COLUMN ONE : Drug War Looks Like a Long One : As cocaine use declines, new problems cloud the horizon--increased violence among traffickers and a rising tide of heroin.

When President Bush declared late last year that the nation was on the road to conquering its drug problem, some entrepreneurs from Nigeria, Thailand and Taiwan apparently were not listening.

Smugglers from those countries began showing up at Los Angeles International Airport last fall carrying ever-larger quantities of heroin--in the hollowed-out soles of tennis shoes, in suitcases with secret compartments and even in condoms they had swallowed. So far this year, U.S. Customs seizures of heroin at LAX have mounted to 86.8 pounds, compared to 10 pounds all of last year.

“This is really alarming,” says Carol Boyd Hallett, commissioner of the U.S. Customs Service.

The heroin traffic at LAX is just one more sign that, despite evidence of progress against what Bush has called the greatest domestic threat, new fronts continue to open in the “war on drugs.”

While overall drug use is declining and law enforcement authorities are gaining skill in disrupting narcotics traffic, drug barons in South America and Asia remain unbowed and drug-related crime rages unabated in many American cities.

And now the President’s war on drugs faces new threats: fading political commitment and a potential waning of public interest.

A flagging of political will seems evident in Congress’ apparent determination to cut as much as $600 million from Bush’s $11.7-billion anti-drug plan for fiscal 1992. Congress’ slimming down of that budget is likely to kill Bush’s proposal that $99 million be spent for treatment of 200,000 addicts, and it jeopardizes the $25 million the Administration wanted to spend on education efforts directed at hard-core users.

There is “the potential for the effort to unravel because of a steady erosion of funding, of consensus and of the support it needs to allow the program sufficient flexibility and time,” said Melvyn Levitsky, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics matters.

A year ago, Operation Desert Shield pushed the drugs issue out of the top position on the public agenda it had held since 1989. It has yet to regain that position.

Now, with middle-class consumption of illegal drugs falling, some experts fear that Americans will lose interest--and the willingness to pay for continuing the fight in the inner city.

William J. Bennett, who was the first director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, has predicted that his successor, Florida’s former Gov. Bob Martinez, will have a harder time than he did getting attention for the cause. Now “it’s not Page One news,” Bennett said, “so it’s a more difficult job.”

That is significant because, in the view of many experts, efforts of the White House’s drug war officials to shift public attitudes have been their most important contribution.

Amid these sobering prospects, the good news is growing evidence of a long-term decline in drug use.

According to federal surveys, the number of Americans who used illegal drugs slid to 13 million last year from 23 million in 1985, when the crack epidemic first exploded.

“The total number of illicit-drug users peaked in 1979, and you had a narrowing but deepening of the drug problem in the 1980s,” said Mark Kleiman, a former U.S. Justice Department official who teaches drug policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “All the speeches demanding the middle class get off drugs were calling for the sunset after it had already gone down,” he said.

The trends among more hard-core users are not so reassuring. A government survey, released in June, found that the number of Americans using crack cocaine once a month was steady at 500,000 last year, just as in 1988. The survey found a 15% increase, to 336,000, in the number of people who said they used cocaine daily.

Many experts see the drug plague as part of a cycle that has recurred at intervals throughout history.

A period of growing fascination with drugs much similar to the present one occurred between 1880 and 1920. In the first years of that period, drugs enjoyed such widespread acceptance that Pope Leo XIII gave a gold medal to the manufacturer of a weak and highly popular cocaine-and-wine tonic called Vin Mariani, and Germany’s Bayer Co. marketed a cough potion that it named heroin.

Excitement over the capabilities of drugs begins these cycles, “and anger at what they do to people brings them to an end,” said David F. Musto, an expert on drug history with Yale University’s School of Medicine.

Although a variety of experts acknowledge the cyclic nature of widespread drug use, recent figures suggest that the end of this epidemic may be further off than many had hoped.

Last month, federal figures showed that the decline in drug-related hospital visits slowed sharply during the last two quarters of 1990. Cocaine-related visits to emergency rooms, which fell by 23% between the third and fourth quarters of 1989, did not decline at all in the last nine months of 1990, the figures showed.

