I Can't Get Out of The Jungle!

Aside from making me cranky and tired and sore the malaria has made me stupid. I should not be in Leticia right now. I should be descending onto Bogotá like my bags are. But, no, I am in Leticia, and in Leticia with no clothes.

I went the the airport, arrived early, got my ticket, got it stamped by the police and I was ready to leave. I even made sure they put my spear on the plane carefully. So then I walked down the hall and sat down at a table where I saw a lot of people waiting around a window through which I could see my airplane. I started to read but really just spaced out for a while. I looked up, saw more and more people in the group waiting to board the plane, and looked back down and tried to read. Eventually I looked at my watch and realized it was about fifteen minutes before the flight was supposed to leave. I got up and walked through the tiny airport to where I had checked my bags. I asked a guard where I was supposed to board the plane. He said `oh, it's too late, you missed it'. I said, 'no!' and I pointed out the windown to the plane. I said 'I can see the plane. it's right there. He said, 'yeah, but you've missed it. they have already boarded.' I turned to the agent who checked my bags and she said 'what happened?' and I said I was waiting to board the plane. I thought I was supposed to bored over there.' she said, 'no, that's a restaurant'. i said, uselessly, 'then why are there so many people waiting in there'. She didn't know either, but she said it was too late. I said I really needed to get to bogotá, she said I would have to leave tomorrow. I had the same conversation four more times before everyone decided I was totally stupid.

They were right, it was clearly written out that the boarding area was in one place. If I had been in a mood for reading I would have seen that I was in a restaurant. I think two things happened. First, I assumed the airport was so damn small any group of people waiting must be the waiting area. Second, I was completely out of it. And now I was out of it and angry. I was furious in the way that people are furious when something goes wrong and it is no one's fault but their own. I asked them to call bogotá to make sure my bags would be safe and they did. Then, because I was mad, I asked if they thought it was a safe practice to load bags onto an airplane when the owner is not on the same airplane. I told them this was not done in other countries. They were sort of offended becuase no colombian likes to be suspected of not taking security precautions seriously. I apologized becuase I think I had really crossed the line. Then I left the airport.

I was sad because I knew I would have to spend another night with malaria in the same hotel in the same heat and this time I wouldn't have clean clothes. And when you are in this kind of mood it is the appropriate kind of defiance to refuse to take a cab and, in fact, to tell the cab driver who keeps offering you a ride to go away and that you can walk to the city. It was childish, yes, but I had nothing else to do but walk. While I was walking I looked at my watch to see that it was 12:30, the time my flight was going to leave. Then I heard a loud noise, I looked up and saw my flight leave with may bags that contain everything I have in colombia minus my passport, some cash, a book, and a camera. Everything else is in Bogotá, which is, i suppose, in another hemisphere.

I found a peruvian restaurant and I ate lunch and a nice peruvian woman talked to me and we have a nice conversation. I told her my story and she thought it was funny. I was relieved to discover that tomorrow is a holiday and that I don't have school. She told me she had a daughter who studies in Bogotá and she gave me her phone number and told me to call her and that she would cook me peruvian food.

As I left, I saw the same cab driver who took me to the airport. He laughed. He picked me up and took me the rest of the way to the city for free. He offered to take me to a bar but that was obviously a bad idea.

So now I have nothing to do. It is a sunday and I can't even buy a pair of shorts in this small, small town. I've elected to pass the time by drinking three litres of water (The largest bottle you can buy on a sunday in leticia) and reading about Malaria.

So I Have Malaria

So when my friend said 'you'll know' when you get malaria, he was right. I have Malaria and I know it.

I hope that I don't spend a night as uncomfortable as last night for a very long time. When I got off the boat I went straight back to my cheap, bad, seven dollar amazonian hotel and put my bags down. I was pretty tired, but I made myself go buy a bottle of water and a spear. I ate something and realized I didn't feel so good. I drank a lot of gatorade and went to an internet cafe where I tried to write an e-mail just as the power went out (this happens a lot). I left and stopped by a pharmacy which was the only store with a power generator and bought another bottle of water and as I was leaving to stumble through the dark streets to find my hotel I realized that it would be a good idea to pick up some kind of medicine in case I do actually have malaria. I asked the pharmacist what kind of medicine people take when they have malaria and he looked at me sort of scared. I told him I thought my friend had malaria, then he was polite and handed me two kinds of pills and said my friend should take them every eight hours.

I found my hotel room in the dark and realized that this was going to be a very bad night. My 'hotel' is really a large house for a small family that has a long of small rectangles of rooms that have a block of cement in the shape of a bed on which there are some cushions. There is a window with no screen, a fan and a light. Because the power was out, there was no light and there was no fan. I found my flashlight after a nauseating frustration that made me want to cry. I turned it on to discover that my room was full of cockroaches. There were probably ten in avery small room. But the worst part was, they were not all on the floor, they were on the ceiling and on the walls and as I would later discovcer, they could fly. If you know how much I hate cockroaches, and if you know how big Amazonian cockroaches are, and you've had malaria in 100 degree weather with no fan, you can imagine how I felt. It was not long after that that I felt so dizzy and feverish that I KNEW I had malaria. I had be humming the same damn Juanes song (the one that starts out 'cuando me dices por media voz...') for hours and all I could think about was the proof that pi is irrational. The thoughts were repeating themselves. I was sweating and shivering at once. I was dizzy and I didn't want to stand up. I had been worried earlier about not having a screen on the window because of the bugs but at this point I didn't care. I had a fever and I was cold and I really disliked thinking about the cockroaches so I did the only thing one can do and turned off my flashlight so I didn't have to see them, took my pills and tried to go to sleep.

I kept thinking about cockroaches and that juanes song, not much math anymore. I woke up in the middle of the night becuase I was really hot and thirsty. I turned on my flashlight to find that the bottle of watter I had set on the table was covered with the same big amazonian cockroaches. I turned it back of and tried to go back to sleep.

