‘Marijuana of the ‘80s’ : Cocaine--a Fact of Life in America

Panamanian diplomat Roberto Leyton took his family to the Fourth of July celebration near the Washington Monument last summer for fireworks and the Beach Boys concert, but he found a lot more.

“I couldn’t believe what I saw,” he said. “Everybody consuming drugs in front of the police, doing all type of stuff. People even came to our group and offered us drugs for us to give them ice.”

For Leyton, who is Panama’s special envoy to the United States on drug matters and its ambassador to the Organization of American States, the incident illustrates a profound strategic weakness in the U.S. war against cocaine trafficking.

“In this country,” he said, “anybody can carry cocaine and nothing happens to them. There’s no serious enforcement on the consumer.”

Traditionally, law enforcement authorities have considered it more efficient to go after major dealers than to sweep up the multitude of users. As Leyton sees it, however, profits are so high and the Latin American nations that produce cocaine are so poor that choking off the supply is virtually impossible if U.S. demand is allowed to run unchecked.

Not all experts agree with Leyton’s assessment of the problem, but there is one thing that almost everyone involved is eventually forced to concede: Despite a five-year crusade in which the Reagan Administration has poured unprecedented amounts of money, manpower and sophisticated equipment into the war against cocaine, the addictive and potentially deadly white powder is more plentiful, cheaper to buy and more widely used today than it was before the current crusade began.

‘Falling Out of the Sky’

“It’s the marijuana of the ‘80s,” said Andrew Fenrich, spokesman in New York for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. “The stuff is falling out of the sky.”

Indeed, cocaine has become such a fact of American life that it is estimated that 5,000 people try it for the first time every day.

At least 100 tons of cocaine will slip past U.S. watchdogs this year, enough to let 5 million to 10 million Americans use the drug at least once a month, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. And it is not just users who can expect to go unpunished.

The evidence is that despite the Reagan Administration’s effort, including its mobilizing of the Navy and the Air Force to interdict smugglers, the other links in the cocaine chain--the producer, the smuggler and the dealer--also continue to thrive.

Dozens of interviews with government policy-makers, drug enforcement agents, drug addiction experts and drug addicts paint a discouraging picture:

--Cocaine smuggling is nearly impossible to stop. In the almost-pure form in which it is smuggled, the drug is so concentrated that this year’s supply for the entire United States could be carried by half a dozen big trucks. Thus, even major shipments can be relatively small, and authorities see little hope of sealing some 12,000 miles of land and sea border tight enough to throttle the supply.

“If you built a 12-foot wall around the United States,” Robert Stutman, agent in charge of the DEA’s New York state office, said with a sigh, “it would take a dope peddler about 60 seconds to realize he only needs a 13-foot ladder.”

--The Latin American nations that produce virtually the entire American supply of cocaine are all too aware that the United States has failed to take forceful steps to block the spread of drugs domestically, and those nations have balked at bearing the whole burden themselves, especially since it is a dangerous task that often pits the local government against its own citizens.

Leyton, for one, said Panamanian authorities are not going to risk their lives to intercept cocaine on its way to the United States when U.S. officials frequently allow drug dealing to go unpunished.

--The crackdown on cocaine dealers has led to some sensational arrests. Yet for each trafficker arrested, enforcement officials concede, several are standing in line to take his place. The House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control estimates annual U.S. sales of cocaine at $60 billion to $70 billion, and the lure of all that money has proved irresistible.

--Using cocaine is even less risky than smuggling or selling it. First offenders typically serve no time in jail; in California, for example, those arrested for the first time for using cocaine serve a maximum of three years, but most get probation and mandatory counseling.

Given that enforcement record, it is not surprising that the amount of cocaine expected to be smuggled into the United States this year is four times the amount that slipped through in 1980.

Price Driven Down

The soaring supply has driven down the price of a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of the white powder from $50,000 wholesale several years ago to as little as $35,000 in many cities today, according to the DEA. Ronald Siegel, a psycho-pharmacologist at the UCLA medical school, said cocaine paste--increasingly popular in South America to lace cigarettes--can be sold for “pennies a hit.”

“If the price of cocaine remains low or drops even lower and the purity remains high or goes even higher, this society may experience an epidemic of cocaine use without historical equal in terms of magnitude and coverage,” the National Institute on Drug Abuse warned in a recent report.