While some of the figures were more reassuring, the report showed that progress against drug use “may at times be slower and more uneven than in the past,” Martinez said.

Meanwhile, law enforcement authorities have marshaled an array of figures to show the progress they and their Latin American allies have made in interrupting the northward flow of cocaine.

So far this year, authorities have seized about 53 metric tons of cocaine in Colombia, equal to the amount seized in all of 1990. Colombian authorities have destroyed 40 laboratories and 58 clandestine airstrips, and have seized cash and assets including nearly $70 million from Medellin trafficker Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, who was killed by Colombian security forces Dec. 15, 1989.

Radar surveillance of aircraft and speedboats has shut down many Caribbean smuggling routes, so that 90% of the cocaine traffic is now believed to cross the border from Mexico. Although the Pentagon withdrew long-range radar-surveillance planes late last year for use in the Persian Gulf War, authorities say that gap was filled immediately by shorter range, P3 reconnaissance aircraft and other equipment of the Customs Service.

U.S. authorities count among the anti-drug allies’ achievements the disabling of the Medellin cartel, whose 90% share of the cocaine market may have dwindled to as little as 10% as the Colombian government has killed or captured dozens of its members. The biggest fish netted so far is drug supremo Pablo Escobar, who surrendered in June and is awaiting trial.

“If, four or five years ago, you had said all the leaders of the Medellin cartel would be killed or incapacitated, no one would have believed you,” said Robert C. Bonner, chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “This is significant progress.”

Yet even the Medellin offensive is far from total victory.

This was apparent on July 26, when U.S. law enforcement sources said they believed Escobar had ordered and paid for the recent assassination of Henry de Jesus Perez, a former ally of Escobar’s who allegedly cooperated with government efforts to capture him.

“There is a great deal of circumstantial evidence that (Escobar) is continuing to control his cartel,” one federal law enforcement source said. He refused to describe the evidence, saying that to do so would give away sources and methods of monitoring Escobar and his gang.

The development raised further questions about Colombian President Cesar Gaviria’s pledge that Escobar would not be allowed to revive the cartel from the bungalow-style mountain prison that was built to Escobar’s specifications.

Still unclear is whether Escobar will receive more than a token sentence. Some wonder, too, whether authorities will get him to cooperate in dismantling the organization that has killed hundreds of Colombian judges, soldiers and policemen, or to give up assets worth billions of dollars.

Martinez has been openly critical of Escobar’s comfort in exile. He says that U.S. authorities have made it clear to the Colombians that only a lengthy sentence will send the proper message to other traffickers.

Stanley E. Morris, Martinez’s deputy for supply reduction, noted that, when Escobar and other Medellin leaders were on the run, their communications were disrupted and management was difficult. Now, “in some ways, his incarceration provides stability for the cartel to operate,” he said.

American officials have also been unhappy over signs that the Colombians are suing for peace with the drug lords by outlawing their extradition to the United States, and may abandon a system of judicial anonymity that sought to ensure that judges would have the courage to impose stiff sentences.

Even as the government has pursued the Medellin group, however, the void has been filled by the cartel from Cali, in southern Colombia, and up to 200 smaller, independent operators.

The Cali group, businesslike and discreet where the Medellins were swashbuckling and flamboyant, boosted its market share to 75% from 30% in the 10 months that the government pressed its offensive against Escobar’s gang, Bonner said. In the United States, Cali has expanded from a New York City headquarters to regional offices in Los Angeles and Miami, where the Medellin group once alone held sway.

“We need to open a second front against the Cali,” Bonner said. He described the members as “a little more astute” than their Medellin counterparts, though, he added, “that doesn’t mean they can’t be dealt with.”

The Colombians recently destroyed nearly a dozen of Cali’s cocaine-producing laboratories, but they have yet to move against Cali leaders such as Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, who is believed to have close ties to some Colombian authorities.

U.S. officials insist that the year-old strategy of working with Andean governments is on track, as evidenced by Peru’s signing of an umbrella cooperation pact on drugs and Bolivian efforts that include dismantling the Meco Dominguez gang.

The Colombian efforts have also had the effect of dispersing cocaine production into other countries, including Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil and Argentina.

