Search and Destroy--The War on Drugs
AT a third-floor window of a Lower Manhattan hospital, a team of federal agents huddled behind a battery of cameras. Below them, other agents strolled along the sidewalks, or cruised down Gold Street in unmarked cars. One group waited in a windowless minibus parked across the street. Not far away, another group, posing as an emergency crew, sat under a yellow canvas work tent over the open manhole in which they had set up a communications center. Precisely at 8:40 p.m., two undercover agents drove up Gold Street in a green 1970 Cadillac. They pulled to a stop in the No Parking zone in front of the hospital--and waited.
Minutes later the hidden agents--there were 40 in all--got the word over their short-wave radios: "Suspects are proceeding down Spruce Street, headed for Gold." In the third-floor observation post, one agent cracked to TIME Correspondent James Willwerth, "The Chinese are very punctual." So they were--right on time for the most important narcotics bust this summer.
At 9 p.m., two wary men walked up to the green Cadillac: Kenneth Kan-kit Huie, 60, self-styled "unofficial mayor of Chinatown," and Tim Lok, 35, known to federal agents as "the General" for his ramrod-stiff posture. The four men--two undercover narcotics agents, and the two "connections" whom they had been trying to nail for four months--wasted no time. The agents opened the trunk of the Cadillac and showed the Chinese the contents of an olive-drab attache case inside: $200,000 in $50 and $100 bills. Then the General led one of the agents off on a meandering excursion that ended up in a Chinatown sportswear shop. There it was the agent's turn to inspect the wares: a cardboard box packed with 14 plastic bags containing 20 Ibs. of pure No. 4 white heroin from Southeast Asia. Street value: $10 million.
The agent and the General then went back toward Gold Street in a taxi, followed in a gray Dodge station wagon by a third Chinese, Guan Chow-tok, bringing the heroin. But Guan, owner of the sportswear shop, doubled back and dropped the heroin in a vacant lot, arriving emptyhanded. He seemed worried about police. The agent and Guan argued in the street in front of Beekman Hospital for several minutes, and finally the hesitant Chinese agreed to make the deal. The four men piled into the green Cadillac and followed the gray Dodge station wagon to a dark, deserted street, under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Following the General's directions, one undercover agent walked through waist-high grass into the vacant lot. Suddenly, he knelt down and said loudly: "This is the package; this is the package."
On that signal, the night fairly exploded with armed men and flashing lights. Two unmarked cars squealed to a stop at opposite ends of the street, blocking the escape routes. Agents waving pistols and shotguns sprinted out of the shadows from all directions. Huie, the General and a fourth Chinese accomplice surrendered immediately. Guan jumped into his gray Dodge--and found himself staring into the muzzle of a .45 automatic in the hands of an agent who was leaning through an open window.
Though last week's Chinatown bust was motion-picture perfect, to U.S. narcotics experts it was another bittersweet element in an increasingly frustrating, not to say disastrous situation. True, the raid was the latest in a number of successful skirmishes in what President Nixon describes, more and more plausibly, as a global "war on drugs." In Montreal and Saigon, narcotics officers have recently nabbed some of the bigger wholesalers. Washington, meanwhile, is awaiting the imminent extradition by Paraguay of Auguste Joseph Ricord, French-born boss of a Latin American connection that is alleged to have piped heroin worth $1.2 billion into the U.S. over a five-year period (TIME, Aug. 28).
But the bad news about narcotics far overshadows such success. The "skag" seized at the Brooklyn Bridge last week was the second large shipment of Asian heroin to be intercepted in New York. The first seizure came last November when a Philippine diplomat and his Chinese partner were arrested at Manhattan's Lexington Hotel with 38 Ibs. of heroin in their luggage. The two busts tend to confirm the gloomy forecasts of U.S. narcotics experts that as some of the old drug trade routes from Europe become more dangerous, new ones will open up from Asia. The emergence of Asia, with its immense opium production, as a major exporter of narcotics, promises to make the drug trade a truly global problem.
New Routes. Through most of the postwar years, drugs had flowed from the poppy fields of Turkey and the labs of Marseille direct to the U.S. via the famed "French connection." In the past two or three years, more and more heroin has been routed through Latin America and the Caribbean, where law enforcement is spotty and protection cheap. But as the Latin connection begins to feel more and more heat, and if Turkey phases out remaining opium production under pressure from Washington, the drug trade is expected to swing increasingly to Asia, drawing on the vast surpluses of opium grown in the remote, misty hills of Burma, Thailand and Laos, source of 58% of the 1,200 tons of illicit opium the world produced last year. State Department narcotics experts already see several routes developing, including one to the U.S. via Hong Kong and Britain.
