen. Charles Grassley, the Republican co-chair of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control. The Washington Office on Latin America, a think tank, obtained the letter and made it available to The Associated Press.
Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, told the AP that Walters would not comment on the letter, but Lemaitre described it as "an accurate reflection of our agency's thoughts on the issue."
Next Wednesday, President Alvaro Uribe is set to meet with U.S. President George W. Bush at the White House to discuss U.S. support for Plan Colombia, the anti-narcotics and counterinsurgent program that has cost American taxpayers more than US$4 billion since 2000.
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