COCAINE: THE ENDLESS WAR : Big Busts Haven’t Shut Down the County’s Cocaine Pipeline

Orange County, which almost overnight found itself straddling America’s newest cocaine pipeline, is waging a war on drugs it may never win.

It is a war involving some of the most powerful drug cartels of South America, which have chosen to convert Southern California into a national distribution center for millions of dollars worth of cocaine, heroin and marijuana.

Orange County’s weapon against the drug barons is the Regional Narcotics Suppression Program, a law enforcement task force bringing together 17 local and federal agencies. Created in January, 1987, it has enjoyed resounding success, seen most recently in the seizure of $5.2 million in cash--the second largest cash seizure in U.S. history.

But despite a series of headline-grabbing busts that give the illusion of progress, experts say cocaine in the county is more abundant and cheaper than ever before.

“It is so alarming, so frustrating because the enforcement effort has never been better, never been so sophisticated,” said Ray Tripicchio, director of the Drug Enforcement Administration office in Santa Ana. “The penalties are harsher, the laws working for us are much better than ever, the education effort is better, but with all this you still have this incredible problem.

“The whole country is inundated with cocaine,” he continued. “It scares me to think how much is in the four counties of Orange, San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino.”

As Orange County’s appetite for cocaine increases, so does the drug’s toll on lives. Consider these statistics:

- Cocaine and heroin use killed 184 people in Orange County last year, up from 64 the year before. “It’s very obvious the numbers are on the rise. It’s out of control,” said James D. Beisner, chief deputy coroner.

- The wait to enter county-run treatment and rehabilitation programs ranges up to almost a year. Yet financing for drug treatment programs here and nationwide has languished just as the number of cocaine casualties has soared.

- The number of patients entering government-funded treatment programs here for cocaine abuse has jumped threefold since 1983.

Simple geography may go a long way in explaining what has happened and why.

Southern California, long a favored entry point for marijuana and heroin smuggled up through the old “Mexican pipeline,” is now rapidly gaining on Florida as the country’s major shipment route for Colombian cocaine, according to the DEA.

Five years ago, almost every kilo of cocaine smuggled into the United States was flown or shipped by boat directly into Florida from Colombia.

Mexican Connection

But today, federal authorities estimate that at least a third of the more than 150 tons of cocaine entering the United States now comes up through Mexico, most of it into Southern California along the same networks that were used to smuggle in Mexican black tar heroin.

And as this cocaine makes its way up the Southern California coast, experts say more and more is being stored and distributed in suburban counties like Orange, where there is easy access to airports, seaports and a large Latino population into which the smugglers can disappear.

Orange County sits in the middle of this booming trade. More and more, members of the county strike force are uncovering record amounts of cocaine and heroin stashed in garages, attics and closets from Seal Beach south to San Clemente.

“It really is amazing,” said Capt. Tim Simon, head of the task force. “You never know where it will turn up next. In Fullerton? Huntington Beach? Down the street from where you live in Mission Viejo? It seems to be all over.”

“We’re a major hub serving the rest of the country,” added Roger Guevara, a DEA spokesman in Los Angeles. “We’re no longer just a consumer. We’re in the import and export business.”

In late 1986, Sheriff-Coroner Brad Gates met with U.S. Atty. Robert Bonner in Los Angeles to discuss how Orange County should confront the influx of Colombian cocaine traffickers.

Looking back, Gates said he was concerned because “of the overwhelming evidence of deaths from cocaine overdoses. We had a real problem--with the deaths and the magnitude of the problem and our inability to work the cases.”

While most city police departments and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department had narcotics investigators, Gates said it was clear that a unified and more sophisticated approach was needed to confront what everyone agreed was a growing problem that was only going to get worse.

After talking to Bonner, Gates began meeting with municipal police chiefs and representatives of the FBI and DEA to discuss a regional anti-narcotics effort. Simon, the Sheriff’s Department investigator who heads the task force, was asked to come up with a budget and proposal for a countywide narcotics strike force team.

Florida Model

The idea was to get most, if not all, of the 26 cities in Orange County to band together with the Sheriff’s Department and the federal agencies to fund and coordinate the task force’s activities.

