An abominable idea, to allow the smoking of socalled ``medical
marijuana,'' is circulating in Florida and should be rejected soundly. It
would permit just about any Floridian who claims to be suffering from
``chronic pain'' and who can convince a physician of it, to puff the potent
and addictive kind of marijuana easily available today.

The proposal, in the form of an initiative petition, asks that the Florida
Constitution be amended to permit the wholly unnecessary use of an
addictive drug. If 435,073 Floridians make the terrible mistake of signing
this petition, the proposal would appear on the statewide ballot next fall
or in 2000.

A close reading of the proposed amendment strips the pretense of help for
patients in pain, and reveals it as a plan to legalize marijuana. Here is
part of it; read carefully and judge for yourself:

Each person has the right to obtain and use marijuana for medical purposes
when a licensed physician has certified ``that the person's health may
benefit from use of marijuana in the treatment of cancer, HIV, AIDS,
anorexia, glaucoma, arthritis, chronic pain, spasticity, migraine and other
specified medical condition or illness.''

Where's the common cold? Where's the nagging hangnail? Covered, no doubt,
under either chronic pain or ``other specified medical condition or
illness,'' which are categories large enough to hold the continent of Europe.

Usually these dangerous proposals are argued in terms of relieving cancer
patients undergoing chemotherapy or those burdened with intolerable pain.
The arguments, however, are plainly false and should be dismissed.

This is the answer to anyone who claims smoking marijuana relieves the
nausea and vomiting that sometimes accompanies chemotherapy: Tested and
safe medicines are available, now, for nausea and vomiting, and they are
more effective than marijuana.

Moreover, the medical management of pain has progressed greatly, especially
from doctors who specialize in that field. There is no need to endanger a
patient by introducing marijuana smoke into his lungs, and simultaneously
making pot seem like a healing substance instead of an addictive one.

In two powerful sentences from his new book, Dr. Robert L. DuPont sums up
marijuana and medicine: ``It is inconceivable that marijuana would ever be
approved as a medical treatment, since marijuana smoke contains more than
2,000 chemicals in an unstable and unpredictable mix. Modern medicine uses
purified chemicals in controlled doses to treat specific illnesses.''

DuPont, a psychiatrist, was the first director of the National Institute on
Drug Abuse and the second director of the White House drug abuse prevention
office. His credentials are impeccable, and his book, The Selfish Brain:
Learning from Addiction, punctures the carefully contrived myths of those
who seek legalization of drugs.

Americans are learning that ``medical marijuana'' is a phony idea meant to
conceal attempts at legalizing drugs for just about anyone. In Washington
state last month, voters resoundingly defeated an attempt to permit medical
use of marijuana, heroin, LSD and other drugs.

Earlier this year, voters in Arizona and California unwisely approved
``medical marijuana,'' although in Arizona implementation has been stalled.
Floridians should never let it get that far, and the quickest and best way
to block it is to refuse to sign the petition.

TO REDUCE SMUGGLING, WORKERS AT POINTS OF ENTRY SHOULD BE KEY

The 400milelong peninsula called Florida thrusts southward from the rest
of the United States and therefore becomes especially inviting to drug
smugglers. How could they not appreciate Florida's 1,350 miles of coastline
along the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico?

How could smugglers not savor Florida's hidden coves, barrier islands and,
for the airminded among them, big airports and small airfields dotting the
state and the flat terrain that, in a pinch, can be used as a landing
strip? How could they not be pleased at the relatively short distances from
Colombian and Bolivian coca fields to transshipment points such as Puerto
Rico, and then on to Fort Lauderdale or Miami?

Drug criminals in large numbers saw Florida as an unmatched opportunity and
took advantage of it, until law enforcement agencies massed their forces
and made smuggling into this state much more difficult. In the early 1990s,
drug lords shifted many routes and transported cocaine and heroin overland
or by air through Central America and into Mexico and then across the
border into the United States.

Reacting, law enforcement moved its emphasis to the U.S.Mexican border,
whereupon the ever flexible smugglers reversed themselves and started back
to the Caribbean. That's where the fluid chess game stands now, with the
smugglers' presence still strong on the Mexican border but shifted in part
back to the Caribbean and Florida.

