Word: underground
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...backlash drove coke and opium underground. Cocaine was the narcotic of choice among some jazz-band musicians and avant-garde actors and artists, but "decent" Americans steered clear. It was Prohibition, after all, and most Americans in the years after World War I were too busy finding bootleg gin to think about more exotic intoxicants. Marijuana began arriving in large quantities in the 1920s and '30s, smoked by Mexican immigrants who came North looking for jobs. Pot, too, was regarded with horror. One 1936 propaganda film called Reefer Madness warned the nation's youth that smoking the "killer weed...
...underground labs do not have the most stringent quality controls. Four years ago a botched batch of a designer drug called MPTP circulated through Northern California and left scores suffering from a frightening side effect: Parkinson's disease. If drugs like MPTP become as popular as cocaine, warns Ian Irwin, a San Jose neurotoxologist, "you would have the makings of a real national disaster. It would make Chernobyl look minor...
Meanwhile, houses on Florida's eastern coast are beset by another insect immigrant. The Formosan termite, thought to have arrived there aboard a seagoing yacht, forms colonies underground. Its subterranean paths sometimes extend as far as 300 ft. Says Entomologist Nan-Yao Su of the University of Florida's Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center: "In one instance, in Hallandale, Fla., a single colony had driven foraging tunnels underneath four large condominium buildings and infested each one." The insects chew up virtually anything in their path. Last year downtown Honolulu lost power for half a day after Formosan termites severed...
...that point the Americans pass on the information to Mexican police and hope, often vainly, for the best. "It is not unknown," says a U.S. official, "for DEA agents to give the name of someone to Mexican cops and then learn the guy was tipped off and has gone underground...
...again, making a disarmingly simple offer that seemed hard to refuse. If the U.S. would follow the U.S.S.R. in halting all nuclear testing, said the Soviet leader, the agreement would be "some kind of prologue" to eliminating nuclear weapons. In a televised speech, Gorbachev announced that his moratorium on underground testing, which began in August 1985, would be extended for a fourth time, to Jan. 1, 1987. He even suggested that a comprehensive test-ban treaty might be signed at a summit meeting with President Reagan this year...