Colombian anti-drug assault aimed at Europe

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Colombia's vice president is taking a hard-hitting anti-drug message to Europe, complaining about cocaine-snorting celebrities who he says are financing the drug-fueled civil conflict bleeding this South American nation.

Vice President Francisco Santos spoke of supermodel Kate Moss, although she doesn't appear in the ads that he planned to unveil today in London along with 13 European anti-drug czars.

Santos called Moss a perfect example of liberal European attitudes toward drug use because she is enjoying a career comeback after a British tabloid last year published photos of her apparently snorting cocaine.

"To me it's baffling that somebody who helps cause so much pain in Colombia is doing better than ever and winning more contracts than ever," the vice president told The Associated Press.

Moss lost contracts after the photos were published, but her career resumed after she spent time at a clinic in Arizona. She apologized to "all the people I have let down" over the incident but was never charged with any drug offense.

"Cocaine not only destroys you, it also destroys a country" is the theme of the advertising campaign designed to change attitudes among Europeans about their booming cocaine habit.

Santos spoke of what cocaine consumption does to Colombia, where drug-financed armed groups murder hundreds of people each year and force thousands to abandon their homes.

"We need to tell Europeans that that line of coke they snort is tainted in blood," Santos said.

Colombia, the world's largest producer of cocaine, hopes European governments will fund placement of the ads on billboards, television and even bathrooms of trendy dance clubs

It has also launched an English-language Web site, www.sharedresponsibility.gov.co, to highlight its efforts in the U.S.-sponsored war on drugs, including aerial eradication of more than 1.5 million acres of coca, the base ingredient of cocaine, since 2002.

According to the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, cocaine use among young adults in Spain and Britain has doubled over the past decade, reaching levels similar to those in the United States, where 5 percent of people have reported recent usage.

Santos noted findings by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy that cocaine consumption has declined 50 percent in the United States over the past two decades.

Also

Trafficking suspect arrested: Spanish police said Tuesday they had arrested Orlando Sabogal Zuluaga, 40, a leading member of one of Colombia's most feared drug-trafficking cartels, the Norte del Valle cartel, whose head, Luis Hernando Gomez Bustamente, was captured in Cuba in 2004. Spanish police began searching for Sabogal after a request from the U.S. Embassy in Spain.

Soccer connection: A Colombian soccer club was characterized by the Bush administration Tuesday as a front for one of the South American country's four most-wanted cocaine kingpins. The Treasury Department announced it was freezing any U.S. assets of Cortulua, a second-division soccer club based in Tulua, near Cali in southern Colombia.