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Users of cocaine are destroying the rainforest, according to law enforcement officials.
From the Guardian:
Four square metres of rainforest are destroyed for every gram of cocaine snorted in the UK, a conference of senior police officers as told yesterday.
Francisco Santos Calderón, the vice-president of Colombia, appealed to British users of the class A drug to consider [...]

Brazil’s Environmental Minister is blaming farmers who illegally clear the Amazon and traffickers of exotic species as the root causes of animals becoming extinct in the country.
From BusinessWeek:
Minc blamed the growing number of endangered species on deforestation in the Amazon, which he said is sparked by soy farmers and ranchers illegally clearing land to plant [...]

A new report has found that the Brazilian government is among the worst illegal loggers in the Amazon.
From the CS Monitor:
Brazil’s environment minister announced yet another series of measures to halt deforestation of the Amazon this week, but their impact was weakened not only by the fact that destruction had increased sharply once [...]

The WWF released a report stating that the European Union imported 30 million cubic meters of illegal wood in 2006.
From the AFP (via Google News):
The World Wildlife Fund on Tuesday criticised the European Union’s illegal wood imports, singling out Finland as the top offender and calling for EU-wide legislation to tackle the issue.
“Illegal logging destroys [...]

The Amazon Forest in Brazil is expected to see an increase in illegal logging after years of declines. 
From the AP (via Yahoo News):
Destruction of the Amazon is again on the upswing despite a recent crackdown on illegal logging, Brazil’s new environment minister said Wednesday.
Carlos Minc said official calculations of how much rain forest has been [...]

In an article reporting on the arrest of a timber smuggling network, The Telegraph (India) quotes a villager who explains the impact that illegal logging has made.
“Till 1995, sunlight could barely penetrate these reserve forests. Now one has to search quite a bit for a patch of shade,” said a villager in Langting.

Illegal logging [...]

From the BBC:
The Brazilian government has announced a huge rise in the rate of Amazon deforestation, months after celebrating its success in achieving a reduction.
In the last five months of 2007, 3,235 sq km (1,250 sq miles) were lost.
Gilberto Camara, of INPE, an institute that provides satellite imaging of the area, said [...]

From the New York Times:
In the United States, forests are not being illegally logged on a systemic scale, as is the case in countries like Indonesia, Malawi and Brazil, where unauthorized harvesting has led to serious deforestation and attendant environmental problems. Here, the issue is often scattered and intimate, and often affects homeowners, parks [...]

The International Herald Tribune is reporting on the trade in illegal logging in Indonesia.
Illegal logging is commonplace in Indonesia, and though the government has prosecuted dozens of cases in recent years, it admits it cannot be everywhere.

The article mentions that the illegal logging trade is able to continue in Indonesia due to the rampant corruption [...]

According to Havocscope’s calculations, on the conservative side the illicit market in Burma generates around $470 million dollars a year. The breakdown is as follows:
$350 Million in Illegal Logging. Timber from the Burma’s famed teak forests are cut down and smuggled and sold in China.
$120 Million in Opium Production. The Opium industry is [...]