There is no small irony in the movement of drugs into rural America, for it was the federal government itself that set in motion the chain of events leading to the troubles now besetting small cities and towns.
The much-ballyhooed federal crackdown on drug lords in South Florida boomeranged in a way no one could anticipate.
In the early 1980s, the federal government turned up the heat on Colombian drug kingpins who were bringing vast amounts of cocaine into the U.S. through the ports and back-country airstrips of South Florida. By the mid-1980s, the effort had been somewhat successful-as far as it went.
But the cocaine barons, fabulously rich and resourceful, were not crushed. They simply began channeling drugs across the U.S. border with Mexico, and it wasn`t long before they had established a bloody new pipeline running through the West and middle America.
Mexicans had been smuggling people and things across the 1,993-mile-long, scantly policed border for decades. Migrant farm workers long had slipped across the Rio Grande River and followed the harvests as far north as the Canadian border. All the while, Mexican heroin and marijuana smugglers were plying similar routes, often blending in among the itinerant laborers to cloak their illicit operations.
Then, in the 1970s and early 1980s, millions of illegal aliens, again using many of the same routes, began pouring into the U.S. in search of jobs and opportunity.
So when the Colombian cocaine czars went looking for a new route a few years ago, the Mexicans had the answer. The Colombians, armed with muscle and money, found it quite easy to co-opt the Mexican operations, then piggyback their cocaine deliveries on the shipments of heroin and marijuana. And suddenly, cocaine was abundant in small-town America.
At least a third of the drugs coming into this country now moves across the Mexican border, law enforcement officials say, and many predict the share will reach one-half within two years.
Along isolated stretches of interstate highways in Utah, Arizona, Illinois, Missouri and elsewhere, state troopers have seized tons of cocaine from specially customized compartments in the gas tanks or door panels of automobiles. Often the drugs come concealed in the aging rattletrap cars that migrant workers flog from town to town.
In years past, the Mexican couriers who transported drugs across the U.S. en route to the main metropolitan areas paid scant attention to the small towns they passed through. Those towns, where the police were few and largely ignorant of the specifics of the drug trade, served primarily as relatively safe rest stops for couriers on marathon cross-country runs.
But in the mid-1980s, the new Colombian kingpins decided to increase their already formidable profits by selling drugs wherever possible along the routes running from the border to the biggest U.S. cities. And dealers discovered that, while small towns were not immense markets, they could be extremely lucrative ones.
The same kilogram of cocaine that brings $8,000 in Miami or $17,000 in Chicago may command $30,000 in Peoria because of its relative scarcity there. The dealers also found that, despite the mythology of small towns as the last citadels of clean living, many people in them were not immune to the allure of cocaine. In fact, by the mid-1980s, the popularity of cocaine had begun to trickle down from the nightclubs of Manhattan and the sushi bars of Los Angeles, and was beginning to become the drug of choice for some on Main Street America. The drug peddlers simply cashed in on that trend.
”Small towns can`t close their eyes to this,” said Ruth Edwards, director of the Rocky Mountain Behavioral Science Institute in Ft. Collins, Colo., which has surveyed 250,000 school-age children in more than 250 communities since 1986. ”It`s not going to go away by itself.”
And it is not going to go away without an infusion of cash far beyond the $7.8 billion pledged by Bush last week, many experts say. Meanwhile, embattled small-town police and prosecutors have tried other ways to battle the dealers. In Albany, Ore., a town of 29,000, customers received an extra form in their monthly water bills, asking for information on suspected drug activity. A similar program in Newkirk, Okla., population 2,500, drew almost 100 responses and led to the arrests of five people on cocaine and marijuana charges, District Atty. Joseph Wideman said.
Wideman placed ads in four local papers urging area residents to ”Turn In A Dope Pusher.” The ads provided a form on which the suspected dealer could be identified, down to date of birth, color of eyes, Social Security number and nickname. The form also asked the potential informant to provide police with a ”code name you wish to be known by.”
”The number of forms we got was way beyond our expectations,” Wideman said. ”People want to be involved because they`re angry and they`re frightened. And they want the drug dealers gone.”
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A small town is a fragile ecosystem. When drug dealers invade, everything is knocked out of balance. It is not only the weak-willed and criminally inclined who can be swept into a vortex of violence and suffering, but the mainstream of the community as well-those who come from good families, were brought up right and received what once was considered a ”good foundation.” In Yakima, the fight against drug dealers is even more difficult to win because, every year, this verdant valley is flooded by migrant workers who make the trek from Mexico to pick apples, cherries, pears, hops and mint.
Some of them also double as drug couriers, or ”mules.” One of these mules, police say, was Pantaleon Trujillo, who lived in a squalid trailer home in nearby Moxee City. When police raided the home Trujillo shared with his wife and five children, they found two kilograms of cocaine and $8,000 in cash lying on his bed.
