COLUMN ONE : The Science of Fighting a Drug War : Government researchers view technology as the key weapon. Their proposals may be beguiling, but they come with a price--and problems.
Here in the birthplace of the atomic bomb, the disappointments of the war on drugs have set scientific minds to turning.
Enough of this stalemate, researchers say. Enough of slogging through jungles and sifting through cargo. They see a better way: a technological fix.
The echoes are faint but inescapable. Fifty years after Albert Einstein urged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to begin the Manhattan Project, two scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory dispatched a letter this summer calling for a comparably intense drive against drugs.
Already one Los Alamos team has shifted its sights from Cold War to drug wars. Others may follow. And the ambitious proposals they are bouncing off well-guarded walls during months of brainstorming at this cloistered facility hint of major breakthroughs.
Munitions experts here talk of wreaking irreparable damage on the airstrips that are stepping stones in the cocaine chain. Physicists offer up lasers as eyes that could uncover fumes from drug laboratories hidden in jungles or anywhere else. Biologists recommend sophisticated bacteria that would remove the psychoactive powers from the global coca crop.
Other possibilities under discussion include isotope fertilizers that would impregnate illicit crops with easily detectable radioactivity, stun guns that would disable car and plane engines, and supercomputers that would track the flow of drug profits.
“Technology,” the Los Alamos team declared, “can have major leverage.”
The Los Alamos proposal is the most ambitious under consideration, although by no means the only one. Government scientists across the country have set their sights on new weapons for counter-drug missions.
But, with new ideas flooding into the agencies that combat drugs, skeptics are beginning to voice misgivings. They warn that some proposals represent “solutions waiting for problems” and that others reflect a bid for abundant drug-fighting dollars in an era of Pentagon constraint.
That charged atmosphere presents a dilemma for an Administration eager to score points in the drug war. From a dizzying array of innovative ideas, officials are seeking to settle on anti-drug solutions that work. And the drawing-board sketches available so far might depict either miracle weapon or costly dead end.
“All this is well and good,” one official said. “But at some point we’ll have to decide. Is the answer going to be Buck Rogers? Or do we really need more Dick Tracy?”
The technological starting point, experts say, is unimpressive. Past research has produced drug-sniffing dogs, mirrors on poles and high-resolution photography.
But the government still has very little success in ferreting out the smuggled cocaine that crosses U.S. borders by land and sea. South American processing laboratories lie mostly undetectable beneath triple-canopy jungles. And trafficking operations themselves remain difficult to track, leaving scarcely a fingerprint on the products they peddle.
“Frankly,” said one expert in anti-drug technology, “just about everything has failed.”
The congressional Office of Technology Assessment two years ago blamed a “serious lack of support” for potential inventions. But most anti-drug initiatives have revolved around such stopgaps as deploying National Guardsmen to search cargo at U.S. borders.
“That’s not an American solution,” entrepreneur Martin Anis, president of the Boston-based American Science and Engineering, groused.
As the drug issue leaped to the top of the national agenda, Congress last year voted to establish eight federal laboratories to aid in the drug fight. William J. Bennett, who heads the war on drugs as director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, advocated the “development of new technologies” for use against illegal drugs. He is expected to deliver to Congress by the end of the year a plan based on ideas developed at the eight national laboratories.
After meeting with the Los Alamos delegation, Sen. William S. Cohen of Maine, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, described the discussions last month in glowing terms. “Technology,” he declared, “can make a contribution to stopping the flow of drugs into the United States.”
“This field,” an enthusiastic Democratic congressional official said, “is probably the clearest example you can find of progress requiring money.”
That technology-friendly spirit has left the government’s research-and-development experts besieged--and not only by the Los Alamos team. “Everyone thinks they’ve got a weapon that will shoot around corners,” Washington consultant Neil Livingstone said.
“Congress starts saying: ‘Money for drugs,’ and you immediately start hearing vendors talk about high technology,” said John J. O’Neill, deputy assistant administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration for investigative support.
