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QUESTIONS TRUMP ANSWERS IN WAR ON DRUGS

Lots Of Cash, Little To Show For All Of It

If America's drug war is not already lost, it is clearly
unwinnable.

Just ask Border Patrol and Customs agents who chase pot runners
through catclaw canyons west of Naco.

Ask the inspectors pounding pavement at Nogales' ports of entry, using
everything from sniffer dogs to gamma rays to check for cocaine and
cash.

Ask the Mexican newspaper reporter dodging death threats in San Luis
Rio Colorado, the smuggler doing time in a federal penitentiary, the
undercover narc making buys in Phoenix.

After nearly a half-century of escalating efforts to stop illegal drug
smuggling, the casualty count is a litany of lives wasted, criminal
violence, tax dollars lost, corruption and public cynicism.

Even a gung-ho crimebuster like Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio
acknowledges the failure as he thinks back on a 42-year career of drug
busting.

Arpaio hunted heroin smugglers in Turkey, oversaw Drug Enforcement
Administration operations in Latin America and headed federal drug
enforcement in Arizona.

"Here it is today," he says, shaking his head, "and there's not much
difference in drug trafficking . . . except there's more of it."

What went wrong?

President Lyndon B. Johnson, faced with an explosion in casual drug
use and drug-related crimes in the 1960s, launched the first big
offensive in the nation's drug war.

He merged two federal anti-drug agencies to create the Bureau of
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in 1968, hoping that a powerful new
federal effort could eliminate the scourge. But the drug trade and
related crime only flourished.

A few years later, President Nixon shifted the focus from enforcement
to treatment. Federal spending on drug treatment, rehabilitation and
education outstripped spending on enforcement during Nixon's first
term.

But interest waned after Nixon's 1972 re-election, and tough new
anti-drug laws passed by Congress consolidated federal enforcement
powers. Spending on law enforcement began a slow upward spiral.

Even then, some saw the writing on the wall. A Ford Foundation study
in the early 1970s concluded that "the criminal-law approach appears
to have had little impact on the growth of the problem, as is
demonstrated by the fact that illegal drug use, by everyone's
calculation, is increasing and shows no sign of leveling off."

More than two decades later, Henry Hinton, assistant comptroller
general for national security and international affairs in the General
Accounting Office, offered a nearly identical assessment to Congress:
"Despite long-standing efforts and expenditures of billions of
dollars, illegal drugs still flood the United States."

The Arizona Bulge

America's enforcement tactics are frequently compared with the
squeezing of a balloon. Fifteen years ago, anti-smuggling operations
pressed in on southern Florida, pushing smugglers toward America's
2,000-mile Southwestern border.

Then in the 1990s, authorities targeted San Diego and Texas. This
time, the smuggling bulge popped up along Arizona's southern edge. For
three years, at least, it has been one of the world's busiest dope
corridors.

There's no telling how much drugs pour into the Grand Canyon State
every year. There's not even a composite tally of all the smuggled
drugs that are caught. But, certainly, it's more than ever.

Fiscal 1999 was a record year for marijuana seizures by federal law
enforcement agencies in the state. The DEA, the U.S. Customs Service
and the Border Patrol reported nabbing nearly 350 tons of pot in
Arizona last year, twice the amount reported by the same agencies in
1995.

The more than 23,000 pounds of cocaine seized by those agencies last
year, although not a record, was up slightly from the year before.
Heroin seizures were at their lowest point in four years at 53 pounds.
But a record 693 pounds of methamphetamine was snared in 1999 by the
DEA, the agency with the most focus on meth trafficking in Arizona.

In the past year alone, drug smuggling tunnels were unearthed in Naco
and Nogales, $891,000 of cash was seized at the Douglas port, and
1,886 pounds of coke was pulled out of a boat at Lukeville.

But no matter how large the busts or how many, only an estimated
one-tenth to one-quarter of all drug shipments into the United States
are caught.

"When you think about how many people they're catching and how much
has gotten through all these years, they aren't slowing anybody down,"
said David Alvarez, a federal public defender in Tucson.

Demand for Drugs

The drug war cost the United States $17.7 billion this year, up from
$1.5 billion in 1981 and $102 million in 1970. One-third of that goes
for treatment, education and prevention, compared with nearly 60
percent in the early '70s.

But billions of tax dollars have not put an appreciable dent in the
black market. Instead, the cost of catching a pound of dope just keeps
going up. A decade ago, the U.S. government spent less than $3,500 for
every pound of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and hashish seized. By last
year, the average was up over $5,000 a pound.

The dope that gets through finds a steady market on this side of the
border.

A study in the mid-1990s estimated that Americans were spending nearly
$50 billion on their illegal drug habits.

A 1998 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse found that 13.6 million
Americans, or 6.2 percent of those 12 or older, were using illicit
drugs, down from a high of 25 million in 1979 but virtually unchanged
from 1991.

