A VETERAN OF THE DRUG WAR FIRES AT U.S. POLICY

Having spent the last decade studying the war on drugs, I have come
across no military veteran of that conflict who publicly challenged it
- - until now.

Retired Lt. Cmdr. Sylvester L. Salcedo, who spent the best part of
three years working closely with law enforcement agencies doing
anti-drug work, believes it is time to share his disillusionment with
the policy he helped enforce. From October 1996 to April 1999, Salcedo
served as an intelligence officer with Joint Task Force Six (JTF-6), a
Department of Defense unit that provides military specialists to law
enforcement agencies. In New York, Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico, he
helped agents from the DEA, FBI, Customs and local police departments
penetrate drug gangs and disrupt money-laundering rings. He regards
the $1.6 billion that the Clinton administration is proposing to spend
on drug-fighting efforts in Colombia as good money thrown after bad.

I first learned about Salcedo's views last June, when he sent me a
letter. He had read a book I'd written that was critical of the drug
war and, he explained, fully agreed with it. Over the next few months,
we had several phone conversations, and in each he was more passionate.

Salcedo's views offered front-line confirmation of the conclusions I
had reached. I've been to both Colombia and Peru to examine U.S.
efforts to disrupt the South American cocaine trade. I visited Panama
in the wake of the U.S. invasion and later attended the trial of Gen.
Manuel Noriega in Miami. In New York and other American cities, I'd
gone on ride-alongs with drug agents, witnessed police busts on the
street and sat in courtrooms as drug offenders were marched off to
prison.

None of it seemed to make much difference. Over the last 10 years, the
federal government has spent about $150 billion to combat drugs, yet
the cocaine market is glutted as always, and heroin is readily
available at record-high purities. And, while the number of casual
drug users has declined some, the number of hard-core users, who are
responsible for most of the crime and other social problems associated
with drugs, hasn't. In short, the war on drugs seemed a costly
failure. And now a soldier in that war was saying as much.

Salcedo became particularly animated by the news of U.S. intentions to
increase spending in Colombia over the next two years: Much of the
money is for military purposes--providing 60 helicopters and training
two Colombian rapid deployment battalions. While sympathetic to the
need to confront leftist guerrillas in Colombia, Salcedo said that the
stated goal of the aid package--to disrupt the production and export
of drugs to the United States--is unrealizable. Salcedo was so
disturbed by this new development, he said, that he wanted to return a
Navy medal he had received for his work with JTF-6.

I arranged to meet Salcedo at a coffee shop in New York, where we both
live. With his boyish face, erect bearing and strait-laced appearance,
the 43-year-old seemed every bit the military man. His firsthand
perspective made his comments all the more striking to me. "I don't
think we can make any progress on the drug issue by escalating our
military presence in Colombia," he told me. "As in Vietnam, the policy
is designed to fail. All we're doing is making body counts, although
instead of bodies, we're counting seizures--tons of cocaine, kilos of
heroin." Rather than spend more money in Colombia, Salcedo said, we
should confront the issue of demand here, by providing more services
to "the hard-core addicted population, the source of 80 to 90 percent
of the quality-of-life issues associated with drugs. That's what's not
being addressed."

He showed me the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal he had
received last year. The certificate accompanying it cited his
"professional achievement in the superior performance of his duties"
and his "exceptional diplomatic aplomb." It added: "Lieutenant
Commander Salcedo's distinctive accomplishments, unrelenting
perseverance and steadfast devotion to duty reflected great credit
upon himself, and were in keeping with the highest traditions of the
United States Naval Service."

In deciding to return the medal, Salcedo said, he hopes to evoke the
actions of Vietnam veterans who opposed that war. "My goal is to . . .
get us to focus on our own drug addiction problem," he said. "I want
to show that somebody is speaking out against the orthodox
policy--that there is a dissenting opinion."

Salcedo's views, it turned out, aren't simply the result of his recent
military deployments; they stem from a lifetime of experience. Born in
Minneapolis, he spent his early years in the Philippines (his father
is Filipino and his mother Filipina-Chinese). When he was 12, the
family moved to Boston, and Salcedo was sent to a Jesuit boarding
school. After graduating from Holy Cross College in 1978, he joined
the Navy, and he spent most of the next four years at sea. In 1984,
Salcedo entered the Naval Reserve, specializing in intelligence. He
also began working as a Spanish teacher in the Boston public schools.
He was assigned to Dorchester, a low-income section of Boston that was
rife with drugs, and many of his students got sucked into the trade.

