D-Men on the Road

Every weary truck driver knows the highway stops where he can pay $15 for a bag of stimulating amphetamine tablets--he calls them "bennies" or "copilots." Equally knowledgeable is Harold Leap, agent of the year-old U.S. Bureau of Drug Abuse Control and head of its St. Louis office. Disguised as truck drivers, Leap's D-men have bought illegal bennies time and again, but not just to nab roadside peddlers. They aim to buy supplies of bennies wholesale, and thus trace the black-market drugs back to their source.

Last month Leap's agents were able to place an order for 10 million pills at $15 a thousand (they cost 56-c- a thousand to make). Next, the D-men raided an outfit aptly named Fixaco Inc., operating out of a motel in Imperial, Mo., where they said they found 650,000 bennies. The agents made six arrests, including John R. Kauffmann, operator of the motel and of Fixaco, who was charged with having made two illegal sales. He and the other five all pleaded not guilty.

Where had this cache come from? BDAC agents traced a Fixaco shipment eastward to a New York City pier where it was marked for legal export to Hong Kong. U.S. Customs men opened the two drums. Instead of a million bennies, they found nothing more incriminating than concrete and stuffing, topped with a thin layer of pills. After two more arrests were made in New York, Assistant U.S. Attorney Irvin L. Ruzicka indicated that one way for bennies to get into the domestic black market is by simple diversion from the perfectly legal export trade.

Asleep at 60. There must be many other channels. BDAC headquarters in Washington estimate that only half of the 5 billion amphetamine tablets produced in the U.S. each year are sold legally on prescription as psychic stimulants and appetite depressants. The rest filter into the black market.

Drivers of independent trucks use bennies to stay awake and make longer runs, but major fleet operators sternly forbid them. When amphetamine stimulation wears off, it may do so abruptly and put the driver to sleep at 60 m.p.h. In several fatal accidents, highway police have found a half-emptied bag of bennies in the driver's pocket, and autopsies have revealed as many as a dozen in a driver's stomach. With severe overdosage, though the driver stays awake, he may have hallucinations and see "ghosts" on the highway, with equally fatal results.

After drivers and hippies, the biggest consumers of illegal bennies are students cramming for exams, which partly explains why the BDAC has recently enlisted coeds and young agents to infiltrate college groups. BDAC has nothing to do with such notorious narcotics as heroin and morphine, which are policed by the Treasury Department's Bureau of Narcotics. Though BDAC has been given responsibility for surveillance of LSD, its main concern is with the amphetamines, barbiturates and the milder tranquilizers, which are legal on prescription and medically valuable--but are nonetheless dangerous when bandied about on campuses and highways.

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