And on Capitol Hill, some wonder whether the country is getting sufficient payoff for the $373 million spent on anti-drug aid to Andean nations in the past year. Rep. Edward F. Feighan (D-Ohio), member of a drug task force of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, recently voiced concern about the Colombians’ slow movement against the Cali group, Peru’s hesitancy to sign a bilateral anti-drug agreement and appointments of corrupt officials to high posts in Bolivia. “My concern is that the legs of our chair are being sawed off by a lack of political will, both here and abroad,” he said.

Indeed, some experts say, the Andean strategy demonstrates that there are more efficient ways to spend drug-fighting dollars than trying to halt cultivating and production efforts that involve 250,000 peasants in an area of more than 1 million square miles.

Rensselaer W. Lee, a drug consultant and scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, said U.S. dollars are better spent to seize drugs en route, tighten controls on money-laundering, confiscate traffickers’ assets and improve drug treatment and education programs.

Fighting the problem in the producing areas “is the least promising approach,” said Lee, who is skeptical that the effort has brought any significant reduction in the flow of cocaine from South America. “We’ve spent billions on international assistance programs, and have nothing to show for it.”

Another thorny problem is surging heroin production.

By DEA estimates, production of opium--the source of heroin--has quadrupled in the Golden Triangle region of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar (formerly Burma) in the last five years. Policing problems are compounded by the facts that these countries are far less responsive to U.S. pressure than Latin American nations, and that the heroin trade is run by a new class of Chinese and African gangs.

Questions of whether more emphasis should be placed on heroin traffic arose in June, when a cargo of 1,100 pounds of heroin--worth perhaps $1.5 billion--was seized from a container ship that had come from Thailand via Taiwan.

That seizure, at Oakland, “is a major signal to us that there is a heroin threat,” Bonner said. “It is important that we give it attention now, and not wait.”

Still, he insisted that the heroin menace is not nearly as great as the danger posed by cocaine, because the amount of heroin coming in is still so much smaller, and because heroin’s association with addicts and needles has given it a terrible reputation with most Americans.

While government officials are cheered by signs of declining drug use, they said the waning interest of the middle class has yet to show much of a difference on the street. Indeed, “in many places, the fires are still burning very hot,” said Bennett, who resigned as the nation’s drug war chief last November.

One of those places is Southern California.

While Los Angeles police last year reported about 60,000 drug arrests--the same as in the two preceding years--1990 was a record year for federal narcotics indictments. Prosecutors have predicted even more charges of drug crimes this year.

Heroin is plentiful and “the demand for crack is tremendous,” said William Fahey, chief of the narcotics section of the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles.

Nationwide, however, the FBI this month will report that drug arrest figures dropped significantly last year.

“There have been successes by local law enforcement in reducing the number of open-air drug sale hot spots,” the DEA’s Bonner said. “That means fewer easy pickings as far as street sale arrests, which would account for some of the drop.”

Morris, the Martinez deputy, said he is not surprised that drug-related violence continues while drug use is declining. He recalled telling his former boss, Bennett, that enforcement success would force traffickers to compete more viciously for a shrinking market.

The violence will not recede until the market is small and stable, and police “truly take the bread out of (traffickers’) mouths, the Rolexes off their wrists, and the Porsches out of their garages,” Morris said.

And there are signs that the traffickers have adopted sophisticated means of evading police--for instance, by using couriers who do not fit the descriptions for which customs agents watch.

On July 9, for example, Customs agents in Nogales, Ariz., became suspicious of a motor home driven by a most ordinary-looking, middle-aged couple.

Marvin D. Harris, 53, and his wife, Raquel, 60, said they were headed for their home in Troy, Ala., but the agents noticed California license plates on the vehicle. Using a dog and a density meter that detects potential hiding places, they discovered that the walls of the motor home were packed with 624 packages--or 1,522 pounds--of cocaine, worth about $68 million at retail.

“We really have a lot to work on,” the DEA’s Bonner said. “There’s no need for any premature euphoria over what are a couple of positive signs.”

Trends in Cocaine Use

“Casual” use declines as number of hard-core users rises.

1988 1990 Users who report consumption 2.9 million 1.6 million in the past month Users who report consumption 292,000 336,000 daily or almost daily

Source: National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee