To all those people doing lines

You know the song Salvation by the Cranberries?
To all those people doing lines, don't do it, don't do it
Inject your soul with liberty, it's free, it's free

...to all those people doing lines, this is where (part of) it comes from.

Small impoverished farming jungle communities, where the economic opportunities include: working someone else's land in the burning sun and pouring rain, being paid by productivity and making between $3 and $4.50/day; construction work paid $4 to $6/day; backbreaking work moving stones to direct the course of the river, for a little higher salary; or if you're very lucky you might work in a little shop or restaurant. All work is temporary, all salaries are low and not constant, and (almost) everyone is poor/extremely poor (by IMF definition).

Otherwise you could take a taxi in the evening and go to the neighbouring town and work during the night stomping over coca leaves, the first step in making cocaine, for $30/day. It takes various kilos of leaves to make a few grams of cocaine. Great, so buying cocaine you're helping the Peruvian economy? Not quite.

Western governments have apparently decided to stop demand by destroying supply (brilliant!). So coca plantations, which constitute the livelihoods of many farmers in the jungle, are being sprayed with chemicals from US helicopters, and destroyed. Coca has always been part of the Peruvian and Andean culture in general, and for the most part it is not grown to produce cocaine. The chemicals used to destroy the plantations have destroyed other plants as well, and have caused cancer in people living there.

Cocaine, produced in the Peruvian jungle, is carried to different places (Bolivia, Brazil, and others) to be exported. Carriers are also well-paid, but given the risk involved, you must be pretty desperate to accept. The bus I took back to Cusco last night was stopped twice by policemen looking for cocaine: the search was the most approximate I've even seen: they got on the bus without dogs and with a couple flashlights, took down a few plastic bags and confiscated a couple bags of coca leaves that people were carrying to Cusco to chew or to make tea with. I doubt there was cocaine on the bus I was travelling on, but the night before I'd watched a horrible TV programme about the "successful" operation of a police unit against drug dealers. It showed a helicopter carrying thousands of dollars of cocaine money, being embushed when it landed, the two people on it being dragged down and shot dead as they tried to escape, and the money taken out of the plane. Aside from the close-ups of the two dead men, this "successful" operation involved the death of two poor men who were obviously not the drug lords the money was going to, and everything will continue as usual.