I woke up at six am to find all the cockroaches gone. I went to go take a shower and realized that the family who owns the hotel has a pet monkey in the washroom which is right next to the bathroom. It was all I could do to brush my teeth. I wanted to shave, but it was too much work. I'm pretty gross right now and I think I'm going to go to the airport or something. I came here to read about the symptoms of malaria.

I won't describe it, but if you want to know how I feel, you can read this:
http://www.emedicinehealth.com/malaria/page3_em.htm

Also, I think this article by Malcolm Gladwell, of whom I am a big fan, is pretty interesting about wy malaria is such a problem in some places and about a great Malaria warrior, Fred Soper. I've revised some of my opinions about malaria and i'll have mroe to say about that, probably when I feel more like writing.
http://www.gladwell.com/2001/2001_07_02_a_ddt.htm


Anyway, I'm pretty sure this is malaria and it sucks. I'll be in bogotá soon.

Walter Lamberson Can Survive in The Jungle OR The Amazon Is Incredible!

I lived! Seeing the Amazon was one of the most incrediable experiences in my life. Spending five days in the Amazon should be some kind of minimal requirement for having strong opinions on enviornmental degredation, sustainable development, the assimilation of indigenous cultures, how dirty you can be, and how big cockroaches can get.

I wish I could aptly describe the Amazon. If I could put pictures online that would help, but I don't know where the start. Wikipeida says that one square kilometre of Amazon rainforest can contain about 90,000 tons of living plants. That is meaningless to most people who are reading this because it in units of kilometers and 'tons of living plants'. But it sounds like a whole lot. It's unfathomably diverse. After five days I needed not do more than open my eyes to find vegetation I had never seen before. It's a weird way to feel. I have some expectation of pattern recognition that had to go unfulfilled. However, in selva segundaria (rainforest that is not virgin, or has been deforested in the past (read: used to be a farm)) the biodiversity is much, much less.

Among the things that shocked me was how much of the forst had been deforested around this area. Most of the forest that was on 'dry' land was formerly a farm. Starting in the late 1800s people went nuts to farm the Amazon. IT's a good farm for a few reasons: stuff grows quickly and it is functionally an international port (I didn't realize that ocean-going ships can take the Amazon up to Iquitos, Peru--it's that big). The farm land is rather poor as it is not the minerals in the soil that allow the Amazon to host all that it hosts. The amazon is such a forest because of the abundance of fresh water from the Andes and the sunlght present near the equator at a low elevation. Evolution acts quickly in such an environment. In the absence of trees falling and rotting all the time, there is nothign to fertalize crops and after one or two years the farms are basically infertile.

Most of the land which is dry year-round had been deforested at some point, and after a while I got good at identifying selva segundaria. It is not as diverse, the trees are smaller and all of about the same height and, interstingly, the trees are straighter as opposed to curved. The curvature of the trees in selva primaria is incredible becuase the dense canopy of trees makes it very difficult for new trees to find sunlight so they grow in the direction where it is present, making them interesting, curvy things. The selva segundaria had very few Ceibas, my favorite tree in the forest (everyone's favorite tree in the forst) because of it's enormous size (they can get to be 150' tall). They are so large they host an ecosystem of their own. Trees grow within them, mamals and birds nest in their branches, and there is an infinitude of insects that live in and under their bark and roots. They are, quite simply, the grandest trees in the world. They are rather endagered. I climbed one with rock climbing equipment. It was one of best things I've ver done. I can't wait to see the pictures I took from above the canopy of the forest. (you might remember these trees from the Sean Connery film 'Medicine Man'. I believe in that movie they cure cancer.).

About 25 years ago the Colombian government started buying a lot of farms from the indigenous (for, and I asked some indians, very low prices). They allowed these to grow back into rainforest. So there are few farms now, but there is a lot of selva segundaria wherever there is dry land.

Fortunately, there is not much dry land. Or not much land that is dry year-round (including this month). I had a notion that the Amazon Rain Forest was something through which one could walk. I did not do as much walking as I expected but I did a lot more paddling. Along most of the river one would have to paddle ten Km in either direction to reach actual dry land. How there the place where the river ends is not the river bank, and how there are islands that are not made of land is hard to explain. There is dense, dense forest (think swamp) whose base is underwater for most of the year. The land that is 'inundable' was impossible to farm because, well, it spends most of the year under water. So it's virgin forest. Only in the summer when the water levels drop can one walk through any of it. Here you can see what the land used to look like. It is incredible.

My guide, who is really more of a nice guy with a boat than a professional tour guide, is from an indegenous village called Moncagua about four hours by slow boat from Leticia. This is where I spent two nights. I say it is indigenous for the reason that the people who live there are of indigenous ancestory. I don't know what else makes it indigenous. Most of them speak spanish, and they live, while in relative poverty, in the same way many mestizos in Leticia do. They have some electricity (sometimes), access to cities like Leticia and they work to sustain themselves each day by catching fish, picking bannanas, and growing some crops (yuca). They use currency to the extent that they have to (not much considering there is no real division of labor) but many possessions are the property of the community as a whole. I thought this was interesting. The community owns cows and there is a Curaca (a word I was surprised to hear and remember from Latin American civ class) who regulates community labor, which each family (there are about 50) must provide. Only males must perform community labor. I was very glad to have stayed in Moncagua.

People like the 400 residents of Moncagua, whom I like very much, constitute a significant threat to the Amazon. There are laws to protect the Amazon and in most of the seven countries where it florishes they are quite strong. The problem is with enforcement. Laws are good at protecting the Amazon from multinational corporations--paper mills etc--because it is realatively easy to enforce such laws. It is much more difficult to prosecute a tribe of indigenous people who farm the land to grow food, especially when these people live in abject poverty relative to most Colombians or Brazilians. They are not starving, most of them and right now. But there are things they want that can get by cutting down rain forest, like Yuca, a big root food that is very important to them. I watched a community labor force led by the Curaca of the puelo destroy about an acre of rainforest in under an hour. I don't know how I feel about this.

