The Texas drug connection

By Rena Pederson / The Dallas Morning News

The scene: an asphalt highway outside of Amarillo. The flat open spaces of
the Texas Panhandle. Some might say the middle of nowhere. Some might say
the middle of America.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger McRoberts and a Border Patrol team gathered
at Interstate 40 earlier this year to try a novel crimefighting idea. They
placed several fake signs just before the last turnoff. One warned "Check
Station Ahead." Another said "Immigration and Narcotics Checkpoint 1 mile."

For the next few days, virtually every vehicle that pulled off the highway
to avoid the Immigration and Naturalization Service checkpoint had illegal
drugs or aliens on board. Even though it was the bonecold dead of winter
and the operation was conducted only during daylight hours for safety
reasons, several million dollars worth of cocaine, marijuana and
methamphetamine were confiscated and 98 illegal aliens apprehended.

So, yes, smuggling drugs and people is big business, even in places that
used to be known for tumbleweeds and roadrunners.

Just a few months ago, Aziz Ghanbari of Istanbul, Turkey, was sentenced to
life imprisonment for his role in an international drug smuggling venture
that brought 98 kilograms of heroin to Lubbock. There was a time when the
only thing Turkish in such parts was a little tobacco in Camel cigarettes.
The trail of this deal read like a spy novel: The conspirators, who hailed
from Vienna and the Netherlands as well as Istanbul, transported large
shipping containers from San Francisco to Romania, where they filled each
container with 500 kilograms to a ton and a half of heroin base from
Southwest Asia. The goal: bring it to Texas, ship it around the country,
rake in millions of dollars.

Thanks to its central location, great highways and grand Dallas/Fort Worth
International Airport, North Texas has become a simply terrific place to
ship drugs through.

Since February, a task force has seized nearly five kilos of Colombian
heroin from airline flights originating in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Often it was stashed in the MOX boxes that control headphones at passenger
seats.

Welcome to the '90s, where you might be sitting on drugs and not even know
it. Sometimes the deals are right under your nose. Julio Mercado, the
special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Dallas,
recently stopped in a grocery store to wire some money to his son in
college. He noticed the guy in line ahead of him had a Colombian accent.
And he seemed to be conducting quite a bit of business.

When the guy's record subsequently was checked, it turned out he had made
14 wire transactions to South America that day alone. You can guess he
wasn't wiring lunch money to his son. And it might have been you, instead
of the drug agency chief, walking by with eggs and milk in your basket,
while he shifted hot money around.

Oh, sure, drugs have been around a long time, but what's different these
days is (1) the smuggling operations are more sophisticated and global,
bringing in distributors from Asia, Russia, Colombia, Cuba and Nigeria to
slip heroin into residential communities like Plano, and (2) the users are
getting younger and younger, with heroin users as young as 13 dying of
overdoses in Dallas suburbs.

Several national surveys have confirmed this summer that heroin is seducing
a younger audience. A Columbia University report released Wednesday said
more than 50 percent of American adolescents said they have friends or
classmates who use heroin, cocaine or acid. Earlier this month, a Health
and Human Services Department survey showed heroin use among young people
up sharply.

Indeed, the drug is so available in Texas that in Laredo and San Antonio
kids mix heroin with water and use it as nose drops or nasal spray in a
Visine bottle. It is called "agua de chango" water of the monkey or
"shabanging." According to the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse,
increasing numbers of young people in the state are showing up hooked on
agua de chango.

The new heroin also is purer, stronger stuff. That means users are more
likely to die from an overdose. According to the Drug Enforcement
Administration, Dallas has seen an 18 percent increase in overdose deaths
attributed to heroin from 1994 to 1997.

It's time to get more serious about fighting back. That's going to take a
more concerted law enforcement effort. As an editorial on this page points
out, North Texas needs to be declared a High Intensity Drug Trafficking
Area to get more funding for local efforts. Federal attorneys also could
use more help there are seven narcotics attorneys in Dallas, while there
are nearly four times that number in Houston.

At the same time, we also need to start asking ourselves some tough
questions: Why on earth are youngsters who are too young to drive smoking,
snorting and shooting up heroin? What can we say or do to convince them
that life without drugs is more worthwhile? Catching smugglers on the
highway is the easy part. Reaching inside is harder.

Rena Pederson is editor of The Dallas Morning News editorial page.