DRUG WARRIORS - Government Officials

MYLES AMBROSE

Tell me about Operation Intercept. What did you think when you first heard
the idea?

Well, I thought it was crazy. It was in the spring of '69. . . . We had
these meetings in the Justice Department and they decided they were going
to close the border. I kind of did a double take about it. They were going
to close the border, and then of course it was decided that they were going
to do it as a kind of a shock treatment to the Mexicans.

I became the Commissioner [of Customs] in July or August of '69. It was
apparent to me that if we were going to do this shock treatment, it was
Customs that was going to have to take the lead in it. . . . The committee
voted that the Customs Service and I would be responsible for it. I figured
my name would be blackened in Mexico forever. . .I think it was September
16th. . .that we closed the border effectively. And cars were backed up as
far as you could see, and we kept it going maybe five days. We then had big
meetings with the Mexican Minister of this and Minister of that, Secretary
of this and Secretary of that. They promised everything. . .and we went
back to where we were before not too long after.

You set up camp in Long Beach?

The headquarters of the Operation Intercept [Communion] was at Long Beach,
the Customs agents' operation out there. I stayed in Los Angeles, and then
every day I'd fly down on one of the helicopters to the border . . .

What did it look like from your helicopter?

The first day it was just incredible. The backup was as far as you could
see--it was miles and miles and miles. After that people realized they
couldn't get across, so they turned around and didn't bother trying. And
there were all kinds of screams. I mean we had screams from congressmen.

What was the process of closing the border?

The entrance points, essentially. You know, you're only technically legally
entitled to come across to the United States at a border entrance point.

But in terms of what you were doing, everyone was being searched.

Just about 100% search most places. Some of them, of course, were very
quick, but every car was going to be stopped. That is absolutely impossible
to ask under ordinary circumstances.

Did you warn the Mexicans?

Well, we told them. The newspapers particularly tried to play it up as if
this was going to be the way we were going to stop drugs from getting in
the United States. Well, obviously it would stop drugs from getting in the
United States for three, four, or five days maybe, but that would be it. It
was basically designed to be a shock treatment, to let the Mexicans know
that we were serious about drug interdiction and they better get their act
together.

It just worked for [a few days]?

. . .The Mexicans started some cooperative efforts. And there are many
sincere anti-drug officials in Mexico--don't misunderstand me. We did work
very closely with a number of them. The problem is the corruption in the
Mexican system has always been endemic. It's very, very substantial. . .

[During this period] there were a lot of ideas being tried. After
Intercept, didn't Moynihan argue to have drugs elevated to a national
security issue?

Oh yeah. Well, they'd had a cabinet committee on narcotics . . . Pat
Moynihan took a very active interest, and he was trying to get the European
governments and NATO and everybody else involved. . .

I went to one meeting, though which was a kind of a strange meeting. .
.There had been some talk and discussion in newspapers about what was
referred to as "preemptive buying." Opium only came from a couple of
places. The Turks were really cracking down on it. They were cooperating
very heavily. But Burma was a very serious [problem]. [At this meeting]
they started talking about the subject of preemptive buying. And they
talked about "Well, we could go to Burma and we could get all those farmers
and we could just let them produce everything they want and we'll just buy
it from them. It would be a lot cheaper than the interdiction and
enforcement efforts." This went on for about fifteen minutes and it got to
be kind of serious.

Finally John Mitchell. . . turned to me and said, "Well Myles, what do you
think about that?" And I said, "You really want to know, General?" He said,
"Yeah." I said, ". . .You can grow opium on probably 70% of the earth's
surface. And a mile or two square area would supply every heroin addict in
the world. I'm in the wrong business if you're going to do this kind of
thing. I mean you'll have a lot of people that you'll be buying up in the
next growing season." So he laughed and he said, "Well I guess that's the
end of that.". . .

Everybody was looking for every kind of a solution, every kind of a
mechanism, every kind of a tool, everything you could think of, and we were
very creative. Some of them worked and obviously a lot of them didn't.

Why were drugs a priority with Nixon?

He took a very direct interest in it. Why? I can't tell you his mind,
except that I know that he was very much enforcement-oriented. He wasn't as
much for the treatment side at that stage, because nobody knew a hell of a
lot about the treatment, whether it worked or whether it didn't work--it
was still in its fairly early stages. But enforcement had been a campaign
issue. . .

[Tell me about the] rise in the use of heroin.

