Tougher drug laws

One of the sparkling sights at this time of year around the equinox – it can vary by a day or two – is to see the boats go out from the marinas and inlets into the blue expanse of Peconic Bay, which divides the forks at the end of Long Island.

The boats are owned by the so-called baymen and what they go out now to garner is the first harvest of a delicacy about which a friend of ours, a visiting Frenchwoman, once said, 'If they were as fine as this in France, tourists would come from all over the country'. The delicacy is the tiny Peconic Bay scallop, in its maturity no more than an inch in diameter, and on the first day of the season, the baymen usually bring in hundreds of thousands of this tender, delectable, bi-valve mollusc, which is not matched anywhere.

The Peconic harvest provides more than 30 per cent of the bay scallops served in restaurants around the country. At any time of the year you can see bay scallops printed on menus everywhere but the fresh Peconic variety is not available before the third week in September. What you get at any other time is either frozen scallops or calicoes from the Carolinas. Most often the title 'bay scallops' is a cover-up for the large sea scallops cut up into small chunks.

Well, this past weekend, it was a sad sight on the shores of the bay. The 400 baymen whose livelihood depends on this late and abundant harvest stayed home. No boats went out for the simple, blunt reason that there are no scallops. This is the third autumn of our discontent. In the later summer of 1985, we'd look out from any cliff or bluff and see something new and puzzling.

Instead of the blue waters lapping in, we looked down on what we came to call the brown tide. It was the first invasion in human memory of what the marine biologists call a 'bloom' of algae, so microscopic and so dense that we assumed we were the late victims of some pollutant, of spreading industrial waste which has deprived us, for instance, of our finest eating fish, the noble striped bass. They spawn in the Hudson River in what are now polluted stretches, but even when they swim out along the ocean line and into the bays along a hundred miles of Long Island, their catch has been prohibited.

But this is not the case of the bay scallop. Nobody knows where the brown tide came from. One marine scientist has a theory but is ready to admit it's only a hunch. He thinks it's meteorological in origin and follows on a succession of dry winters and dry springs, but we've had, we had in the mid-Seventies, three or four such dry seasons, we also had a million scallops later on. There's no mystery, however, about what the algae do. They choke out the normal phytoplankton, the microscopic plant life on which the scallops feed so, simply, they starve to death.

In the fall of 1985, the scallop harvest was pitifully small; last year there was none. Same this year. The expert theory, not a very cheerful one, is that in some mysterious but dependable way, the scallops would learn to overcome the algae and would recover on their own, but not much before the end of the century. So, at the understandable pleading of the 400 baymen who together will lose the $2 million they earn at the dock, New York State has done something about it – an experiment conducted with skill and crossed fingers.

Last Monday in the late afternoon, a single-engine plane flew into Montauk, the last, the most eastern, settlement on Long Island. It had come from the state of Maine. It carried 800,000 minute bay scallops taken from a nursery on a river in Maine at eleven in the morning. They were packed in foam coolers and the pilot was nervous about their expectation of life, for they can live outside salt water for no more than eight hours. He landed at Montauk just after 4.30. That left two and a half hours to get them into pens in a salt lake on Montauk Point. It took two hours to unpack and separate and open up the scallops.

In the last half-hour, the divers started plunging into the lake and by seven o'clock, just when the sun was sinking, as it does at this latitude as fast as the divers, and to everybody's relief, the minuscule molluscs were feeding away in their new home. It's a reseeding project and the hope is that if it works and if the brown tide that killed the native scallops doesn't come back next summer, there could be a sizeable crop of these mature immigrants by the fall of 1988.

I appreciate that the sudden impoverishment of 400 men and their families is not a matter of great pain to 99.9 per cent or more of my listeners, but it was happening to us and, as we all come to know, 400,000 people killed in an earthquake in China is a horrid but bearable statistic, whereas a child you saw killed by a motorcar is a memory that stays with you for life.

