Marijuana vexes border guards
'Pot' brought from Mexico
Editor's Note: This is the second of four stories dealing with the wide use of marijuana in the United States.
By JACK V. FOX UPI Staff Writer
SAN YSIDRO, Calif. - It is late Sunday afternoon and the bullfighters have just ended. The last race at Caliente has been run and the horseplayers are streaming from the track.
The weekending California couples are speeding up the magnificent Mexican coastal highway from Esenada.
The vacationers with license plates from Colorado and Missouri and Michigan have the back seats of their cars littered with pottery and pinatas.
And then, all at once, they come to a traffic jam that makes the wall-to-wall traffic on New York's Long Island Expressway at rush hour look like the Indianapolis Speedway.
It is the United States border crossing point between Tijuana and San Ysidro, 20 miles south of San Diego.
3 cars a minute
It will take six hours for 25,000 automobiles backed up in Mexico to clear through 18 gates, past immigration and customs.
Three cars a minute, one every 20 seconds. Through one gate in one hour, 160 cars will pass. Every five minutes or so, a driver will be told to get out, unlock his trunk.
Maybe one car out of 15 will get such cursory inspection. Every once in a while a car will be pulled out of the line and directed to a secondary search area where it will be given a real going over.
Inside the immigration-customs building, a 16-year-old Mexican-American girl sits on a bench softly crying. She and her boyfriend have been caught.
On a table nearby lie two cellophane packets, each the size of a brick, enclosing a green substance that looks like a crumpled up weed.
That is exactly what it is. It is marijuana. Two kilos, 4.4 pounds.
The girl and the boy, who has already been jailed, and the two little packets represent the total catch of marijuana smugglers
14 KANSAN Feb. 20
1969
over a three-hour period this Sunday afternoon.
Greatest entry point
Yet this is by far the greatest entry point of marijuana into the United States. Of the entire supply of maijuana entering the country, it is estimated that more than 70 per cent—perhaps up to 90 per cent—comes in from Mexico across the border into California.
The United States Customs Service here faces an almost impossible task. That morale is high is a tribute to the men who, almost without exception, have made it a career.
In the course of 1968, there were 38 million border crossings in the California-Arizona district. The agents not only check on marijuana, drugs and narcotics but have the broad responsibility of collecting duty on all items bought in Mexico and in preventing the import of any liquor.
The arrests and seizure for marijuana smuggling on the border here reflect the astonishing increase in the use of "pot" in the United States.
The ingenuity of the smugglers is matched by the instinct of the inspectors but mathematically it is no contest.
Marijuana has been found in hollowed out surf boards, in split and carefully re-welded gasoline tanks.
The inspectors look for signs of fresh paint on cars. They study faces for nervousness. They even have a dog named Rebel who can smell marijuana.
How much marijuana slips through is impossible to estimate but Melvin Johnson, customs supervisor for the area, concedes it must be an enormous amount.
Clearing center
The great magnet is the city of Los Angeles, 150 miles to the north, with its own cast market for marijuana and the clearing center for shipments across the nation.
Not only must the customs people watch automobile smuggling but they also must check airports and coastal shipping, particularly fishing boats coming up from Mexican waters.
Small airplanes take off from remote fields in Mexico and drop bundles of "grass" on the California desert where they are retrieved by confederates.
Johnson, who says he and his men would go batty if they
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didn't keep a sense of humor, tells with some amusement of an incident a year ago in the midst of an exercise testing West Coast defenses against infiltration by saboteurs.
Several teams were assigned to try to slip ashore in small boats.
The men in the fishing boat stared back in astonishment. They had by chance been apprehended in trying to smuggle in 1,600 kilos of marijuana.
A Coast Guard cutter spotted a fishing boat off Malibu with several men paddling for shore in a rubber dinghy. The cutter drew alongside and the skipper shouted: "Scarecrow"—the signal the "saboteurs" had been caught.
(Tomorrow: The users)
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