The present flow of narcotics to the West is capable of supporting a savage rise in consumption--and with it, savage rises in crime, in crippled lives and in deaths. Hard statistics are hard to come by, but the best Government estimates put the U.S. heroin-addict population at 560,000--ten times the level of 1960 and almost double what it was only two years ago. On the average, a U.S. addict spends $8,000 a year to support his habit; in New York City, with an addict population of more than 300,000, as much as 50% of all crime is related to addiction. The U.S. has become a heroin market worth $5 billion a year to the international drug trade.
As other countries are discovering to their horror, it is an expanding market. In Canada, recent estimates place the addict population at 14,000 and rising. Turkey now has a small heroin-addict population--a development that defies Moslem strictures against drugs and the powerful conviction among Turks that narcotics reduce sexual potency. Heroin is spreading among young South Vietnamese, who have picked up a taste for hard drugs from the departing American soldiers. All over Western Europe, which once idly dismissed hard drugs as "an American problem," officials now reckon that they have a growing addict population of about 100,000. Says a U.S. State Department official: "They're real scared about what the late 1970s will bring."
So is Washington. One day last January, John E. Ingersoll, blunt-spoken chief of the Justice Department's Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, went to the White House to report personally that an "astonishing variety" of drugs--heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, hashish, marijuana--was continuing to pour into the U.S. Nixon, by all accounts, was in a rage. "But dammit," he said at one point, "there must be something we can do to stop this."
The result has been a dramatic change in the U.S. approach to drugs. Only two years ago, U.S. narcotics agencies operated on a miserly $78 million budget. Now the White House is asking Congress for $729 million next year for a flock of new agencies.
The agencies are charged with what is essentially a broad-gauged search-and-destroy mission. In the U.S. the Justice Department's eight-month-old Office for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement has 300 investigators tracking down street pushers, while the Internal Revenue Service has 410 special agents checking distributors' tax records.
The Bureau of Customs, charged with policing thousands of miles of wide-open frontier, is due to add 330 new men to its hard-pressed 532-man border patrol force. Last month Nixon ordered the Air Force to help out by installing new extra-low-level radar at sites in Texas and New Mexico, where it will be used to track the airborne smugglers who scoot across the Mexican border in light planes, avoiding detection by flying at cactus level. Air Force and Air Guard squadrons have been ordered to maintain their F-102 and supersonic F106 interceptors on alert status, ready to scramble in five minutes. Besides the heroin smugglers, their targets will also include the light planes that deliver something like a ton of Jamaican marijuana daily, mostly at airfields in Florida.
The heart of the strategy is a U.S. effort, one with no precedent in history, to tear up the major international drug routes. On one wall of the Washington "war room" of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, magnetic chips on a huge map of the world indicate the location of the bureau's 1,610 agents--up from 884 two years ago. In each of the key drug-traffic countries, such as France, Mexico, Turkey and Thailand, eight to 15 BNDD men act as advisers to their local counterparts, gather intelligence on their own, and, when necessary, engage in what is known in CIA argot as "dirty tricks."
BNDD men talk as if their job is to tear up the Ho Chi Minh Trail, not the international drug trade. "We'll never dry up the supply lines," Ingersoll tells war-room visitors. "But we can disrupt the lines and reduce the flow to a tolerable irritant. That's our goal."
The Administration's boast that "the tide has turned" is vastly exaggerated, but there are encouraging signs. American agents in and out of the U.S. so far this year have helped seize 3,966 Ibs. of heroin, a sixfold increase over three years ago. The amount represents less than 20% of the estimated 11 1/2 tons of heroin that U.S. addicts used last year--a measure of how far the war is from being won. But the effect is being felt on the street.
Evidently because of recent busts in Canada, France and New York, addicts are shuddering through the third month of a major heroin drought. In Montreal, a major port of entry for French heroin, one dealer complained last week that "the stuff is scarce as hell. I can pay but my man can't deliver." In Marseille, the price of a kilo of heroin has risen in past weeks from $2,500 to $5,000, partly as a result of the shortage, partly because the heat is on.