There's one form of pollution that is drastically affecting this whole nation and if it's true, as somebody said, that in America we see our future, good and bad, then this blight will soon overtake the other countries of the Western world. In fact, there's lots of evidence that in Germany, in Scandinavia, in Holland, in Britain, it is already well under way. I mean the drug blight which 60 years ago was a small, sinister symptom of the decadent 1920s, restricted to Hollywood and among the arty society bohemians of London. Dorothy Sayers wrote one of her novels, an untypically tart one, about them, 'Murder Must Advertise'.

But now, we're talking about a country, this one, in which one high school pupil in five has tried cocaine, in which one in 20 or 30 is likely to become an addict. A treatment programme in Florida which has over 600 teenagers under treatment found that most of them had started a drug habit by the age of 12 and, as against seven per cent of a similar group that had used cocaine in 1984, today 63 per cent, two in three of them, used drugs of one sort or another before their parents suspected it and most, 70 per cent, were introduced to drugs not on the street or by pushers, but by friends.

I talked at length a few weeks ago about cocaine which has become the drug of choice of the middle-class teenager, not to mention, of course, prosperous yuppies, rock performers and showbiz parasites and an alarming minority of star footballers and baseball players. I come back to the odious topic again because President Reagan decided to propose a national battle against drugs.

Of course, the White House, through the Department of Justice, has for long had a programme of trying to stop the importation of drugs into the United States from South and Central America – an effort which, in view of the size of the country, its enormous wriggling borders, the impossibility of patrolling the 2500-mile southern border of the United States with anything like enough radar-equipped helicopters, the ruthless ability of South American growers and organised crime to mount fleets of small boats and larger fleets of private airplanes on secret night flights – in view of this tidal wave of drug entry into the country, the official programme has been, so far, about as effective as mopping up the ocean with a pocket handkerchief.

What the president has now done, in a deliberately dramatic appearance with Mrs Reagan on national television, is to announce what he called 'a national crusade against drug abuse'. It went far beyond the long battle with foreign importers, suppliers and pushers. For the first time, it turned to the users. It was a powerful sermon against drug abuse and a warning especially to the young, though as such people who've spent half a lifetime with addicts doubted that the young, who are temperamentally curious and likely to try out drugs, will be stopped by sermons however eloquent or well-intentioned.

The presidential programme, which must go before the Congress, would stiffen the laws against drug-related crimes, give more money for research and treatment centres and, in its most controversial proposal, require about a million government workers in sensitive jobs to take regular drug tests. That means routine urine analysis. This suggestion at once provoked an outcry in Congress and from civil libertarians and one from one government union that has already filed a suit. They all protested that compulsory testing would violate a citizen's constitutional rights by invading his/her privacy.

The House of Representatives, which is controlled by the Democrats, no sooner heard about the president's forthcoming address than it rushed, three days before it was given, to prove quite suddenly that it was more alert than anybody to the nationwide drug abuse. The House passed, helter-skelter, it's own anti-drug programme. It was more specific than the president and tougher on two counts, both of which had other congressmen and civil libertarians protesting against an unconstitutional use of the military and a federal return to the death penalty.

The House bill proposes the death penalty for pushers of drugs, especially to children and it sanctions the use of the military instead of only the local police and the FBI to stop illegal drugs coming into the country.

I'm afraid that both the House bill and the president's crusade represent less of a considered cure than a rush to righteousness. The whole House comes up for re-election in November and a congressman voting against a drug abuse bill today would be about as popular as a congressman who voted against Mother and Santa Claus. Maybe when the election is over, both Houses will sit down and look at all the facts and ponder and write a thoughtful, effective programme.

At the moment, the government's anti-drug programme and the House's response to it have been launched in the headlong, vote-catching atmosphere that characterised the passage of the 18th Amendment which prohibited the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors and which plunged the country into a 14-year orgy of self-righteousness, hypocrisy and prosperous crime.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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