. . .There was virtually no political involvement at all during the sixties
in the drug problem. It was left to the local jurisdictions to do what they
could. . .And the drug problem rose. And of course we had the Vietnam
concomitant situation. There was no question that the sixties were when the
whole thing really got out of hand.

In the fifties and the early sixties I used to have an expression that the
public isn't going to really care about drug enforcement, drug use, until
heroin left Harlem and went to Scarsdale. And that's what happened. It went
to Scarsdale. We used to estimate in the late fifties and the early sixties
that there were probably 60,000 heroin addicts in the United States. That
figure was subject to some question, but certainly had some validity. In
the late sixties you probably had 70,000 or 60,000 heroin addicts in three
blocks in some areas of the United States. . .

The interesting statistic at that point in '69 and '70--we were losing more
people in the United States from drug overdoses per week that we were
losing in Vietnam. That was a figure that used to scare me. . .

Of course I was always of the belief that one does not become a heroin
addict in the abstract. One never becomes a heroin addict unless one meets
another one who gets them into the [habit]. So I was always of the belief
that you have to work on the street level, to build cases, and also to try
to stop the proliferation of addiction. I put together a paper with the
help of some people in the office suggesting that we establish a short
term, temporary program for the purpose of working particularly the street
level to build up some cases, and then working in conjunction with the
other agencies involved. . .

I put this together and I shipped it over. I didn't hear anything for some
months, and then one day I got a call saying, "Put this thing together, we
really want to look at it. But we don't want anyone in the Treasury to know
about it." Boy, that put me on the horns of a dilemma to say the least. So
I used a couple of agents that I had long relationships with, and we put
together the program that later turned out to be ODALE [Office of Drug
Abuse Law Enforcement]. It was designed to be a task force operation
[utilizing] prosecutors, grand juries, local police, Customs, Narcotics,
IRS agents, and Secret Service agents in some cases. . .We had remarkable
success. In 18 months we arrested over 6,000 people, and we broke up the
major Harlem underworld drugs operation. . .

Part of the idea behind ODALE was because drugs were so corrupting, it
would be a good idea to have federal and local [forces] working together.
[How were jurisdiction questions worked out?]

Well, there's no question when you have overlapping jurisdiction, it's a
problem in one respect. But the advantage is it makes it very difficult for
corrupt practices to develop. Because you're not just dealing with your own
guys; you're dealing with somebody else. . .

Describe your position as head of ODALE. . .

I had three hats. I was Special Assistant to the President on Drug Abuse
Enforcement. [I was] a Special Assistant Attorney General, because I was
going to be responsible for a number of prosecutors. And then [I was]
Director of the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement. . .

. . .Despite all these books and articles that have been written, it was
clear from the start of ODALE, that we knew one of the responsibilities we
were going to have was recommending new procedures and new programs,
including possible changes in the way law enforcement operations took
place. It became quite clear after awhile to me that we had to consolidate
drug enforcement further, and that while Customs still had to have an
operational capability, it would be strictly related to border interdiction
and so forth. . .

You built ODALE with a sunset clause into it.

Right from the beginning, 18 months, yes. It was not designed to be a
permanent agency and it was not designed to do away with BNDD or Customs or
anybody else. It was designed to see if we could do an effective job of
task force agency cooperation and arrangement at the street level to work.
. .to try to reduce the number of addicts in the United States, and to push
people into treatment programs. That was it. We now had treatment programs.
And the alternative of. . .going to treatment was a big opportunity for
people who thought treatment was going to be the answer. It's never been
the complete answer, but it certainly has helped a lot.

What were your ideas [regarding] treatment? One thing I've heard from a lot
of law enforcement people is that there was a feeling of optimism--that you
would do so much on the law enforcement side, there better be a lot of beds.

Well, that was my pitch. I don't know how many beds we got, but we got a
lot, I can tell you. I know that people I met in the treatment area were
very pleased with what we were doing on the enforcement side. The other
part of it, of course, was prevention and education. And everybody talks
about it. They talk about it to this day and I don't think there has ever
been any empirical evidence that talking to kids in school and telling
them, "Don't take drugs," is going to stop them from taking drugs. I think
we've lacked an ability to develop a conceptual way of doing this--it may
have some impact, and I'm well out of the scene these days, so I don't
pretend to know everything about it. But if we could teach kids not to use
drugs, that would be the best method.

. . .Drugs [had become] such a big issue, that it seemed like you were
willing to [push the] limits of the law. What kinds of tactics were you using?

