Yesterday, Colombian vice president Francisco Santos Calderon reported that cokeheads were destroying the environment. Speaking before the Association of Chief Police Officers in the UK, he released the sober statistic that four square meters of rainforest are destroyed for every gram of nose candy snorted. From The Guardian:
"He said that while the green agenda would not persuade addicts to give up, the middle-class social user who drove a hybrid car and was concerned about the environment might not take the drug if they knew its impact."
Calderon then went on about the land cleared for coca plant cultivation being dominated by guerillas.
First, it's unfair to single out drug users as a primary driver of environmental degradation, especially when the consumption of something as seemingly innocuous as chocolate bars is responsible for far greater eradication of rainforests than cocaine ever will be. Palm oil used for chocolate, cooking and fueling products is bought in mass volumes by companies such as Proctor & Gamble, Nestle, Hershey, Kraft and Burger King. It's used as an ingredient in a substantial amount of cosmetics, as a cheap vegetable oil and increasingly as biofuel for vehicles -- but the amount of trees cut down for palm oil production releases far more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than is saved by switching some cars from fossil- to bio-fueling. In fact, the greenhouse gases released from deforestation is far greater than that released by all the cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships in the world.
