20 November 2008

Colombian rainforest disappearing up noses

From today's Guardian online, it seems that the yuppie habit might be as immoral a big mac, when it come to remaining South American rainforest.

Four square metres of rainforest are destroyed for every gram of cocaine snorted in the UK, a conference of senior police officers as told yesterday.

Francisco Santos Calderón, the vice-president of Colombia, appealed to British users of the class A drug to consider the impact on the environment. 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.

Santos said 300,000 hectares of rainforest were destroyed each year in Colombia to clear land for coca plant cultivation, predominantly controlled by illegal groups, including the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as Farc.

3 comments:

alison said...

Unless some enterprising coke dealer starts selling offsets along with every gram!! Closely followed by organic coke, single source coke, and fair-trade coke

Anonymous said...

I can offer my services as an inspector... seriously though, how about just legalising it and regulating it like any other commodity such as, oh, I don't know, Palm Oil? Oh, probably not a good example... wish the British authorities were as concerned about that as they are the coke...

BSharp said...

Guardian's upset about Palm oil in colombia too. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/12/colombia.food

No cakes, no indugences of any kind! And don't even get me started on tobacco plantations.