For a lot of people, their poverty justifies the descruction of the forest. And they are poor but it's hard to know how poor one must be to destroy the rainforest. First, because there is a very misleading notion of a 'minimum standard of living' in conversations about such things. There is no such thing as a bare minimum of food or money or calories that allow people to live below which they will die. There are degrees to which people aproach life and approach death all the time. More food improve peoples quality of life and it's absence degrades it, but nature did not do us the service of deliniating a line below which man cannot survive. Some of the people go to sleep hungry and little have any money at all but some of them have televisions. Almost none of them have medical service or cars (or roads) or pluming or bread but some of them have DVD players and all most of them have plentiful access to fish. (I have eaten nothing but fish and fruit for the last three days).

So it's complicated. And I don't know how I feel. But I have a few thoughts. The first is that the American environmental movement is really quite misguided. The forests of North America are beautiful and we should dedicate resources to protecting them by paying people not to farm them, pollute them, log them or hunt in them. But they are not the only forests that need protection. The Amazon is one of the most beautiful things in the world and no one dedicates nearly enough to protecting it (I don't have any numbers at all, can you tell?). I would guess that that acre of Amazon we spend well under one-onehundredth on environmental protection that we spend protecting each acre of National Forest in the U.S. We should not spend anymore protecting some of the more banal national forests of Missouri, but rather reallocate to protect something that is beautiful and in dire need of protection. I say this not only because I think the Amazon is more beautiful than Missouri but we spend more protecting Missouri, but also becaust it would be SO EASY to protect the Amazon. I watched twenty boys destroy an acre of forest in an hour with Machetes to grow Yuca (a crop that really has no U.S. equal) for two years before they have to destroy more to grow more. I don't know much about Yuca, but I'm going to guess that the amount 400 people use in two years is a pretty small price to pay for an acre of Amazon.

My second thought involves the Ceiba and how few of them there were in the selva segundaria (none) relative to how many there are in the Primavaria. They were cut down for wood. It's pulp, like the pulp of many trees, can be used to make paper. Not fancy furniture. Paper. And there were a lot of them--according to Estaban's father--until forty years ago. Forty years ago they were sudenly able to import electrical saws to cut them down. They cut them all down very quickly. He said back then paper was very cheap.

There are a couple of problems that allowed people to destroy the Ceibas. It reminds me of the Buffalo that no longer live in North America. They disappeared when settlers and railroad workers came through, killing them for their hides and leaving the meat to rot. The price of hides was low but people shot buffalo because, first, if they didn't someone else would (there were no property rights over buffalo) and second, because they could make more money doing it than not doing it. The second part would not have been true if people had access to credit. At any reasonable interest rate people could have done better borrowing money, buying buffalo, and saving them for later when the hide or meat was more in demand (how much would people pay for one buffalo today?). But settlers had no access to credit, just like the people in Moncagua. So they do not buy trees and wait for a true shortage of trees or timber. They cut them down and sell them or whatever they can get.

Anyway, enough of that. There were a lot of comments about insect repellent and there is more to the story! When I met Esteban on Tuesday he told me to buy a certain kind of insect repellent, a wax which he said worked better than anything else. It was, the box said, super strength. (Colombians are really into maximums, supers, and ultras. There are lots of ultra-marts, super-tiendas, and mega-bodegas). So I bought it. I go into the jungle armed with an array of insect repellents. My battery includes Nopix, a self-purported super wax, and that maximum-repellant from the Bogotá airportm Nopter I think it was called.

I did what anyone truly curious would do and set up a controlled experiment. I applied one to the left side of my body and one to the right. The repellent burned like hell and the wax primed me for skin cancer under the equatorial sun. I figured after one night in the Amazon, even under an misquito net, I would know which was the best. I would count the stings on the left side of my body and then count those on the right. I even made an effort to put both sides and similar risks for stings, keeping both near the water equally and making sure to roll both sleves equally. Simple.

When I woke up I was excited to know the results of my controlled experiment. I looked at my left arm and I had a hell of a lot of misquito bites. Then I looked at my right arm, where I also had a hell of a lot of misquito bites. I looked at my legs and they told the same story. Both Maximum and Super strengh insect repellents do the same crap job in the Amazon. It didn't matter though becase when I saw the size of Amazon bugs I was not so worried about them biting me as I was them stealing my wallet.

Before I left Anisha, who shares all my fears, tactfcully e-mailed me to let me know that cockroaches in the Amazon can get to be more than 15" long. She was not wrong. I don't think I saw any that were 15¨ long but I did see one that was as long as my forearm (I'm going to say that's about one foot). This was pretty traumatic. But after a while you get so muddy, wet, bug bitten, and smelly that you feel like nothing else can happen to you that you would really care about. This indifference is comforting becasue it means you don't care if you fall into the mud or the river. You stop giving a damn about rain and getting out of it. Being dry is unimportant. It's the only way to enjoy the amazon or the outdoors more generally. There is nothing pretty about it, but it's very comfortable.

Speaking of which, I think I might have malaria. My malaria medicine made me very tired, but now I feel sort of loopy like thoughts are repeating in my mind and I'm quite cold despite the fact that leticia is hot as hell. I'm not sure what I have but I have something and it came from the jungle. I would say it's malaria but for a conversaton I had about Malaria with someone from South Africa who had Malaria four times. I asked him 'how do you know if you have malaria' and he said 'you'll know'. And that's the thing, I don't know. So I'm not sure what to do except drink water.

I Fulfill a Childhood, Forge Legal Documents, and Eat an Insect

Last night, I was told that the University where I lecture will be closed for wednesday, so I won't have to give a lecture. Realizing that I had several days free, I went to a travel agency and asked if I could fly to Leticia in the morning. They said sure, 'but do you have a yellow fever vaccine'. Claro. 'Do you have your document of proof?' Pinche.

