The Jail Scene

Coming into Los Angeles Bringing in a coupla keys Don't touch my bag, if you please, Mr. Customs man.

--an Arlo Guthrie song, 1970

Guthrie's lyrics celebrate a popular underground myth: that the U.S. is a tough drug scene compared with countries abroad, where the laws are loose and the hash is cheap. Though it is true that a "key" (kilo) of hashish may cost as little as $10 or $20 in Lebanon or Morocco, the price for many young American smugglers turns out to be almost unbearably high. All along the "trade routes" by which narcotics make their way back to Europe and the U.S., young Americans are filling up a veritable Baedeker of prisons.

The State Department reported last week that, as of February, there were no fewer than 404 Americans being held in foreign jails on various drug charges, compared with only 142 a year ago. And the count is rising. Paris-based John T. Cusack, the chief U.S. narcotics agent for Europe and the Middle East, estimates that foreign police and customs agents are booking young American smugglers at the rate of 40 per month. In Morocco, five Americans have been arrested on drug charges in the past five weeks. Last week in Lebanon, Morocco's main rival as a Mecca for drug-seeking tourists, police arrested eight youthful Americans who were trying to sneak some 70 kilos of hash out of the country. The catch brought Lebanon's current population of Americans imprisoned on drug charges to 15, pushing the country ahead of Italy (12) and Greece (13), and closer to the league leaders, which are Spain (about 50 jailed Americans) and West Germany (30).

Drug Scare. The prison population explosion is worrying the State Department, which calls it "a very important question." In many areas, it is rapidly becoming the prime concern of American diplomats. In Rabat, U.S. Consul Joseph Cheevers is besieged by requests for such items as antiscorbutic vitamin C, soap and blankets from American inmates of Morocco's dank jails (40 to a room). At the same time, he is handling twice as many requests for information from worried parents in the U.S. as he was a year ago.

The surge in overseas drug arrests of American travelers is largely the result of a crackdown by foreign governments. They are disturbed at the emergence of narcotics problems in their own countries. Furthermore, some widely publicized drug-connected horrors, particularly the Sharon Tate murders, have helped to erode whatever benign neglect traveling American hippies once enjoyed abroad. A few of the jailed Americans are professional smugglers, supplying the Mob in the U.S. "But most of them," says Cusack, "are not pros in the true sense. They have no records. They are users, and many of them are 'missionaries.' They want to turn others on--and if there's a profit in it, so much the better."

Busted Playmate. There are profits aplenty. A $10 or $20 "key" of Lebanese hash can fetch $1,500 or more in the U.S., and the figures tempt a wide variety of improbable smugglers. Book-of-the-Month Club Author W.S. Kuniczak (The Thousand Hour Day) was arrested last December for smuggling 160 Ibs. of hash into Greece; he is presently serving a 4 1/2-year sentence on the island of Corfu. Playboy's December Playmate Gloria Root, 21, currently graces Athens' stark Averoff prison, where she is serving a ten-month sentence for crossing into Greece from Turkey with 38 Ibs. of hash. Nearly all of the amateur smugglers are under 30, but surprisingly few are drifters or dropouts. One of three young Americans who have been cooling their heels in Beirut's Asfourieh Prison Hospital since they were arrested on smuggling charges last August is Harvard Sophomore Steven Miller, 21, a grandson of a former dean of the Harvard Divinity School.

Although they are generally long on education (and long on hair), the young tourists are strictly bush-league smugglers. Says Agent Cusack: "They use methods that would make a professional pusher blush--putting the stuff in the mail or hiding it under the back seat of a car." In Algeciras, Spanish customs officers last year arrested 64 Americans as they stepped off the ferry from Morocco. If Moroccan dope peddlers have not already fingered the Americans in advance, Spanish agents have little trouble picking out probable smugglers. The giveaways: hippy dress ("a long or loose anything"), and talkative over-friendliness.

At Beirut International Airport, customs men have trained dogs to sniff out drugs hidden in luggage. In Tashkent, a woman Soviet agent with a superb olfactory sense sniffed hash carried by three young Americans, who were flying via Aeroflot from Afghanistan to Finland. Two are still serving time in the infamous Potma labor camp southeast of Moscow.

Series of Horrors. Often the youthful smugglers are suckers from the start. In Lebanon, tourist guides around Baalbek's famous Roman ruins sidle up to adventurous-looking American kids and sell them not only cheap hash but identical cheap cardboard tourist suitcases to carry it in. Airport customs officials are so familiar with the suitcases that they almost yawn as they arrest the tourists who show up with them.

Arrest is only the first of a series of horrors. Beyond helping young smugglers to get a reputable lawyer, U.S. consuls can only ensure that Americans get the same treatment as the local nationals do--which is often a far cry from U.S. standards. Bail is unknown in many countries, and there are long waits in crowded prisons before cases come to trial. Beirut's notorious Sands prison, where seven Americans are currently awaiting trial, is filled with rats, homosexuals and filth.

American parents of jailed students are invariably flabbergasted at how little they can do to ease their cases. Ronald Lee Emmons, 22, a black Chicagoan and a former basketball player at the University of Illinois, was picked up in Istanbul for possession of two kilos of hash. Despite the efforts of his mother, he waited 13 months in Istanbul's Sagmalcilar prison before his case came to trial last February. He was sentenced to five years in jail, where all he can look forward to are the letters, books, money and extra food that U.S. Consul Douglas Heck brings on his twice-monthly visits. As a U.S. consular official in Lebanon confesses: "The truth is we simply can't do any more." The only American ever to be sprung from a Lebanese prison by executive clemency was a Los Angeles youth who was found to have terminal cancer. He was allowed to go home to die.

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