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A LOSING DRUG WAR (Introduction)

Arizona's Porous Border Ground Zero

Arizona is Ground Zero in America's war on drugs.

Every day, guerrilla smugglers invade the state's southern border with
payloads of pot, coke, meth and smack. The drugs are spread across the
country - to schoolkids in New York, to stockbrokers in Phoenix, to
farm workers in Seattle.

The United States has spent billions of tax dollars on border
checkpoints, undercover agents, air patrols and money-laundering
probes. We've crisscrossed the globe with agents, developed an arsenal
of technological goodies to ferret out narcotics, even aimed spy
satellites at Colombia to count the coca plants.

From Agua Prieta to Yuma, dope smugglers and impoverished illegals
dodge a gantlet of interdiction forces. Government agents, most of
them dedicated and downtrodden, hunt down the dumb and unlucky.

The result: As a new millennium dawns, agents along the Southwestern
border are seizing more drugs than ever. Yet they've barely made a
dent.

In Arizona alone, more than 150,000 people were arrested for drug
offenses during the 1990s. Nationwide, prisons teem with a
quarter-million dope offenders.

But no matter how many are locked up, new drug runners and users take
their places, spawning an epidemic of crime, cost and social calamity.

The truth is inescapable: The fight against narcotics, which costs
Americans nearly $18 billion a year, is the nation's most failed
police action since Vietnam.

During a seven-month investigation, Arizona Republic reporters spoke
to dozens of drug officers, smugglers, drug counselors and residents
on la frontera, the 350-mile border separating Arizona from Sonora.

They reviewed law enforcement files, court records, congressional
reports, expert research, drug legalization tracts and literature from
the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Nearly every voice, every report, reaches the same conclusion: The
drug war isn't being won, and it's not about to be won - not as long
as the United States is rich and Latin American countries are poor;
not as long as one has drugs and the other wants them.

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