Business Isn’t Booming

Has Austin/Travis County won the drug war, or just given up on it? Clearly, most accounts indicate that "zero tolerance" doesn't carry the same urgency here that it does in Hays County. Last year, for instance, the Austin Police Department ditched its $500,000 DARE program due to -- the company line goes -- resource problems. But APD also may have been influenced by the program's own ineffectiveness, as several national studies indicate. The Travis County Sheriff's Department, meanwhile, is pressing on with its DARE program in schools outside the city limits.

Additionally, big drug sweeps don't seem to be the rule here these days. The last high-profile bust was in the spring of 1998, when Operation Big Dawg nabbed seven alleged gang members for selling cocaine, marijuana, and heroin. Before then, the last time something that newsworthy went down was 1994, when APD teamed up with county deputies in Operation Street Sweeper and busted 27 people on weed and hallucinogenic mushroom charges. "It was a good day," Lt. Gary Barrington told the Statesman at the time. "The dope gods are smiling on us." Apparently, the dope gods haven't smiled much since then.