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cargo at the Port of Newark," but he also mentioned, "Five tons of Cocaine in Houston... three [more] tons in San Francisco... five [additional] tons in El Paso" all in a three -month period. 12 So are you getting the picture here - -this is a long, long way from nineteen pounds. We are being flooded with high grade hard drugs. And how has the war on drugs aided our children? Has it reduced drug availability or use in our schools? (When I give my public presentations, I always ask how many people know who John Walters is. Almost no one ever knows. I tell them John Walters is the Drug Czar of the United States the "Top Cop" the one in charge of coordinating the U.S. war on drugs. But I also tell them there is no reason they should know his name since every year or so we throw out the old Czar and appoint a new one because the old one has never been capable of diminishing this country's "drug problem." However, I suggest to them, we shouldn't be too hard on the drug czars because we have given them an impossible task we cannot arrest our way out of our drug problem. So the only thing that really changes from the old drug czar to the new drug czar is the new drug czar tends to lie a whole lot better than the old one. And John Walters is really a pip. He would have you believe we are winning this war. He pointed to "Monitoring the Future 2002, " the largest government funded study ever done on the behaviors, attitudes, and values of American secondary school students, college students, and young adults, and said, "This survey confirms that our drug- prevention efforts are working ...... 14 What did the report really say? The study asserted that over a ten -year period, between 1991 and 2002, marijuana use among students in all school grades across the United States increased. How much did it increase? 30 percent for twelfth graders; 65 percent for tenth graders; and for eighth graders, an 88 percent increase! 15 How can John Walters say this study shows our drug prevention efforts are working? Could the drug- warriors possibly be lying to us? A 2002 drug survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University revealed that schoolchildren across the country say it is easier for them to buy marijuana than it is to buy beer and cigarettes. 16 How can that be? The answer is really not very complicated. When I first worked undercover, I was hanging out with about 20 kids in front of a bowling alley at a suburban strip -mall. They were not criminals. They didn't mistreat anyone, rob, or steal. And they were not drug dealers, at least not as I identify the term. In the words of one of the more courageous Juvenile Court Judges who later threw out many of these types of cases, "They were not selling drugs they were simply accommodating friends." What would happen was one night "person A" got a chance to use his parents' car so he could make the trip to New York City to buy drugs for the whole group (at the beginning of the war one had to go to a large city to buy drugs). The next night it might be "person B" or "person C" who made the trip to the city. Whoever made the run, first went to all the friends, took orders for what each wanted and collected enough money from them to pay for the drugs they ordered. On returning from the city, the individual doses of drugs were handed out to those who had ordered them. No profit was made on the transactions. Most probably didn't even earn enough to pay for their gas. Because I had befriended them, I could also buy drugs from them in that manner. That after all is the job of an undercover agent. It is not the romanticized work you see in the movies or on television. Every war must have a spy and in the war on drugs the spy is the undercover agent. You see, the drug culture may not involve victimless crimes but it does involve consensual crimes. Both the seller and the buyer get something they want from the transaction and neither is going to report the other party to the police. That is why it is necessary to infiltrate that world with an undercover agent who is willing to arrest any- and -all players, whether they are dealers or users. The job of all undercover agents is to become the best friend and closest confidant of the persons they are targeted 7