A Letter From the Publisher

By Richard B. Thomas

This week's Special Report on the U.S. drug crisis is TIME's third cover- length examination of the subject in the past 19 months. In delving into a problem that seems to grow steadily more acute, TIME correspondents around the country talked with sources ranging from drug pushers to medical experts. Their findings were frequently chilling.

From Los Angeles, Correspondent Jonathan Beaty directed the four-member reporting team that covered the Western states. Says he: "After a while it became obvious that as long as America's infatuation with mind-altering substances continues, there will be unlimited supplies of drugs." In New York City, a similar conclusion was reached by Correspondents John Moody and Joseph Boyce, deputy chief of TIME's Eastern regional bureau. They interviewed police and law-enforcement officials. Says Moody: "They think they are outnumbered and surrounded, but not a single cop I talked to even hinted at giving up."

Washington Correspondents Anne Constable and Dick Thompson saw the drug crisis through the eyes of politicians, interest groups and legal and medical specialists. Constable found a "sincere desire to end drug abuse and the desperate feeling that Government will never be able to do it." On the street, Thompson discovered another side of the story. Says he: "When I interviewed heroin and cocaine addicts in Baltimore, I saw first-hand that there is a core group of drug abusers who may be ignored by the popular concern over drug abuse: ignored except as object lessons."

Senior Editor Walter Isaacson, who edited the Special Report, has had ample time to reflect on the drug problem since 1979, when he wrote a TIME cover story on the Colombian cocaine and marijuana connection. Says Isaacson: "The big change is not in drug use, which has come and gone in waves throughout the entire century, but in the public perception of the problem. More and more people are saying, 'This has to stop.' "

Associate Editor Evan Thomas, who wrote the Special Re-

port's main story, concurs: "There has been so much written about drugs recently that we thought it was time to step back and take a longer view. In 1900 people were bent out of shape over Coca-Cola because it contained cocaine. At the same time there is a serious problem here, and, the hype notwithstanding, we really are in the midst of a national crisis."