A year after President Bush vowed a renewed war on drugs, cocaine is abundant as ever on the streets of America despite mammoth federal drug arrests, stepped-up efforts in Colombia and Mexico, and an infusion of millions of dollars in manpower and technology for law enforcement.
But there is also growing hope that the war can be won, because across the nation a not-so-silent army of ordinary citizens has risen to battle the drug dealers in neighborhoods, schools and businesses.
This army has risen in Alexandria, Va., a suburb of Washington, where residents of a black working-class neighborhood flood the streets on Friday nights to scare away drug dealers and their potential customers. And in Yakima, Wash., where police are devising innovative methods to flush out dealers-some patrol parks on bicycles, others train kleig lights on suspected drug houses at night.
And in Peoria, where 5th graders are being warned of the dangers of drugs in a nationally syndicated drug education program. And in Chicago, where the Chicago Housing Authority has formed a midnight basketball league so 18-to-25- year-olds can play ball instead of dealing drugs.
”I think we`re on the verge of starting to win the war because of public support,” said Ray Vinsik, chief of the Chicago office of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. ”I think the public is just sick and tired of drugs and they want something done.”
Not everyone is so optimistic. It will be a long war, most experts say, and many still believe it will never end.
The herculean scope of the task was underscored last fall, after federal authorities seized 21 tons of cocaine in a Los Angeles warehouse, and a few days later, snared nine tons in a Harlingen, Texas, barn.
Those hauls capped a year in which federal drug agents captured nearly twice as much cocaine as in 1988. For a few days or weeks, the price of cocaine spurted in some places and the supply almost dried up.
More Top Picks Best Walking Shoes For Achilles Tendonitis
But it didn`t last long.
Overall, those seizures created hardly a blip in the nationwide supply and price of cocaine. And that has sent stunned drug experts scrambling to revise upward their estimates of how much cocaine cascades into the U.S. every year, and how much is already stockpiled here.
That also has led critics to complain that Bush`s recent proposal to spend $10.6 billion on drug interdiction next year is not nearly enough. Police across the country unanimously-and not surprisingly-clamor for more money. At the same time, most say it is too early to judge the results of the president`s anti-drug plan, unveiled last September.
But federal money is not the only weapon in this war. There are education, treatment, and grass-roots neighborhood campaigns, all of which are finding private, state and local sources to help pay for the battle against drug dealers.
And by some measures, those programs appear to be working, particularly in white middle-class America. Government surveys say the number of drug users has been declining since 1985. The number of cocaine deaths and of people admitted to emergency rooms suffering from cocaine overdoses is stabilizing for the first time in a decade. In some of the 21 cities monitored by the Drug Abuse Warning Network, the numbers are falling.
”There`s been no dramatic decline, but for the first time the majority of cities were not reporting increases in cocaine abuse,” said James Hall, executive director of the Up Front Drug Information Center in Miami.
In the Chicago area, use of cocaine and of the smokable form of cocaine called crack appears to be up slightly over a year ago, said Sgt. James Brady, head of the Chicago Police Department`s crack task force. But he said it could be a lot worse.
”We`re not winning, but we`re slowing it down,” he said. Brady said use of the dangerous and highly addictive crack ”increased a small amount over the previous year, but it`s still not anywhere near the epidemic proportions of other cities.”
Authorities warn that even as some casual users abandon drugs, the prognosis for heavy users remains grim, particularly as they graduate from cocaine to crack, which is popular in poor, black neighborhoods.
Many Americans, including most police, appear to be convinced that the war will not be won by federal drug agents or with massive cocaine busts. Instead, they say, this battle must be fought door to door, in every neighborhood, classroom and living room in America.
Nowhere in the U.S. is the double-edged nature of the crisis more evident than in Yakima, Wash., a city where massive cocaine seizures are common but also a city where innovative community efforts are beginning to bring results. – – –
For a few weeks after the stunning discovery of 21.4 tons of cocaine in a warehouse in Los Angeles last fall, Yakima Detective Jim Baldwin thought he had a chance of winning the war on drugs in Yakima, a small orchard town in central Washington state.
The price of cocaine in Yakima, a hub for cocaine distribution throughout the West and Pacific Northwest, shot up almost overnight from $18,000 a kilogram to $28,000 and more. Those arrested in drug buys said supplies were all but shut off.
It didn`t last.
Within a month cocaine supplies in Yakima were back to normal. And when prices rose in Yakima but almost nowhere else, police interpreted that fact to mean that most of those 21 tons were headed toward Yakima for distribution elsewhere.
