Authors: Norm Stamper
Breaking Rank (9 page)
Then I became a cop. In my first year I kicked in a dozen or so doors, charged into people's homes, scooped up their weeds, seeds, and pot pipes, and carted these “felons” off to jail in handcuffs. It was fun for a while. But it got old.
Patrolman “Mike Jones,” who worked a beat near mine, lived to pinch druggies. He wasn't a narc, just a uniformed patrolman like me. But for some reason he had a hard-on for anyone holding. He'd twist and bend the U.S. Constitution left and right to get a “consent” search on everything from traffic stops to loud-party calls. Then he'd rip out back seats, rifle
through drawers, and stuff his hands into people's pockets until he'd come up with half a baggie, or a seed. A
seed!
Since Jones drove the police ambulance, I usually wound up transporting his prisonersâolder teens and young adults mostly, not likely to make anyone's “most wanted” list. They'd sit in the back seat of my cage car, mumbling, “Oh wow, man. Oh wow.” Or, “This cage is
weird
, man.” Or, “Hey, you got any Fritos?” I had plenty of other things I couldâand shouldâhave been doing. Like arresting wife beaters and child abusers, giving rides to real criminals.
By then I was convinced that drug abuse was a medical problem. I found myself debating fellow cops, arguing that society ought to help abusers get off drugs. I won few converts. Most of my colleagues thought drug users should rot in hell and traffickers lined up and shot. But a few showed compassion, and some actually tried to get medical assistance for the strung-out junkies on their beats. The best we could do for them was to haul them to County Hospital for a stomach pump, or attempt to sneak them into the East Wing, known in those days as the “psycho ward.”
Today, in these more “enlightened” times, the most caring cop would still be hard-pressed to find adequate services for those in need. Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Drug Policy Institute, says he does not favor broad legalization of drugs. But he does advocate, forcefully, “harm-reduction.” Writing in the January/February 1998 issue of
Foreign Affairs
, he defines the strategy:
           Â
Harm-reduction innovations include efforts to stem the spread of HIV by making sterile syringes readily available and collecting used syringes; allowing doctors to prescribe oral methadone for heroin addiction treatment, as well as heroin and other drugs for addicts who would otherwise buy them on the black market; establishing “safe injection rooms” so addicts do not congregate in public places or dangerous “shooting galleries”; employing drug analysis units at the large dance parties called raves to test the quality and potency of MDMA, known as
Ecstasy, and other drugs that patrons buy and consume there; decriminalizing (but not legalizing) possession and retail sale of cannabis and, in some cases, possession of small amounts of “hard” drugs; and integrating harm-reduction policies and principles into community policing strategies.
Sound sensible? Of course it does, at least to those not under the influence of shortsightedness. Yet many cities refuse to adopt or even allow needle exchanges. They're thinking, among other things, “There goes the neighborhood.” Doctors and other professionals have been known to use heroin, but more often the user resembles your worst stereotype of a drug fiend. Moreover, many communities cannot afford to staff an exchangeâparticularly late at night when an IV user is searching for a clean needle. Still, it's in everyone's best interest, for public health reasons alone, to have sufficient numbers of needle exchange programs, or better (as California has done), to allow nonprescription sales of clean needles in every city in the country. Thirty-five percent of all AIDS patients have been infected by contaminated needles, or through sex with an IV user.
Methadone clinics, in those few communities willing to tolerate them, have long waiting listsâand that's for people who
want
to wean themselves off heroin, who are willing to work at it.
Where do we find the money to treat addiction and other drug abuse problems when tens of millions of Americans can't even get basic health insurance, or insulin or heart meds or cancer drugs at affordable prices? Law enforcement officials at every levelâfederal, state, and localâknow the answer, and it scares them to death: take it from them, the cops.
Use the money now being squandered on drug enforcement, domestically and internationally, to finance a fresh, new public policy that educates, regulates, medicates, and rehabilitates.
But shouldn't certain drugs, certain
really
dangerous drugs be outlawed? Possibly, but only one comes to mind: the animal tranquilizer, PCP (see sidebar).
PHENCYCLIDINE (PCP)
Phencyclidine, a synthetic drug manufactured originally as a human anesthetic (and quickly abandoned when people under its influence turned violent or suicidal), wasn't aroundâor at least being used by humansâwhen I was a beat cop. Along about the time I became a lieutenant it started showing up under its various colorful street names: Angel Dust, Hog, Peace Pills, Rocket Fuel, Wack, Ozone, and, my personal favorites, DOA and Embalming Fluid. PCP wasn't pretty, and it took us a good while to learn how to handle it on the streets.
Let me illustrate with a hypothetical, drawn from experiences both in San Diego and Seattle, replete with the obligatory racial and political overtones.
