A Losing Battle

By ELAINE SHANNON WASHINGTON

Remember the war on drugs? George Bush waving a plastic bag of crack bought across the street from the White House during a nationally televised speech? The Pentagon planning to station an aircraft carrier off the coast of Colombia to monitor suspected drug smugglers? Candidates for political office proffering urine samples and daring their opponents to do the same? The appointment of combative William J. Bennett as the nation's first drug czar, a post from which he would coordinate an all-out assault on a menace that seemed to threaten the very survival of the U.S.?

Though those events now seem like relics of a long-distant past, they all occurred in the past two years. Since last summer, however, the war on drugs has become almost an afterthought. Part of the reason is simply that public concern has been diverted by the Persian Gulf crisis and fears of a recession. But there is another sign of the issue's decline: though he sounded a call to arms soon after taking office, the President too has turned his attention elsewhere.

In recent months confident assertions that the U.S. is making great strides in kicking the habit have become conventional wisdom in the drug war's high command. When he resigned as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy three weeks ago, Bennett proclaimed that success, while not yet achieved, was in sight. He contended that his original goal of cutting drug use in half by 1999 could be achieved five years sooner if the federal, state and local governments maintain their current efforts.

Bennett's hopeful forecast was shared by the President, who declared earlier this month, "We're on the road to victory." Federal surveys found that "casual" consumption of cocaine and marijuana had fallen, as had emergency-room admissions and deaths from drug overdoses. Federal agents believe cocaine prices have risen because of the pressure international police operations are putting on suppliers.

But how much of the optimistic talk emanating from Washington is warranted and how much of it is hype from an Administration and Congress eager to justify the expenditure of billions of dollars at a time of budget crunches, rising taxes and widespread anger at government? Those on the front line of the war on drugs -- the beleaguered law-enforcement officers, the overworked drug counselors, the terrified residents of crack-infested neighborhoods -- are far from positive that the "war" is going all that well.

What those on the front line fear most is that Washington is preparing to declare victory and walk away from a battle that it is not winning, but was not serious about waging in the first place. Some critics charge such a turnabout is conceivable only because drug abuse, which continues to rage in poor ghetto areas, has sharply declined within the white middle class. If the Federal Government were to withdraw from the field, it would not be for the first time. In 1973 Richard Nixon announced that the U.S. had "turned the corner on drug addiction." The federal antidrug effort was allowed to shrivel even as Colombia's "cocaine cowboys" were establishing their first beachhead in Miami. Some battlefield reports from the latest round:

Boston. Police are barely holding their own against drug dealers, and a $20 "blow" of crack is still easy to find. "The Federal Government is giving us more lip support than financial support," says William Celester, Boston police commander in Roxbury, Boston's toughest neighborhood. "People tend to believe that if you don't hear about the drug problem, it is somehow subsiding," says Don Muhammad, a minister for the Nation of Islam in Roxbury. "I feel it's going to escalate because of the economy. More people are going to resort to unethical and illegal means of earning a living."

Starr County, Texas. If drug demand is down, says Fred Ball, Drug Enforcement Administration special agent, the smugglers don't seem to know. Starr, along with two neighboring mesquite-covered counties along the Mexican border, has become known as Little Colombia because of high-profile drug smuggling since the federal crackdown in Florida. Officially designated as one of the nation's poorest regions, the area is basking in a cocaine-driven economic boom that has helped fuel a surge in bank deposits. Lavish homes -- paid for in cash -- have been built fronting the Rio Grande, and luxury cars equipped with cellular telephones dot the unpaved streets of such towns as Roma and Rio Grande City. Hard-pressed lawmen fear that they can do no more than hold the line against the traffickers.

"The best we can do is stick our finger in the hole," says Terry Bowers, a supervisor with the narcotics division of the department of public safety. "We will never be a match for the drug dealers as long as they have unlimited funds and we have to fight budget wars."

Detroit. Dr. Padraic Sweeny, vice chief of emergency services for Detroit Receiving Hospital, is seeing fewer overdoses but more drug-related shootings, stabbings and assaults as street dealers fight over fewer customers. The saddest casualties are children. "We have a whole generation of human beings within this urban area who could be so productive and helpful to humanity but are being lost," says Sweeny. "We have kids 13 and 14 years old who are as hardened as anyone in a penitentiary. Look into their eyes, and you see these cold blank stares, void of most moral values. The drug trade has shown them that in a little time they can make a lot of money, and they've accepted the violence that goes with it."

Miami. In one of the nation's key drug-smuggling cities, crack addicts are stealing any piece of metal they can to sell for scrap, from awnings to aluminum stepladders. Along State Road 112, only 2% of the lights work, because thieves have ripped off the copper wiring. At one point, Florida had 5,800 addicts begging to get into treatment programs. The number this autumn fell to under 2,000. But experts say that is because many of those who want help most have despaired of getting it and gone back to the street.

