Tears Of Rage

By Ed Magnuson

His timing was not the best. "The tide of battle has turned, and we are beginning to win the crusade for a drug-free America," Ronald Reagan declared last week at a White House conference on drugs. Yet as the confrontation escalated between the U.S. and Panama, and thousands of police gathered for the funeral of a New York City officer assassinated by a drug gang, Nancy Reagan took a tougher line. "Drugs are tearing our communities apart," insisted the First Lady. "If you are a casual drug user, you are an accomplice to murder."

The destructive and insidious menace of drugs has again boiled to a crisis. Once more, the First Couple and other Americans have declared themselves fed ^ up and angry about the damage that illegal drugs are wreaking on their homes and communities. This time, however, many people were asking more insistently whether the U.S. is really serious about combatting its drug problem. How long should Washington tolerate drug-financed corruption in such allied nations as Panama, Mexico and Colombia? And how long will ordinary Americans wink at the widespread, casual drug use that underwrites the violence on their streets?

In 1986 the death of Basketball Star Len Bias after a cocaine overdose caused a national outcry. Last week another death became an even more chilling symbol: the brazen assassination of Police Officer Edward Byrne, 22, a New York City rookie cop guarding the home of a Queens resident who had complained about cocaine dealing in his neighborhood. A gunman fired five shots into Byrne's parked squad car, breaching a line against the deliberate killing of police that even the Mafia usually respects. An army of 10,000 lawmen, some from as far away as Texas, attended Byrne's funeral in what may have been the largest such U.S. police honor guard. "If our son Eddie, sitting in a police car representing and protecting us, can be wasted by scum, then none of us is safe," said his grieving father Matthew, a retired New York police lieutenant. New York Mayor Edward Koch called Byrne a "martyr in what amounts to a war for national survival."

Another focus of the anger was the difficulty of ousting Panama's arrogant military leader, General Manuel Antonio Noriega. U.S. attorneys in Tampa and Miami last month had announced indictments of Noriega for drug trafficking and money laundering. The charges made it impossible for the Reagan Administration to continue to overlook Noriega's sinister activities.

The Administration's initial steps against Noriega last week seemed timid and tentative. In response to a deadline imposed by Congress in 1986, the President struck Panama from a list of nations certified as cooperating with the U.S. in reducing the production or transport of drugs. Any such "decertified" nation loses half of its U.S. economic aid and faces American opposition to requests for loans from international lending agencies. But the move was only symbolic, since U.S. aid to Panama was discontinued last year after anti-American demonstrators attacked the U.S. embassy.

The only other nations on the U.S. aid blacklist because of drugs are Iran, Afghanistan and Syria, none of which have received official American aid for years. The President claimed that the Bahamas, Colombia and Mexico have made progress against drugs, even though the Bahamas is widely known as a money- laundering and transshipment point for drug dealers, Colombia has made no visible headway against its notorious Medellin cartel and Mexico is the base of ever growing drug-smuggling traffic across the porous U.S. border.

Even the State Department, which produced the certification list, has quietly joined the DEA in opposing the full certification of Mexico, partly on grounds that Mexican authorities have failed to prosecute suspected killers of a DEA agent. But the President and Attorney General Edwin Meese took a more tolerant view of Mexico's drug-fighting efforts. "We have to recognize that in some countries the government is fully cooperative," Meese said recently. "They are less than fully successful because of intimidation, bribery and corruption."

The Administration's tactics in dealing with Noriega, however, soon turned out to be tougher than its toothless drug decertification had suggested. The State Department declared that Panama President Eric Arturo Delvalle had been unconstitutionally dismissed by a legislature controlled by Noriega after Delvalle attempted to fire the general. Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead certified that the proper custodian of Panamanian government funds in the U.S. Federal Reserve and federally insured banks was Juan Sosa, Delvalle's Ambassador in Washington. Sosa thus controls $50 million that would otherwise come under the direction of Noriega's cronies.

Delvalle and Sosa sought other ways to squeeze the Noriega government financially. One was to urge the Administration to hold up $7 million that the U.S. will soon owe Panama as a periodic payment required by the Panama Canal treaties. Delvalle has persuaded most of Panama's worldwide consulates to retain the more than $20 million in annual payments that the government reportedly receives from 11,000 merchant ships registered under the Panamanian flag. In a written response to questions from TIME last week, Delvalle declared from hiding, "All imaginable pressures, no matter how dramatic they may seem, should be taken if we want to have a democracy in Panama."