Kids are considered a barometer of abuse, and the trend among those
ages 12 to 17 is troubling. About one in 10 has been using drugs
regularly during the past several years, up from one in 17 or 18
during the early part of the decade.

The problem is particularly acute in Arizona, where teenagers have a
higher abuse rate, 14.4 percent, than the national average of 9.9.
percent.

Easy Money?

Bring a kilo of coke into Phoenix and you can sell it for $14,500 to
$20,000. Get a pound of cannabis to Tucson and you can pick up $400 to
$600.

Anthony P. Maingot, a sociologist who researched the worldwide drug
economy, estimates that annual narcotics proceeds total more than $1
trillion.

The futility of enforcement efforts is hardly a surprise when such
enormous amounts of money are at stake.

Consider Billy Martin: The one-time Douglas schoolkid, the son of
upper-middle-class parents, is accused by federal prosecutors of
cozying up to major cartels in Sonora and running a trafficking ring
that raked in more than $19 million over five years. Martin fled to
Mexico a step ahead of the law in the mid-1990s, but last year was
sent back to the United States to stand trial.

Sworn statements from Martin's confederates offer glimpses of the
insane profitability of their ventures. The affidavits speak of a
courier, code-named Slim, who regularly met a New York City drug buyer
to ferry thousands of dollars back to Tucson or California. The buyer
"delivered money to Slim at hotels in the New York/New Jersey area 15
or 20 times between March and May 1994, never less than $300,000."

Slim, who earned $5,000 per trip, "sometimes traveled with an exotic
looking female . . . strikingly beautiful," letting her carry the cash
in a hand-held travel bag. Sometimes, couriers flew west in the
opulent comfort of now-defunct MGM Grand Air.

A woman who reputedly worked for Martin told federal agents that
Martin's home in Mexico was "like a palace."

"There were Mexican federales all over the place with machine guns,"
she said.

The lure of fast American cash is nearly irresistible in a country
where much of the workforce is unemployed and laborers earn only about
$25 a week.

Even those at the bottom of the chain, the human mules who risk their
own hides to deliver loads into the United States earn wages they
couldn't hope to match in Mexico's legal economy.

Blame To Go Around

Lionel De Gunther, a student and teacher at the University of Sonora
in Hermosillo, said U.S. officials see only one side of the tragedy:
their own. But while drugs go north, decadence and crime, he said,
flow south.

Hermosillo, a state capital 350 miles from Phoenix, has been
transformed from a religious city to a haven for contraband,
greenbacks, guns and gangs from Arizona.

Kids sniff paint as a sedative to hunger, then discover a better high
with cocaine and money. Radio stations play corridos, or ballads, in
honor of narco-lords.

In Juarez, the Chihuahuan city south of El Paso, citizens have lived
in the shadow of violent cartel rivalries for most of this decade.
This winter, U.S. and Mexican authorities began uncovering graves
thought to contain some of the dozens of people kidnapped and killed
by the Juarez Cartel.

"Mexico is the diving board for drugs, and the United States is the
swimming pool where they land," De Gunther said.

No matter how much blame is cast on Latino criminals, they could not
thrive without U.S. collaborators and buyers, said Adolfo Garcia
Morales, assistant state prosecutor for Sonora.

"The way to cut off drugs is to stop the consumer," Garcia Morales
said. "If we attack the causes, it will be much cheaper and much more
effective."

Mexicans also resent the notion that corruption is unique to their
country or culture. But they are not naive about it.

Many concede that cartels have subverted the nation's fabric, creating
a narco-democracy, a country whose institutions are increasingly
controlled by powerful drug alliances.

"One such Mexican organization generates tens of millions of dollars
in profits per week," the U.S. General Accounting Office reported 18
months ago. "Profits of such magnitude enable the drug traffickers to
pay enormous bribes, estimated for one organization to be as much as
$1 million per week, to Mexican law enforcement officials at the
federal, state and local levels."

Some of that money also goes to U.S. officials; witness the bribery
convictions of several Arizona immigration inspectors last year.

But if America's enforcement machine is flawed, Mexico's is so
compromised that U.S. narcotics investigators refuse to trust anyone
across the border.

Customs and Border Patrol agents simply assume that Mexican troops and
federal police are protecting drug loads, not seizing them. Those same
assumptions apply higher up the government ladder.

In 1997, Mexico's drug czar, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was exposed
for aiding traffickers he'd pledged to exterminate.

More recently, Operation Casablanca, a three-year undercover money
laundering probe, proved "enlightening . . . as to the depth of
deception and corruption in the Mexican system," said former Customs
Agent William F. Gately, who led the investigation.

Among 142 people arrested in the operation were top officials of three
major Mexican banks. Gately insists the operation might eventually
have snared a top Mexican Cabinet minister who was reputed by members
of the Juarez drug cartel to be interested in laundering $1 billion in
drug profits.