For years, Yakima rarely recorded a homicide. Last year there were 28. The rate of homicides per person in Yakima, in fact, was double that of Seattle, a city 30 times its population. Many people in town now fear to venture out at night. They have begun to lock their doors.
For many decades, there was a serene isolation, a sort of Shangri-La quality to life in Yakima. There was no rush hour. There was no rush. Orchards bloomed in the dry desert climate, thanks to irrigation. In the spring, a cold snap would bring out the smudge pots to warm the apple trees, and a fine membrane of inky soot would cover everything.
There was an innocence about Yakima, an innocence shared by many small towns. When a local restaurant attempted to introduce quasi-French cooking in the area, its menu included ”Le Reuben Sandwich.”
In many ways, Yakima is still the same. But the innocence is gone.
The arrests of Ralph Vickers and others last year galvanized more than 1,000 residents to march in protest through an eight-square-block area of town known as ”The Hole,” where drug dealers openly solicited customers and where empty hypodermic needles were scattered on the ground.
The drug furor prompted local employers to begin testing employees for drugs. Schools trained teachers and staff to spot students who might be abusing drugs. Security guards were hired at the two high schools after a Seattle street gang member was arrested on one campus for selling drugs.
Yakima has five drug treatment facilities, all opened since 1985, but affluent youngsters are sometimes sent elsewhere for treatment. According to seniors at Eisenhower High School, a trip to the famed Hazelden Foundation drug rehabilitation center north of Minneapolis-St. Paul is now seen as a status symbol.
”It`s `in` to be in rehab,” one senior said.
In one elementary school, a 2d grader informed a teacher that her 7th-grade sister was snorting methamphetamine. ”The little girl pronounced methamphetamine correctly,” said Frank Glaspey, director of Yakima County`s War on Drugs program.
And Nan Hough, a local librarian, said she watched as a 3-year-old toddler in a supermarket pointed to a bag of sugar and shouted to an older sister: ”Look! Cocaine.”
A survey of 372 Yakima high school seniors in 1987 revealed that 25 percent had sampled cocaine, compared with the national average of 15 percent, and that 8 percent had used it in the previous 30 days. In Boston, by contrast, only 9 percent of the students at Brookline High School reported last year that they had tried the drug.
At least 37 cocaine-addicted babies have been born at Yakima`s Memorial Hospital in the last 18 months. ”This problem came on so abruptly, it caught us all off guard,” said Karin Carlson, nurse-manager of the hospital`s neonatal intensive-care unit. ”People don`t want to believe it`s happening here.”
The drug epidemic in Yakima has reached into every social strata. Jon Beauchamp, the 19-year-old son of a former mayor, was a star basketball player headed to Eastern Washington State College on an athletic scholarship.
But in February, he and two other young men were arrested by a state trooper on Int. Hwy. 5 about 30 miles outside of Yakima, after a search of the 1988 Nissan Pathfinder in which they were traveling turned up two kilograms of cocaine. Beauchamp recently pleaded guilty to possession of the drug.
”My son is not an addict, and he is not a criminal,” said Henry Beauchamp, the former mayor. ”He was just going along for a stupid ride and got himself burned and his reputation trashed, and it may follow him for life.”
The elder Beauchamp said he ”regularly monitored” his son`s dresser drawers and pants pockets for ”telltale signs” of drug profits, but never found any.
In the neighborhood around ”The Hole,” Theresa Ocampo, 37, joined the Guardian Angels after she found her son Santos, 3, sucking on a discarded hypodermic needle. Her daughter Vicki, 15, had already admitted cocaine addiction, and her 8-year-old son had been arrested for shoplifting.
”I joined so my kids would start looking up to me,” she said.
But the message has not yet gotten through to Vicki, who was recently caught by her mother with a sawed-off shotgun that she said belonged to a dealer friend.
”They`re out of control,” Ocampo said. ”All I can do is pray for them.”
”We`re damn tired of this whole thing and trying to do something about it,” said Bill Doyle, president of Yakima`s Western Recreational Vehicle Inc., one of at least 30 companies in town that have started employee drug testing. ”Yakima isn`t what it used to be.”
The same can be said of many other small cities and town across the country. In Lebanon, Pa., a town of about 28,000 near Harrisburg, for example, a group of five grammar-school-age children recently were discovered to be playing a new game-”drug dealer.”
The children, all under 12, were bagging grass clippings and powdered sugar in a fishing tackle box and selling them as cocaine and marijuana on the playground for a few pennies. They kept detailed list of buyers and a ledger of accounts.
”It`s absolutely horrifying,” said Mayor Betty Eiceman.
”People have buried their heads in the sand,” said Lebanon Police Chief Michael DeLeo. ”They don`t want to know about this. But now they`re realizing it`s here and we must face it. We`ve got to do something to save the next generation.”
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Monday: Corruption, poverty complicate the drug war in Mexico.