How should South Florida deal with this renewed pressure from drug
smugglers who are clever, wellfinanced and blind to the human misery they
cause? The weakest link right now in blocking drugs from coming into this
region is inside the workforce at seaports and airports, and that's where
the focus should be.

Smugglers prey on the greed of dishonest workers and, occasionally, of
bent law enforcement officers to grease the path for drug shipments.
There is no better warning about specific workers' susceptibility to
committing illegal drug acts than a history of lawbreaking.

That's why the MetroDade Commission finally acted to impose a criminal
background check on workers at the Port of Miami, and to bar those who had
felony convictions. This belated action came only after Rep. E. Clay Shaw,
RFort Lauderdale, produced startling data about the criminal records of
workers at the Port of Miami and Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale.

The Broward County Commission, meanwhile, has done nothing about workers at
Port Everglades. Why the lack of action? Why the blind eye?

Surely the commissioners realize Shaw accurately presented appalling facts
about the rap sheets of some workers at the port. It is asking for trouble,
inviting smugglers to penetrate the port, by employing workers whose long
rap sheets include convictions for cocaine dealing and use.

Every port in Florida must be extraordinarily careful not to allow workers
on the property who have felony backgrounds. More than that, a drugtesting
process should be put in place at all ports, following the example of the
Port of San Juan in Puerto Rico.

From executives to longshoremen, everyone who works at a Florida seaport
should be tested for drugs before being hired, and randomly thereafter.
Any worker showing suspicious changes in behavior ought to be retested
immediately.

Arguments about intrusions into civil rights should be considered untenable
in this circumstance, because these workers are in a highly vulnerable
spot. If they succumb to bribes from drug smugglers, their criminal acts
can bring misery and death to thousands of Floridians who are foolish
enough to rely on drugs.

Workers in airports and for the airlines are just as vulnerable to the
bribery of drug smugglers. Their backgrounds should be checked closely, and
drug tests required, to weed out the worst risks and reduce the amount of
drugs smuggled into this country.

It's not necessary for every American to be tested for drugs, or checked
for a criminal history, but certain segments of the population cannot be
allowed to escape such processes. Airplane and ship pilots, train engineers
and others whose mistakes at work can cause the death of many others
already fall in drugtesting categories accepted by most Americans.

Workers at seaports and airports are in a separate and equally critical
category. The right of Florida's children not to be inundated by drugs and
narcotics dealers outweighs the sensitivities of drug tests and background
checks for workers in critical positions.

EVERY BUST SHOULD BE A REMINDER OF THE DANGER

Drug busts are as familiar to South Floridians as palmetto bugs the size of
linebackers. There's the oftrepeated scene, on TV or in a newspaper photo,
of federal agents displaying mounds of confiscated cocaine, heroin or
marijuana.

It's not the same pile of drugs being photographed over and over again.
You'll be forgiven, however, for thinking it might be.

Talk of kilograms, street value, criminal charges, grand jury indictments
and seized property boats, say, or expensive homes threads through
the news accounts. In a few days a specific drug bust is forgotten, to be
replaced in the public eye by another, and another.

We become inured. Another day, another cache of drugs, another arrest.

It's a mistake to be bored by attempted criminal invasions of this region.
Each drug bust should be a sharp and disturbing reminder of the flood of
narcotics pouring into South Florida. Each one should jar Floridians into
protecting their children from this onslaught.

When law enforcement agents confiscate more than a ton of cocaine, as they
did this year in three related busts at South Florida seaports, does it
mean authorities are more vigilant or smugglers are sending more drugs this
way, with therefore larger amounts being intercepted? It could be both.

Law enforcement does an admirable job, using high tech detection, dogs,
informants and, in these cases, courtauthorized wiretaps. It's also true,
unfortunately, that drug criminals in significant numbers have switched
back to Caribbean smuggling routes, away from Mexico, making South Florida
again a favorite destination point.