Another sign of hard times is slipping quality. Even after being cut with sugar and powdered milk, retail heroin used to be about 10% pure; now the range is from 3% to 7%. So low is the potency nowadays that the "good stuff," when it is available, may kill an unwary addict. San Antonio has had twelve overdose deaths in the past nine weeks because someone--perhaps an inexperienced pusher--has been peddling heroin that is 53% pure.
To Myles J. Ambrose, a hard-bitten former federal prosecutor and Customs Bureau chief who heads the domestic side of the Justice Department's drug effort, the shortage proves that the Administration strategy is on the right track. "The name of the game for the big-time pushers is moving the stuff into the U.S.," he says. "We belt 'em at one place, and they move someplace else. When we catch the stuff, that's when they lose their money."
Of late, the big-time pushers and traffickers have been losing their money, goods and sometimes their freedom at an encouraging rate. Some of the bigger catches over the past year:
SAIGON: South Vietnamese police and BNDD agents nabbed Joseph Berger, 66, a pudgy, balding American who arrived in Southeast Asia 16 years ago and skillfully worked his way up to the top of the drug-smuggling heap. Narcotics agents believe he is the only American to have had face-to-face dealings with "the Phantom," the ubiquitous Chinese who until recently reigned supreme over drug traffic out of Indochina. Four months ago, Berger hauled a 400-lb. load of opium down Thai country roads, bullying his way past police checkpoints into Cambodia. He arrived in Saigon in June for a scheduled meeting with the Phantom, but was arrested. When the Phantom arrived at Tan Son Nhut airport, Berger fingered him. He turned out to be one Wan Pen Phen, a middle-aged Chinese with both Taiwanese and Thai papers. Police say Phen routed 4,500 Ibs. of opium monthly through the area. In July, the cops arrested Luu Phuc Ngu, a prominent Saigon hotel owner, his son Luu Se Hon, and Phen's No. 2 man, Am Nui. The three organized the South Viet Nam end of the opium trade for the Phantom. Under interrogation last week, both Phen and Nui denied any knowledge of any drug dealings.
MARSEILLE: The shrimp boat Caprice des Temps (Whim of Time) attracted the attention of French customs agents last March when its captain refused an order to cut his engines. The captain, Marcel Boucan, 58, was already being watched for his dealings with cigarette smugglers. The agents also noticed that though the 60-ton boat had made two trips to Miami, it never ventured near the shrimp-fishing grounds. After customs agents forced the Caprice back to port, Boucan dived overboard. He was picked up the next morning, exhausted, near Marseille's harbor fortress. Finding nothing illegal, police were about to release Boucan when they noticed that the concrete ballast was slightly awry. On investigation, they discovered 937 Ibs. of pure heroin hidden in the ballast. It was the largest narcotics haul in history, worth up to $400 million on the New York streets.
NEW YORK: Louis Cirillo, 48, posed as a Bronx bagel baker making $200 a week. In fact, police say, he was one of the biggest narcotics distributors in the U.S., supplying a ton a year to street pushers. Cirillo got his heroin from a French ring that smuggled it into New York concealed in expensive automobiles. After intercepting a heroin-laden car that had been shipped to the U.S. from Europe, French and American agents indicted 28 members of the ring, including Cirillo, another Bronx man, John Anthony Astuto, 20 Frenchmen and an Austrian national; a number of them are still at large. For his role in the case, Cirillo was sentenced in May to 25 years in prison. After his conviction, federal agents dug up $1,078,000 in cash from his backyard.
LA PAZ: When three men and two women checked into a La Paz hotel in February, an alert desk clerk recalled that one of the men had checked in four years before under a different name and passport. Bolivian police arrested the man, who turned out to be a Uruguayan wanted in Miami for drug trafficking. The cops let the others go, but BNDD agents were convinced that the ones who got away were important and traced the two couples to Mexico City. There they were identified as Jean-Paul Angeletti, 28, a Corsican, and Lucien Sarti, 34, a native of Marseille, and their mistresses. The two men were top operatives for the notorious Auguste Joseph Ricord. Their mission: to set up a new route for getting drugs into the U.S. Agents moved in on them after two months' surveillance. Angeletti, who was nude in bed when agents kicked in the door, surrendered and was extradited to France. Sarti shot it out and was killed. In his possession were ten stolen passports from four countries, which enabled him to pose at will as a Uruguayan diplomat, a Panamanian student or an Italian businessman.
