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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 Hürriyet 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