“Thank God,” he added wearily, “for the American entrepreneurial spirit.”
The ideas, officials say, range from the beguiling to the absurd. Among the latter was a proposal to use trained gerbils to sniff out contraband drugs--a “complete fiasco,” Customs Service scientist William Johnson said.
Another came from an “accredited etymologist” who suggested that insects could do the job. Customs officials thought the idea promising but reconsidered when they thought of a potential obstacle: Nocturnal bugs might not work around the clock.
“We appreciated the suggestion,” Johnson said, “but we declined to be involved.”
On the rugged New Mexican mesas of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, two senior researchers last summer produced the 16-page draft white paper that quickly became fuel for fancy in some anti-drug circles.
“New weapons,” the scientists wrote in the “Role of Technology,” which was distributed to the Senate Intelligence Committee and at least four federal agencies, are “badly needed in the war on drugs.”
Although spare in language and detail, the July 24 paper conjured up images of stunning advances, such as isotope fertilizers to tag drug crops, laser spectroscopy to sniff out drug fumes and stun guns to attack cars and planes.
A cover letter was dispatched to officials in Washington on Aug. 3, exactly 50 years and one day after Einstein wrote to Roosevelt to urge “quick action” on experimental atomic research that was soon sited at Los Alamos.
With the expertise garnered since then from its role as the nation’s atomic city, researchers Terry D. Bearce and John D. Immele wrote, Los Alamos was now well-placed to play a “major role in the counter-drug research and development.”
From their laboratory complex in the Jemez Mountains, the researchers refused to discuss their proposal with a reporter. A special assistant to the director of Los Alamos, William (Buck) Thompson, explained that the scientists believed it important to maintain “sensitivity” about the yet-unfunded proposal.
“Security is why a lot of federal agencies come to Los Alamos in the first place,” Thompson said.
Scientists at other defense laboratories were similarly guarded. Even some who agreed to discuss their work asked that their names not be used. Now that their research is being focused on the drug wars, they feared retribution from its soldiers.
But together, the researchers, government officials and experts in the field offered accounts of the technology drive now under way.
One hope lies in proposals to penetrate the dense Andean jungles that shield cocaine processing pits from probing eyes. Even the best of U.S. satellite photography is often thwarted by forest canopies, experts say. But some researchers believe that high-tech sensors and lasers might zero in on telltale signs of drug activity.
“If we can sniff out acetone and ether in the middle of the jungle, we will in effect have found one of the laboratories,” said a senior
chemist at the Aberdeen Weapons Center in Maryland.
The research at Aberdeen, supported by the Drug Enforcement Administration, illustrates a switch in focus. The vast Army facility was founded in 1917 to combat the threat posed by German use of gas in World War I, and it has concentrated on chemical warfare ever since. With the new anti-drug project, researchers hope to apply the lessons learned.
The approach is modeled on new battlefield devices that use ion mobility spectrometry to sniff the air for chemical weapons. Already the researchers have found a way to reprogram a hand-held sensor to be alert instead to ether, acetone and other chemicals used in cocaine production.
In time, the researchers hope to mount such sensors on drones or helicopters that might conduct airborne jungle sweeps. If current projections hold, the sensors would be 1,000 times more sensitive than the human nose in identifying traces of chemicals.
Los Alamos researchers see physics, not chemistry, as the means to the same end. The fumes that rise from jungle factories, they contend, can be detected by tunable lasers mounted aboard helicopters or aircraft. The plume would be detected by its “unique return after laser illumination.”
Other technologies under consideration aim at tracking any cocaine that escapes such airborne scrutiny. If the fertilizer fed to coca plants could be chemically doctored, the cocaine would forever bear an isotopic tag detectable at U.S. borders, the Los Alamos team suggested.