First: I did get a yellow fever vaccine about two months ago in the University Hospital. The document I forged--a MS Word document in English with some U of C Hospital clip art slapped on it and a fake doctor's name with a signature to match--wasn't really a lie. I had the vaccine that the law requires I have to enter the southern state of Amazonas. I just didn't have the card. In my mind, they are splitting hairs.

I printed out my shot-record/letter-type-thing at six PM, went to dinner, studied, and then hung out with some brazilians who were in the hostel. I fell asleep around two AM after a far-too-intense attempt at religious conversion by a peruvian. I woke up at Six AM, packed my goods, checked out of the hostel, and went to the airport. I didn't know if it would work, but I bought a ticket, and got in line to go through security where the military police were asking for proof of immunization. I pulled it out, handed it to them, they took it, held it up into the light, turned over the other side to find nothing, pretended to read it for a second, handed it back to me and said 'listo'. I was good.

Then I realized I had forgotten to buy either malaria medicine or insect repellent. The pharmacy at the airport had insect repellent but no malaria meds. I was surprised the airport had a pharmacy. I had an overpriced can of 'off' in my hands when the woman at the register said that there was a better insect repellent. It was 'maximum strengh' she said and it cost five times as much. I was sold. I want the dosage of insecticide that would kill me, minus epsilon as epsilon gets small. When all you know abut the place you are going is that it is the Amazon Rainforest and it's the most virgin rainforest that we have in the world and the most diverse biocosm in the known universe, you are really a sucker for words like 'maximum strengh'. This is a male thing. All I can't tell if the maximum strength bug spray works, all I know is it burns like hell.

I guess I'm used to pilots mentioning points of interest as we fly by them in the US. The grand canyon and Niagara Falls say. So I thought it was novel when the pilot pointed out the equator (I'm in the souther hemisphere). But as the started to descend, the pilot mentioned that, 'we will soon be flying over land controled by the government of the republic of Colombia.' When I think about it, It's good news. I'm glad we did descend on to the area controled by paramilataries, but I really didn't want to be reminded of it.

Descending down on Leticia is incredible. I am the sort of kid who always gets a window seat, and it was well worth it. As you come down the only thing you notice is that EVERYTHING is green everywhere. There is nothing but Extremely thick forest. As you get closer to the pueblo, there are some houses carved out of the selva. And then, all the sudden, there is a rectangle that has no trees. That's the airport.

It differs from an air strip in it's bureacratic structure. the plane lands on the approximation of pavement that constitutes the only runway. It seems like an airstrip. But then there is a guy with the most boring job on earth (if he wasn't a volunteer), who has a stick painted red which he uses to guide the one plane from the one runway to--no, not the gate, there are no gates, but the parking lot. He was putting on his headphones as the plane landed and he dropped his stick not long there after.

Your first reaction when you get off the plane is that it's hot as hell and where can you put your sweter. Your second reaction is 'wholly shit, that's the amazon, right there!'. And your third reaction is, 'who are those people in police uniforms playing the keyboards and singing?'. Those are the Tourist Police of Leticia de Amazonas and that's what they do when the daily flight from Bogotá lands. Three officers in uniform play the keyboard and sing songs-I think three of them-about the Amazon. I don't think they wrote any of the songs, but I'm not sure.

After the worlds most rubber-stamped security check, you are free to go. too..... and there is no one there. There are about 25 people on the flight, and either their families or their pre-arranged tour groups pick them up. If you are like me, you don't have any family or any reservations. You get to walk to the city.

Ultimately, I found a 'taxi' which was a motorcycle (there are very few cars here since there are no roads in or out of the city). He tooke me to the city center. I walked to the River and I sad Wholly Shit Godamn. and I sat around for a while and watched wodden canoes loaded to the brim with Bananas come into the city. This is where your bananas come from.

Later I realized I wanted to take my pants off, and outside of L.A. that means you need a hotel. I don't have a guide book because someone borrowed it and left in another part of Bogotá last night. So I don't know where to stay. I stopped by the pharmacy and bought malaria drugs, and then asked a cab driver if he knew where I could rent a boat to go up the river. We talked for a while, he told me about offers which, he later admitted, were really a rip-off. Then he told me his name was WALTER. And I was all ýo tambien and he was all, sí? and I was all, claro.

And we were basically BFF after that. He said he had some friends who might be able to do it. He made some phone calls, drove me to some peoples houses, and after an hour of looking for his cousin at various bars and billiard clubs in Leticia we found him at his uncle's house in Brazil. (Leticia and the Brazilian city of Tartagomana are seperated by, well, nothin. There is a street that is an international boarder between the two countries. There is a house with an address that is in both countries.) After finding him, we talked about where we would go. He said I needed to rent him a boat and he would take me. I leave tomorrow morning. I will be canoeing and hiking the Amazon and it's tributaries sleeping in some indigenous villages and in no place in particular. I should be back on Saturday.

This is much better, I think, than being an illegal immigrant in brazil for the good reason that when you're in a hammock in a barge down the river you can't really see the rainforest. You see the riverbank. This on the other hand, while a little last minute and unprepared, will have me traveling way up the small tributaries where you might be able to see Wild Beasts. That's what it came down to for me: wild beasts.

I spent the rest of the day walking around in three countries and taking pictures of kids. Some old guy tried to be nice to me and get me to pay him for taking pictures of me. I bought him and his friends two rounds of beer while he told me about how much he hated peruvians and how much money americans have. I didn't really disagree. He liked me because I gave him alcohol. I don't think I really did like him, but I felt bad for him because he was old and because he was poor. He gave me something called chuchuraza, which is an amazonian spirit that tastes like a mix of whiskey and ass. I told him I liked it. He told me he drinks it because he is poor. I don't think he's wrong, but I think alcoholism is probably also part of the reason he drinks it (he said he can drink a bottle in a day). I don't say that to relieve myself from thinking about his poverty. His alcoholism and his poverty are surely related.

