Why Drug Enforcement Doesn't Work

Jack Devoe was a Miami pilot who became a drug smuggler. He made more than 100 flights carrying 7000 pounds of cocaine to the U.S. from South America. He had so much money that he founded an aviation school, a commuter airline and five other businesses. He carried his money to the bank in plastic garbage bags.

Louis Garcia was another drug-smuggling pilot. He testified before the President's Commission on Organized Crime that his boss, a man named Victor, "kept a large supply of cash in the trunk of his car and told me when I needed money I was simply to take what I needed. This is typical of the amount of money that even smalltime dealers have at their disposal." The assets (not including the drugs) and the cash seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1983 totaled $235,000,000. In 1982, the DEA seized assets including a Tiffany Favrile vase that brought a record $64,900 at auction.

In one case--the arrest of Paolo LaPorta in Philadelphia--the DEA took $2,500,000 in cash and assets. Another suspect was photographed using a hand truck to wheel a cardboard carton containing $4,500,000--a single deposit--into a bank. He was arrested shortly thereafter. In another case, Donald Steinberg grossed $100,000,000 in 1978--about half the DEA budget for that year. Isaac Kattan, a money launderer, processed more than $200,000,000 a year. When he was arrested, he had $383,404 on his person. Kattan had many money-counting machines. Today, it is customary for drug traffickers to weigh their money rather than count it.

One of Colombia's top drug barons, Gonzalo Rodríguez, is said to make $20,000,000 a month. That's $666,666.67 a day. A man could live on that. In fact, a man could have his own army, set up his own city and declare himself independent of his native country, which is what many drug producers have done, not only in South America but in southern Asia as well. Pablo Escobar Gaviria, the mastermind of a Colombian drug empire, is credited with inventing the South American cocaine trade as it is known today. His personal army is estimated at more than 2000 men. (For comparison, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration has 1800 agents.) Gaviria's personal wealth may well exceed two billion dollars. Roberto Suárez Gómez is the ruler of a renegade state high in the forests to the east of the Andean Mountains in Bolivia. The peasants who live there are his serfs. They produce coca. Suárez is thought to earn some $33,000,000 a month.

There is more money in illegal drug traffic than in any other business on earth. That is a powerful incentive for a lot of people, so powerful that experts who have been studying the problem for years believe that all our efforts to stop drug traffickers are doomed to fail. They further believe that there is no way to stop drugs from being produced, short of taking away the financial incentive. There is abundant evidence that these experts are right: In spite of the largest antidrug effort in history, more drugs of higher quality are being sold at lower prices on American streets than ever before.

And yet the Reagan Administration is still bent on sealing U.S. borders by military might and on punishing both the users of drugs and the countries that produce them, whatever the cost. The President announced his war on drugs when he first took office. In The War on Drugs (Playboy, April 1982), I documented the beginnings of that campaign. I showed how a national effort, conceived in the White House and spawned at the grass-roots level, was eroding civil liberties and threatening constitutional rights in the name of fighting drug abuse. Nancy Reagan spearheaded the campaign, appearing before parents' groups around the world to encourage legislative action aimed at controlling drugs. President Reagan appointed an energetic antimarijuana spokesman named Dr. Carleton Turner, an organic chemist from Mississippi, as his special assistant on drug-abuse policy.

In Cocaine (Playboy, September 1984), I examined addictive disease, showing that "the addictive properties of a substance appear to be far less important than a person's tendency to become addicted." Medical research points to the fact that while certain drugs can produce physical dependence, most individuals will not willingly take those drugs, even after experiencing their effects. A small percentage of the population, however, will become fully addicted. Of that group, the medical classic The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, by Goodman and Gilman, says, "Those who persist in the use of drugs, in spite of the social pressures against such use, and eventually become compulsive users of narcotics, have personality disturbances that antedate their contact with the drug."

In other words, drug addiction should rightly be viewed by the Government as a medical problem, not a criminal one. It has taken a long time for people to accept alcoholism as a disease. Now many employers are realizing that cocaine addiction works the same way and that rehabilitation is cheaper than hiring new employees.

But the Government persists in relegating the entire problem to the criminal-justice system. In January 1983, Reagan appointed Vice-President George Bush to lead the nation's drug-law-enforcement efforts. Three years later, the U.S. war on drugs is going full tilt, and as Congressman Dante B. Fascell, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, announced in The New York Times in January 1985, "The bottom line is that, despite some encouraging developments, particularly in Colombia, the war is being lost."

• We are losing money: U.S. taxpayers are spending more than two and a half billion dollars for the Drug Enforcement Agency, State Department and Coast Guard antidrug efforts. Many more hundreds of millions are spent by other agencies and organizations. In spite of the increase of Federal dollars devoted just to drug interdiction from an estimated $83,000,000 in 1977 to $278,000,000 in 1983, William J. Anderson of the General Accounting Office was forced to admit, "Recent estimates indicate the quantity of drugs supplied to the illicit U.S. market has increased.... Recent street price and purity statistics indicate an increased availability of most drugs." Congressman Glenn English said, "The old common rule of thumb is that if purity is up and price is down, there must be more availability." There hasn't even been a Federal effort to count all the money being spent to stop drug use.

