Coming into Los Angeles Bringing in a coupla keys Don't touch my bag, if you please, Mr. Customs man.
—an Arlo Guthrie song, 1970
Guthrie's lyrics celebrate a popular underground myth: that the U.S. is a tough drug scene compared with countries abroad, where the laws are loose and the hash is cheap. Though it is true that a "key" (kilo) of hashish may cost as little as $10 or $20 in Lebanon or Morocco, the price for many young American smugglers turns out to be almost unbearably high. All along the "trade routes" by which narcotics make their way back to Europe and the U.S., young Americans are filling up a veritable Baedeker of prisons.
The State Department reported last week that, as of February, there were no fewer than 404 Americans being held in foreign jails on various drug charges, compared with only 142 a year ago. And the count is rising. Paris-based John T. Cusack, the chief U.S. narcotics agent for Europe and the Middle East, estimates that foreign police and customs agents are booking young American smugglers at the rate of 40 per month. In Morocco, five Americans have been arrested on drug charges in the past five weeks. Last week in Lebanon, Morocco's main rival as a Mecca for drug-seeking tourists, police arrested eight youthful Americans who were trying to sneak some 70 kilos of hash out of the country. The catch brought Lebanon's current population of Americans imprisoned on drug charges to 15, pushing the country ahead of Italy (12) and Greece (13), and closer to the league leaders, which are Spain (about 50 jailed Americans) and West Germany (30).
Drug Scare. The prison population explosion is worrying the State Department, which calls it "a very important question." In many areas, it is rapidly becoming the prime concern of American diplomats. In Rabat, U.S. Consul Joseph Cheevers is besieged by requests for such items as antiscorbutic vitamin C, soap and blankets from American inmates of Morocco's dank jails (40 to a room). At the same time, he is handling twice as many requests for information from worried parents in the U.S. as he was a year ago.
The surge in overseas drug arrests of American travelers is largely the result of a crackdown by foreign governments. They are disturbed at the emergence of narcotics problems in their own countries. Furthermore, some widely publicized drug-connected horrors, particularly the Sharon Tate murders, have helped to erode whatever benign neglect traveling American hippies once enjoyed abroad. A few of the jailed Americans are professional smugglers, supplying the Mob in the U.S. "But most of them," says Cusack, "are not pros in the true sense. They have no records. They are users, and many of them are 'missionaries.' They want to turn others on—and if there's a profit in it, so much the better."