Drug Ills Begin at Home, First Lady Tells U.N. Panel

--Nancy Reagan kept the focus on the United States as she carried her anti-drug campaign to an international audience with a speech to a United Nations committee. Mrs. Reagan said America need not look further than its own communities and “our neighbors, our sons and daughters” to find drug problems. “Now, frankly, it is far easier for the United States to focus on coca fields grown by 300,000 campesinos (peasants) in Peru than to shut down the dealers who can be found on the street corners of our cities,” she told the General Assembly’s Social and Humanitarian Committee. “We will not get anywhere if we place a greater burden of action on foreign governments than on America’s own mayors, judges, and legislators.” Mrs. Reagan was serenaded by schoolchildren when she arrived at U.N. headquarters in New York, and was received by Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar before her speech. Secretary of State George P. Shultz accompanied the First Lady.

--Soviet Ambassador Yuri V. Dubinin took diplomacy to the birds. Dubinin, who said the Soviet Union wants to increase chicken production, took a daylong tour of Perdue Farms on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Frank Perdue, chairman of the poultry company, accompanied the ambassador and his entourage of eight, including Dubinin’s wife, Liana, and two daughters, through a hatchery in Westover, Md., and a processing plant in Accomac, Va., that slaughters about 300,000 chickens a day. “Diplomacy is not just politics, it’s economic relations . . . technological relations,” Dubinin said of his visit.

--Napoleon Bonaparte never put his secret plan for invading Britain into action, but the orders, penned in his crabbed hand while lading his Mediterranean fleet at the port of Toulon in 1803, survive and are to be sold in a Paris auction of rare and precious manuscripts on Nov. 29. “If we are masters of the (English) Channel for six hours, we will rule the world,” the emperor wrote in an order to an admiral. The manuscript, which outlines possible ways of invading the southern coast of France’s longtime enemy, belongs to collector Jacques Guerin.