• We are losing people: The kidnap/torture/murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena Salazar and pilot Alfredo Zavala focused global attention on drug trafficking early in 1985. That came after some notable successes in American-Colombian antidrug efforts. Now the Colombian drug dealers are offering a $350,000 reward for anyone who will bring them the head of Francis "Bud" Mullen, head of the DEA from November 1983 to spring 1985. There are also $300,000 rewards for several other U.S. narcotics agents. Traffickers tried to destroy the U.S. embassy in Bogotá with a car bomb that killed a woman. In May 1984, Colombia's justice minister, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, was assassinated when two men sped up to his car on a Yamaha motorcycle, gunned him down and fled into traffic. They were believed to be doing the bidding of the infamous Pablo Escobar Gaviria. Nineteen members of an American-backed team trying to eradicate coca plants in Peru were hacked to death in the jungle. Four of them were brutally tortured first. Colombian and Bolivian drug lords have joined in offering $500,000 to anyone who will kill U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia Edwin Corr. And recently, ten American diplomats stationed in Colombia were sent on extended holiday with their families after death threats were received from drug smugglers.

Nor is the violence just on foreign soil: At the height of the "cocaine wars" in Miami, 28 percent of all murders in that city were committed with a machine gun.

• We are losing civil liberties: Laws designed to maintain basic freedoms in America have been altered or undone in a misguided effort to stop drug traffic. The Bill of Rights and various constitutional amendments were drafted to provide protection from the powers of government.

But the Reagan Administration, desperate for results in the war on drugs, appears willing to forfeit the precepts of democracy. And people all over the country seem to be going along, unaware of the damage they may be doing to their own civil liberties. For example, many employers require job applicants to submit to urinalysis screening for marijuana and other drugs. An early draft of the Reagan Administration's drug-war strategy suggested that if the test proved positive, the doper should be held in detention without trial until he could be treated for and "cured" of his affliction. Thus, the Administration claims it does, in fact, view drug addiction as a disease and is willing to treat it--if we'll do away with the bother of constitutional guarantees against pretrial detention.

In addition, Reagan is using the military to enforce domestic law, a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which was designed to prevent abuses of military power--including the appearance of a police state. (Congress, in what many legal authorities think was a poorly thought-out move, voted to make an exception for drug enforcement.) The National Guard has been called out to assist in raiding domestic marijuana plantations in 30 states. Numerous other measures taken by Reagan and by local state officials following his lead have undermined the protections afforded by the exclusionary rule, the Tax Reform Act, the Freedom of Information Act, the Habeas Corpus Act, as well as the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and (continued on page 238)Drug Enforcement(continued from page 108) 14th amendments. For example, the war on drugs has made it possible for a person's own attorney to be called as a witness against him. The attorney can be given immunity and forced to testify under threat of jail. (This is not merely a possibility: One such case, U.S. vs. William Thomas Sheehan, is pending right now in the Eastern District of California.)

When Reagan put the Vice-President in charge of a domestic law-enforcement matter, some observers believe, he exceeded the powers given to the President by the Constitution. Charles F. Rinkevich, former coordinator of Reagan's South Florida Task Force, was put in the embarrassing position of having to remind Congressman Glenn English in his own 1983 subcommittee hearing that the "Constitution of the United States and laws passed by Congress place in the Attorney General of the United States responsibility to serve as the chief law-enforcement officer in the country. I think it is in some ways inappropriate, on a long-term basis in our system of Government, for the Vice-President to exercise that kind of continuing law-enforcement responsibility."

• We are losing the struggle to control international drug traffic: Even if the end did justify the means, we are not achieving the stated goal of reducing drug use. While 20 percent of the people now in prison are there for drug-trafficking offenses, while over the past 15 years in the U.S. one person every two minutes has been arrested for marijuana possession or sale, drug use and availability are greater than ever.

The entire effort is in vain. In the early months of 1984, police captured some of the largest hauls of heroin in the history of Hong Kong, the banking center for world narcotics traffic. The only noticeable effect was a 72-hour shortage of heroin. Similarly, there have been numerous operations by joint U.S. forces, including the Coast Guard, Customs, the DEA and the military, aimed at halting drug traffic in the Caribbean. Congressional Report said that such operations "have resulted in increased drug seizures and improved coordination. However, they are costly and may have only limited long-term impact."

The fact is, drug traffic cannot be stopped in an open democracy. But the war goes on.

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Reagan, following Nixon's example, has employed a two-pronged strategy: (1) Stop the cultivation of marijuana, coca bushes (which produce cocaine) and opium poppies (which produce heroin); (2) interdict or seize the drugs as they are transported out of the country of origin or into the United States. But a systematic analysis of each of these tactics shows why they were not successful for Nixon and cannot be any more so for Reagan.

Let's consider attempts to stop cultivation. The U.S. State Department works with foreign governments to help them reduce their production of drugs. There are two steps to this process: First, kill the offending plants and, second, substitute some other crop (such as potatoes in Bolivia) that will produce income for the peasant growers. In fiscal 1984, the State Department dedicated $50,200,000 to international narcotics control. Nevertheless, marijuana, cocaine and opium crops are breaking records. Why? To start with, not even the most ruthless potato trafficker can hope to make anything approaching $20,000,000 a month.