ANKARA: Turkish Senator Kudret Bayhan told friends in Ankara last February that he was going to France to buy a dress for his daughter. Nothing unusual about that. The high-living Senator was well off, and he had made frequent trips to France in the past. This time Bayhan failed to reckon with the newly coordinated French and Turkish narcotics enforcers. The Turkish Ministry of the Interior had sent out an all-points bulletin for Bayhan's rented Turkish-made Anadol automobile. When the Senator got to the French-Italian Mediterranean border, the "Route 66" of drug traffic to Marseille, police stopped the car and found 300 Ibs. of morphine base. The case has led to three other Senators, although, said Turkish police last week, "it is too early to make an announcement."
The classic example of greenhorn clumsiness is that of a former Vice President of the Laotian National Assembly, Prince Sopsaisana, who arrived in Paris in April 1971 as his country's new Ambassador to France. One key item of his luggage was not passed by customs at Orly airport: a valise containing 123 Ibs. of pure heroin. Informed of the incident, President Georges Pompidou refused to accept Sopsaisana's credentials and the smuggler-prince was soon back in Vientiane.
Amateurs are frequently recruited to smuggle drugs, particularly between Latin American cities and the U.S. Carriers bring in heroin (or cocaine) in innumerable ingenious ways--including, on one occasion, stuffing it inside a live boa constrictor. A more common method, however, is for women airline passengers to travel to Miami with cocaine or heroin hidden in their girdles or in false-bottomed suitcases. Near Santiago there is a factory specializing in making suitcases with hidden compartments. The agents are catching more and more such carriers, in part through use of a secret "smuggler's profile"--a telltale behavior pattern apparently common to amateur smugglers.
One courier who fell afoul of customs was Carole Dale Robinson, a 19-year-old model from San Francisco. She arrived at Mexico City airport last March clutching a stuffed toy llama from Peru. Customs officers split it open--and found 8 Ibs. of pure cocaine inside. She protested that she was merely carrying the toy as a favor for someone else, but in fact U.S. agents had been watching her since she left California. She is now awaiting sentence, which may run as high as seven years.
The amateur who shows up in Montreal or some other point with heroin in the hollowed-out heels of his shoes may not be able to find a buyer at any price. The professionals deal only with other professionals; they almost never move drugs on speculation, and they prefer to deal in lots of 50 or 100 kilos. The biggest operators are shadowy figures, little-known and rarely seen. Much of the international trade is still dominated by the fabled, Marseille-based French Corsican families who developed the deadly business back in the 1930s (see box, page 24).
In Southeast Asia, the U.S. State Department has long been following the operations of one Lo Hsing-han, a Chinese of mysterious background who is said to enjoy absolute rule over drugs in the mountainous region of Burma, Thailand and Laos known as the Golden Triangle, the richest poppy-growing area in the world and the source of the Asian heroin now reaching the U.S. in growing quantities.
Opium production is outlawed in Burma, but Lo has what the State Department describes as "a contract" with the Burmese government: he keeps his turf clear of Communist insurgents, and the government allows him to deal in opium as he pleases. Lo has had no trouble in keeping up his end of the deal. He maintains a private army of some 5,000 local tribesmen and deserters from Chiang Kai-shek's old Kuomintang 93rd Independent Division.
Typically, the big-time operators deal in more than just drugs. After they deliver their opium to smugglers on the Thai border, Lo's huge caravans--often 200 mules and 200 porters, guarded by 600 troops--frequently return to Burma with contraband ranging from trucks and airplane parts to bolts of cloth and auto engines. Lo, says one U.S. official, "doesn't go empty-handed either way."
Similarly, drug traffickers in Uruguay, Argentina, Peru and Brazil dabble on the side in cigarettes, TV sets, whisky, radios and watches. By some accounts, French smugglers are into something far more complex. It is said that the SDECE, France's CIA, has quietly engaged Paris-and Marseille-based smugglers to move arms to a number of Middle East countries. These secret arms shipments are said to enable France to bolster its export arms industry and its influence in the Middle East, while it continues to adhere publicly to its 1968 total embargo on weapons sales to the belligerent nations of the region. The theory goes that arms and ammunition are turned over to established smugglers and shipped in compartments concealed in specially fitted vehicles. The underworld then takes advantage of the arrangement: on the return trip, the same compartments are filled with drugs.