”That tells us something about the volume of cocaine that we`re not stopping,” Baldwin said.
”No, we`re not winning the war on drugs,” said U.S. Atty. Donald Kresse, who has prosecuted 300 major cocaine cases in the last three years in Yakima County, an area with 184,000 people. ”And, frankly, if I were betting on it, I would hesitate to predict that we ever will.”
But prosecutors, police and citizens` groups are not giving up. Police, in fact, have helped pioneer several innovative law enforcement tactics for coping with drug dealers.
In one technique, the police set up a kleig light on the sidewalk and train it on the front door of suspected drug houses.
”Drug dealers are like cockroaches,” said Frank Glaspey III, director of the Yakima County Coalition for the War on Drugs. ”They run away when you turn on the lights.”
Officers also patrol on bicycles through drug-infested areas, a strategy that has produced dozens of arrests simply because the dealers didn`t hear the cops coming.
Glaspey hopes to raise money for other innovative projects like installing mercury vapor lamps in dark alleys that are havens for dealers.
The county coalition is also lobbying the state legislature and Congress for a plan in which illegal immigrants convicted of drug charges in the U.S. are shipped back to Mexico to serve sentences meted out by American courts. The plan calls for the U.S. to pay the Mexican government to operate jails for the dealers.
Illegal immigrants convicted of drug charges now serve their terms in the U.S. and then are deported. Yakima County spends $35 a day per prisoner, Glaspey said, ”but the Mexican jails spend maybe 35 cents a day. I think they would be glad to be paid half of what it costs us to keep these prisoners.”
The drugs reach Yakima through a border more porous than ever before.
– – –
Big, basically empty, and nearly impossible to patrol, the U.S.-Mexico border remains a smuggler`s paradise and one of the most complex and frustrating battlegrounds for drug agents. For hundreds of miles, there is little more than a ramshackle fence separating the two countries.
In Texas, smugglers wade across shallow spots in the Rio Grande, pilot private aircraft low into clandestine airstrips, or drive jalopies through U.S. Customs Service checkpoints overwhelmed by thousands of vehicle crossings a day. In McAllen, Texas, there are 250 to 300 tractor-trailer rigs crossing daily from Mexico to the U.S., full of seafood, produce and often cocaine.
Last year, authorities estimated that about 70 tons of cocaine are smuggled across the 1,993-mile border annually. But last fall, in an extraordinary six-week period, 42 tons of cocaine were seized, much of it on or near the border, casting serious doubt on the earlier figures.
”My gut feeling down here is we`re waging a hell of a holding action right now,” said Drug Enforcement Administration agent Fred Ball in McAllen, the town agents say has become the epicenter of drug trafficking along the border.
Some say the war can be won only with more technology and assistance from the U.S. military. More of that may be forthcoming since Bush designated the border as one of five ”high intensity” zones eligible for further federal funds in his latest anti-drug plan.
The border is already swagged by high-tech radar balloons, and patrolled by the U.S. Custom Service`s growing armada of Cessna Citations and Lockheed P-3 Airborne Early Warning radar aircraft. There has also been an infusion of troops and soldiers from the National Guard to assist law enforcement officials.
But there have been problems, technical and human.
In late December one of the six border radar balloons, huge and white and blimp-like and equipped with radar equipment that scan the skies for low-flying smugglers, inexplicably snapped its tether and crashed at Eagle Pass, Texas. The $6.5 million balloon-billed as a crucial link in the airborne anti-smuggler network-was destroyed.
On the ground, meanwhile, the U.S. military last November launched Joint Task Force 6, a military command post at Ft. Bliss in El Paso, designed to assist local, state, and federal officials in the drug war.
The troops are not expected to engage smugglers, but last month, four Marines near Nogales, Ariz., exchanged gunfire with drug traffickers on horseback in the Coronado National Forest. The Marines, who were accompanying a Border Patrol agent, also fired several flares in the nighttime incident. The smugglers fled, abandoning 431.6 pounds of marijuana.
Unfortunately, that was not the end of it. The flares set a forest fire that burned 400 acres.
Despite border problems, the drug war is gathering momentum at the grass- roots level with ground-breaking educational programs such as Drug Abuse Resistance Education.
– – –
More Top Picks Best Magnifying Floor Lamps For Reading 2
The wood floors creaked and the radiators hissed in Caryl Galler`s 5th-grade classroom at Roosevelt Magnet School, a 56-year-old building in a blue-collar Peoria neighborhood. Though the classroom had a cozy, nostalgic feel, the message delivered to the 28 students last week was an urgent one from an anxious modern world.
