WASHINGTON — Arkansas’ drug czar told a Senate subcommittee Thursday that involvement in federal drug-eradication programs has helped combat narcotics trafficking in the state.
State Drug Director Fran Flener said the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program has provided law enforcement training and strengthened intelligence networks needed to address illegal drug production and distribution throughout Arkansas.
“Arkansas’ participation in federally funded drug enforcement initiatives serve to provide the means for greatly enhanced counter drug efforts,” Flener said.
In 2008, four Arkansas counties - Benton, Jefferson, Pulaski and Washington - joined a dozen other counties in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana in the Gulf Coast High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a program of the White House’s National Office of Drug Control Policy.
Since then, Flener continued, “Arkansas has gained many advantages in its capacity to attack the command and control of the groups which engage in it” - many of which have ties to Mexican drug cartels.
Flener appeared before the Senate Homeland Security’s Ad Hoc Subcommittee on State, Local and Private Sector Preparedness and Integration, which is led by Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas. The hearing focused on drug traffickers’ evolving tactics for smuggling drugs across the United States’ southwest border with Mexico.
Pryor, joined by Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, the panel’s ranking Republican, heard how these gangs use everything from tunnels to submarines to ultralight aircraft to ferry drugs across the border. They saw photos of a wooden catapult and delivery vans disguised with the logos of Dish Network and the U.S. Border Patrol.
Witnesses from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Drug Enforcement Administration told senators about the methods they are using to disrupt the flow of drugs - and how their collaboration has been critical to the success of their efforts.
So why were Flener and a fellow drug czar from Nevada testifying at a hearing about border security? Because those drugs end up in their states, they explained.
Pryor put it this way: “Many Americans, and likewise many lawmakers, may be inclined to believe this problem is for the border states only, and for the border states to solve. Yet there can be no doubt that this is a problem for all Americans,” since an estimated 230 U.S. cities, including some in Arkansas, have Mexican drug gangs.
Flener elaborated on why Arkansas is “an attractive target area” for drug traffickers: “Its relatively low population, rural areas, and small law-enforcement presence in some remote regions provide the privacy required by those manufacturing or distributing drugs.”
Small towns are seeing the kind of drug-distribution activities more commonly associated with larger urban areas, Flener said, with traffickers importing drugs from the Southwest border and transporting them to Arkansas locations before redistributing them to other locations in the state and nation.
Although Arkansas has seen problems stemming from marijuana, heroin, cocaine and other drugs, methamphetamine continues to be the chief threat, Flener said. To illustrate the scope of the problem, she pointed to a recent operation under the auspices of the high-intensity drug program involving at least a half-dozen state, federal and local law-enforcement agencies.
In the end, Operation Ice Princess dismantled a large scale methamphetamine distribution ring based in Jonesboro that relied on a network in Searcy, Kensett, Rose Bud, Batesville and Little Rock - netting 19 arrests and 9 pounds of methamphetamine.
The example of Rose Bud, a town with fewer than 500 residents, underscores why federal support is key to the anti-drug efforts, Flener said: “They have no means to fund anyone that can just specifically be assigned to drug enforcement even though probably 90 percent of their problems are drug-related.”
Front Section, Pages 2 on 04/01/2011