STATE'S STRATEGY ON DRUGS LAUDED

Experts Discuss Program At MNB Conference

Mississippi's five-year statewide drug strategy is a unique approach that
works hand-in-hand with federal drug enforcement efforts, experts say.

William E. Ledwith, the director of the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration's El Paso Intelligence Center, commended Mississippi Bureau
of Narcotics Director Don Strange on his plan, one which may be expanded
throughout the Southeast.

"Eventually violence has a numbing effect on the populace," said Ledwith as
he spoke Thursday at the bureau's year-end conference held at the Grand
Casino in Biloxi.

As DEA agents fight to stop the incursion of high-level narcotics
smugglers, Ledwith attends a chilling number of funerals for the 350
Colombian police officers killed annually in the South American drug wars.

"We are trying to keep that violence from the U.S.," Ledwith said.

As one of three guest speakers, Ledwith, a former Massachusetts state
trooper, advised an audience of more than 140 agents and support staff that
the days of working drug investigations on a local level are long gone.

"If you only take out one piece of this thing it comes back," Ledwith said.
"We have to do fewer investigations, and we have to do them better."

That means employing federal, local and state resources to stop the
worldwide drug flow, said United States Coast Guard Rear Admiral David S.
Belz, the director of the Joint Interagency Task Force East in Key West,
Fla. Belz began his Department of Defense mission in 1989 to detect,
monitor and sort air and maritime drug smuggling activities in the U.S
Southern command.

"The Department of Defense's role is not to be law enforcement," said Belz,
a 1970 graduate of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. "We support your efforts.
We're all doing different things, but we are on the same team. There's no
way we can do our job within the law without working with law enforcement
in the United States."

As illicit narcotics usage increases domestically, 14 million Americans are
currently hooked on drugs, creating social, health and criminal costs of
$110 billion annually, Belz said.

"In the 1980s, we learned as much by our failures as by our successes in
stopping maritime smuggling," Belz said. "A lot of that is a function of
your own intelligence network."

And the DEA has the largest domestic law enforcement intelligence system in
the United States, with 700 analysts, said Steven W. Casteel, the DEA's
chief of intelligence.

His agency's strongest programs have always been state and local task
forces, especially in the DEA's 31 High Intensity Drug Trafficking areas.
The Gulf Coast HIDTA operations center is in Pearl.

Drug peddlers settle in the South falsely assuming an opportunity to
operate anonymously in rural areas, Casteel said.

"Most of all because they think nobody is watching them," said Casteel,
born and raised in the central Illinois farm belt. "And everybody knows the
nosiest person in the world is a farmer."

To win the drug war, information has to flow both ways, Casteel said.

"We need to get away from the statistics game," he said. "It's not how many
arrested, it's whom. I think it's critical that someone in each state has
the focus on drug enforcement Drug traffickers are organized. So we better
be organized, too. This new drug strategy in Mississippi is the right approach."