Living in the Amazon isn't the carefree paradise that I might hope it is. It's really hard. It's an extremeley poor place. People make a living carying boatloads of bananas from the tops of trees, down the river in boats, to a market where they are sold for lots less than the minimal price we pay for them in the U.S. The peruvian island in the middle is a lot poorer than either the Brazilian or Colombian parts.

Anyway, I came into this internet cafe to get out of the most serious rain I've ever seen in my life. I need to go try to buy ziplock bags before the electricity is turned off at midnight.

So someone who is not me knows: I am going with only the guide west toward puerto narino and the parque amaracuryaca tomorrow. we will go north on some tributary, i don't remember which. I should be in leticia saturday becuase I just bought a sunday flight to Bogotá. Someone should hear from me by Sunday night at the latest. If not, maybe someone could think about that.

The Peruvian Embassy to the United States

http://www.peruemb.org/

Cokeheads are Bad at Soccer, I´m Bad at Buying Sox

Last night was my first night in the Hostel in downtown Bogotá, right off the Plazuela de Simón Bolivar. About half the people there are foreigners, Swiss, Swedes, Argentines, a South African, some Brazillians, lots of Venezuelans, a contengent of Israelis, and one other American--the others are colombians. The spoken language is a definate Spanglish. They all went to a club, I went to a coffee shop with a colombian friend where I had mediocre coffee and really good chocolate (Colombian coffee in Colombia = not very good). I came back to the hostel and talked to people until about 4 AM while they ALL did line after line of Cocaine. I "just said no."

A few observations about cocaine abuse: I was surprised by how unaffected most people were (though there was the swiss guy who was really quite affected). The Israelis said they had come to Colombia for the Coke. The American girl who was there was very much someone who had not done coke before coming to Colombia. Small quantities are legal in the city, which is interesting because large quantities are so violently illegal. It's basically an export product that few colombians use. Many visitors do. When I am around foreigners or speaking english I am often offered Cocaine. It was novel and funny at first, now I'm just used to it.

In the US people are very afraid of drug dealers and many of my friends think are or would be mildly traumatized if offered Cocaine in Chicago or New York. That's becasue in the US the law is so strictly enforced and the penalty so large. Drug dealers have good reason to be violent people. Because it's easy to aviod the law, cocaine is cheap. And because it is cheap it's not worth fighting over. In Colombia, certainly many of them have violent friends, but 'would you like some cocaine?' is asked with the same intonation as 'Chicle! Chicle! ¿Quien quieres chicle?'. In Colombia, cocaine costs about 1/20th of the price here as in the States, according to the Venezuelans. It is, I am told, very cheap and very pure.

It has been a long time since I've watched people do coke, but my thoughts today are that most Americans would be surprised by how functional its users are. Some of these people were pretty heavy users (they came to Colombia for it) but looked better than some drunks. Addiction is another thing.

I went to bed and woke up. Some of them were still awake others were waking up. I got everyone in the hostel to go play fútbol after breafast. The people who were still high on cocaine were the worst soccer players I've ever seen. Even the Latin American ones. Our team won, mostly thaks to a couple of sober brazilians and a colombian. I am comparatively bad at soccer here and definately benefited from the cocaine handicap the other team endured. I scored two goals.

Afterward I went to some museums, for a long walk, and I talked to a family of indians for a long time. They were neat. They showed me pictures and taught me words in Quecha.

I need to buy more socks. I tried to today but it didn't work. I know where to buy fake watches, pirated DVDs, Cocaine, good Mexican food, green tea (really hard to find), and Native American art but I can't figure out sox.

I have school tomorrow. I´m going to go to the library.

I Give In: I Finally Bought Malaria Medicine

Today, I moved. I am much happier in my new residence, a student hostel next the La Universidad de Los Andes. It's the best hostel I have ever seen. In a place like Colombia the people who come and stay in hostels are very intersting, but it is also very well run. Free coffe, Hammocks, patios, and balconies in a very old colonial building. I can see the kitchen below me through the spaces betwen the old planks of wood on the floor. It's also directly downtown in the colonial district, much better than the boring but safe suburb I was in. I think this was a good decision. In other news, I still have a headache that is the result of staying at various salsa clubs until 7 am. Colombians can dance. Well. And for a long time. When I woke up this morning (afternoon?) I tried to calculate how many beers I must have hade in the 10 hours I was out last night. For a variety of reasons I could not even estimate. I still don't have an apartment in New York. If anyone is reading this and has an apartment that they don't want, LET ME KNOW. I was reading The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber--decidedly my favorite Ernest Hemmingway short story and the only reading in English I have with me--and found a quote I rather like that I think about a lot in Colombia. In general it's a good world view, to realize that the worst thing that can happen to you is death. It's Shakespeare, I think from King Henry IV: "By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next." It's a helpful way to think about a world where you need to have firm opinions on taking risks.

Speaking of which, I am going to the Amazonian town of Letcia soon. I don't know when. But it's a tiny town on the borders with Brazil and Peru. I'm going to go to the Brazilian embassy first to present FINGER PRINTS to get a visa to visit Brazil. Americans have to do this. Brazil made this law after America required the same of Brazillians. I think it's pretty funny, but I'm sort of upset that it's so hard to get a visa. If I do get one in time, I am going to rent a hammock on a boat that runs down and through the Amazon from Leticia to Manaus. I think it will be sweet. I´m actually going to buy malaria pills.

As you may know, I think malaria pills are a scam. Doctors and, mostly, pharmasutical companies, advise you take them everyday if you leave the euro-american bubble. In the states, due to the monopoly rights that patents grant, you pay an ENORMOUS amount for them. When we went to India last summer my friends paid upwards of $200 (After the Insurance contribution) for drugs that they were told to take the entire time we were in India. First, the same drugs in India cost no less than ten dollars for a months supply.

