Gangsters winning drug war

Press, 23 September 1983, Page 17

Gangsters winning drug war

From

WILLIAM SCOBIE

in Los Angeles

The United States Navy, Air Force, and Marines — even the C.I.A. — have been brought into the fight. Some five billion dollars in contraband has been seized, hundreds of smugglers jailed, and 5000 transports, from old trucks to a Boeing 707, impounded. Yet President Reagan is very far from winning his much-vaunted, two-year-old “War on Drugs.” In fact, America’s multi-billion dollar dope habit is growing steadily worse.

“There is so much cocaine in this town,” says a Los Angeles narcotics officer, “that prices are down as much as 50 per cent. A kilo which once cost $60,000 now goes for $30,000 to $40,000.”

“The rise in cocaine-related deaths is frightening,” says a doctor at San Francisco Haight-Ash-bury Free Clinic, where 100 drug patients are treated each day. “The figures have doubled in two years. The new coke is purer, stronger. More people are injecting it. For the first time, cocaine overdoses outnumber the heroin.” An unlooked-for achievement of the Reagan crackdown has been to switch the centre of smuggling operations from Florida to the

President’s home state. For years, 80 per cent of America’s coke and pot consumption was funnelled through Miami, processed and giftwrapped from South America. An anti-drug drive — Operation Florida — masterminded by VicePresident George Bush, is described as “so successful” that bigtime operators have fled the state. Unfortunately they have simply moved elsewhere, chiefly to Los Angeles. “Southern California is now the drug smuggling capital of the world,” concedes Mr Bush’s chief of staff, Admiral Daniel Murphy. So a new command post has been set up at Long Beach, the big port south of Los Angeles, and “Operation California” is underway. Military involvement is intense — and unique in 14 years of dope wars that began under President Nixon.

Sophisticated spy planes with “look-down radar” track low-flying smuggling aircraft that dodge ground radar. Flights of 852 s scour

the seas. Information comes from spy satellites. Marine Corp helicopters drop troops and police on marijuana plantations. Mr Bush has six big task forces in the field. The Attorney-General has 12 more, chasing “top-level targets” in a dope industry that the F. 8.1. calls “easily the top moneymaker in crime today.” The drive stems from a Reagan campaign promise to make the traffic a “number one law enforcement priority.” In the last three years, cocaine has moved from the Hollywood and jet-set wonderland to become the “drug of choice” for millions of Americans in every walk of life. Drug use in the workplace, according to one new think-tank study, is now costing the United States economy about $26 billion a year in lost productivity, accidents, crime, and prevention-detection. Some experts call it the biggest problem in United States industry today, and a major cause of

America’s slide in world industrial leadership. Hundreds of companies require suspect employees to take blood or urine tests for coke. Drug-sniffing hounds patrol work areas, lockers, and parking lots. The military has one of the most glaring problems. After an inquiry into the 1981 crash of a jet into the aircraft carrier Nimitz revealed that six of' the 14 men killed were on drugs, the Navy has spent S24M a year on a programme that involves tests on two million sailors annually. Marijuana is the second target of President Reagan’s private war. InCalifornia, in the first two weeks of this month, more than 100 raids by paramilitary federal and state strike forces, using military helicopters and guns, have hauled SIOOM worth of pot from the remote hills of northern California.

Enraged residents, charging that “militaristic hooligans” have caused tens of thousands of dollars in property damage and terrorised peaceful villages, are going to court in a bid to stop this latest drive to uproot the Golden State’s billion-dollar-a-year, marijuanafarming industry. — Copyright — London Observer Service.