Cocaine’s cost to the U.S. economy is already enormous: $100 billion a year in lost productivity, crime and even death, according to the House Narcotics Committee. And the social costs--prostitution, teen-age drug addiction, lost jobs--are incalculable.

Costs Certain to Rise

Those costs are almost certain to rise. Given the almost endless opportunities for dealing and the astronomical scale of its profits, the cocaine trade is one of the best positioned and most modern industries in the nation.

John O’Neill, agent in charge of the DEA’s Denver office, says modern techniques for smuggling cocaine into the United States “almost totally defy prevention without advance information. You have so many remote areas, you could land a plane and park it on a road for four days and nobody would ever see it.”

And convicted smuggler Barry Seal, a former commercial airline pilot who flew 100 illegal drug missions in seven years, told the President’s Commission on Organized Crime that the cartel he worked for was “as professional as any Fortune 500 company.”

Displaying some of the sophisticated communications equipment he used on his drug runs, Seal said, “I don’t believe there’s any paramilitary group better equipped than my former associates.”

‘Cash Moves People’

Seal, who claimed he once spent $200,000 on smuggling equipment during a one-day shopping spree in Miami, said his former employer owned many airstrips and had foreign government officials under his control. “We never failed to get what we wanted,” he said, “because cash moves people.”

In 1981, with the Reagan Administration’s support, Congress opened the way for expanded military involvement in civilian drug enforcement. Army Lt. Gen. Dean Tice, director of the Defense Department’s Task Force on Drug Enforcement, told a House Judiciary subcommittee in April that the four military branches had spent millions of dollars and were “making significant contributions to the anti-drug effort.”

Tice detailed a joint military exercise, launched last year with the Customs Service and the DEA and code-named Operation Hat Trick, in which an armada steamed into waters off Colombia and seized part of the U.S.-bound fall drug harvest: 600,000 pounds of marijuana and 6,200 pounds of cocaine.

More Ambitious Drive

An even more ambitious Hat Trick II is now under way with the cooperation of Colombia, Panama, Belize and Jamaica. Warships, aircraft and ground patrols are seeking to shut down the flow of cocaine, marijuana and other drugs in an operation that one Pentagon official described as “massive.”

But despite such efforts, smuggling remains rampant. The General Accounting Office, a nonpartisan congressional watchdog agency, reported in July that the Administration’s efforts “fell far short of what is needed to substantially reduce the flow of drugs into the country.”

Rep. Glenn English (D-Okla.), chairman of the Government Operations subcommittee with responsibility for overseeing the government’s anti-drug effort, said in an interview, “You could almost fly the Rayburn Building across the border and not get detected.”

The Rayburn Building, the congressional office building where English’s subcommittee has its headquarters, is a massive marble and granite structure covering an entire city block.

Highest Priority: Cocaine

The National Narcotics Border Interdiction System, headed by Vice President George Bush, coordinates the Administration’s multi-agency assault on drug smuggling, with cocaine its highest priority. Its efforts to crack down on drug traffickers are coordinated by 13 regional drug enforcement task forces, reporting to Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III.

Each task force pools the resources of seven federal agencies and state and local law enforcement officials.

The task forces, which focus on high-level traffickers, have leaned heavily on recently enacted laws that make possible more seizures of property acquired through drug trafficking and stiffer fines for banks that fail to report international cash transactions of $10,000 or more, a size that frequently means drug money is involved.

Meese said recently that the task force program has proved “extremely successful, accomplishing a great deal in the short period of its existence.” Now beginning their fourth year, the task forces have generated 2,700 convictions of drug traffickers and have cost traffickers $219 million in fines and seized drugs, Meese said.

2,200 Agents Nationwide

Most of the manpower for the campaign against cocaine comes from the DEA, an arm of the Justice Department that deploys 2,200 agents nationwide and another 195 in 41 foreign countries. The DEA was responsible for seizing most of the 20,000 pounds of cocaine confiscated by federal agencies in the first six months of this year, more than total seizures in all of 1981 and 1982. The year-end total will almost surely surpass last year’s 25,289 pounds.