The strategy was modeled on the South Florida Task Force, organized in 1982 as the first regional anti-drug effort to coordinate the overlapping efforts of different crime-fighting agencies. What came out of discussions among Gates and the various city police chiefs was the jointly manned and funded Regional Narcotics Suppression Program.

Each agency was to allot at least one agent to the task force, donating his time, salary and a vehicle. About 30 agents are now divided into three strike force teams.

Under federal law, money confiscated in drug raids is returned to the local agencies based on a formula of how many people each agency contributes to the task force.

The task force is composed of agents from the FBI, DEA, Customs Service, Internal Revenue Service, Sheriff’s Department and 12 local cities: Santa Ana, Anaheim, Costa Mesa, Newport Beach, San Clemente, Tustin, Garden Grove, Westminster, Placentia, Fullerton, Huntington Beach and Laguna Beach.

Of the dozen Orange County police departments that did not join the task force, Gates said most were reluctant to free an agent when they were already strapped for officers.

“I think it’s dollars, budgets, that is keeping them out,” he said.

The success of the program astounded even the task force organizers.

“We never envisioned this kind of success,” said Gates, an unabashed cheerleader for the program.

Little Has Changed

But while the task force approach in other areas of the country has also led to record drug seizures and arrests, some experts say little has changed. The domestic drug market remains swamped with cocaine.

“We’re not putting a dent in it,” said the DEA’s Tripicchio. “The Colombians with this cocaine have flooded the country. Nothing’s affecting it at all.”

The Florida experience offers a dramatic case in point.

Just as hundreds of federal agents in the task force were deployed in Miami, cocaine imports skyrocketed. In 1982, during the first year of the task force, government agents in the Florida region seized some 3 tons of cocaine. By 1987, the figure had jumped to 36 tons.

But for every ton authorities intercept, an additional 8 or 9 tons slip through, the DEA concedes. To satisfy America’s booming appetite for cocaine, smugglers simply ship more of the drug, writing off the seized tons as business losses.

Police resources committed to the war have been enormous and are growing.

Since 1981, the federal government has spent more than $11 billion enforcing U.S. drug laws, according to the National Drug Policy Board. That amounts to roughly double Colombia’s 1985 national budget, supplier for 80% of the cocaine in this country.

By comparison, total federal spending over the same period on treatment and prevention programs was around $3 billion.

Cheaper, Purer

A look at arrest and drug seizure figures would suggest that this money has paid large dividends. But the numbers that count--cost and purity of cocaine--tell a story of failure.

As supply dwindles, so the traditional enforcement theory went, the cost of cocaine should increase and its purity should drop. But the numbers are moving in the opposite direction.

A kilogram of cocaine that fetched $65,000 from a smuggler in 1981 now sells wholesale for less than $15,000 in Orange County. With prices depressed, competing street dealers are selling cocaine in increasingly stronger doses--up to triple the purity of 1981.

Gates himself admits that it is impossible “to solve this problem from the enforcement angle. We will never totally solve the problem of narcotics use. We have to convince people that it kills you.”

Many academic experts and drug treatment and prevention specialists have long criticized the country’s emphasis on enforcement as an incomplete approach to battling drug abuse.

“Supply reduction must be linked to demand reduction,” says DEA Chief John C. Lawn. “To reduce supply alone cannot of itself change the appetite of our citizens for drugs.”

Said William Norris, chief federal narcotics prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami: “You cannot confuse effective law enforcement with solving the drug abuse problem. Ultimately it will be public attitudes and perceptions that will have an impact. I don’t know if law enforcement ever in history has been able to stop drug abuse.”

International smugglers and local dealers rely on compulsive users--the “bubble of abuse”--for the bulk of their business. This is the core of the demand that Lawn, Gates and other experts say must be reduced if Orange County and the country are ever to win the war on drugs.

These are the people, mostly in their late 20s to 40s, who started regularly using cocaine at the height of its 1970s glamour. At the time, its dangers were largely unknown. It was expensive and kept elite company, and its health risks received scant press scrutiny.

Many people turned to the newly fashionable drug unaware of its perils. Unlike marijuana, cocaine is a drug that can quickly lead to a costly addiction that is difficult and painful to kick.