Dropping all pretense that Delvalle is calling the shots alone, the State Department asked again for Noriega's removal. Secretary of State George Shultz declared that "Noriega is a drug runner and he has to go." Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams explained that the Noriega government has a public payroll of $65 million a month and has only enough cash left for another month. "After that, he's out of money."

Worried about a financial collapse, depositors rushed to withdraw cash from Panamanian banks, and the Panama National Bank declared that it could not help meet the demands placed on these institutions. All banks in the country were shut down by Friday. An anti-Noriega general strike gradually picked up steam before being called off by its leaders, who were worried that an economic panic might produce widespread violence.

Still, the Administration's moves against the Panamanian general did not stem solely from any newly inspired outrage over his alleged drug dealing. "We don't know anything today about Noriega that we didn't know a year ago," conceded a senior State official. "What's changed is politics and Panama, not Noriega."

While Reagan seemed to hold the upper hand in the battle against the general, few experts agreed with the President that the war against drugs was being won. Some were reminded of Richard Nixon's 1974 declaration that "we have indeed turned the corner" in fighting drugs. "Yeah," scoffed one federal drug agent last week. "We turned the corner -- and there was an army coming."

Prompted by the previous burst of national anger over drugs in 1986, Congress appropriated $1.7 billion that year for a multiple assault on the problem. The fresh cash had an impact. The DEA last year seized $500 million in assets of drug traffickers, such as airplanes, speedboats and property purchased from drug profits -- a haul that equaled the agency's annual budget. Antidrug agencies at all levels combined last year to intercept 356 kg of heroin and 35,970 kg of cocaine, estimated by some authorities at about one- third of U.S. consumption. The comparable figures in 1981 were 209 kg of heroin and 1,872 kg of coke.

But these staggering totals also indicate how the tide of narcotics keeps rising. One measure of the huge supply: the wholesale price of cocaine in the U.S. has dropped by roughly half since 1986. The advent of crack has spread cocaine use from the enclaves of middle-class America into the mean streets of the ghettos.

At last week's White House Conference on a Drug-Free America, experts differed on whether to place priority on choking off the supply or diminishing the domestic demand. U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett argued that schools cannot be expected to check effectively the demand for drugs when so many youngsters watch their parents feed their own addictions. Bennett urged the full and forceful use of the U.S. military to eradicate drug crops in the producing nations and to block shipments to America. "It is to be hoped we can do this in collaboration with foreign governments," he said, adding ominously, "But if need be, we must consider doing this by ourselves."

A tough tactic was advocated by William von Raab, head of the U.S. Customs Service. After complaining that some low-ranking bureaucrats were "conscientious objectors in our war on drugs," he announced that he will order his agents to confiscate the passport of any American traveler caught carrying even so much as a marijuana joint into the U.S., starting later this month. Such measures seem certain to be challenged in court, as was random drug testing of key civilian employees in the Army and the Transportation Department. The Army halted its program last week after a federal judge declared that random urinalysis amounted to an unconstitutional search.

Many local officials were far from impressed by the federal efforts. After calling the President a "wimp" in the drug war, New York's caustic Mayor Koch complained that "we are sending economic aid to countries that are killing our children. We are paying for our own lynching." Arguing for massive military interdiction, Koch declared, "The Communists aren't crossing our borders. The drugs are. The political aim of the drug traffickers is to make addicts of all of us."

Even U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani, a Republican whose prosecution of New York Mafia families has given him a gangbuster's reputation, criticized the Administration's antidrug efforts as too weak. "The State Department has an elitist attitude toward the drug problem," Giuliani charged. "They don't want to deal with it. Yet it is just as important as our relations with the Soviet Union or the Middle East."

Unless drugs are attacked at every level, the U.S. may continue to flail at the problem. With a touch of sarcasm and a call for much stronger action on all drug fronts, including education, treatment and enforcement, Sterling Johnson, a special narcotics prosecutor in New York City, declared sadly, "If we are winning the war on drugs, every American better just pray each night that we don't lose."

CHART: TEXT NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Nigel Holmes

CAPTION: DRUG TAKE

DESCRIPTION: Percent change in amount of drugs marijuana (cannabis), heroin and cocaine seized by federal agencies from 1981 to 1987.

With reporting by John Moody/Panama City and Elaine Shannon/Washington