In 25 years with the Drug Enforcement Administration, Felix Jiminez has
obsrved smugglers change their routes frequently to dodge police. From his
current perspective as the DEA's special agent in charge in Puerto Rico,
Jiminez now sees the return of smugglers to the Eastern Caribbean ``back
to us, just like 15 or 20 years ago.''

The three related drug busts demonstrate smugglers' ingenuity and
willingness to use any South Florida port to escape a storm of law
enforcement agents. They also show the determination of those agents, from
six cooperating agencies, to crack a ring of smugglers working from perhaps
four countries.

It's no surprise the ringleader is from Colombia, sent from Medillin by his
bosses to supervise the South Florida end of the smuggling. He was
identified by Assistant U.S. Attorney Ann Taylor as Nestor Salgado, also
known by a raft of aliases: ``Cabeza'' (``head'' in Spanish), ``Heads'' and
``Santiago.''

Aliases are part of drug criminals' operating styles, keeping real
identities hidden, and one of the gang members is called all of the
following: ``Elena,'' ``Stump,'' ``Vinnie'' and ``El Enano'' (the dwarf).
His real first name is Oscar, with the last name unknown to authorities at
the time of the federal indictment.

As the FBI and U.S. Customs Service, the lead agencies, pieced it together
from phone taps, interviews and other evidence gathered over seven months,
the gang adopted an equalopportunity attitude toward South Florida ports.
Each major port Port of Miami, Port of Palm Beach and Port Everglades in
Broward County was chosen to receive one shipment of cocaine.

The first two shipments were relatively small, with 195 kilograms of coke
seized in July at the Port of Palm Beach and 53 kilograms confiscated at
the Port of Miami in late September. Both were concealed in containers of
fish from Trinidad; one of the alleged gang members, Ian Ali, aka ``Ali
Baba,'' is a citizen of Trinidad.

Port Everglades was honored with the biggest shipment, 1,045 kilograms
confiscated on Oct. 29. It was hidden inside a container of soap from
Venezuela.

Despite the size of this drug bust, it represents just a small percentage
of narcotics seized in South Florida in 1997, let alone the amount that got
through. There will be other busts, next week or next month, and more
aliases will be added to drug criminal lore.

Although Cabeza is moderately interesting as an alias, my nominee for most
compelling remains ``Coffee House Israel,'' who was caught in Orlando this
year on serious drug charges and returned to Puerto Rico to face trial. His
nickname would be more fascinating, of course, if it hadn't been connected
with addicting and otherwise harming many Floridians.

DRUGS COME ROARING BACK

Take a snapshot of American drug abuse today and the picture is disturbing
and encouraging at the same time. Encouraging because if it's a family
photo, the adults probably look sober and healthy. Disturbing because the
children seem to be staring blankly, as if they were stoned.

Peer closely at the 12yearold girl and her 14yearold brother, and the
picture becomes truly frightening. They could well be under the influence
of drugs, at that vulnerable age.

Contrasted with just five years ago, many more American children are using
illegal drugs. Among eighth graders, drug use has tripled since 1992,
rising every year.

That's a deep and legitimate worry for parents, teachers and communities
although of course it doesn't faze the heedless, highrisk children
themselves, who take the first foolish step toward a wrecked life. They
brush off any incipient worry, but anxiety about this alarming trend has
affected all of those who work so desperately to prevent drug abuse, to
treat addicts or to block the smuggling of narcotics into this country.

In the photo, the parents look healthy because, more so than in many
previous years, they are in fact drugfree. Overall drug abuse in America
has dropped by almost half since the hazy ``high point'' of 1979, when an
estimated 25 million Americans used, and often abused, illegal drugs.

Still, however, there are 13 million frequent drug users in the United
States, about six percent of Americans who are at least 12 years old. That
just about equals the population of Florida, the nation's fourth most
populous state.

What kinds of drugs do these misguided Americans use? It's not easy to be
precise, because many drug abusers mix several kinds of narcotics, flirting
with death and 14,000 times a year, getting there.

In the decade from 1985 to 1995, the overall number of cocaine users
dropped fast, but the amount of that drug consumed in the United States
stayed about the same. That means many casual cocaine users shucked their
habit, while hardcore addicts consumed more and more as they plummeted
toward disaster.