“We’re on the offensive rather than the defensive,” DEA Administrator John Lawn, a former prep school basketball coach, declared in an interview, although even the Administration concedes that for every pound of cocaine seized in the first half of this year, another five pounds or so found their way to American users.

Drug enforcement is one of the few domestic activities whose budgets have grown under the Reagan Administration. The GAO says the federal government spent $1.2 billion on drug enforcement in fiscal 1985, up from $708 million when President Reagan took office in 1981.

Public, Private Comments

Despite the increased funds for drug enforcement, English contends that the Administration has failed to ask Congress for sufficient resources to get the job done. Administration officials, he complained, “tell you publicly that they’re getting enough money, then tell you privately they can’t possibly do the job.”

Coordinating the federal anti-drug drive with state and local enforcement remains a major problem because each agency frequently wants to take credit for high-profile cocaine busts. Johnny Phelps, chief of the cocaine investigations section of the DEA, dismissed such differences as rare “personality conflicts,” but one California DEA agent recalled a major cocaine seizure in which “the biggest hassle was whose case it was.”

Coordination is difficult enough at the federal level alone. Partly in an effort to curb rivalry between the DEA and the FBI, the Reagan Administration has filled the top levels of the DEA from the ranks of the FBI and ordered the DEA administrator to report to the FBI director.

But rivalries still exist on the street, where DEA agents grumble that their FBI counterparts lack “street smarts” and FBI agents trained in sophisticated crime-fighting techniques sometimes look down on the DEA.

Frustrated by Obstacles

Many U.S. drug experts, frustrated by the obstacles to breaking the cocaine chain in the United States, have begun directing their fire on the foreign countries that grow the coca plants whose leaves are processed into cocaine.

Dr. Arnold Washton, a co-founder of the national cocaine hot line (800-COCAINE), called it “an outrage for (producing countries) to take our hard-earned money with one hand, while shoving cocaine under our noses with the other.”

Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, and Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.) are co-sponsoring legislation to deny most-favored-nation trading status to countries the President finds uncooperative in the cocaine war.

Rangel has also urged President Reagan to recall his ambassadors from drug-producing countries. He complained about what he sees as “the lack of priority the State Department attaches to international narcotics control.”

1 Job Easier Than Other

At the State Department, Jon Thomas, assistant secretary for international narcotics matters, replied that “sitting up on Capitol Hill in an air-conditioned hearing room” is much easier than his job of recommending diplomatic action to press the war against cocaine.

Thomas praised Colombia for its coca eradication efforts and added, “There has been no government that has not gone through some degree of effort” to eliminate cocaine production. “I don’t care if they can’t eradicate one coca bush,” he said, “if they’re willing to do so but can’t fight their way into the territory,” which often is remote and heavily guarded.

The United States provides $50 million annually to 15 drug-producing countries for eradication, training and drug awareness programs.

Beyond that, the President has the authority to cut off foreign aid to countries that do not cooperate with U.S. anti-drug efforts. No President has ever been done so, and Administration officials argue that Congress, too, can stop foreign aid for the same reason and has likewise taken no action.

But earlier this year, Congress required cuts in military and developmental aid to Peru and Bolivia, two major sources of cocaine production and trafficking, unless the President certifies that they are meeting cocaine eradication targets.

Need for Education

If government officials have learned one lesson from their halting efforts to combat international cocaine trafficking, it is that law enforcement alone cannot keep the drug from being used by millions of Americans. They increasingly stress the need to educate the public about the dangers of the potentially deadly white powder.

“The orchestra has to play together--you have to do it all,” said John Cusack, chief of staff of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. “You have to inform people of the dangers, and you have to deny the availability of the substance.”

The anti-drug campaign is being carried out on television and radio, in newspapers and magazines and pamphlets and by schools and churches and community agencies. Athletes, movie stars and even DEA agents spread the word: Cocaine is not glamorous, it is powerfully addictive, it can cause seizures, convulsions, heart attacks, even death.

Cusack calls the Administration’s contribution to the education campaign, which is largely privately financed, “good public relations” but little more. Although the Administration has cited education as a primary weapon against drugs, Cusack said, it has cut funds for drug education programs from $404 million in fiscal 1981 to $253 million in fiscal 1985. Administration officials respond that private, state and local sources of education funds are available.

Related story, Page 22.