You're a white cop. You get a call about a young black man acting strange at a grocery store. You show up, find him sweeping items off the shelves. He's incoherent but unambiguously threatening. He's got a wild look in his eyes, he's sweating buckets. You try to calm him, speaking softly, murmuring soothing words. He acts like you're not there. You know that you need reinforcements, at least three, preferably twice that many additional cops. You understand that you and your colleagues will be criticized for “ganging up” on the young, black, unarmed man, but you've been here before. This is not your first PCP case. You know that the best way to get him into custody and into a secure medical facility (the jail won't, and shouldn't, take him in that condition) is to swarm him, literally overwhelm him. No guns, no sticks, no fists, no feet. Just a good old-fashioned eight-arm bearhug. It's what they taught you in the academy.
As your backup units stream into the parking lot, your suspect starts flinging canned comestibles your way. You and your fellow officers keep your guns holstered, likewise your mace and batonsâan act of remarkable (and legally unnecessary) restraint. Slowly, no sudden movements, you inch toward him. As a tin of green beans sails past your head you and your mates lunge, grab the guy, take him to the floor. Even with all that weight on him he puts up a hell of fight, flailing savagely and kicking you in the cojones. Through your pain, you attempt to wrestle a pair of plastic flexcuffs on him. The fight lasts three minutes which seems like three hours. Finally, he's subdued.
As you start to lift him you notice he's not breathing. Nobody's choked him, nobody's hit him. But, there he lies, limp, motionless, his eyeballs rolled up into his head, drool running down his chin. You immediately cut the flexcuffs off, and you and a second cop begin CPR. Another gets on the radio and summons an aid car, Code 3. You lay him out on the gurney, get him into the ambulance. You follow the medics to the ER. But your man's DOA.
You're devastated. And, as members of the black community rally and march and demand your dismissal and prosecution for murder, you wonder what you could have done differently. An autopsy reveals the probable cause of death: acute PCP intoxication combined with intense physical exertion and “positional asphyxiation” leading to sudden, irreversible cardiac arrest. Maybe he had a preexisting conditionâheart disease, arteriosclerosis, high blood pressure, asthma. Maybe not. Whatever. He's dead. At the hands of the police.
Who killed him? He killed himself! (See “100 percent responsible, 100 percent accountable.”) But that will not satisfy the ignorant throngs calling for your badge. And, it probably won't satisfy you, as you continue to grieve and to speculate. What if . . . If only . . . Apart from not showing up that day, or pretending not to hear the call, what could you have done differently? How might you have been able to get that guy into the hospitalâalive?
You'll ask yourself that question for the rest of your life.
So maybe we ought not to legalize PCP. But are there others? Police officers will chime in with crack cocaine; they do fight a lot of crazy-acting crackheads. Crankheads too, for that matter. And what about gamma hydroxybutyrate, also known as GHB? Ecstasy has been abused, unconscionably, especially on the clubbing/dating scene. But, realistically,
any
drug can be scapegoated. In fact, people under the influence of booze, or anger, or jealousy, can be just as dangerous as those who've smoked crack. Hell, even a pot smoker can occasionally get in touch with his or her inner demon and come out swinging.
If decriminalization makes sense, why is there such virulent opposition to permitting and regulating drug use and “medicalizing” drug abuse? Well, many parents have witnessed firsthand the harmful effects of drug abuse in their own children. They've seen their families damaged or destroyed. To them, decriminalization makes as much sense as letting a three-year-old play with a loaded .38. To others, drug use is a sin, a moral transgressionâand what is government for if not to enforce morality? Then there are those like former attorney general John Ashcroft, who argue that in addition to its moral deficiencies, drug legalization would aid
terrorism.
*
And, let's not forget the drug dealers: at last count
they
were overwhelmingly opposed to legalization.
But the greatest resistance is embedded in the culture of the “drug enforcement industry.” Generations of lawmakers and law enforcers have invested, psychically as well as financially, in our current system.
Thousands of local PDs, for example, rely on “seized assets” from narcotics suspects to fund a significant slice of their budgetary pies. Lest there be any misunderstanding about my position on nailing drug traffickers and sticking it to them, let me just say I remember the day SDPD took delivery of a pair of matching Bell Jet Ranger helicopters. They'd been “donated” by a couple of dealers who wouldn't be using them for, say, twenty years to life, their trafficking means and proceeds having been forfeited to the cops who'd captured them. I harbor no love for dealers; they're a despicable lot, on the whole. But I've grown serious doubts about the asset seizure philosophy, as well as the seizure and forfeiture practices of most police agencies.
**
Opposition to legalization runs so deep among law enforcers that many refuse even to talk about it. And they'll do their best to shut you up if you so much as mention it.