Narcotics experts say that big drug dealers share something approaching a community spirit. On one occasion a trafficker loaned a competitor 20 "keys" (kilos of narcotics) in order to make up a shipment. The real common denominator in the business is an addiction to immense profits. At the labs in Marseille, a dealer must shell out anywhere from $120,000 to $350,000 for 100 kilos of heroin refined from Turkish opium. On delivery to a U.S. wholesaler, however, the 100-kilo package is worth about $1 million. After expenses, the net profit can be as high as $750,000.
Those profits attract investment funds from a variety of sources. Switzerland is so fretful about an influx of tainted narcotics money that the government has announced a special drive to screen numbered bank accounts for illegal uses. While there is no financial "octopus" for drug money in Switzerland, there are ways in which capital flows into narcotics. Money invested in clandestine companies registered in the name of a "manufacturer's representative" or "legal representative" often finds its way into the drug underworld.
A big operator may never even see the drugs he deals in. They are handled by a small platoon of hirelings: "plant men" who package the stuff, "chemists" who turn morphine base into pure heroin for $400 a kilo, and "mules" who will carry it to its destination for $1,000 plus plane fare. The narcotics trade has been a boon to Paraguay's so-called "Mau Mau" pilots. The pilots fly contraband drugs north to the U.S. from Buenos Aires or from any of 500 tiny airstrips that dot Paraguay. The pilots joke that they have a "Cessna 500" (which can carry 500 Ibs. of cocaine) or a "Cessna 130" (130 kilos of heroin).
Panama has become the Grand Central Station of Latin American smuggling, partly because it has nearly 100 remote World War II landing strips, partly because it is the closest place to the U.S. with anonymous, Swiss-style numbered bank accounts. The fact that Panama has 33 major international banks, up from only six in 1963, indicates that those accounts are in heavy demand. Until recently, as many as 20 aircraft a month would arrive in the U.S. from various South American countries via Panama's Tocumen International Airport, where they had been cleared through without any inspection. One of the cleared planes, tracked by U.S. agents to one of the 83 small airstrips that dot southern Florida, was found to have 94 Ibs. of heroin aboard.
What could the U.S. narcs do about it? Plenty, as it turned out. One evening in February 1971, the acting Tocumen transit chief, Joaquin Him Gonzales, a baseball addict, drove into the U.S.-controlled Canal Zone to see a local game, and the feds pounced. Flown to the U.S. and tried in Dallas, Him is serving a five-year rap for narcotics conspiracy in a Texas jail. Washington has ignored the protests of Panamanian Strongman Omar Torrijos and his brother Moises, who is Panama's Ambassador to Spain.
Latin America poses other worries besides heroin for U.S. narcotics agents, and more serious ones than the tons of marijuana that are smuggled across the border daily. Along the continent's Andean spine, the peasants of Bolivia and highland Peru, who have long chewed the coca leaf for pleasure, are now selling more and more of it as a cash crop--cocaine. The drug, which is psychologically if not physically addictive, has become popular in Europe and in parts of the U.S. Ingersoll worries that "in the long run, the cocaine dilemma is going to be more serious than heroin."
To really stop the flow of hard drugs, the U.S. must somehow attack the source of supply, a crucial role that has fallen to the State Department. The U.S. outlawed heroin in 1924, becoming one of the first nations to do so. Since then, narcotics have been the target of no less than nine separate international agreements. The latest one, the U.N.'s 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, calls for what are essentially voluntary restraints on the cultivation, manufacture, import and export of opium and its derivatives.
Washington, seeking a more muscular approach, is focusing direct diplomatic pressure on a list of 57 governments that are concerned with the narcotics trade in one way or another. Secretary of State William Rogers, who as chairman of a Cabinet-level International Narcotics Control Committee is the top man in the U.S. anti-drug effort, is thus doubly concerned with the role of his department. That has been to remind other governments forcefully that under Section 481 of the Foreign Assistance Act the Administration must cut off aid to countries that do not cooperate in the war on drugs. Out in the field, U.S. ambassadors have been charged with driving the point home. In Turkey, Ambassador William Handley told friends: "In this embassy, careers depend on getting opium banned." In drug matters, the U.S. has been receiving close cooperation from Yugoslavia and even Bulgaria, but State Department officials gripe that "it's damned hard to get an Italian or a Belgian even to think about pollution, let alone drugs." In Latin America, only Mexico has been really responsive. Chile has flatly refused to help.
