Drugs United States

A government test has determined that a red dye used in many lipsticks is a powerful herbicide capable of killing marijuana plants, prompting some Bush Administration officials to propose using the dye in an airborne offensive against domestic marijuana cultivation.

With cocaine use waning, authorities waged the war on drugs this year with strategies tailored to the regional battlegrounds: marijuana in the Appalachian states, methamphetamine in the Rocky Mountains, cocaine in South Florida. "There is no longer any one drug that consumes America as cocaine did in the 1980s," said Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Medications banned or highly restricted in the United States because of severe, and sometimes fatal, side effects are being smuggled in from Mexico and peddled out of back-room shops across Southern California. These potentially dangerous drugs, which multinational pharmaceutical companies market in Mexico, where regulations and enforcement are less stringent, have shown up consistently in more than 70 raids over the last year of markets, dress shops and swap meets catering to Latino immigrants.

Barry R. McCaffrey, the impassioned but often controversial architect of the Clinton administration's drug policies for the last five years, announced Monday that he will step down from his White House post in January, two weeks before a new president is inaugurated.

Lawyer Ron Minkin, once the defender of men who shipped tons of marijuana into this country from such places as Thailand and Colombia, is a most unlikely volunteer in the war on drugs. For 15 years, Minkin smoked his clients' dope, shared their lavish meals, became godfather to their children. And as his core clientele of hippie dealers moved from small-time street deals on the Sunset Strip and became international drug barons, they paid him millions to keep them out of prison.

William J. Bennett, the first director of the nation's war on drugs, went out with a bang Thursday, calling one congressional critic "a gas bag" and labeling the drug-plagued District of Columbia "a basket case." President Bush, in accepting Bennett's resignation at the White House, praised his leadership in the war against drugs and said that the nation "is on the road to victory" in that war.

In the piney woods surrounding this old east Texas oil town, a burgeoning cottage industry is taking root. Setting up makeshift laboratories in remote trailers and farm houses, an army of amateur chemists is churning out hundreds of pounds of "crank," a powerful chemical stimulant that has become the hottest-selling drug in a chunk of rural America.

Determined to keep control of their lucrative, illegal business, Colombia's drug cartels are finding new partners to move their cocaine and heroin into the United States and Europe. Imprisoning the country's top drug lords and deporting their traditional European contacts weakened the cartels for a time, but now law enforcement officials fear that they are rebuilding their illicit empires with reliable new routes.

An investigation into last year's record cocaine seizure at a Sylmar warehouse shows that Colombian drug cartels have shipped vast quantities of cocaine along America's interstate highway system despite law enforcement efforts to choke it off, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

At first, it appeared to be just another drug bust by U.S. border agents--nothing compared to the thousands of pounds of Colombian cocaine they have intercepted entering the United States in recent years near this strategic border town. On May 27, using sophisticated night-vision equipment and a helicopter, the U.S. Border Patrol swooped down on four female drug couriers crossing into New Mexico about eight miles from here.

It is an open secret in Mexico that often ill-trained pharmacy clerks illegally diagnose and prescribe medications for millions of Mexicans every year, sometimes without mentioning potentially fatal side effects. "It is very probable that [pharmacies] are selling 3 or 4 million prescription drugs a day without prescriptions," said Dr. Luis Zavaleta, president of the Mexican Doctors Assn. "We as a population have to change our culture.

Medications banned or highly restricted in the United States because of severe, and sometimes fatal, side effects are being smuggled in from Mexico and peddled out of back-room shops across Southern California. These potentially dangerous drugs, which multinational pharmaceutical companies market in Mexico, where regulations and enforcement are less stringent, have shown up consistently in more than 70 raids over the last year of markets, dress shops and swap meets catering to Latino immigrants.

Black leaders and public health advocates on Wednesday joined to protest several hard-line aspects of the federal government's anti-drug strategy, accusing the White House of spreading misinformation. In a letter to Gen. Barry R.

Hammering home the need for a strategy that measures success and failure, the Clinton administration is announcing a five-part plan designed to cut the size of the nation's drug problem in half by 2007. In a three-volume report to Congress, White House drug policy director Barry R. McCaffrey said drugs cost the country more than 14,000 lives annually, despite a nationwide effort that includes close to $18 billion spent this year by the federal government.

Levels of violence and drug availability in U.S. schools rose slightly from 1989 to 1995, a government study concludes. In 1995, 14.6% of students ages 12 to 19 reported violence against people or property at school, compared with 14.5% in 1989, according to a joint study by the Justice and Education departments. But the report, based on interviews with a nationally representative sample of 10,000 students, showed that 4.

A Republican senator speaking for his party chided President Clinton for what he termed a too-little, too-late strategy for ending teen drug use and blasted his proposal to ease prison-sentencing guidelines for small-time crack cocaine dealers. "It would be a catastrophe to let any drug dealer think the cost of doing their deadly business is going down," Sen. Spencer Abraham of Michigan said Saturday in the GOP's weekly radio broadcast.

House and Senate negotiators Thursday agreed to compromise legislation establishing a Cabinet-level federal drug czar and imposing a death penalty on murderers who kill as part of a drug-trafficking enterprise. The death penalty and drug czar provisions are the centerpieces of an election-year anti-drug bill that could be passed as early as today as the last official act of the 100th Congress.

While cocaine use continues to slow, methamphetamine is gradually taking its place as the most widely abused drug in the United States--and use of the potent stimulant is becoming increasingly prevalent in Los Angeles, the federal government reported Tuesday. Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco now lead the nation's cities in the number of deaths associated with methamphetamine use, according to the latest quarterly report by the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Determined to keep control of their lucrative, illegal business, Colombia's drug cartels are finding new partners to move their cocaine and heroin into the United States and Europe. Imprisoning the country's top drug lords and deporting their traditional European contacts weakened the cartels for a time, but now law enforcement officials fear that they are rebuilding their illicit empires with reliable new routes.

Americans spent $57.3 billion on illegal drugs in 1995, a catastrophic amount but down from previous years, according to a report from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The report said estimated spending on cocaine, heroin, marijuana and other illicit drugs compared with $57.5 billion in 1994. It continued a downward trend from 1988, the first year of the study, when drug sales were estimated at $91.4 billion.