Drug trafficking in Central America may be directly affecting not only human lives, but also forests, as drug cartels illegally cut down trees to make secret roads and fake farms to support their operations.

Directly under risk are the ecologically important rainforests in Central America. This phenomenon is made worse when drug traffickers bribe officials to look the other way, while they acquire local land and then convert them into plantations and ranches as a cover for their money laundering and drug trafficking businesses.

A new policy paper published in the online journal Science , with Kendra McSweeney as lead author, reveals that in the Honduras alone, between 2007 and 2011, deforestation rates increased fourfold, and the spike coincided with reports of increased cocaine shipments within the country. Guatemala and Nicaragua have also been notable for having very high deforestation rates since 2000, and they are well-known for being embroiled in a battle against drug cartels for a long time.

The study was done on a grant from National Geographic. McSweeney told National Geographic that she "wondered who had the money and impunity to do that, and when we looked into it we found that the answer was narco-traffickers. The flow of drugs through the region resulted in ecological devastation."

However, McSweeney, who has been studying the Honduras for over 20 years, also said that the rapid deforestation in Latin America cannot be completely attributed to drug trafficking. She also factored in the impacts from the construction and usage of dams and roads, urban development encroaching into forest lands, the need to convert forests into farms, and the presence of illegal logging.

McSweeney did stress that drug trafficking was accelerating the clearing of important rainforests that are important for ecological sustainability. Thus, her research encourages scientists, specifically biologists and ecological workers, to rethink the idea that drug policy has nothing to do with science, and that winning the war on drugs may yield important benefits, ecology-wise.

Unfortunately, proving the connection between drug trafficking and deforestation is easier said than done, since drug money has largely hushed government officials. Nevertheless, governments see that a possible solution to this problem would be to decriminalize certain degrees of drug possession. Experiments in legalizing marijuana are ongoing in Colorado and Washington as well as Uruguay in South America. The Colombian government has already decriminalized possession of personal doses of drugs. How effective this will be in controlling both drug trafficking and deforestation, though, remains to be seen.