From the Publisher

By Louis A. Weil III

Few social issues are more daunting than the nation's drug-abuse epidemic. That is one reason the war on drugs, despite government claims to the contrary, is in trouble. And that is why TIME is lucky to have veteran investigative reporters Elaine Shannon and Jonathan Beaty reporting on drug problems.

Beaty has been doing it since a 1978-82 stint in TIME's Washington bureau; among other duties, he covered the Drug Enforcement Administration. He first contributed to a major TIME story on drugs in 1981, when we examined cocaine. This week he takes a look at the empire of Los Angeles superdealer Bo Bennett. Beaty covered Bennett's trial, but also spent months talking to drug traffickers. "At one point," he says, "I actually presided over a conference, with people at all levels of the business explaining to me how it works." Gaining their confidence was not easy. Beaty, who once went through 10 days of screening before being allowed to meet with Bolivian coca baron Roberto Suarez Gomez, knows the first rule: "You have to promise you won't write anything that reveals their identities to the police -- or their competitors."

Shannon approached the story from the government side, interviewing officials in Washington and heading for the Mexican border. There she flew with U.S. Customs officers as they patrolled smuggling routes and staged mock intercepts. They scouted the "slots," mountain passes where airborne smugglers fly only feet above the ground to evade radar. "Drug pilots are all a little crazy," she says. "They carry extra fuel bladders, which means they're flying a bomb. At 50 ft., graze a hill and it's all over."

Shannon first covered the drug problem in 1968 as a cub reporter for the Nashville Tennessean. She worked for several publications before coming to TIME in 1987, and has written a book about Enrique Camarena Salazar, the U.S. DEA agent kidnapped and murdered by Mexican drug traffickers and corrupt officials. Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Can't Win was a best seller in paperback earlier this year. The book was turned into the NBC mini-series Drug Wars: The Camarena Story, which won an Emmy as the best mini-series of 1989-90.

Supplemented by the reporting and efforts of colleagues including Latin America bureau chief John Moody and senior writer Ed Magnuson, Beaty and Shannon have a fascinating, disturbing story to tell.