Gately never got the chance to find out. The Clinton administration,
voicing diplomatic concerns, halted the operation in 1998. President
Clinton apologized to Mexico for conducting the sting without its knowledge.

When There's Not Diplomacy To Consider, There'sTtrade.

Every year, U.S. presidents preserve Mexico's trade status by
certifying the southern neighbor as a drug-fighting "favored nation,"
despite ample evidence to the contrary.

And the North American Free Trade Agreement, which knocked down
commerce barriers between countries, often pits anti-smuggling efforts
against U.S. business and political interests.

he 6-year-old open-border compact brought a flood of travel and
trade. But law enforcement agencies can't keep pace, and efforts to
tightly screen free trade are condemned by business leaders and
politicians.

"NAFTA means the North American Free Trafficking Agreement because
that's what it's become," Gately said.

New Approaches

Those closest to the struggle say they're tired of the way America is
waging its drug war. They say it's time to get tough.

Some advocate militarizing the U.S. border and cutting off foreign aid
to Mexico. Others want undercover investigations that reach deeply
into Mexico and its cartels. Some support sending special forces into
Latin America to destroy crops and cartel operations.

Reform advocates, on the other hand, say the only answer is to combat
drug abuse.

"We spend so much money building walls and arresting people in the
drug war, when the problem is right here at home," said Gail
Rittenhouse, an administrator for Arizona state prisons, where up to
85 percent of the inmates have drug problems. "What if we spent at
least half of that money on treatment, education and
prevention?"

Stephen Ralls, a Tucson defense lawyer who once worked as a Douglas
narcotics detective and later as a DEA agent, said the government and
the public are obsessed with get-tough solutions. So they hire more
cops, pass mandatory-sentencing laws and build more prisons.

"There is no education for young kids," he said. "There are no
signature programs for the people who use drugs."

U.S. politicians are caught in a vise between public ambivalence and
anti-crime zeal. Americans demand that drug users be arrested, unless
it's their kids. They support long prison sentences for smugglers,
then cringe at the costs.

Some, like New Mexico's Gov. Gary Johnson, have come to believe the
only solution is the legalization of some drugs.

"Control it, tax it, regulate it, get control of a product that is
black-market," Johnson said.

In the past 20 years, drug use declined by half while the annual cost
of the fight went from $1 billion to $17 billion. By that math,
Johnson argues, it will take $40 billion and 3.2 million arrests to
cut use by half again.

"As a cost-benefit analysis, this really stinks," Johnson
said.

By his own admission, Johnson is a voice in the political wilderness.
But sentiment seems slowly to be steering American drug policies in a
new direction.

Voters in several states, including Arizona, have passed initiatives
approving marijuana for medical use. This year, another initiative
could be on Arizona's ballot to decriminalize the use of smaller
amounts of pot and ease punishment for non-violent drug offenses.
Supporters call it a halfway point between a drug war that is failing
and a legalization scheme that is politically unpalatable to most Americans.

No War At All

Gen. Barry McCaffrey, Clinton's drug czar, isn't ready to surrender
the drug war.

What needs to change, he said, is the terminology.

"This metaphor, "war on drugs,' has gotten us into a lot of problems,"
said McCaffrey, a decorated former Army general who now heads the
Office of National Drug Control Policy. "I understand war, and this
ain't no war. If it's a war, then we expect to achieve total victory
through violence and deception."

McCaffrey prefers to describe the drug problem as "a cancer affecting
our community life."

"You don't talk in terms of a cure, but you talk in terms of a
five-year survival rate," he said.

By that standard, he says, federal drug policies have succeeded:
Overall abuse rates have more than halved since 1979, and cocaine use
has been sliced by 70 percent in the past 10 years.

The drug czar would have a tough time, however, convincing border
narco-warriors that things are getting better.

Tons of dope have turned tiny towns like San Luis Rio Colorado into
drug meccas where cartel smugglers unload Uzis at those standing in
their way.

Drug distribution rings have set up operations across the street from
Carl Hayden High School in Phoenix.

And corruption has infected those who are supposed to cure the
cancer.

Consider Ronald "Joe" Borane, who spent a lifetime rising from Douglas
cop to police chief to judge. In an interview last summer, he told of
putting hundreds of drug smugglers and dealers behind bars.

After 44 years in the drug war, Borane allowed that U.S. interdiction
efforts are as useless as "kicking sand at the tide."

One month after that interview, Borane was indicted on money
laundering charges stemming from an FBI sting. According to court
records, an undercover agent coaxed the judge into a deal that
involved sending military surplus gear to Guatemala in exchange for
pot and coke.

The ex-cop and ex-judge now faces trial and, if convicted, prison time
with the very people he once pursued from the other side of the law.

No wonder those left fighting the drug war question how much good
they're doing.

"We're not going to win it with law enforcement," said Kermit Miller,
a Tucson police narcotics captain and leader in southern Arizona's
High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a task force of law enforcement
agencies.

"We're just a stopgap. We're holding the line."

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