More importantly, there are a billion people living in India, almost none of whom take malaria medication regularly. Most are fine--or at least malaria is the least of their problems. They are not somehow imune to the illness, they have the same suceptability that anyone else does. It's just, in most places, exceedingly unlikely you will get malaria. You have to be bitten by a female member of a very specific and uncommon species of misquito that is only active for an hour a day (sundown) and lives in swamps. Yet almost all doctors, the AMA, and the US Department of Health advise good idea to take anti-malarials in Bombay, Bogotá, or other enormous, poor city.

In my mind, there are two reasons for this, both are incentives problems. The first is that, you Doctor, the AMA, and the Department of Health only care about your health, not about you more generally. That means, they have nothing to gain from saving you two hundred dollars and taking a very minor risk. But they would be in a bad place if they advised you not to take an anti-malarial and you got malaria. In many places, people would be better of spending the same $200 taking other safety measures (like flying instead of taking a bus through Colombia). Gurillas are a much greater threat than Malaria in the country at large.

The second reason is that drug companies are a very organized group with clear incentives. They want you to take drugs, and they can easily target your doctor or the health department trying to get them to advocate your case. There is no organized group of people in whose interest it is that you not take malaria drugs when they are not necessary. By saving some $200 and spending it somewhere else, you certainly help people. But you help commerce in general and no single industry can expect to see a big difference in their profits if they save you $200 every time you go on vacation. It's not worth any one persons time to tell doctors and the health department when anti-malarials are not worthwile investments.

I don't want to make it sound like Malaria is not a problem in the world. It's a big problem for a lot of people. Most of these people live in impoverished, rural places where a misquito net is an absolute necesity that many cannot afford. For these people, unlike tourists with the means to travel to the third-world, Malaria is fatal. For wealthy tourists it is certainly unplesant and inconvenient and can be fatal if not treated, but because they have access to superior medical care, the disease is almost never deadly.

But tourists are seldom infected even in the absence of anti-malarials because they tend to travel to cities, and it has never been a very good idea to build large cities in places with serious malaria problems. The better way to think about this is that malaria investations have always prevented towns from becoming large cities.

And on top of tourists having a small risk of contracting a disease that is, to them, not very dangerous, malaria medicine doesn't work very well at all. To give you an idea, the most popular anti-malarial in Latin America, Chloroquine, is as effective as a heavy regemine of gin and tonic as quinine is the active ingredient in both. (though modern tonic water does not contain nearly enough quinine. But you can, evidently, put Cinchona bark in brandy for a few hours to make a drink that has about two grams of quinine, the same a Chloroquine. says this website: http://www.thetraveldoctor.com.au/gin_tonic.html)

But for the first time, I am going somewhere (the rural Amazon) where malaria medicine is a good idea and people should take it. I give in.

Oh, but the line about 'you should never trust drugs from other countries' that my doctor read to me from a script that I presume Pfizer provides is complete nonesense. The United States is a net importer of pharmaceuticals where as India is a next exporter. http://www.piribo.com/publications/country/usa_canada/usa/usa_intell.html

I Like This Poem

Mi vida entera
Jorge Luis Borges


Aqui otra vez, los labios memorables, único y semejante a vosotros.
Soy esa torpe intensidad que es un alma.
He persistido en la aproximación de la dicha y en la privanza del pesar.
He atravesado el mar.
He conocido muchas tierras; he visto una mujer y dos o tres hombres.
He querido a una nina altiva y blanca y de una hispánica quietud.
He visto un arrabal infinito donde se cumple una insaciada inmortalidad de ponientes.
He paladeado numerosas palabras.
Creo profundamente que eso es todo y que ni veré ni ejecutaré cosas nuevas.
Creo que mis jornadas y mis noches se igualan en pobreza y en riqueza a las de Dios y a las de todos los hombres.

Here once again the memorable lips, unique and like yours.
I kept getting close to happiness and have stood in the shadow of suffering.
I have crossed the sea.
I have known many lands; I have seen one woman and two or three men.
I have loved a girl who was fair and proud, with a Spanish quietness.
I have seen the city's edge, an endless sprawl where the sun goes downtirelessly, over and over.
I have relished many words.
I believe deeply that this is all and that I will neither see nor accomplishnew things.
I believe that my days and my nights in their poverty and their riches arethe equal of God's and of all men's.

Economics of the Drug War

So last night I gave my first lecture at la Universidad Nacional de Colombia. I presented a great paper by some of the best economists around, Gary Becker, Kevin Murphy, and Michael Grossman. The paper, The Market for Illegal Goods: The Case of Drugs, is a hell of a paper to talk about in Colombia. I think it basically begins to explain two thirds of the problems in this country. (On the note of problems, it’s been raining a lot and there was a serious thunderstorm two days ago. When there is unexpectedly loud thunder, people duck out of habit.)

Here is the paper´s abstract: This paper considers the costs of reducing consumption of a good by making its production illegal and punishing apprehended illegal producers. We use illegal drugs as a prominent example. We show that the more inelastic is either demand or supply for a good, the greater is the increase in social cost from further reducing its production by greater enforcement efforts. So optimal public expenditures on apprehension and conviction of illegal suppliers depend not only on the difference between the social and private values from consumption, but also on these elasticities. When demand and supply are not too elastic, it does not pay to enforce any prohibition unless the social value is negative. We also show that a monetary tax could cause a greater reduction in output and increase in price than would optimal enforcement against the same good if it is illegal, even though some producers may go underground to avoid a monetary tax. When enforcement is costly, excise taxes and quantity restrictions are not equivalent.