The State Department claims to have reduced Mexican heroin imports from six and a half metric tons in 1975 to one and a half metric tons in 1980. If that was true then, it certainly isn't anymore: The DEA estimates that Mexico produced 17 metric tons of heroin in 1983. Mexican heroin production is on the rise.

Aerial defoliation missions in Mexico destroyed 6422 acres of marijuana in 1983. But in November of that year, Mexican police raided a 700-acre plantation in northern Mexico and discovered 10,000 tons of pot. What may sound like a victory for law enforcement was actually a setback, because until then, no one had believed there was that much marijuana in all Mexico. In fact, the most grass ever seized in any one place prior to that had been 570 tons taken in Colombia in 1978. The State Department called it "staggering." The DEA's National Narcotics Intelligence Committee had estimated that Americans smoked--in total--about 14,000 metric tons of marijuana annually. Suddenly, authorities were faced with the specter of incomprehensible amounts of drugs sweeping the globe, not only out of their control but utterly undetected. In fact, that one bust threw all Government figures into question; and even now, the means of estimating drug production and use are being reconsidered.

Reagan's advisor, Dr. Turner, disagrees. When I visited him at his White House office and mentioned the 10,000-ton figure to him, he responded angrily. "That's bullshit!" he shouted. "It was not 10,000 metric tons. You go talk to the DEA, you go talk to State, and you ask them what was the magnitude of that, and I think they'll all tell you it was anywhere around 1200 to 1900 metric tons. They know it was not 10,000 metric tons; but, you see, the Federal Government and the other governments of the world are captive to the word ten."

Turner's theories about numerology are not as difficult to swallow as his facts and figures. Speaking in a sharp Southern voice, he can reel out sentences nine feet long, studded with what sound like authentic statistics. He says it would take 44,000 acres to grow 10,000 tons of marijuana. The DEA estimates 20,000 acres. Congressional staffers working on the military effort to stop drug traffic confide that "Carleton is not really qualified to talk about these matters. He's a chemist."

Yet Turner persists: "All my surveys show that cocaine consumption in the U.S. is leveling and beginning to come down." Everyone else's surveys, including that of a House Select Committee, say it's going up.

"The American public has recaptured the spirit of democracy," says Turner. "I think we have the pieces of the puzzle in place that are very effective," he says of the over-all drug effort.

On that point, Turner has some supporters. Congressman Clay Shaw of Florida, for example, says, "There is no way anybody can say that we are now losing the battle. We have got them on the run.... We have the ear of the White House. We do have a program that is working."

On the other hand, the year Reagan took office, 25 tons of cocaine entered the U.S. At the beginning of his second term, more than 85 tons a year were coming in. In its 1984 report, the Congressional Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control referred to "our failure in bringing under control illicit production and traffic of narcotics." And Vice-President Bush's chief of staff, Admiral Daniel J. Murphy, told The New York Times, "I don't see where we are winning the war on cocaine."

The truth, Government agents fear, is that far more people are using far more drugs in far greater quantities than anyone ever dreamed possible. Some experts believe that the illegal drug trade is so large that it contributes significantly to the trade deficit; most agree that it is well in excess of 100 billion dollars annually and rising, perhaps by as much as ten billion dollars a year.

The sheer quantity of drugs is only one of a galaxy of problems confronting those who would control drugs at the source. An Assistant Secretary of State listed a few of the other obstacles:

• Frequent changes in the governments of other countries.

• Populations that are heavily dependent upon cultivation and trafficking for their income.

• An indifference to U.S. interests.

• The belief that drug abuse is a U.S. problem, created by U.S. demand.

• Requirements that we virtually reconstruct much of the countries' economies in exchange for enforcement cooperation.

• Widespread official corruption in grower countries, including government involvement in the narcotics trade.

Yet even if the U.S. were completely successful in getting Colombia and Mexico to stop producing all drugs--and most authorities agree that even that modest goal is impossible--it would do nothing to reduce production in Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, Paraguay, Guyana, Surinam, Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and the more than 1000 islands and several thousand cays of the Caribbean.

And then there are countries we know nothing about. For years, Ecuador, for example, was thought to produce no significant quantities of drugs; now, suddenly, Ecuador has emerged as the world's third-largest cocaine-producing nation. It seems we don't really know which countries produce drugs and which don't. Police went into Ecuador and found coca bushes three times the normal size. (At first, they didn't know what they were seeing. It turned out to be a previously unknown and especially virulent strain of coca called epadu.) Since coca bushes take four years to mature, it was obvious that at least 7000 acres of these plants had been overlooked by DEA and local officials.

Belize is another example of the same phenomenon. This tiny country suddenly went from having no State Department ranking as a drug producer to being listed as the number-four exporter of marijuana to the U.S.

The message is clear: The American drug-buying public is giving foreigners an immense incentive to grow and supply drugs, and when they do it, the U.S. Government threatens to hit them with a small stick. The incentive is far greater than the risk. And even if the risk were made larger, there is no way it can be made large enough for, say, Brazil.