Los Angeles. Police continue to make drug arrests at a rate of 60,000 a year, roughly the same as in 1988 and 1989. There would be far more if the jails, courts and parole system were not already strained to the breaking point. A 1989 seizure of cocaine at a warehouse in the San Fernando Valley's Sylmar illustrates the size of the problem. Though 21 tons of coke were confiscated, records showed that at least 55 tons, worth $1.1 billion, had passed through the warehouse in the previous three months. According to Deputy Chief of Police Glenn Levant, the raid "made little if any impact on the availability of cocaine that we have been able to measure. There was a big jump in wholesale prices after Sylmar, but in the long term the street price and purity of cocaine remained essentially constant. It didn't make a dent."

Such reports underscore a dismaying fact: for nearly every item of good news on the drug front, there is at least one bad-news bulletin. While the U.S. has made significant progress in curbing casual drug use, it has made far less headway on the problems that most trouble the public, hard-core addiction and drug-related violence. Last year the National Institute on Drug Abuse estimated that the number of current users of illegal drugs had fallen to 14.5 million from 23 million in 1985. But while there was a dramatic decrease in the number of occasional users, the number of people who used drugs weekly or daily (292,000 in 1988 vs. 246,000 in 1985) had escalated as addiction to crack soared in some mainly poor and minority areas. Despite the passage of tough antidrug laws and police dragnets, street crime, much of it drug- related, continues to surge. The nation's violent-crime rate rose 10% in the first six months of 1990. Murders were up 8% in the first six months of the year and armed robbery rose 9%.

Nor, despite increasing vigilance on its borders, has the U.S. been able to stanch the flow of drug imports. Federal drug agents are making impressive cases, last year seizing almost 70 tons of cocaine and more than $1 billion worth of cash and assets -- roughly double the Drug Enforcement Administration's 1990 budget of $549 million. A relentless Colombian government campaign has disrupted the Medellin cocaine cartel's refining and transportation operations.

But rival cocaine refiners in Cali and elsewhere have stepped in to fill the void. Raw coca from Bolivia and Peru is plentiful and will remain so. Leaders of the Andean governments have rejected U.S. State Department plans for wholesale eradication, arguing that such an approach would starve and radicalize hundreds of thousands of peasants for whom coca leaves are a valuable cash crop. Moreover, heroin is making a frightening comeback in some areas. Thanks to bumper crops of opium in insurgent-controlled northeastern Burma, Southeast Asian heroin traffickers are flooding New York and New Jersey with moderately priced, high-quality "China White."

According to the DEA, wholesale prices have risen across the nation. But it is not clear whether the increases reflect actual supply shortages or price gouging by traffickers playing on consumer fears. Los Angeles defense attorney David Kenner, who represents many alleged traffickers, maintains that "all the interdiction efforts do is keep profit margins high for the cartels." Robert Bonner, head of the DEA, warns against complacency: "There have been some rays of hope, but I'm not sure we are at the end of the beginning. I think we are still at the beginning."

The U.S. is trying to plug the holes on the Mexican border with radar balloons, aircraft equipped with infrared sensors and ground-implanted motion sensors. But vast stretches of badlands are not constantly under guard. The traffickers, in turn, have proved endlessly inventive. On May 17, Customs agents discovered a 250-ft.-long, 5-ft.-wide concrete-and-steel reinforced tunnel that ran 35 ft. under the border, between a construction-supply warehouse in Douglas, Ariz., and a house in Agua Prieta, Mexico. Agents figure virtually all of Arizona's cocaine supply moved for a time via the passage.

Bush insists that despite the nation's preoccupation with the gulf and the economy, "my Administration will remain on the front lines until this scourge is licked for good, block by block, school by school, child by child. We will take back the streets, and we will never surrender." But political pros wonder how long the President, whose approval ratings have dropped more than 20 points since August, will put his political prestige on the line by embracing a problem of such daunting complexity and intractability. In the 1992 presidential election, Democrats are expected to try to nail Bush, fairly or not, as the man who "lost" the war on drugs.

Bennett's successor is expected to be Florida Governor Bob Martinez, 55, who was defeated in his bid for a second term. The Republican Governor is known more for a hard-line approach to law enforcement than for progress in education and treatment.

Martinez will inherit an effort that has enjoyed some limited successes. Bennett's supporters credit the drug czar with shaping the national debate on drugs into a more mature and less hysterical discussion. He considers the fact that drugs did not figure in most political races this year as a plus because "it means the issue is not a political football."

To his credit, Bennett did not fashion a strategy that depended on what he calls "magic bullets." He called for putting steady pressure on every conceivable point, from interdiction abroad to stepped up domestic police work to prevention. His approach won bipartisan support in Congress, which last month voted a record $10.4 billion for federal antidrug programs in the current fiscal year. Bennett and congressional Democrats pushed for dramatic increases, to $2.7 billion, in federal spending for drug treatment and education.