It´s strange to read about coca production and the destruction of coca fields on the front page of the paper every day. On any given day El Tiempo has two articles about Coca on the front page and another three inside. One thing I´ve learned is that it’s really easy to make cocaine. Coffee, difficult; bananas, difficult; exotic Amazonian fruits and nuts, very difficult. Coca and cocaine, easy. it’s a leaf treated with some chemicals. The plant grows like a weed, unlike coffee or bananas, which you have to irrigate and tend to aggressively. And there is a virtually endless supply of farmers in the mountains willing to grow it at any price, because it’s much easier to grow that their alternatives.

In the context of the paper I presented, the supply of cocaine is extremely inelastic. The price could fall drastically or raise drastically and you would see a similar number of farmers growing coca. 145 k hectares in Colombia are dedicated to growing coca (about 2% of the land in the country). That number could not be much larger if it were legal.

The idea from which the paper procedes is this: the way a regime of criminalization reduces the quantity of cocaine is by raising the price paid by those who demand it. There are two kinds of prices: pecuniary prices, which the law increases by making drugs cost more money, and non-pecuniary risks, which is how you think about the chance that you might get shot when you buy drugs, or that they might be poisonous. The government raises the price by making it hard to get drugs from point A (let´s call it Colombia), to point B (Chicago). Because cocaine is illegal everywhere in between, you have to take serious risks to traffic cocaine into the US. For smugglers, narcos and drug mules to do this work, they must be paid more than the simple compensation for transporting from one point to another (more than say, someone shipping coffee), they have to be compensated for both their efforts to avoid detection and the risk of being caught. The stronger the penalty or the more likely detection the greater the risk and thus the compensation which results in a higher price of the final product. More police or more jail time raises the price of drugs. This is the reason a kilo of Cocaine in Chicago costs more than a Kilo of Coffee. In Bogotá, it doesn’t.

The conclusion of the paper shows that, because Cocaine is so easy to produce, and producers of coca and cocaine respond minimally to changes in price (even if the price fell considerably, it would remain the most lucrative crop considering the small amount of work involved) its demand is inelastic. If you increase or decrease the price of Cocaine by 10%, you won’t change the quantity of cocaine much at all--so people will try to break the law even if it is harsh, and the harsher the law the greater the social cost incurred by those who break it.

One social cost in this situation is any wasted effort or unnecessary risk. For instance, balloons hidden in the orifices of a smugglers is, among other things, inefficient. A bad way to transport anything anywhere. If we transported Coffee from Colombia in this way it would be extremely expensive.

More important social costs are the cost of enforcement: Colombia spends some 5% of it’s GDP fighting narcos and rebels, The US poisons the countryside to kill crops (not just coca), millions of people die in the war with drug dealers, millions more are put in prisons thought the Americas at no small cost where they can neither work nor raise children, and there are millions of people who do not have access to civil services because they must remain outside the bounds of the law.

The last one is important. It’s why drug dealers are violent and Starbucks is not. Starbucks might be able to make a good thing out of taking up arms against Duncan Doughnuts, but they don’t for the obvious reason that it’s illegal. Duncan Doughnuts is protected by laws. Drug dealers aren’t. Gangs fight for turf and clientele and monopoly power just as Starbucks and Duncan Doughnuts do but since they have no legal recourse, their competition is a very violent one. Drug dealers get killed a mugged often because they carry cash and can’t call the cops. Lots of people die. More are killed on both sides in a war between police and drug dealers, gangs, and cartels.

The final topic, and the students in lecture really objected to this one, is the role of the drug trade and legislation in corrupting the government. Laws against a popular, easily produced crop in high demand can do a lot to explain Latin America´s problems with corruption (and I don’t mean to absolve the US (see: Noriega)). When you make a large portion of the population criminal, and you have to dedicate another large portion of the population to enforcing the laws against them, there are plenty of mutually beneficial transactions that are possible, from the police officer who finds drugs in a car to the president whose government spends an enormous amount of resources fighting a cartel that exports something very profitable. Criminalization makes drugs so profitable that drug traffickers have, in the past, offered to pay enormous sums of money to the government if they would stop enforcing their laws.

In Colombia, a cartel offered to pay off the country’s 3 billion dollar national debt if they would cease their war. After a long national debate, the government rejected to idea and entered the most brutal phase of violence in recent history. This was in 1988. Another former president was revealed, in a scandal compared to Watergate, for having taken some 6 million dollars from the leader of the Calí drug cartel to finance his campaign. Pablo Escobar, of the Medilliean cartel, donated several million to the poor of Colombia’s second largest city, building ten thousand new houses, new schools, and providing running water where it was previously unavailable. His two billion dollar drug-fortune financed it. This was another attempt to buy legaslative change.

Drug dealers pay so much to corrupt the government at the highest levels because of the profit in the trade, which only exists in a state of criminalization. If drugs were legalized, there would not be the opportunity for profits. You would expect fair compensation. If a trade, like coffee production, compensated people excessively they would enter the trade. In class a student objected to this assessment. I asked him, I thought cleverly, why he didn’t enter the coffee industry if he thought it was so profitable. He told me his family owns many hectares of coffee plantations. I was the ass. But the point remains. Anyone can grow coffee so there is no “real” profit if the market is efficient. He conceded his family would make more if they grew coca on the same farm.

The other reason the social cost of criminalization is so high is because demand is inelastic. Americans will pay a whole lot for coke. This was pointed out to me at a Bogotá club two days ago. I was talking to some people and a guy came to our table, pulled out a bag of Cocaine, and asked if we wanted to buy some. He saw that I was both (1) surprised and thus (2) an American, tossed the (large) bag toward me and said, nicely, "yeah, it’s cocaine. people use it. no big deal. the only reason it’s a problem is because you people pay so much for it." He understood the problem better than any of the econ students at Uni. Nacional.

The real lesson of the paper is that since the laws reduce the quantity of drugs by raising the price, we could achieve the same result through taxation. That is not to say that if the completive market price of cocaine is 10 dollars a kilo and the street price in Chicago is 1000 that we need to tax cocaine to cost 1000 dollars a kilo and should expect the same results. That is clearly not true. If legal markets provide consistent quality and a safe transaction, the price would have to be greater than $1000/kilo. The current quantity of drugs in Chicago reflects the pecuniary price, but also the risks involved. Legal markets can get rid of those risks by taking the violence out of the industry. The point is, sending people to prison for producing something is expensive, inefficient, and unjust.

