American Notes: Aug 19,1985

DRUGS Crackdown on Grass Farmers

Attorney General Edwin Meese clearly relished the numbers he ticked off for the press: 342,635 marijuana plants uprooted and destroyed, nine pot farms confiscated, 175 arrests, 73 weapons seized. Those were the results of the first three days of "Operation Delta-9," this year's expanded version of the Justice Department's nationwide marijuana-eradication drive. By the harvest season in late fall, lawmen hope to surpass last year's record total of 13 million plants eliminated.

Meese was criticized for making Delta-9 a media extravaganza. Word of the operation was leaked to the press well before the raids began, and reporters and television camera crews accompanied officers as they swooped down on cannabis fields in helicopters or hacked away at the plants with machetes. Said New Jersey Democrat William Hughes, chairman of the House Judiciary Crime Subcommittee, in an angry letter to the Attorney General: "I realize we live in a media-oriented environment, but this is the first time I have ever seen a press release issued three days in advance of a dangerous law-enforcement operation."

During the more than four years he spent as President Reagan's embattled Budget Director, David Stockman received a top annual salary of $75,100. For the four months that he plans to spend writing a book about his experiences in the Administration, Stockman will receive more than $2 million. In the hope that the outspokenness that made Stockman so controversial in Government will make him a hit at the book stores, Harper & Row beat out a number of other prominent publishing houses with its extravagant bid, putting Stock man in a league with Henry Kissinger. Stockman, 38, who plans to join the investment banking firm Salomon Brothers this fall, negotiated the book deal without the services of an agent.

In recent months, Geraldine Ferraro, Tip O'Neill and Jeane Kirkpatrick have each sold rights to their memoirs for what at the time seemed a hefty sum of about $ 1 million. According to friends of his, Stockman chose Harper & Row in part because the publisher promised him editorial independence. The question is whether he will be able to resist pressure to pull his punches from the colleagues he left behind in the Reagan Administration.

Despite the concern of many Americans over military spending, the defense contracting business remains one of the nation's most mysterious industries. There have been precious few truly reliable statistics on whether the Pentagon is protecting the interests of taxpayers and, conversely, whether the defense industry is achieving an equitable return on its investment. Last week the Pentagon released its first comprehensive report on the subject in a decade. The 18-month study found that, thanks to the Reagan Administration's military buildup, weapons contractors made a 4.7% profit between 1980 and 1983. Over that same stretch of time, manufacturers of durable goods in the commercial market averaged losses of 3.65%.