Peakah's Provocations...

By KIM HOUSEGO
Associated Press Writer
PUERTO ARTURO, Colombia

Cocaine is killing the great nature parks of Colombia.

Government spraying of coca plant killer is driving growers and traffickers out of their usual territory into national parks where spraying is banned. Here they are burning thousands of acres of virgin rain forest and poisoning rivers with chemicals.

Now the government faces a painful dilemma: to spray weedkiller would be devastating, but the impact of coca-growing is increasingly destructive. The question is, which is worse?

Hmmm, which would be worse...
Weedkiller or Cocaine... Weedkiller, Cocaine...

Yeah, that is quite the dilemma!

Colombia is home to about 15 percent of all the world's plant species and one of its most diverse arrays of amphibians, mammals and birds. Dozens of species that populate its jungles and Andes mountains exist nowhere else on the planet. One of the richest is the Sierra Macarena National Park, where monkeys clamber across the jungle canopy and seven species of big cat prowl in its shadows.

Big coked up kittys and junked out monkeys is a much better alternative than spraying a little weedkiller! It's all so clear!

But Sierra Macarena is most threatened by cocaine. A recent flight over part of its 1.6 million acres revealed a trail of ugly gashes and charred trunks of trees felled by coca planters. The intruders also have built dozens of makeshift drug labs in the park and in the nearby village of Puerto Arturo, bringing in tons of gasoline, cement, hydrochloric acid and other toxic chemicals to process the coca leaves into cocaine. All of it pollutes the rivers and soil.

Hmmm... Weed killer or cocaine...

If this stuff gets into the Amazon river could you imagine the effect on the anacondas? Pretty soon there's going to be a competition between Italy's Po River and the Amazon to see which whacked out river produces the most jacked up animal.

Linked with Basil's- Supper.