The number of Americans hooked on cocaine was estimated at 582,000 for
1995, the same as 10 years earlier, with 225,000 of them strung out on
quickly addictive crack cocaine. The total number of cocaine users fell
sharply, from 5.7 million in 1985 to 1.5 million a decade later.

Those statistics were assembled by the Office of National Drug Control
Policy, headed by Barry McCaffrey, and were presented in the official
National Drug Control Strategy for 1997. The numbers may be a little out of
date, because more recent statistics gathered in Miami show something of a
reemergence of cocaine abuse in South Florida.

Tellingly, it involves younger users than before, in their teens and early
20s. For 1996 and the first quarter of 1997, cocaine abusers in Dade,
Broward and Palm Beach counties who sped to hospitals for emergency
treatment were decidedly younger than before.

The most comprehensive drug numbers in South Florida are obtained and
compiled by the Up Front Drug Information Center in Miami, and much of the
information refers just to Dade County. James N. Hall of the center says,
however, that numbers on emergency room admissions encompass the three main
South Florida counties, and they show troubling signs of a newer, younger
group of cocaine abusers.

Instead of cocaine dependence being confined mostly to ``an aging cohort of
hardcore addicts,'' which was the pattern here for several years, a new
group is using coke. Often these younger users, ages 14 to 20, tumble into
the dark world of cocaine by mixing that drug with another, perhaps marijuana.

In the foggy life of a drug addict, heroin is the big time. It's a
nofooling narcotic, ready to drop the user in his tracks, dead of an
overdose.

The resurgence of heroin in Florida has been the most terrifying in the
Orlando area, where 30 overdose deaths occurred last year. The heroin
reaching Florida is from Colombia, where drug farmers have diversified to
grow an especially potent poppy alongside their coca fields.

The result is a much more pure form of heroin, which can be snorted or
smoked as well as injecting it, the traditional method. This has led to an
increase in heroin abuse in the U.S., with an estimated 600,000 addicts in
the nation.

In Miami, Hall reports a new and perilous fad among some young heroin users
again, Miami statistics show a younger group than reported nationally
who mix new combinations of drugs. One is referred to as a ``fiveway,'' in
which a foolhardy abuser snorts a line each of heroin, cocaine,
methamphetamine and groundup ``roofie'' pills, and then drinks alcohol.

No wonder overdose deaths are increasing. No wonder antidrug fighters fret
about the easy availability of more kinds, and more dangerous, narcotics.

Marijuana, still the most used illegal drug, was puffed by 9.8 million
Americans in 1995, with 5 million of them frequent smokers (at least 51
days a year). While the number of frequent users dropped from 8.4 million
in 1985, new smokers are flocking to pot in larger numbers, with 2.3
million in 1994 alone.

The source and potency of marijuana have changed. In South Florida, most of
the pot confiscated by law enforcment agents is grown in the United States
and carries a powerful addictive wallop.

The socalled ``domestic sinsemilla'' varieties of pot sell for a
stunningly high $250 to $500 per ounce in South Florida and contain 8 to 14
percent of marijuana's narcotic agent, THC (tetrahydrocannainol). Imported
``commercial grades'' of marijuana are much cheaper, $65 to $180 per ounce,
and deliver just 3 to 4 percent THC, the low level of potency baby boomers
remember from the 1960s.

The dangerous pattern of combining drugs also occurs with marijuana, which
often is mixed with cocaine. Frequently young South Floridians smoke what
they think is just marijuana, only to learn later that crack cocaine has
been packed into the joint as well.

Although methamphetamine abuse is growing nationally, with 4.7 million
Americans estimated to have tried the drug, its use has been mostly in the
West, Southwest and Midwest. In South Florida, its use has been spotty, but
it seems to be moving southward and eastward from Tampa.

Overall, this complex profile of current narcotics abuse leaves positive
and negative impressions. On the plus side, the nation's war on drugs must
be considered a partial success because the total number of drug abusers
has dropped considerably.

That encouraging trend, however, is being negated by the rising use of
drugs by the very young and very vulnerable. It's a bleak fact, and it
cries out for firm action.

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