Brazil, inside of whose borders all the previously named countries could fit with room to spare. Brazil, which is approximately the size of the entire United States (3,300,000 square miles, compared with our 3,600,000) yet has millions of acres ideal for growing marijuana, coca and poppies. Brazil: unreeling countless miles of uncharted forest and jungle, a growing season for two crops a year and more sparsely populated tropical wilderness than any other free nation on earth. The idea of controlling Brazil's drug production is preposterous. State Department officials have recently acknowledged that they have no idea what's going on in Brazil and that they suspect vast quantities of--at least--marijuana and cocaine.

And if Brazil were burned off with defoliants and nuclear fire, if the fertile Amazon basin were plowed under and salted with Agent Orange, like the jungles of Vietnam, that would still leave Burma, a country where the government has no control over drug-producing areas. The freelance armies that dominate those regions started running drugs to support their ideological struggle. They ended up concluding that when running drugs makes you rich, ideology becomes an academic matter. Burma is now the world's premier opium producer, and last year's was its biggest bumper crop.

And if Burma were wiped off the face of the map, that would still leave Morocco, Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Chad, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and all the rich soil down the gentle and fertile crescent into Indonesia. And if we bombed southern Asia into the ocean, that would still leave Argentina, which I haven't mentioned because only recently have cocaine refineries been discovered in that area, where 1,000,000 square miles await cultivation, if some modest entrepreneur in search of a steady income of $20,000,000 or $30,000,000 a month hasn't begun already. And don't forget that Afghanistan and Iran, neither of which has diplomatic relations with us, could grow all the drugs needed to supply the entire world without help from South America, Central America or the Caribbean.

The fact is, our most popular drugs of abuse come from plants that are nothing more than weeds. Domestically grown marijuana was the second largest cash crop in America in 1983, selling for $13,860,000,000 compared with the $15,332,400,000 we spent for corn. When the DEA cracked down on home-grown pot, growers went indoors. A three-story hydroponic Cannabis factory was discovered in Cleveland. The plants were fed automatically from a 600-gallon tank of liquid nutrient. Even without this elaborate help from man, marijuana grows wild now in every state in America. With cultivation, its ability to reproduce is Herculean. If you want to get a sense of how difficult it would be to wipe out marijuana, consider the problems posed by the humble dandelion. If we can't even wipe it out on our own lawns, imagine trying to wipe out a hearty weed like Cannabis in thousands of acres of roadless jungle.

Yet, right now, the Reagan Administration is trying to get Colombia and Mexico to eradicate their Cannabis plantations. The premise: If drug traffickers can bribe foreign officials to let them grow the drugs, then certainly we can bribe foreign officials to help us wipe them out. The problem is, drug traffickers have more money.

The result has been twofold: Drug growers and smugglers have taken the initiative in killing American and local law-enforcement agents; and many former marijuana growers have turned to growing and processing cocaine, creating an enormous glut of cocaine on the American market. That fact prompted Congressman Claude Pepper to remark in a House subcommittee hearing that since a kilo of coke was selling for only $15,000, compared with $65,000 in 1981, "If the price goes much lower, we may have the drug dealers coming in and asking for price support." Reagan has, in effect, forced Americans to trade a marijuana glut for a cocaine glut, without really affecting anyone's ability to buy and smoke marijuana.

And if you think Cannabis is tough, take a look at the coca bush. It will grow on the carpet in your office. Its grip on life is so tenacious that pulling off all its leaves will not kill it--not even pulling it out of the ground will kill it. You can't spray it from the air, as you can the marijuana plant. (You can't even see coca from the air; it's hard to tell whether you're looking at coca, coffee, plantain or yucca. After harvest, aerial cameras detect nothing at all of the leafless bushes, though they are still very much alive and already at work producing the next season's crop of leaves.) To kill the coca bush, you have to drill down into the extensive root system and pour poison directly into its veins. Coca bushes have been successfully transplanted out of their native Bolivia and Peru into Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador, to name just three countries known to be producing cocaine--and in the past year, cocaine laboratories have been discovered inside the United States. At last report, about one a month was being busted in the Miami area. These domestic labs are believed to be a response to crackdowns on the exportation of chemicals (mainly ether) needed to refine raw coca paste into pure cocaine. Shipments of coca paste have been found in the United States, even though it is far heavier and more difficult to smuggle than cocaine powder (it takes 1000 pounds of coca leaves to produce one kilo of cocaine). But some authorities are beginning to worry that the coca bush itself may be appearing in the U.S. No one is certain if it could be grown in American soil, but it could certainly be grown hydroponically indoors.

Since it is so difficult to stop the coca bush from growing, the United States persuaded Bolivia to move its army in to prevent cocaine producers from buying the 1984 coca-leaf harvest. The theory was that if cocaine producers couldn't buy the raw commodity, then the world's supply of this illicit drug would shrink. But half of Bolivia's foreign exchange derives from coca trade, and with their leaves harvested and no one to buy them, the people of Bolivia came close to revolt. The Bolivian peso was devalued by two thirds overnight, and the nation (which has changed governments about once a year for the past decade) was left in near collapse.