In one experiment, monkeys allowed to self-inject a variety of chemical substances, including cocaine, went on binges with all of the drugs. But only with cocaine did their use become so compulsive that they reached lethal doses and died.

Use Slowed

Ironically, as new billions of dollars were pumped into enforcement in the early 1980s, the number of new users entering this bubble slowed abruptly.

The number of current users--defined as people who say they have used cocaine in the past 30 days--tripled between 1977 and 1979, to 4.3 million, according to federal estimates. But by 1985, the most recent figures available, the number had only edged up to 5.8 million.

At the same time, according to county and federal budget figures, spending in Orange County and nationwide on government drug treatment programs targeted to help the compulsive users was either cut or did not increase.

More drug enforcement spending did not prevent the bubble from buying its cocaine, said Peter Reuter, a Washington-based economist who has studied drug enforcement. “What is the irony here?” he asked. “You can’t stop people who are committed users from getting their drug.”

Meanwhile, cocaine-related emergency room visits and drug deaths began to climb.

Nationally, cocaine use was linked to 812 deaths and 15,116 emergency room visits in 1986, more than a tenfold increase from 1977, according to annual surveys of 26 metropolitan areas by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

“Once we decided it was a crisis,” said Bob Garner, California chairman for county drug program administrators, “we were already five years behind in our response.”

And so Orange County, like the rest of America, was unprepared for its wave of cocaine casualties.

“There hasn’t been the resources put into education and treatment,” said Bill Edelman, who heads Orange County’s drug abuse programs. “Most of the people at high levels in law enforcement are beginning to recognize that they don’t have the answers. Now how do you get them to move?”

Funding for drug treatment and rehabilitation programs here was slashed in the early 1980s with Proposition 13 budget tightening and again after federal cutbacks under the Reagan Administration. The budget picture brightened last year after infusions of new federal money from the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986.

But the caseload of drug abusers here has swelled.

“You just can’t stack them in,” Edelman said. “We’ve been operating for years at full.”

Private clinics, too, have been swamped by cocaine’s victims. The CareUnit Hospital of Orange reports that 90% of the 3,500 drug abuse patients it treats each year have a cocaine problem, up from a third only five years ago, said Lyn Marian, a clinic spokeswoman.

Youth Use Declines

The one bright spot in the otherwise dark picture of cocaine abuse is that young people appear to be turning away from the drug.

Annual federally sponsored surveys of graduating high school seniors across the country showed a drop in regular cocaine use in 1987. The same surveys showed a huge jump in use in the late 1970s that was followed by a gradual plateau through most of the 1980s.

The drug has gained an unsavory reputation among many youths, experts say. Among the reasons: publicity over the cocaine-related deaths of comedian John Belushi and athletes Len Bias and Don Rogers, as well as more effective education programs that rely on techniques similar to those used in anti-smoking campaigns.

“What we need to do is not give drug information but rather work on the underlying causes and give kids the skills to stand against the pressure of getting involved,” said Dr. Bert Simpson, coordinator of drug prevention programs in the county Department of Education. “We know the technique works, but we haven’t been operating long enough to know if it works here in Orange County.”

A county grand jury report issued last summer pointed to some other problems in the fight against drugs in Orange County schools. Drug education and prevention programs for young people here were criticized as fragmented, uncoordinated and underfunded.

“There is not enough spending for prevention,” Simpson said. “There is no master plan out of Sacramento for schools or any entity. What is going on is because of individual or small group interest.”

Sheriff Gates readily acknowledges that Orange County’s year-old task force won’t solve a national drug problem 20 years in the making. But he hopes that it might force the traffickers to at least take their business out of the county.

“I don’t know if it is unrealistic to expect that,” he said. “When the risk to the criminal goes up, you can make it so hard that they go somewhere else. We wanted to send a message to those guys who are dealing dope. We’re going to take your dope, take your money and send you to jail. We have to send that message to the dope dealers of the world.”

In a press conference two weeks ago to announce the task force’s seizure of 500 pounds of cocaine, Gates called again for a “united team” of law enforcement, businesses, schools and local politicians to “turn off the drug faucet and hope it’s an idea that catches on.”

“Are we going to win the war?” Gates asked. “We guarantee we’ll win the war.”

Times staff writer Richard Beene contributed to this story.