Turkey agreed last June to complete a gradual phase-out of its opium-poppy production this year, rather than maintain severely limited production for medical use, as originally planned. The government did not find the decision hard to make, in view of the fact that Washington seemed to hint that the U.S.'s $140 million Turkish aid program hung in the balance. The U.S. is easing the country's cold-turkey withdrawal from poppy production with $35 million in special funds, to be used, among other things, for the construction of a sunflower-oil processing plant near former poppy fields. But many Turks are now having second thoughts. Istanbul's influential daily Huerriyet has protested that "we feel sorry for American heroin addicts, but it is unjust to put the burden on the Turkish economy." With elections looming next year, Premier Ferit Melen's opposition has introduced two bills that would repeal the poppy phaseout. The vote, worried U.S. officials say, "could go either way."
Poppy Problem. The reason is that out on the parched plains of Anatolia, where towns have names like Afyon (opium), the white poppy is central to the local way of life. It is a source of seed, fodder and fuel, of a low-cholesterol cooking oil and of cash. An acre of poppy brings a Turkish farmer $235 at government prices and even more on the black market; by contrast, wheat brings $100 an acre at best.
International traffickers have been moving through Anatolia's medieval villages for months, buying and salting away quantities of opium. Says a Turkish narcotics official: "We will still be finding it four or five years from now."
Turkey has been a sobering experience for U.S. opium warriors. "There was at first too much enthusiasm, too much optimism," says Assistant Secretary of State Nelson G. Gross, boss of narcotics affairs at Foggy Bottom. Some Washington officials still talk of achieving a "drastic" reduction in the drug flow within two or three years, but others are skeptical. Veteran agents, among them New York's Daniel P. Casey, doubt that detective work can ever stop any more than 50% of the total drug flow. As a U.S. agent based in Latin America puts it: "We need 16,000, not just 1,600 guys, to stop this traffic. As fast as we close one route, they come up with two others."
What is the solution? Nixon has argued that the "only really effective way" to end the drug traffic is to end poppy cultivation. The U.S. already has satellites in orbit that can locate poppy fields on the earth's surface. In The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, a new study that attempts, with only partial success, to blame U.S. policy for the vigor of the world drug trade, Author Alfred W. McCoy, a Yale graduate student, suggests that Washington might consider paying the hill peoples of the Golden Triangle area not to grow their poppies. If they were paid the going price in the area of $50 a kilo, by McCoy's reckoning, the cost to the U.S. would be $50 million.
Tough Strategy. But that is hardly realistic; the dollar has not always served the U.S. well in Indochina, and there is little reason its luck would be any better in the hills of Burma, where the poppy is deeply embedded in the local culture. What are the alternatives then? India, which dominates the world trade in legal opium used in medicine, is widely regarded as having one of the best control programs in the world. That is somewhat mythical, however. In New Delhi, there are 800 registered addicts, served by two government opium shops--but another 30,000 or so unregistered addicts can get opium under the counter at tea stalls or from cigarette vendors in the city.
The U.S. would hardly accept drastic measures like those of China, where opium dealers were shot on sight in the 1950s and 1960s, or Iran, which has a chronic addiction problem. In 1955, when that country was plagued with 2,000,000 addicts in a population of 25 million, the Shah ordered Iran's opium fields burned and addicts bused off to camps for a forced withdrawal program. Addiction dropped way down, but it was only a temporary reprieve. The addict population is back up to 400,000 and still climbing, even though Iranian troops regularly fight gun battles with Turkish and Afghan opium smugglers along the borders.
The U.S.'s war on heroin is only getting under way, and it is not without its critics, who variously contend that it is too little too late, and that the effort is diffused because some narcotics agents go after marijuana dealers with the same zeal they apply to the heroin traffic. Yet barring any unexpected developments--an international agreement for a total ban on the poppy, say, or discovery of insects that attack the plant, or a medical breakthrough in treatment of addiction--the outlook is for a protracted war. There will be little deviation from the present U.S. strategy of tough, front-door diplomacy with the countries along the drug supply lines and back-alley skirmishing with the traffickers. That strategy will not bring victory in the drug war, but even a draw would be a plus--provided that the respite is used to develop a social and educational approach to the problem of addiction.
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