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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 11½ 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