Salcedo's experience as an intelligence officer, serving periodic
two-week tours abroad as an assistant naval attache, fortified the
knowledge he was gaining in those drug-ridden pockets of Boston. With
his fluency in Spanish, he was sent to Argentina, Ecuador, Chile and
Colombia, where he could see how the booming cocaine trade was
corrupting society. Back in Dorchester, Salcedo saw the other end of
the cocaine pipeline--a bustling street-level market that resisted all
efforts to quash it.

"I saw a disconnect between being in a minority neighborhood that was
awash in drugs and jumping on an airplane and being at the U.S.
Embassy in Colombia," Salcedo says. "I didn't see how this evolving
strategy of trying to stop drugs at their source was going to work . .
. as long as the demand was there, it was going to be provided for."
It was a conclusion that I, too, had reached early on in my research.

Then in 1990, when Salcedo enrolled in a master's program in national
security studies at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., he got his
first glimpse of the growing institutional support for getting the
military more involved in fighting drugs. With the Cold War over, many
of his fellow students were writing papers calling on the military to
join the drug war. "Everybody was jumping on the bandwagon of the drug
war," Salcedo says. He took a strong stand against them, arguing that
drugs were not a national security issue but a public health one.

Around this time, Salcedo hit a major bump in his career. Passed over
for promotion, he suspected he was being discriminated against because
of his Filipino background. He filed a formal complaint with the Navy,
and, over the next two-and-a-half years, it worked its way up the
chain of command. Salcedo was given the choice of either suing the
Navy or continuing his service in the Reserve. He chose the latter,
hoping to demonstrate that the Reserve had made a mistake. Over the
next several years he continued to serve temporary tours.

Then, in 1996, Salcedo heard that JTF-6 was looking for intelligence
specialists to work in the war on drugs. Despite his skepticism about
the war, Salcedo--eager to prove his worth to the Navy--applied and
was taken on as a analyst. He was assigned to work with
drug-enforcement task forces on the East Coast. Because he signed a
confidentiality agreement upon taking the job, Salcedo avoided talking
about the substance of his work. But, based on my knowledge of drug
enforcement, it wasn't hard to figure out. These drug task forces,
which bring together specialists from federal, state and local
agencies, are flooded with data, much of it from informants inside the
drug world. With his expertise in intelligence, Salcedo could help
make sense of it all.

From what Salcedo could tell, however, such actions had no effect on
the supply of drugs on the street. Adding to his disillusionment was
the constant bickering among the DEA, FBI, Customs and Coast Guard. It
is revealing, I think, that the "diplomatic aplomb" mentioned in his
medal certificate referred to his work not with foreign governments
but with U.S. agencies.

In April 1999, Salcedo took mandatory retirement. But he remained
absorbed by the drug issue. Reading "The Corner," David Simon and
Edward Burns's account of life on a drug-ridden street corner in
Baltimore, he was struck by how much the young dealers in it resembled
the students he had seen in Dorchester. Watching a "Frontline" program
titled "Snitch," he was appalled at how drug agents got big-time
dealers leniency in return for incriminating their small-time
accomplices. And, after reading my book, Salcedo got in touch with one
of its protagonists, a street worker in Spanish Harlem named Raphael
Flores. I had described the trouble Flores faced in getting addicts
into treatment, and Salcedo now got a firsthand look at the problems.
Treatment centers seemed completely overwhelmed and understaffed. The
experience strengthened his conviction that Washington should spend
its money not on helicopters and trainers but on prevention programs
and more services for addicts.

Hoping to dramatize his concerns about U.S. drug policy, Salcedo plans
soon to drive from New York to Washington and leave his medal at the
White House, accompanied by a letter explaining his position. His
example, he hopes, will attract other military veterans frustrated by
their participation in what has become a wasteful, wounding and
ultimately futile war. I suspect there are many other such veterans
out there.