'DRUG CZAR'S' PLAN TO SHORE UP LEAKY BORDER MEETS WITH SKEPTICISM

AUSTIN, TEXAS -- In a high-profile display of the tactical sensibilities
for which he was tapped, "drug czar" retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey this week
proposed an aggressive plan to shore up federal antidrug efforts along the
US-Mexico border - the main corridor for narcotics into the United States.

Yet many experts believe the moves, while helpful, will not significantly
cut down on the plastic baggies of marijuana and cocaine hidden in car
fenders that routinely make their way to the streets of America.

One reason: simple economics. While demand for heroin and other illicit
drugs remains high, drug watchers contend that a large amount of contraband
will still filter across the border.

"As long as there are Americans with money and the desire for drugs,
somebody will provide that, no matter what roadblocks you put in the way,"
says Mark Kleiman, a professor of drug policy at the University of
California at Los Angeles.

The new roadblocks General McCaffrey hopes to set up are nonetheless
intended to make smuggling drugs across America's Southwest border
considerably more difficult. A key provision of his plan - which will be
presented to President Clinton this fall - calls for the creation of a
Southwest border czar. The official, probably based in El Paso, Texas,
would coordinate the efforts of the 22 federal, state, and local
law-enforcement agencies in the region.

Currently, the interdiction missions of the FBI, Immigration and
Naturalization Service, US Customs Service, and others are widely perceived
to be hampered by poor communication and interagency turf wars. Under
McCaffrey's plan, the border czar could pool these agencies' resources and
create a unified policy on interdiction efforts.

The proposal also calls for increasing the number of agents on the border
(from 12,000 to 22,000) and for a more sophisticated network of
surveillance technology. This equipment would create a border-long
"electronic curtain" to supplant the painstaking process of hand-checking
vehicles and rail cars crossing into the US.

More than 60 percent of the estimated 300 tons of cocaine that enter the
country each year are believed to pass through the 24 ports of entry and 39
crossing points of the US-Mexico border. More than half of the
methamphetamine and marijuana reaching America is also believed to come
across the Mexican border.

But the search for smuggled drugs can be like looking for a needle in a
haystack, McCaffrey says. The amount of cocaine estimated to come across
the US-Mexico border each year would fill only six trucks - yet more than
3.5 million trucks and rail cars cross the border annually.

According to the US Customs Service, current interdiction efforts stop 10
to 20 percent of the flow. Privately, some border agents put the figure as
low as 2 to 3 percent. McCaffrey said he expects his plan, if adopted, to
stop 50 percent of the drugs within 10 years.

"We can do for drug interdiction what we have done for air-travel safety,"
he said. "One hundred thousand Americans get on airplanes each day. At the
price of minor inconvenience and delay, they have traded virtually
guaranteed security against the threat of guns and explosives."

Few independent analysts, however, have similar confidence. Mr. Kleiman
notes that while interdiction spending has more than doubled since 1979,
the street price of a gram of cocaine has decreased eightfold over the same
period - suggesting that the market is more flooded than ever.

"Our current ... efforts are focused on shrinking supply,... we ought to be
focusing our efforts on minimizing demand," Kleiman says.

To that end, he and others have developed a new policy alternative of
"coerced abstinence," endorsed by Mr. Clinton and newly available to states
this year. It works by focusing on "heavy use" drug addicts - those with
$10,000 to $15,000 per year habits - who make up a small fraction of total
drug users but nevertheless consume 75 percent of the market.

Still, most Americans aren't ready to give up the war on drugs just yet. In
a March study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association,
66 percent of Americans favored increased antidrug spending, despite the
fact that 78 percent of all respondents termed "the war on drugs as having
failed thus far."