THE SECRET WAR AGAINST DOPE: The Inside Story of the U.S. Customs Bureau's Unceasing Pursuit of International Narcotics Smugglers

It was only a matter of time until old Washington hand Tully turned his slightly-above-hack pen to the Customs Bureau, having exhausted the FBI, the CIA, the Treasury Department, and assorted other sleuthing bodies, not to mention the fictionalized accounts (Supreme Court, Capitol Hill). Here the Customs boys are extolled for their energetic if frustrating crusade against drug importation. There are stories of successful operations -- against the Mafia, against the Latin connection (fully told in Clark and Horrock's exciting Contrabandista!, KR, p. 582), against poor fish like Ahmed, a Lebanese camel owner who force-fed the beasts bags of morphine in Syria for transport home and recovery in the dung (Ahmed was apprehended when a camel inconveniently defecated in front of an agent). And there's much incidental information about the drug dealers and how they are spotted via the new CADPIN (Customs Automatic Data Processing Intelligence Network) system which utilizes (and this is irony) Burroughs computers. But really there's very little here that hasn't already appeared in the newspapers and articles Tully occasionally cites. Likewise the solutions proposed -- ""an all-out harassment campaign"" against sources, more methadone for users, more research into investigative methods and psychological causes -- have been heard before. We would urge readers to resist Tully's name and rather misleading title and peruse instead Charles Goshen's Drinks, Drugs, and Do-Gooders (KR, p. 585) which discusses the issue with good historical and common sense.