Suppose a Broward Sheriff's Office deputy trying to sell dope gets robbed, and suddenly some dirtbag is loose on the street, peddling Navarro-brand crack to school kids—crack manufactured by the same people who are supposed to be taking it off the streets.

Why is Broward cooking its own? Officers say they aren't confiscating enough crack to use in big drug stings. Not enough crack? Other urban police departments have no trouble seizing plenty. There's not exactly a shortage of the stuff, especially in South Florida.

Another problem is honesty. The Broward crack lab relies on the assumption that every officer who comes in contact with the cocaine will be straight and pure. In a dream world this might be true, but virtually every local law enforcement agency—from the DEA to the Sweetwater police—has suffered the scandal of drug corruption.

All it takes is one crooked cop and you've got more dope on the streets. Grade-A government dope.

An experienced DEA agent voices a different concern about cops making their own crack: What will happen when these cases go to court? If a fed-up judge trashes the Navarro scheme, it could affect all reverse-sting operations. Such a court decision—over a lousy $20 rock—could cripple many multimillion dollar cocaine investigations.

A second-year law student could have a field day attacking the crack lab: "And where did these drugs come from, Deputy Smith?"

"Uh, we made it ourselves."

"Really? So you manufactured the cocaine. You took it out on the street. You offered it to my client for sale. Yet my client is the one who gets arrested!"

The question that inevitably will be raised in court: By creating the drugs, are the cops creating the crime? Have they crossed the line between enforcement and entrapment? And for what—15 seconds of glory on the local news.

Imagine, in the days of Prohibition, if the government decided to open its own distillery. Brewed up a batch of hooch, bottled it, parked a truck on the streets of Chicago and offered everybody a snoot. You don't think the jails would have overflowed in two hours?

Blockbuster statistics, sure, and big headlines—but absolutely no dent in the problem.

Everybody expects cops to seize dope. Nobody expects them to make the stuff. Just try to convince a South Florida jury that there isn't enough crack out there already.

U.S. murder of drug lords invites chaos

June 12, 1989

Your Tax Dollars at Work (continued):

Last week, it was revealed that U.S. authorities are considering the launching of hit squads to assassinate drug kingpins in foreign countries.

A day later, the U.S. Customs Service announced that it had foiled an assassination attempt on the life of Colombian cocaine lord Pablo Escobar Gaviria.

I wish they'd make up their minds. Either it's all right to murder these guys, or it isn't.

In the first case, a couple of fine upstanding South Floridians were arrested on the turnpike with 23 MAC-11s, 18 AR-15 assault rifles, five machine guns and assorted other party favors, recently purchased from a Palm Beach County arms dealer.

The government says the weapons were on their way to Colombia to be used in an elaborate plot to snuff the elusive Mr. Escobar, a leader of the Medellin cocaine cartel. The killing was allegedly ordered by the rival Cali cartel, with whom Escobar has had long-running business disputes.

In announcing the weapons seizure, Customs officials conceded that a larger public service might have been achieved had the assassins been allowed to carry out their mission. However, there are still a few gun laws left in this country, and Customs felt morally compelled to enforce a couple.

In the meantime, U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen (who had called his own press conference to announce the capture of another alleged cocaine gangster) went out of his way to chastise Customs for "leaking" the details of the Escobar escapade. This snippy exchange typifies the sort of selfless commitment and close interagency cooperation that has helped make the drug war the raging success that it is.

The joke of the week, though, belongs to those geniuses at the National Security Council who are now mapping plans to sneak into South America and murder suspected drug leaders. This ought to be a riot.

The idea is that by knocking off a couple of Escobars and Ochoas, we throw the cartels into chaos and disrupt the flow of cocaine. Absolute nonsense—but exactly the sort of James Bond theatrics that would appeal to desperate bureaucrats who don't know any better.

Certainly the cartels are led by evil, violent men, and certainly they have inflicted unfathomable misery on this country, as well as their own. But killing them will achieve nothing except to bring vicious retaliation against U.S. drug agents, diplomats and civilians in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia.

A man such as Escobar already lives in constant fear of being murdered by his own colleagues. He is protected by armed bodyguards, as well as by crooked cops and soldiers. Assuming a U.S.-backed hit squad could even get to him, it would almost inevitably cost American lives.

And for what? Within days of Escobar's death, there would be a new face at the top of cocaine's corporate ladder. The crops would still grow, the labs would still cook, the planes would still fly.

Look at the infamous Carlos Lender. He was captured, extradited to America, tried, convicted, locked up forever—all without causing even the slightest dip in the supply of cocaine. Shooting him wouldn't have been any more effective. To the cartel, he was totally disposable.

Beyond the practical problems of a U.S. drug assassination are the diplomatic ones. In Bogota, sovereignty remains a passionate cause among lawmakers—if the overnight extradition of Lender caused an uproar, imagine the reaction to the arrival of American killer commandos. Indeed, how would we react if the Colombian president sent undercover assassins to Florida?

William Bennett, the new drug czar, favors U.S. military strikes against foreign "narcoterrorists." If he thinks a hit squad in Medellin is going to solve the crack problem in Washington, he is sadly, pathetically deluded.

To put it in perspective: If Lee Iacocca dropped dead tomorrow, the Chryslers would keep on rolling off the assembly lines. The same holds true for Pablo Escobar and the busy cocaine factories of South America.

Bush fails to pay price of drug war

September 5, 1989

The good news is, we've finally got a president who seems to comprehend that cocaine poses a greater threat to this country than communism ever will.

The bad news is, we still don't have a president willing to pay for a real war on drugs.

Most of the $8 billion pledged by George Bush this week was already in the new budget. He asked for about $716 million in additional funds—peanuts, really, if you're seriously talking war.

Amazingly, Bush's budget director, Richard Barman, has suggested most of the new money should come out of social programs: aid to immigrants, grants for juvenile justice programs and subsidies for federal housing projects.

Brilliant thinking, Dick. Of all the places to scrounge for drug-fighting money, pilfer it from those most brutalized by crack: the young, the poor and minorities.

It's not like we don't have the funds for an all-out drug war; the money is there, and in sums greater than you can scarcely imagine. Billions and billions of dollars—$290 billion, as a matter of fact. Easy to find, too, right across the Potomac from the Capitol. Huge building called the Pentagon.

They've got one little program over there called the Strategic Defense Initiative, otherwise known as Star Wars—space lasers that are supposed to shield us from a nuclear attack. Lots of top-notch scientists don't think SDI can ever be made to work; others say it will be obsolete by the time it's ready to be implemented, well into the next century.