But, as Bennett has warned, the war against drugs cannot be won by Washington alone. "If people don't do the right things in their communities," he says, "it's not going to get better, no matter what the Federal Government does." Increased federal funding for treatment has been disappointingly slow to move down to the people who need it. In many cases federal grants have been held up until state legislatures approve new treatment programs and provide matching funds. Services for poor addicts are particularly strained. It may be years before counseling is available to every impoverished drug user who needs and wants it.

The result is that, in all too many instances, police crackdowns remain the most visible evidence that the nation is at war on drugs. Highly publicized police activity in ghettos and barrios has fed the myth that drug abuse is principally a problem of the black and Hispanic underclass. But federal surveys show that 69% of all cocaine users are white, and that two-thirds of all drug users hold jobs. The cocaine epidemic started in the upper middle class in the mid-1970s. It spread to the poor only in the past four years, when dealers started hawking a Caribbean import called crack (or rock) that sold for $10 or $20 a vial, vs. $50 to $100 for a gram of cocaine powder.

Dr. David F. Musto, a psychiatrist and historian at Yale Shool of Medicine, warns that the myth of drugs as mainly a ghetto habit has an insidious appeal to other Americans: "It allows us to ascribe all the profound social problems of the inner city to one thing -- drugs. A lot of people would add, They've brought it on themselves. That lets the rest of us off the hook, free to ignore the deeper problems of unemployment and lack of education." Moreover, says Musto, by pretending that most addicts are dark-skinned and destitute, middle-class Americans can avoid responsibility for confronting the reality of drug abuse among their own families and friends.

Still, the fact remains that the most violent drug dealers inhabit underclass areas, which are not only the source of many customers but are also short on police protection. Many residents of such communities plead for additional police patrols. Says Reggie Walton, a former District of Columbia Superior Court judge who now serves as associate director of the drug czar's office: "I don't want to see people of color disproportionately brought into the criminal-justice system, but the sad reality is that much of the conduct that outrages the citizenry is open-air markets and crack houses, blatantly out in the open. What are the police supposed to do? Turn a deaf ear and a closed eye and walk away? Most people who live in poor communities are decent and have the same right to protection as everybody else."

Recognizing that the war on drugs has singled out the poor, Bennett has urged state and federal authorities to come down harder on middle-class users by suspending driver's and occupational licenses, sending convicted users to boot camp, insisting on drug testing for government contractors. He considers "casual" drug users "carriers" who are even more infectious than addicts because they suggest to young people "that you can do drugs and be O.K." Last year Congress approved Bennett-backed legislation requiring universities that receive federal aid to proscribe drug use and punish offenders.

Ultimately the solution to the drug crisis is to dry up demand. The conventional wisdom is that demand reduction means prevention, which in turn means education. Which means what, exactly? If it were simply a matter of conveying scientifically accurate information on posters and public-service announcements about the dangers of drug use, the national habit would already / be history. If it were a matter of poverty, the answer would be better schools and more opportunity. Eliminating poverty is a moral imperative that should need no additional justification. But the vast majority of drug users are not desperately poor; many in fact are fabulously wealthy. Their thirst for drugs springs from some other source.

The war on drugs is really a battle for hearts and minds, and not merely an issue for police and courts and jails. So far, the antidrug offensive's main accomplishment has been to dissuade some experimenters and weekend users from digging themselves in deeper. The effort has not reached millions of people so bereft of hope that they are willing to risk everything they have, or will ever have, for a few moments of oblivion.

If Washington were really serious about alleviating the drug problem, state and local governments would establish urgent projects to find and deal with addicted mothers of young children and pregnant drug users. Treatment would be made available promptly to every person who wanted it. Federal and state governments would build enough jails, with humane conditions for prisoners, so that judges would no longer feel obliged to turn traffickers out on the streets. There would be many more judges and probation officers to make sure that criminals did their time and stayed clean afterward. U.S. diplomats would no longer cover up for corrupt officials in "friendly" nations. Foreign leaders committed to suppressing drug production would be rewarded with lowered U.S. trade barriers for legitimate exports and economic aid to help peasant farmers switch from coca to legitimate crops.

Such steps would cost additional tens of billions of dollars and take many years to achieve significant results. Implementing them would also require a new kind of leadership in Washington, one that is patient enough to pursue a steady and determined policy instead of gyrating from cries of alarm to premature claims of success.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Sources: FBI Uniform Crime Reports, DEA}]TIME Chart by Steve Hart

CAPTION: ARRESTS

PRICE of cocaine

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Miami, Deborah Fowler/Houston and Michael McBride/Detroit