Each of America's successive wars on drugs has brought a shift of tactical emphasis and new sets of priorities for deploying resources. Richard Nixon, for example, targeted sites abroad, putting pressure on foreign countries like Turkey and Mexico to stop cultivating the seeds of poison. The new emphasis is on the war within. President Reagan is urging that employees take urine tests and that educational programs be initiated to discourage demand. Cities like New York, Boston and Miami are launching highly visible law-enforcement efforts. Here is a look at the prospects and difficulties faced on five different fronts in the war:
BORDER INTERDICTION
Boats Against the Tide
The 38-ft. craft speeding through the August night north of Key Largo, Fla., looked like the kind favored by drug smugglers. It tried to run from a U.S. Customs patrol boat and stopped only when Agents Patrick Olive and Robert Rutt drew close enough to play their searchlight over its cockpit. One of the four men on board had a record of three narcotics arrests. But a thorough search turned up nothing, so Olive and Rutt could only wave goodbye. Perhaps the boat had been on a successful reconnaissance mission. As Olive explained, "The dope people have their own intelligence and counterintelligence corps. They monitor our communications and use decoy boats to watch our reaction. If we go after the decoy, they run a load north or south of us. Sometimes we get frustrated."
So do other federal agents trying to police the 8,426 miles of deeply indented Florida coastline, through which most drugs sneaked into the U.S. come, and the 2,067-mile border with Mexico, gateway for much of the rest. The smugglers they are up against have almost unlimited funds. "They can afford to lease an entire ranch for one drop," says Marion Hambrick of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Houston. They can also buy the best equipment: advanced fiber boats that elude radar, scuba-diving gear, "voice privacy" scrambler radios and single-sideband transmitters, which are hard to intercept, and light planes that are often faster and have better radar than Customs' planes. Firearms too: gun battles between feds and smugglers have erupted all along the Mexican border.
The federal interdiction forces -- divided between Customs, DEA and the Immigration and Naturalization Service -- are also improving their capability. Those in Florida have acquired souped-up boats with catamaran racing hulls, called stingers, and radar operating out of tethered balloons to keep watch on low-flying planes. The feds along the Mexican land border have long felt neglected, but that is supposed to change under Operation Alliance, an ambitious interdiction plan announced in mid-August by Vice President George Bush. The Customs forces along the border are to be strengthened by 350 new officers, a 30% increase, and INS will get new equipment such as vehicles that carry a 30-ft. tower housing an infrared nightscope. Some 60 additional prosecutors will be sent south to relieve a shortage that has hindered trials of arrested smugglers.