In addition, cocaine production wasn't upset at all; it was merely postponed, and not by much. Bolivia received millions in American aid for drug eradication, yet coca production was unaffected. The American effort there has left Gestapolike antidrug strike forces trained by the DEA and a lot of ill will. Currently, another $53,800,000 is scheduled to be given to Bolivia in 1986. That's the equivalent of about seven weeks' income for Roberto Suárez Gómez.

Bolivia's immediate neighbor to the south is Paraguay. Late in 1984, enough chemicals were intercepted there to refine eight tons of cocaine, almost ten percent of the estimated American market. The seizure of 49,000 gallons of hydrochloric acid, acetone and ether can mean only one thing, said American officials: The Paraguayans are refining cocaine on a large scale. The suspicion was that the highest levels of the government were involved. President Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguay's right-wing military dictator, refused to discuss the matter with the American Ambassador. So even if Bolivia can somehow keep people from turning the indigenous coca leaf into cocaine--a highly unlikely premise--that small country is surrounded by powerful people who will gladly take up whatever slack is left in the world market.

In Peru, which produces more coca leaf than any other country, government attempts to eradicate the plant were met by hit teams, some of which may have been from the left-wing terrorist group Shining Path, which profits from the drug trade. Violence has followed all attempts to eradicate coca, and for a time, the American-supported eradication program was stopped and Americans left the country.

Even U.S. threats to cut off foreign aid have fallen flat and were ultimately abandoned early in 1985, despite a 1983 law requiring that we terminate financial aid to any country that isn't reducing its drug crops. The problem with upholding that law is that it would effectively cut off aid to almost every nation in the world. Take Belize again: That tiny country receives more aid per capita than almost any other nation. Yet when the U.S. demanded that Belize stop growing pot or lose American assistance, nothing happened. State Department officials are cautious about insisting on drug eradication as an inducement to foreign aid; some fear Communist take-over more than drugs. As a result, as Congressman Charles B. Rangel told The New York Times last winter, "Not one of these drug-producing countries expects less than a bumper crop this year."

And, finally, there is the poppy, source of opium, from which heroin is refined. As mentioned, enough opium poppies can be grown in countries where the U.S. has no control to offset any efforts to stop production elsewhere. Indeed, when President Nixon persuaded Turkey to stop growing poppies, the major effect was a glut of Mexican brown heroin on American streets. Nixon's war on drugs put Mexico on the map as an opium-producing nation, while Southwest Asian drug traffickers took their business across the border into Afghanistan. If one American junkie missed an injection, that day has long since been forgotten in the haze of ever-more-potent supplies.

In sum: Drug eradication at the source appears to have failed miserably.

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Part two of Reagan's plan to reduce drug use in the United States--to stop the drugs en route--offers no better hope for success.

The subject of interdiction brings out the true nature of the war on drugs. Congressman Shaw recalls his reaction to the Administration's plans to stop drug traffic in Florida. "George Bush came down and was running down his list of things that they were going to do," he says. "I felt like a small kid watching a John Wayne movie and the Marines had finally arrived." What Shaw overlooked, however, was the fact that the Marines never invaded Florida in a John Wayne movie. One difference between Ronald Reagan and John Wayne is that John Wayne's advisors knew their constitutional law.

Rinkevich, then coordinator of Reagan's South Florida Task Force (part of the police force given to the Vice-President), wrote this account of a contemporary drug bust:

Two small 95-foot U.S. Coast Guard cutters had intercepted a large drug-smuggling vessel off the Georgia coast that refused to stop when requested to do so by pursuing Coast Guard. We had received information that the suspect vessel was heavily armed and that they might resist a boarding by the Coast Guard.

Clearly, the Coast Guard vessels could be outdistanced and, we thought, perhaps they were "outgunned." The chase went on for almost two days. In the process, one of the cutters was running short of fuel. The U.S. Coast Guard requested U.S. Navy assistance. The Navy responded by dispatching the guided-missile destroyer U.S.S. Clifton E. Sprague and two A-7 attack aircraft.

When the Sprague arrived on the scene, she refueled the cutter and stood by while the aircraft flew over the suspect vessel, below mast level. The suspected smuggler decided to stop and submit to a peaceful search. The vessel was seized and arrests were made.

Nuclear destroyers and fighter planes are just a small portion of the arsenal now in use in the war on drugs. And the more we use, the more we need: Just as with our effort to suppress drug crops, one of the most immediate effects of stepped-up interdiction efforts is that the smugglers simply move along to other points of entry. For example, new radar was recently put up all around the Florida peninsula in an effort to detect drug-smuggling planes. But instead of a slowdown in drug imports, the result has been a flurry of protests from the governors of Alabama, Louisiana and Texas. Drugs have been pouring into those states since the spring of 1985, when the radar went up. Governor Edwin W. Edwards of Louisiana complained that a single plane that crashed in his state carried cocaine worth 20 times what his state narcotics police spend in a year. Governors from five states, including Mississippi and Florida, held a conference to ask for still more military assistance, evidently unaware that they were about to increase the problem, not reduce it. Military assistance, as we learned in Vietnam, is like drug addiction: The more you take, the sicker you get. The sicker you get, the more you want.

And so the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and National Guard are all heaping on the hardware: Seek Skyhook tethered aerostat look-down radar, forward-looking infrared, E-2C subhunting radar, P-3 reconnaissance planes outfitted with F-15 fighter radar, AWACS airborne radar, Huey, Blackhawk and Cobra interceptor helicopters, Mohawk tracker aircraft and PHM hydrofoils are all in use. Talking with the drug-enforcement people these days is a lot like talking with Vietnam-war majors was in the early Seventies. Their speech is laced with the dazzling locutions of space war: unit capability, combat sorties, bombs on target, ton miles, force-structure modernization and host-base support. It's no wonder--that's the water they all swim in now.

I interviewed a former Army officer who is now at the forefront of the war on drugs. His eyes lit up as he described the hardware. "You get him on radar and then you zoom in on the optics. The new optics we've got are just incredible. At 100 miles, I can tell if you're wearing a watch. At 50 miles, I can tell you what time it is." He described voice-printing radios. It turns out that no two radios are the same, just as no two voices are the same. New technology can read and identify any radio ever made, the way the FBI identifies a fingerprint. Computer files of suspect radios are being kept, and as planes pop up on radar, the crew is interrogated. "They can lie about their numbers and who they are, but the radio signal tells the truth."

Yet any number of strategies can get around the hardware. One strategy is illustrated by the experience of Avianca, the Colombian national airline, whose planes have been busted 34 times in the past five years for carrying drugs. (I'm not suggesting that Avianca itself was smuggling those drugs.) In February 1985, U.S. Customs caught an Avianca 747 carrying a metric ton (1000 kilos) of cocaine hidden among flowers that were being imported. In June 1984, Customs caught a Panamanian Inair Cargo DC-8 with an even larger shipment of cocaine hidden in freezers. These carriers show up on regular radar, but they cause no alarms to go off: They are scheduled flights with official flight plans. And with the drug trade reaching into the highest levels of government, there is no hope that this type of shipment will stop. The presidential press secretary of Colombia, Roman Medina, was arrested for smuggling cocaine into Spain in his diplomatic pouch. (The charges were later dropped.) Three Bahamian cabinet ministers had to resign when their association with drug trafficking was uncovered by a royal commission. Two others were fired. Mexico is notorious for its corrupt officials, and one of the numerous military dictators who took over Bolivia was himself a cocaine trafficker.

But even without the help of a government, a smuggler can avoid the new radar coverage of Florida. He can go elsewhere or he can fly over the tethered balloons that carry the radar. Or he can drop his cargo onto boats waiting in the water below. The boats can then split up and enter the United States through thousands of inlets along the shore line. For pilots flying large loads of drugs, piggybacking can be used: The illegal plane flies slightly above and behind a routine airline flight. When two planes are that close together, radar will interpret them as one target. Since pilots can't see behind them, the drug plane goes unnoticed. Customs uses this technique to track suspect planes.

Of course, the more tricks the smugglers think up, the more hardware the military will throw at them. The more hardware, the more tricks, and so on in a never-ending spiral. It almost tempts one to make comparisons with the Vietnam war, except that such comparisons are invidious. In Vietnam, we still had our innocence. Now there's no excuse for this extravagant waste. There is no one in the military who can claim he doesn't know from experience that this kind of technological show cannot defeat a large and highly motivated number of individuals who, if they like, can walk into the United States on foot anywhere along 5000 miles of border. Even as Army officers were telling me about new radar installations they had planned for Mexico to guard against aircraft flying in through mountain passes and entering low over Arizona, smugglers were pouring into the United States through the inlets and airfields up and down the coasts--as well as through commercial airports, railway terminals and bus stations.

Most major drug shipments from Asia arrive on commercial cargo jets, usually in so-called containerized form--those aluminum boxes you see sitting out on the ramp at airports around the world. Customs doesn't have the manpower to search each of them. Every once in a while, a dog will sniff out the odd load of heroin, but shrink wrapping and other techniques make that largely a chance occurrence.

Smuggling is as old as commerce itself. Historically, it has proved to be an endless competition of will and imagination, in which the smugglers have better resources and are prepared to be more daring than those who are put there to catch them. The truth is, smugglers are willing to die trying: "I saw a figure a couple of years ago that astounded me," says William J. Anderson of the General Accounting Office. "In one year, 120 plane crashes, narcotics plane crashes, by chance mechanical failures. How many made it? What are the odds of crashing on any one flight?" Customs estimates that 18,000 planeloads of drugs penetrate the Southern borders of the United States annually.

Customs regards that figure as discouraging. The DEA agrees. So do the U.S. Coast Guard, the Department of Defense, the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the IRS, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Department of State, the Department of the Treasury, the Office of the Vice-President and the White House Drug Abuse Policy Office--all of which are waging another kind of war: the fight over who's in charge of the war on drugs. For, although some agents are clearly willing to die for what they represent, they are hampered in ways the drug smuggler isn't.

For example, the DEA has charge of drug-enforcement policy, but it doesn't generally interdict drug smugglers; it usually only investigates and prosecutes them. The Coast Guard can interdict, but it has few resources and also has the mission of safety on the high seas. (And no small concern is this: If Coast Guard officers are riding around on nuclear aircraft carriers, waiting to board drug-smuggling vessels, who is going to help you when your sailboat runs into foul weather? Since only 1390 people died from taking illegal drugs in 1983 and 6000 people drowned, some Coast Guard officials feel that there may be a misordering of priorities.)

The U.S. Customs Service is in even worse shape. Customs is like a few men standing in the surf with their hands joined, waiting to stop a tidal wave. Customs can't even talk to its own boats beyond a three-to-five-mile range from shore. Some Customs boats don't even have radios. Until last year, Customs had only two aircraft, one in San Diego and one in Miami.

In addition, Reagan's quasi-legal Vice-Presidential law-enforcement arm, known as the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System (NNBIS, pronounced Enbus), has produced more infighting than any other antidrug force. NNBIS was created by Reagan in March 1983 to coordinate military involvement in drug-control efforts. It is now common, according to the DEA, for Bush's flamboyant chief of staff, Admiral Murphy, who runs NNBIS, to take credit for drug seizures made by other agencies. Bush's office released a statement that NNBIS and the South Florida Task Force "have captured almost 5,000,000 pounds of marijuana--practically halting the flow of that drug into this part of the country--and confiscated almost 28,000 pounds of cocaine, about 12 billion dollars' worth of drugs altogether."

The DEA responded, "These figures go far beyond what this Administration can support," and NNBIS "cannot possibly account for this large discrepancy."

NNBIS is not empowered to bust anyone. And so far, it has managed to demoralize agents in the field and confuse foreign governments about just who is in charge here. The violations by NNBIS of standard law-enforcement procedures designed to protect civil liberties are so flagrant that they alarm even the DEA, which commented, "The NNBIS center ... has set up information systems to track cases. Its data-processing system is capable of retrieving information by name of suspect, yet appropriate record-system clearances, required by the Freedom of Information/ Privacy Acts, have not been obtained." If this is true, it is a deliberate violation of law.

But the Office of the Vice-President can hardly be blamed for all the confusion: Nearly everyone is involved in the war on drugs. As far back as 1978, the Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control attempted to identify all the players in U.S. antidrug efforts. Its report noted:

Eleven Cabinet departments, 13 independent agencies and nine Executive offices [participating] in the Federal Government efforts to control drug abuse. Operating as part of the 31 Executive branch agencies is a web of 95 additional subagencies that have participated or are now participating in the Federal narcotics-control program.... The Select Committee has become increasingly disturbed by the severe fragmentation that exists in the Federal strategy to prevent or control drug abuse.... Federal duplication of effort creates serious problems for the over-all narcotics-control program.

Five years later, in hearings held in February 1983, the following assessment was made of progress in this area:

Fragmentation of Federal efforts has long been recognized as a major problem.... While various drug strategies have been prepared over the years, the most recent in October 1982, none has adequately defined the various agencies' drug-interdiction roles.... Interdiction difficulties are only one manifestation of a broader coordination problem that we have previously reported on.... No one person has the information or responsibility to evaluate Federal drug efforts and recommend corrective actions.... For example, currently no one can determine whether the $175,000,000 spent on marijuana interdiction by the Coast Guard could be used more effectively on the international narcotics-control program.

Asking not to be named, a Congressional staff member long associated with drug enforcement said, "The Federal effort is in shambles. Nobody's driving."

And of the two basic methods the Reagan Administration has used to stop drug traffic, Congressman Buddy MacKay of Florida says, "They both are a failure, because the amount coming through is greater and greater. We are interdicting ten times as much and the price is going down, which means there is an awful lot more coming through." In other words, grandiose claims of success based on larger and larger amounts seized are nothing more than bigger body counts: They don't mean the war is being won.

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There is one final element to the strategy for drug control, though it is not getting any significant emphasis (i.e., funding) by the Reagan Administration: eliminating drug abuse through education and rehabilitation. This means attacking the cause of the problem, not the symptom. As mentioned earlier, drug-seeking behavior is a symptom of a disease. This country's current approach--removing the drugs--is like treating obesity by making food illegal. On the other hand, education and rehabilitation are the most promising approaches to treating addictive disease. Virtually all responsible medical authorities agree on this point. So far, however, the Government has not made the attempt to carry out such a program.

For one thing, according to professionals in the fields of law, medicine, drug addiction and health, a credible education program cannot be conducted in an atmosphere of prohibition. In its report to the Madrid conference, the International Legal Defense Counsel stated, "Prohibition has fostered a widespread disrespect for law and science, resulting in a loss of credibility concerning reports of the negative health effects of the drugs. The prohibition thwarts effective public awareness and education by parents, school officials and drug-abuse educators."

What was being suggested was this: Make drugs legal and control them as we control liquor and tobacco. When I suggested that to Carleton Turner, he said, "When you think about that kind of question, and you have this big umbrella, it looks like a nice umbrella to get under. But it's like some of those cheap umbrellas you buy when you go to a ten-cent store and buy an umbrella: First rain you get, the rain comes through and you get wet." Which is no doubt one of the reasons Congressional staff members say the President's drug-abuse-policy advisor is not qualified to speak on such matters.

But numerous other rational people, including a former director of the CIA, have suggested legalization as a strategy. It is, after all, the only one we haven't tried. The worst that could happen is that it would fail; it is difficult to imagine that we could have a larger drug problem with legal controls than we have now without them.

On March 28, 1985, William Rusher, the publisher of National Review, wrote, "The one thing that could be done, overnight, is to legalize the stuff.... Congress should study the dramatic alternative, which is legalization followed by a dramatic educational effort in which the services of all civic-minded, and some less than civic-minded, resources are mobilized. Television, for instance. Let the Federal Communications Commission make it a part of the overhead of a television license to broadcast 30 minutes a week, prime time, what dope does to you."

The same month, Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters recommended the same thing on their 20/20 TV show. Mike Royko, in his syndicated newspaper column, asked, "If so many Americans want and use marijuana, if they are already getting it so easily, if they insist on spending billions of dollars a year on it, why are we screaming at Mexico, why are hordes of narcotics agents floundering around in futile attempts to find it, why are the police and courts still wasting time and money trying to put dealers in jail for selling it? ... If it were legal, we wouldn't have gun-crazy dealers spraying Florida and other big import states with machinegun bullets."

The argument against legalizing drugs (leaving aside Turner's fascinating, if recondite, umbrella retort) is that it would turn the United States into a depopulated land of mindless addicts. But Joseph Allen, district attorney for Mendocino County, California--the largest producer of domestic pot in the United States--says, "People have seen there really hasn't been a change in the community.... The only difference now is that people who would have been unemployed are picking up some extra money."

Opium is legal in India, and that country has little problem with opium's being diverted to the black market or converted into heroin, according to the 1984 "Report for the Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control," "largely due to an effective opium-production-control system." The Netherlands legalized marijuana in 1978, and it has fewer pot smokers than nations in which pot is illegal. Dutch government officials say there have been no medical or criminal consequences of legalization, except that fewer people seem interested in the drug now that it's readily available.

And, finally, those who oppose legalization of drugs say that it is impossible because of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, signed by 113 nations in 1961, in which those nations agreed to "take legislative measures ... to limit ... use and possession of drugs." This ignores the built-in mechanisms in that convention for altering its resolution or even for denouncing it under special circumstances. Murder contracts taken out on the DEA administrator and on an American Ambassador provide at least the opportunity to consider whether or not those special circumstances now exist. The International Legal Defense Counsel wrote, "Where a nation which is a signatory to the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs wishes to exercise the option of regulation and taxation, procedures exist whereby said nation could adopt such a plan."

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Drug trafficking is a low-risk business--lower, in any event, than law enforcement. Even if Reagan succeeds in his stated goal of sealing the borders and making the United States the world's largest banana republic, the really good drug smugglers will still get through, and the local growers will supply the rest. Even Poland has a drug problem, and it's not exactly a wide-open frontier state.

Ultimately, sorting the bad guys from the good guys is the oldest problem of societies that have grown beyond the tribal level. This principle underlies all espionage work. It was the fundamental cause of our inability to win in Vietnam--we couldn't tell who the bad guys were, because all the Vietnamese looked alike to us. And that sorting problem forms the basis of all police states, because weak leaders often resort to absolute control (assume everyone is a bad guy) rather than face the possibility that people may do what they want. Turner told me, "We don't want to accept the fact that there are evil people in the world. We Americans think that everyone is good." If that was true, it's ending.

Under new systems of detection, U.S. drug-interdiction forces sighted 10,500 "suspect vehicles" in 1983. Of course, most of those were falsely suspect, and most could never be intercepted, searched and seized. The point is that American antidrug forces are moving toward a day when travel in and of itself may be considered probable cause for arrest on suspicion of intent to smuggle drugs. Already, the Supreme Court has ruled that police may come onto your land without a warrant to search for drugs you might be growing. Owning open land is now probable cause.

Pre-emptive law enforcement of this type has never worked. Pre-emptive law enforcement forms the beginning of a police state. A law professor at the University of Texas, himself a prominent criminal attorney, says, "My students amaze me. They're all smoking pot, studying to be lawyers, and they just shrug it off, saying, 'Well, nobody really gets busted for smoking grass anymore.' Meanwhile, their moms are going to antimarijuana rallies. People are afraid of the unknown, and that is making lawyers like me rich and keeping the average citizen poor. You want to talk about lack of productivity caused by drugs, look at the people in jail. We've got judges releasing murderers and rapists to keep the grass dealers in jail, because mandatory sentencing requires it and the jails are too crowded to keep both. It's a classic case of biting off our noses to spite our faces."

He could not help recalling an Army major who, during the Vietnam war, made history--history many of us have already forgotten--by standing before a blackened spot where the village of Ben Tre had been and justifying what he'd done by saying, "We had to destroy it in order to save it."

The Reagan Administration says we're winning the war on drugs, and yet ...

More Drugs of Higher Quality are on the Streets

Official Estimates of World Supply are Laughably Low

Some Drug Traffickers Gross More Than the DEA Budget

In Short, the Government that tells you we're winning this war is again exaggerating the body counts

"There is more money in illegal drug traffic than in any other business on earth."

"The fact is, drug traffic cannot be stopped in an open democracy. But the war goes on."