Once again, the war on drugs has spawned a misguided essay which would wreak havoc on American foreign affairs if its demands were carried out. Chino Wilson's editorial essay on drugs (1/18/88) discusses the arguments for and against legalization and then draws out a plan of attack on drug suppliers which would include economic sanctions, confiscation of private property and bombings. In this letter, I will ignore the issues of legalization and decriminalization and will concentrate instead on Mr. Wilson's poorly thought out and dangerous ideas concerning private property and foreign nations.

The use of economic sanctions against nations such as Colombia would only make enemies of the United States' South American allies. In fact, even considering such actions shows a lack of understanding of recent events on Mr. Wilson's part. Colombia is not the villain that he believes it to be. Like the United States, it has been fighting, and losing, a drug war.

This month's National Geographic magazine documents the grim facts: In 1983, Colombia appointed a new Minister of Justice who actively cracked down on cocaine production. He was assassinated by machine-gun carrying drug dealers on a Bogota street.

A short while after the U.S. and Colombia signed a new extradition treaty, eleven Supreme Court justices were murdered by a leftist terrorist group which almost certainly had ties with drug lords. Colombian judges are often faced with the choice of accepting bribes from drug dealers or seeing their families gunned down.

Confiscation of all vessels caught carrying illegal drugs is almost as ill-advised as economic sanctions. Such a policy would penalize innocent owners whose passengers carry drugs and would impose the indignity of a trial on those who are unfortunate enough to travel on the same ship as a drug carrier.

Mr. Wilson's sweeping demand that all ships carrying drugs be impounded and all passengers tried raises some interesting questions. Would, for instance, the Queen Elizabeth II be confiscated and its thousands of passengers put on trial if one passenger was caught with drugs. This example may appear to be reductio ad absurdum, but it would be perfectly acceptable if Mr. Wilson's ideas were implemented exactly as he demands.

The most dangerous part of Mr. Wilson's plan is his idea of bombing coca fields in South American nations. These nations are likely already to be hostile as a result of the aforementioned economic sanctions, and they will probably not take kindly to an invasion of their airspace by American bombers. They might even consider it tantamount to a declaration of war. (Wow, neat, then we'd have a real drug war.)

Mr. Wilson definitely needs to rethink his vision for the war on drugs. Next time, he might do well to consider the probable consequences of the actions he advocates.