U.S. Baffled by Apparent Rise in Hashish Smuggling

An apparent surge in the smuggling of hashish across the Pacific has left federal officials baffled and troubled by what some fear may be a new effort to market the drug in the United States, according to law enforcement sources.

In the last several weeks alone, federal authorities patrolling off the West Coast have intercepted many times more hashish than the entire nation’s estimated annual consumption of the concentrated marijuana derivative, officials said.

Authorities say that they have not yet uncovered any signs that large quantities of the drug have become available on American streets. But the unprecedented offshore discoveries have begun to shatter a previous assumption among anti-drug officers that hashish posed little threat in this country.

“Something’s going to happen,” one top law enforcement official warned. “There are just too many boats coming too close to the United States.”

American drug users have long demonstrated a strong preference for marijuana over hashish, a resinous substance typically smoked in a pipe. Hashish generally has been so scarce in this country that drug enforcement officials often do not include it in their standard compilations of statistics.

But, in the first of two seizures last month, authorities intercepted 100 tons of Pakistani hashish--more than twice the previous record--in a vessel near Hawaii. Officials then confiscated an additional 12 tons of the drug from a schooner off the coast of the Pacific Northwest.

The unexpected findings have sparked a sharp debate among federal officials, some of whom believe that these and other large shipments of hashish were bound for Canada, where the drug traditionally has enjoyed greater popularity.

But, in an increasingly vocal dissent, others have warned that the new transpacific traffic can be explained only as an effort by drug merchants in Pakistan and perhaps Afghanistan to exploit a void opened by the U.S. crackdown on domestic marijuana growers.

These officials point to the seizure earlier this month of nearly a ton of hashish in a New York warehouse and the arrest of an Indian citizen there as an indication that previously unknown smuggling rings have succeeded in bringing the drug onto the mainland.

“That one really made me sit up and take notice,” said one high-ranking federal expert who previously had been skeptical about the prospect of increased hashish trafficking.

“No one can figure it out,” a senior Bush Administration official added. “But it sure has got us worried.”

The apparent emergence of a busy transpacific hashish smuggling route follows a two-year effort in which the Administration has quadrupled its spending on anti-marijuana programs and used new military assistance to crack down on domestic marijuana growers.

An aerial spraying campaign that focused on Hawaii last summer was credited with wiping out 85% of that state’s marijuana crop. The Drug Enforcement Administration is now seeking to extend its use of herbicides first to Missouri and then to California and other states.

Because domestically produced marijuana had become the drug of choice for the estimated 20 million Americans who still smoke pot on a regular basis, drug enforcement authorities say that the government assault has caused shortages of marijuana in some cities.

But one senior U.S. official said that new intelligence reports indicate that Colombian growers already may be preparing to fill the void with shipments of marijuana to American markets. Other sources said that the recent hashish seizures could represent an effort by Pakistani growers to enter the market, a development that could complicate interception efforts because the highly compressed drug can be more easily concealed than bulky bricks of marijuana.

At the same time, despite new efforts by the Navy, Coast Guard and other agencies, the Pacific coastline remains far more vulnerable to drug trafficking than the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts, which have been the focus of most federal drug interdiction efforts.

If the recent hashish seizures do represent a shifting pattern in international drug trafficking, it would mark yet another instance of a crackdown in one area leading to a surge in another--a pattern some experts have likened to “squeezing a balloon.”

Officials said that Pakistan was the source of both of the major hashish shipments intercepted last month in Pacific waters, in which trafficking in the drug previously was little known.

The record 100-ton haul was found aboard a freighter intercepted 600 miles west of Midway Island by a Navy warship last month and later escorted into Pearl Harbor. The 12-ton shipment is understood to have been aboard a schooner intercepted by the Coast Guard in a fiery encounter some 1,000 miles northwest of San Francisco.

As drug agents ordered the ship to halt, its skipper set the 83-foot vessel aflame in a powerful explosion. He and five passengers were rescued and arrested, and a salvage team recovered dozens of bales of hashish before the schooner sank.