”Drugs can destroy your lives, young people,” said Police Officer Vivian Lobdell, a former Peoria undercover narcotics officer. ”It is important for you to realize that.”
Lobdell, 37, the mother of three girls, spent six years working undercover on drug cases in Peoria`s housing projects. But for the last two years she has been attacking the drug problem at the point that law enforcement and school officials have come to believe is more critical: the schools.
Lobdell is part of Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or DARE, a national program started by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1983 to educate children about the perils of drugs. It has since been adopted by 2,100 public and private agencies nationwide.
In the program, the officers, who must undergo special training and psychological testing, not only lecture youngsters but build relationships by eating lunch with them and chatting with them on the playgrounds.
Independent studies of the effectiveness of the California program have shown decreases in reported drug and alcohol use by DARE students and also a decline in school vandalism, racial tensions and confrontations between police and school-age youths, according to Los Angeles police.
In the 17-week program, students are taught to identify drugs and their specific effects. Through role-playing and written exercises, they are drilled in ways to fight peer pressure to take drugs.
Last week at Roosevelt Elementary, Officer Lobdell called Couri, a short, wiry boy, to the front of the class, for the first role-playing exercise. The officer assumed the role of a strutting street dealer.
”Couri, my man, I got some marijuana cigarettes. Have one.”
”No, they bad for your health,” replied Couri.
Lobdell pressed the boy, moving closer to him, as the class tittered.
”C`mon, just give one a try.”
”No, can`t do it,” said the boy.
”You a chicken?” sneered Lobdell.
Even in the security of a classroom, Couri`s resolve showed signs of deteriorating. His classmates shifted in their chairs; a few laughed uneasily. ”No,” said the boy.
But the class sensed Couri`s uncertainty. That is why one key in the DARE program is a list of ”eight ways to say no.”
And at the end of the course, there is a graduation party and dance.
The program, said Lobdell, addresses the drug problem at the most effective point.
”I think kids get involved in drugs because they don`t feel good about themselves, and the DARE program tells them they are somebody special,” she said. ”If you feel good about yourself, you are not going to do anything to hurt yourself.”
In many places, people aren`t just saying no anymore, they`re calling the cops to turn in drug dealers.
”NEED CASH?” the big yellow billboard inquires. ”TURN IN A DOPE DEALER.”
Outdoor billboards promising cash rewards for information on drug dealers will sprout later this week in Anderson, S.C., as part of a new campaign by Sheriff Gene Taylor to tap into what law enforcement officials across the country describe as an angry new spirit of vigilantism in America.
”In the past, there was a feeling that if you said anything about a drug dealer you`d get hurt, your house would be burned down or they`d kill you,”
Taylor said. ”But people have found out that`s not true, and that the welfare of their children and possibly our country is at stake. So somebody`s got to do something.”
All over the country, ordinary citizens are getting involved in stopping the drug trade, police say, and many are not doing it just for the money.
In Dallas and Ft. Worth, police were swamped by more than 1,000 tips after an unprecedented two-hour prime-time drug special called ”Texas Crackdown!” that was carried live without commercials on all three network TV affiliates. The program set up a special hot line and offered cash rewards of up to $10,000 for tips.
”It`s awe-inspiring,” said Sgt. Barry Whitfield, a 19-year Dallas police veteran and coordinator of the tip line. ”We didn`t anticipate anything of this magnitude.”
In the first week after the show, the tips figured in the arrest of three drug dealers.
In tiny Torrington, Wyo., which has experienced a rash of cocaine busts, the Torrington Telegram newspaper publishes a coupon every week that potential informants can clip, fill out and send to the local county attorney.
”ENOUGH!” it says. ”I`ve had enough of drugs in my neighborhood.” The coupon contains a space for an informant to list ”suspicious activities” at specific residences.
In Alexandria, Va., Ramona Younger devised a simple plan: Each Friday night, the busiest time of the week for pushers, community residents flood the 800 block of North Alfred Street, frightening off both drug sellers and potential customers.
If would-be buyers hesitate, protesters announce over bullhorns that their license plate numbers are being recorded and if they don`t leave quickly, they will be photographed. When the drug traffic shifts to another block, as it inevitably does, the neighbors bring the church choir and hold outdoor services.
”Every day you can see them fading out,” Younger said of the pushers.