Oh, I wouldn't say the limits of the law. But we did very operative, open
things--no question about it. We did it in conjunction with local police
agencies. For example, we located a bar in Harlem, 125th Street, as I
recall, that was basically a drug operation. And we had undercover agents
in there. We had a bus or a truck pull up and agents went in, of course we
had 5-10 people working undercover there at the time. We searched the
people and we identified the people. And it caused a huge furor. . . But it
gave a lot of impact for what we were trying to do. And it needed impact at
that point, because there was no effective law enforcement.

Was that the idea, if you hit a couple of places like that bar, those
people who were working would go tell other people--

Well, yeah, you get caught dealing in drugs, the penalty is pretty severe.
So it scared people to death for awhile. . .

Now, by the time this reorganization plan was in place in what ways had the
laws and tactics changed since 1969 when you came in to be able to fight
drugs? What new tools did you have?

Well, we had more people. We had much greater awareness by the United
States Attorneys' offices. The Justice Department had beefed up their
narcotics unit. We had much greater use of grand juries to bring people in,
and if they didn't want to testify, they took the Fifth Amendment, we held
them in contempt or we gave them immunity. There was a certain degree of--I
use this expression very carefully--of legal harassment. And you make sure
it is legal and [use] a lot of it. So people knew if they were going to be
dealing in drugs, they were going to be facing a lot of problems, from the
cops, from us, from the district attorneys, from U.S. attorneys. . .

In general, when you look back at this period, I think the Nixon
administration was really positing a lot of successes after that first
term. What do you see now as [having] worked and what didn't?

Well, I think the ODALE program worked. You have to understand our target
was heroin. It was a totally different world in the mid-70s, early '80s,
when cocaine and crack hit the world. That's a totally different situation.
I [had] nothing to do with it. I don't know anything about it. All I know
is, it's a horrible situation. I'm told now it is diminishing considerably.
But that exacerbated the problem beyond anything else. . .

[What was Nixon's view regarding treatment vs. enforcement?]

We were talking about it. And the question came up of treatment, whether
Bud [Krogh] raised it or somebody raised it. And Nixon was sitting there as
usual in his kind of reflective quiet way. And he looked out the window of
the helicopter, and he turned to Bud and me and whoever else was there, and
he pointed--we were flying over Brooklyn then--and he said, "You and I care
about treatment. But those people down there, they want those criminals off
the street." And that was the way he said it. And it was probably 99.9%
right. . . .

Do you remember any conversations with him or any of his concerns about
what was happening?

. . .He was very much interested in effective law enforcement. I mean that
was all there was to it. What could be done to improve it; how we could go
about doing it. He wanted to prove to the American people that something
could be done, because the American people were suffering from this. . .

Did he attach a moral dimension to it?

Oh, yeah. He thought it was a totally immoral situation, and we as a
society had to do something about it. I don't think there's any question
about it. . . And the Black and Hispanic communities [were] where a very
substantial percentage of the addiction was and I met with people from
those backgrounds frequently. And it was sad. . . I became very empathetic
toward the people who were the victims--not the users--but the general
populace. You know, nobody makes you a heroin addict, remember that. You
become a heroin addict because you want to try heroin--I mean that's the
way it is. And they have to be responsible for what they've done. And we
all thought, that while you might feel sympathetic to a person if he became
an addict, you also have to realize that he was the one that got involved
with it--that he was the one that made the decision and people have to
learn to make their own decisions in life. And Nixon felt that way too, I'm
sure. I know I did. . .

Now, thirty years later, Richard Nixon's drug policy seems in a lot of ways
like the most practical. Is that how you see it?

I'd just say amen to what you just said. I don't know if there's any
question about it. There's never been one since like it. . . I don't really
know [how effective prevention is]. I mean we've been through the Reagan
period of "Just say no," and I think they were trying very hard on the
educational side. I've heard that almost every school has a police officer
come in and talk [about drugs]. I don't know how effective it is because
I'm told that marijuana is fairly available all over the country. . .

PBS Frontline Series Follow Up by Tom O'Connell, Kevin Zeese, Doug McVay,
and Eric Sterling:
http://www.drugsense.org/dsw/2000/ds00.n170.html#sec1

Campaign for the Restoration & Regulation of Hemp's HempTV website has the
full, two part, total of almost 4 hours of video of the PBS Frontline "Drug
Wars" available on the web for free video streaming using the Real Player 8.

To watch Part one of Drug Wars, go here:

http://www.crrh.org/hemptv/docs_drugwars1.html

To see part 2, go here:

http://www.crrh.org/hemptv/docs_drugwars2.html

Click this link for an index to this series:
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n1551.a01.html