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Lawmen on the border have high hopes for Alliance. "We will take the battle to the smuggler," pledges William Logan, Customs commissioner in the area. But others voice skepticism as to how soon they will get the promised men and gear. Some wonder whether much can be accomplished without a stronger crackdown on the largely unregulated casas de cambio that exchange dollars for pesos and are thought to often launder drug money along the Mexican border. Sixty or so have sprouted on the main street of San Ysidro, Calif., alone.
The biggest obstacle to interdiction, of course, is the simple length of the coastline and border. Both are so honeycombed with hiding places that searching for incoming drugs will always be a needle-in-a-haystack operation. Though seizures are way up, that is probably an index to the greater volume of smuggling rather than the efficiency of interception. The Government, says Lee Dogoloff, once drug adviser to President Jimmy Carter, "has been interdicting the same 10% since Harry Anslinger," who was appointed U.S. Narcotics Commissioner in 1930. Operation Alliance may increase the percentage, but the greatest optimists have no hope of ever intercepting even half the marijuana, heroin and cocaine slipping into the U.S.
nation: drug enforcement (church)
LAW ENFORCEMENT
Police Crack Down
More arrests, more convictions, longer sentences, more seizures of drug dealers' assets. It is possible to string together statistics suggesting that the war on narcotics on the streets of U.S. cities shows promise of being won. What is not possible is to get a single law-enforcement officer to believe it. Instead, all over the country, lawmen wail that their best efforts are being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of drug traffic. "You can't say anything is working," admits Jim Goudy, commander of the Houston police narcotics division. In Boston, Deputy Superintendent William Celester concedes that raids on crack dens by newly organized police "impact teams" have accomplished little more than pushing the sites from one location to another. Los Angeles Narcotics Detective Kenneth Wilkinson expressed the point with classic simplicity at a meeting of 80 residents who demanded to know how crack dens were going to be wiped out. Said Wilkinson: "It's not going to happen. There are too many of them and not enough of us."
The failure of law enforcement to make any measurable dent in drug use has not resulted from a lack of effort. New laws have helped. A crime act passed by Congress in 1984 made it easier to seize the assets of drug dealers before | conviction. Federal agents last year relieved them of about $360 million. Local police are trying some innovative approaches. In Boston, New York City and Miami, they have begun confiscating the cars of well-off suburbanites who drive into the cities and get arrested while buying crack. The haul in New York since late July: 107 cars, including several BMWs and at least one Mercedes-Benz. And everywhere arrest totals are rising. Police in Florida nabbed 4,573 suspected cocaine sellers last year, more than double the number in 1983.