The researchers’ hunt for chemical indicators derives from an abounding frustration with efforts to detect the drugs themselves. Because drugs are neither dense nor chemically volatile, they have proved invulnerable to most X-rays and sniffer devices. The Customs Service has made the search for a solution its top research priority.
The tools under consideration range from biology to nuclear physics. The Naval Research Laboratory near Washington is injecting small animals with drugs in hopes of developing antibodies that would later serve as sensitive indicators of the presence of drugs. A three-man team at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is using locally seized cocaine to experiment with new applications for vapor detectors built to sniff out bombs.
But so far, Oak Ridge researcher Scott McLuckey acknowledged, “you’ve got to get the thing right up to it to smell anything.”
Those and other failures in drug detection have convinced many technologists that the prospects for breakthroughs lie in more aggressive approaches. One is called “soft kill.”
That idea, included in the Los Alamos white paper, proposes to disable traffickers or terrorists by bombarding their vehicles with microwaves or gases. Even in low concentrations, the paper says, such weapons directed at internal combustion engines could leave cars and planes powerless.
Another would target coca or poppy plants themselves with pathogens far more effective than the defoliants now employed for crop eradication. The compounds, Los Alamos researchers believe, could prevent the plants from developing mind-altering power or stop them from growing altogether.
The team also offered expertise in developing air-drop devices that could halt traffic on dirt runways used by cocaine traffickers. Sketches included in the Los Alamos white paper showed odd-shaped metal-pronged tools that the researchers said would be “positive in their action against vehicles’ tires.”
Unfortunately for the anti-drug agents, technology is two-sided. Cash-flush cocaine cartels have already developed communication systems that are in many ways superior to those of law enforcement officials.
What is more, a senior drug enforcement official said: “All this high technology sometimes doesn’t do much good in labor-intensive countries.” Low-wage peasants have thus far been an effective antidote to assaults on airstrips, for example.
“We could blow one up on Tuesday,” said the DEA’s O’Neill, “and on Wednesday they’d be back with 1,000 campesinos to repair it in a day.”
And sometimes salvation for the bad guys doesn’t require even that much effort. A DEA attempt to track chemical shipments by attaching beepers to barrels ran aground once traffickers began to pour the acetone into five-gallon jugs.
Another plan fell victim to a similar fate. After agents attached one too many transmitters to suspicious automobiles, traffickers found a foolproof way to search the undercarriage. “They’d take it to Jiffy Lube,” O’Neill said.
That record aside, other wariness remains. Some wonder whether technologists’ enthusiasm for the anti-drug effort has been motivated by dwindling federal support for more traditional defense projects.
Los Alamos, for example, has seen its budget for Pentagon and intelligence projects plunge 13% in the last two years. In part to fill the void, noted Rep. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, the laboratory is “aggressively trying to get into (the anti-drug) business.”
A laboratory official once complained to Richardson that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s peace offensive “was the worst thing that ever happened to Los Alamos.”
At the same time, officials worry that good ideas may be lost in the shuffle. The budget for research and development, some of which is classified, is known to be limited. And there is concern that misguided decisions might choke off promising proposals.
To coordinate the effort, Congress and the Administration are nearing agreement on plans that would establish under a Drug Control Research and Development Committee a system for identifying worthy plans and determining appropriate funding.
“The more people stand up and point to particular technologies, the more important we think it is to lay out a lot of plans first rather than get all carried away about particular gizmos,” a senior congressional official said.
The Los Alamos anti-drug proposal endorsed similar action, but with markedly more urgency.
“You’ve got to treat this with the same ingenuity as the problems of coming up with a major weapons system,” Robert Kupperman, who was involved in the Los Alamos overture, said in an interview. “There are technologies to behold, and we don’t really have the (research and development) to go for it.”
And from the white-coated researchers in the laboratories, a similar impatience exudes.
What would set anti-drug ingenuity in gear, an Army chemist on the East Coast said, is “potentially something like the Manhattan Project.”
“We know what is out there,” he said. “What we need is the license to do it quicker and faster and do it right now.”
