Chemicals

Two main factors illustrate the problems with the War on Drugs and the environment.  The first is that while unregulated, the current means of cultivation of drug crops is very harmful to the environment.  Processing laboratories release millions of liters of dangerous gases in to the atmosphere, and governments do a great deal of damage when destroying confiscated drugs.  Unregulated means of substance cultivation also does a great deal of soil damage and loss of other vegetation.

Governments in South American countries have also sought fight drug proliferation by chemical spraying campaigns.  In these campaigns, planes release a chemical related to the Agent Orange that devastated Vietnam to kill the plants.  From 2002 to 2008, the United States gave Colombia over $400 million to execute these strategic airstrikes.

If drugs are legalized, the government can take a personal role in regulating the cultivation of the plants, insuring that they do not cause other environmental hazards and are treated similarly as our other legal drugs.

Source: 

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, "Coca Cultivation in the Andean Region: A Survey of Bolivia, Colombia and Peru" (Vienna, Austria: June 2006), p. 45.