BACK ROADS: EX-DEA AGENT HOPES TO EDUCATE YOUTH

PAWLEYS ISLAND - Death flirted with Glenn Brown one day before lunch, and
the encounter shook him with fear.

The heroin dealer was ready to kill him, and he pressed a gun against
Brown's head to prove it.

Feeling the cold steel on his flesh made Brown, a special agent working the
streets of Baltimore for the Drug Enforcement Administration, plead and
pray for his life.

"Take my car," Brown begged. "Take my money. Take my wife. You can take
anything I have. Just don't shoot me. Please don't pull that trigger."

The heroin dealer never pulled the trigger but robbed Brown of about
$2,000. A DEA surveillance team caught the dealer moments later.

"After they put the handcuffs on that drug dealer, I probably cussed him
out and smacked him on the head, too," Brown said. "It took me weeks to get
over that. I was trembling like a leaf. I just couldn't stop thinking about
that gun to my head."

Brown, 61, dodged death daily during his 30-year career with DEA and has
now retired to a new goal - he intends to tell people in Pawleys Island and
beyond about the dangers of drugs.

He has already chatted with youngsters in the Parkersville area of Pawleys
Island, where he grew up. Drugs, he warns them, will take them to graves or
send them to jails.

"A lot of the kids are getting their information from their peers, and
their peers don't know what they are talking about," he said.

Brown never set out to be a DEA agent. He wanted to be an Episcopal priest
as a child because he grew up surrounded by preachers and teachers,
including his mother, Johanna Brown.

Visions of working with the DEA began after an agent visited St.
Augustine's College in Raleigh, N.C., where Brown was studying history and
social studies. He was hired as an agent for The Federal Bureau of
Narcotics in Washington, D.C. About three week later, Uncle Sam drafted him
for the Vietnam War.

"I got married in June, and I went into the service in September," he said.

From 1966 to 1969, Panama was his home while he worked as a criminal
investigator.

A novice to crime then, Brown became a seasoned professional - an agent who
in 1990 seized $2.5 million from the home of Alberto "Chickie" Muniz
Torres, a reputed drug dealer who lived in Puerto Rico.

His home office is proof that Brown knows drug culture.

The walls are covered with numerous plaques from various countries thanking
him for his help in combating drugs. A photograph with former President
Bush is among a series of pictures of him with fellow DEA agents.

A picture of his daughter, Tiffani, who died at 25 from diabetes, is in the
office, too. So is a picture of her now 11-year-old son, Winston.

As an undercover agent in the 1970s, Brown sported an Afro, platform shoes,
polyester shirts and bell bottoms while hanging out with the very drug
dealers he wanted to arrest.

"You are matching wits against the drug trafficker or the person selling
drugs because you are trying to sell yourself," he said. "You want them to
think you are a drug dealer, but you have to know what you are talking about."

His expertise led to promotions and eventually landed him a job as a team
supervisor for the International Training Division.

He traveled to 64 countries, including Thailand and Malaysia, to teach top
officials all he knew about drugs. Cocaine stimulates the nervous system,
causing the heart to beat with a boom, he said. Heroin makes users sleepy.

But for all his drug fighting and preaching, Brown said the problem is
worse than before because demand is so high.

And he believes legalizing drugs will not help and will never happen.

"If we legalize drugs, then everybody will be involved with drugs," Brown said.

Only good, old-fashioned teamwork, Brown believes, can change the tides.
"At the federal level, I think there are only about 6,500 drug agents
worldwide," Brown said. "And we can't do it all. I think it's going to take
the family, the church, the entire community. Everybody has to be on the
same page."

Brown's 81-year-old mother, a retired teacher, thinks her son can help
young people stay clear of drugs.

"There will be some people who will listen to him," she said. "And there
are children around here who really need the advice of an adult. They want
someone to show them the right way, and Glenn can."