A Special Editorial Page Report

BLITZED MARKET

It's a mean war, vicious and deadly, with rising body counts and crowded
recovery wards. Drug kingpins and their armies of dealers are waging
allout chemical warfare against the United States.

Their main targets are teenagers or preteens, with ages 12 and 13 a
dismayingly common time for the first drug use. It could well be a
seventhgrade girl, eyes wide in fear and excitement, puffing a ``geek
joint'' through the shiny braces on her teeth.

A geek joint is a mixture of pot and crack cocaine, a potent combination
becoming common in South Florida. The young girl naive, afraid of being
scorned by peers as ``uncool'' doesn't know what she is smoking.

Her boomer parents experimented with drugs 30 years ago, escaping
longlasting effects, and they delude themselves into thinking it will be
the same for their daughter. They fail to grasp the immense, threatening
differences between then and now:

The parents were older, in their late teens or early 20s, when they puffed
or snorted, and were fortunate enough to withstand the impact of one or two
drug experiments without getting hooked. They still don't realize how lucky
they were.

More important, the addictive grip of today's drugs grabs hold faster and
drives deeper into the brain, a frightening change from the narcotics of
three decades ago. Crack cocaine, the most addictive drug known, wasn't
around much in the 1960s, but it's everywhere today. Heroin sold on the
street 30 years ago was much weaker than the deadly and more ``pure''
version being pushed so hard right now, with death by overdose ravaging
Central Florida.

Teenagers and twentysomethings who think they're streetsmart convince
themselves that snorting or smoking this more potent heroin isn't as
dangerous as injecting it. Their destiny? Often it's a terrifying overdose,
and then a cold slab in the morgue.

As for marijuana, the misnamed ``soft'' drug has powered up for the worse.
Clever, amoral growers of marijuana doubled, tripled or quadrupled its
potency, and recent scientific studies show that pot creates the same kind
of craving in the brain that socalled harder drugs do.

The dangerous upshot: Trying today's potent drugs can lead to quick
addiction. A somber Anibal Torres, an FBI agent who directs a police
investigations bureau in Puerto Rico, puts it grimly: ``Experimentation has
become synonymous with addiction.''

Law enforcement agents fight back against the drug armies with great
courage and determination, and with a high degree of cooperation among
agencies, arresting smugglers and dealers and putting them in prison.
Instantly, however, fresh smugglers, attracted by the drug trade's huge
profit margins, spring up to plan new narcotics routes, and the endless
battle of wills and tactics drags on.

The forces of law are handicapped on two fronts. No one is in charge of the
fight against drugs, and although the retired Army general filling the post
of national ``drug czar'' creates inventive plans to reduce the demand for
narcotics and to check the flow of coke and heroin into this country, he
has little direct power except to cajole from his bully pulpit.

A second disabling handicap is less well recognized, but devastating. It's
the existence of the huge U.S. demand for drugs, a marketer's dream, the
millions of Americans eager to pay hard cash for illegal drugs.

Call it a fifth column, saboteurs undermining this country's desperate
drive to smash the drug culture. While law enforcement agents risk their
lives to thwart and arrest drug criminals, and while anguished parents try
to restore their addicted children to health, heedless users buy and buy
and buy.

By spending an estimated $57.3 billion a year on illegal narcotics, they
turn drug kingpins into immensely wealthy men, able to influence some
governments and to bribe workers in U.S. seaports and airports. Kingpins
pay their stooges in drugs or cash, American currency mostly, with $20 and
$50 bills bulging out of fat briefcases.

It's hard to trace the cash to its source, because the drug gangs operate
sophisticated moneylaundering schemes, and soon the funds disappear into
banking systems and are switched here and there through electronic
transfers. If the bills could be traced, the trail would lead back to
addicts or casual users, some of whom live down the street.

Keep following the trail, and wind up at the homes and businesses of honest
citizens, victims of burglaries or muggings by addicts craving a fix. A
stolen VCR, sold or pawned, generates cash for the user, who pays the
dealer, who pays the middleman, who quickly shifts the money electronically
until, in one way or another, a criminal in Colombia gets richer.

Arrests and convictions of drug criminals, and confiscation of huge piles
of cocaine, are exhilarating but not lasting. They're essentially holding
actions.

Law enforcement agents on the front lines of this protracted struggle
realize the antidrug war can never reach a satisfactory conclusion until
both critical aspects, supply and demand, are dealt with effectively. Capt.
Norman B. Henslee, who heads Coast Guard operations in much of the
Caribbean from a Puerto Rico base, makes the point:

``Law enforcement can't possibly defeat the drug criminals if the demand
continues. When we make a move, there's a countermove by the smugglers, to
work around us. Someone will always find a way to supply the demand for
drugs''

No one should expect a complete end to drug abuse in the United States or
anywhere else. History argues persuasively against such hopes.

It's possible, though, to reduce drug abuse substantially, to a minimal
level. That can happen if law enforcement continues to push hard and
relentlessly against drug criminals, and if the U.S. population becomes
mentally healthier.

The less dramatic but just as important half of the war against drugs must
take place in homes and schools and religious institutions across this
nation. In those quieter places, the long and frustrating struggle is being
waged to rebuild American families and the sense of community and belonging
that leads to individual selfreliance.

A sturdy 12yearold, with core values already well formed and other
protective factors in place, living in a community where a revitalized
``social norm'' means everyone shares a common attitude against drugs, is
strong enough to resist the phony blandishments of narcotics. When the
overwhelming majority of American 12yearolds fits into that category of
quiet selfconfidence, and only then, will this deadly chemical war grind
to a mostly positive end.

Copyright © 1997, SunSentinel Company and South Florida Interactive, Inc.