Drug Nets

Stepping up the attack

Sometimes it seems that success fathers its own problems. In its campaign to hook smuggled drugs, the Reagan Administration has claimed some impressive catches: since establishing a regional interdiction center in South Florida in March 1982, it says that cocaine and marijuana seizures there are up 54% and 23% respectively, drug arrests have risen by 27%, and the street value of intercepted dope amounts to around $5 billion. Smugglers, however, have risen to the challenge by trafficking in smaller, harder-to-detect loads and by moving some off-loading operations to other places, including California and the Atlantic Coast as far north as Nova Scotia.

To counterattack, Vice President George Bush, in a speech on Friday, announced the creation of five new regional interdiction centers that will be modeled on the South Florida experience. Based in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, El Paso and Long Beach, Calif., each new office will be assigned representatives from all the major military and intelligence bodies and will make use of equipment from other agencies. Explained one Bush aide: "The military has to go on training missions anyway. If we know of a trouble spot, why not ask the Air Force to fly a plane with radar to that spot?"

All of this coordinated activity comes none too soon in the view of the General Accounting Office (GAO). Last week it issued an 88-page report charging that despite a tripling of federal resources to $278 million over six years, only 16% of the marijuana and less than 10% of the other illegal drugs entering the country were seized. It further observed that military assistance is necessarily limited by costs, other commitments and national security considerations. Above all, the GAO urged the creation of a single "drug czar" post to coordinate sometimes inefficient and even counterproductive drug-busting efforts by the various agencies involved.

Administration officials complained that the report, mostly covering the period between 1977 and September 1982, ignored recent developments, and pointed out that there is already an emphasis on closer cooperation. Each of the newly established offices will have a full-time coordinator under the overall command of the Vice President's staff. Said Bush last Friday: "We in the Administration are not unaware of the difficulty of our task. But our efforts are both innovative and substantial." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.