We would be better off taxing people. you can read the paper here: http://gsbwww.uchicago.edu/fac/kevin.murphy/teaching/Market%20for%20Illegal%20Goods-JPE.pdf

La Ciudad Bolivar

First: all that stuff I wrote about Bogotá being the land of milk and honey was true. In some places it’s a nice place most of the time and in most places it’s a nice place some of the time. But in some places, it isn’t ever nice at all. One of those places is la Ciudad Bolivar. This is the largest informal settlement in Colombia, an infamous shanty town on the western outskirts of Bogotá. I went there today.

Colombia has, to be sure, a lot of problems. The biggest by far is the violence. In every war-torn country there is a chicken-or-egg problem: does the poverty cause the violence, or the violence, the poverty. After one week, I believe it’s the latter. Colombians are far too educated, work far too much, suffer from far too many diseases, and have far too many natural resources to be poor in the absence of conflict. It is not inspired by poverty. As a Colombian told me, the war is very much an ideological one deeply rooted in the colonial history, foreign intervention, and the nation’s unfortunate proclivity for growing coca.

The most important consequence of the violence--aside from the obvious problems of war--is the displacement of some 3 million people (says the Economist). Called desplazados, they are a huge population that has fled the country side to come to the cities. Primarily they have abandon lives as farmers and now struggle to survive in and around all of Colombia´s major cities. As such, almost none have any formal education and no opportunity to use skills as farmers. As they have fled a war, many are wounded and cannot work. For reasons I do not understand, most of them are children and many are orphans.In some countries, people leave the city to come to the country seeking opportunities in booming industrial centers. South Korea went from being 80% rural to 80% urban after 30 years of economic development. That was good for everyone. In Colombia they are fleeing a violent war and the destruction of their coca fields, which cover some 144 thousand hectares of the nation.

La Ciudad Bolivar is the largest settlement of desplazados and urban poor in the country. Here they live with almost no public services, including electricity, running water, trash disposal, or police protection. In la Ciudad Bolivar there is one police station for every 100,000 people. The streets are full of trash that, I’m told, they dispose of when the rain comes and floods their settlements. Perhaps the rampant criminality is because of the lack of policing, but it’s also clear that the police are scared of the place and stay away.

While I was there I saw: two fights, one gang of Indians chasing a black boy, a mother cooking over a burning pile of trash, teenagers sniffing chemicals, sewage in the street, naked children walking in the same street, and a the body of an old man who had recently died. Most people have never seen a dead person lying in the place where he died. It’s a hard thing to do. I didn’t like it. And I didn’t like seeing the naked children with no shoes in the same street as the man who was dead. I wonder what they thought.
Most of the people had shoes, but none of the children did. Everyone was very young. In retrospect, the dead man was the oldest person I saw.

I would have liked to take pictures but I did not bring anything with me more than the fare for the cab. I did get out of the cab. Not for long. The driver who took me there was the forth driver I asked to take me. He said the only other time he had been there it was to look for his old cab, which has been stolen. He said there are chop shops that dismantle all of Bogotá`s stolen cars. He said they can take one apart in a half hour. He came looking for his, but he only found the license plate.

I have made Ciudad Bolivar sound very sad, but the children playing in the streets were laughing and the family eating a diner cooked over burning trash was not hungry. La Ciudad Bolivar was very sad to anyone who has known a lifestyle marked by material comforts and stability. The saddest part is that this is better than the places they have fled.

While I was there I saw: two fights, one gang of Indians chasing a black boy, a mother cooking over a burning pile of trash, teenagers sniffing chemicals, sewage in the street, naked children walking in the same street, and a the body of an old man who had recently died. Most people have never seen a dead person lying in the place where he died. It’s a hard thing to do. I didn’t like it. And I didn’t like seeing the naked children with no shoes in the same street as the man who was dead. I wonder what they thought.

Most of the people had shoes, but none of the children did. Everyone was very young. In retrospect, the dead man was the oldest person I saw.

I would have liked to take pictures but I did not bring anything with me more than the fare for the cab. I did get out of the cab. Not for long. The driver who took me there was the forth driver I asked to take me. He said the only other time he had been there it was to look for his old cab, which has been stolen. He said there are chop shops that dismantle all of Bogotá`s stolen cars. He said they can take one apart in a half hour. He came looking for his, but he only found the license plate.

I have made Ciudad Bolivar sound very sad, but the children playing in the streets were laughing and the family eating a diner cooked over burning trash was not hungry. La Ciudad Bolivar was very sad to anyone who has known a lifestyle marked by material comforts and stability. The saddest part is that this is better than the places they have fled.

Here is a website that discusses the rather remarkable urban planning in Bogotà. I have been really impressed by the ingenuity and successes of the municipal government in dealing with the circus that is this city. Given the difficulty of the task, I think Bogotá must be the best governed city in the world. I’ll write about it’s public transit later.http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/03.11/01-mockus.html

I Have Created A Blog!

I´ve done a lot of things in my life, but I always thought a blog was below me. I was wrong.

Anyway, I am here, in Bogotá, alive and happy. I hope this blog will serve two functions: it will be the button I press peridocally to let people (mike) know that I´m not dead. It is also less typing than individual e-mails, and it won´t fill your inbox.

So if anyone is still reading this, Bogotá is beautiful, rainy, stable, happy, and sort of cold at night. I think my first surprise was what a non-fucked-up place Bogotá is. large parts of Bogotá are wealther than large parts of, say, Chicago. There is something between seven and twelve million people here, and most of them live a lot more like americans than I would have thought. The north side of the city, where I am currently staying, is almost boring in it´s stability.