Pubdate: Tue, 01 Jan 2002
Source: Reason Magazine (US)
Issue: January 2001
Copyright: 2002 The Reason Foundation
Contact:  http://www.reason.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/359
Author: Michael W. Lynch

BATTLEFIELD CONVERSIONS

Reason Talks With Three Ex-Warriors Who Now Fight Against The War On Drugs

Like any war, the War on Drugs has its good soldiers -- a varied bunch, 
coming from all walks of life and filling all ranks. They include eager 
volunteers, from the drug czars at the top of the command chain to the beat 
cops, Drug Enforcement Administration and Customs Service agents out in the 
field. The war also has reluctant conscripts, such as state and federal 
judges compelled by mandatory minimum sentencing rules to enforce laws that 
many see as counterproductive and unjust.

Increasingly, the War on Drugs also has what its partisans might consider 
traitors -- former soldiers who have become convinced that U.S. drug policy 
is ineffective, immoral, or some combination of the two. Reason National 
Correspondent Michael W. Lynch recently spoke with three such figures who 
were once integral cogs in the drug war machine.

The Cop: Joseph D. McNamara

Joseph D. McNamara started out as a grunt in America's battle against 
drugs. "It was sort of like the body count in Vietnam," says McNamara about 
the petty arrests for heroin he made as a Harlem beat cop in the late 
1950s. "The department loved to count these drug arrests and release 
statistics to show we were winning the war." In 1969, he spent a year as a 
criminal justice fellow at Harvard Law School. Eventually, he ended up 
earning a Ph.D. in public administration. "I wrote my dissertation in 1973 
and predicted the escalation and failure of the drug war -- and the vast 
corruption and violence that would follow," recalls McNamara. "I never 
published it because I wanted a police career and not an academic career."

That's exactly what he got. He served as chief of police in Kansas City 
from 1973 to 1976. In the bicentennial year, he moved on to become the top 
cop in San Jose, California, a post he held until he retired in 1991. He 
currently hangs his hat at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, where he 
conducts seminars on the War on Drugs for law enforcement officials. The 
author of six books, including the drug war detective novel Code 211 Blue, 
the 66-year-old McNamara is working on a new book titled Gangster Cops: The 
Hidden Cost of America's War on Drugs.

Reason: How did you get involved in what is now called the War on Drugs?

Joseph D. McNamara: I got involved as a foot patrolman in Harlem way back 
in 1957. A few years later the heroin epidemic swept through Harlem and was 
devastating. And so the police did what the police do: We arrested everyone 
in sight. It soon became apparent that it wasn't reducing drug use or drug 
selling. My eyes were really opened one day when my partner and I arrested 
a heroin addict. The addicts gathered on the top floor landings of 
buildings, which we referred to as shooting galleries. We used to routinely 
bust them for possession of hypodermic needles and also for the big crime 
of having cookers with residues of heroin.

One day an addict asked if we could give him a break. He said, "I'll give 
you a pusher if you let me go." We followed him down Lenox Avenue in 
uniform and in a marked police car. As he talked to one man after another, 
it struck me how little impact the police had on the drug problem. If we 
hadn't known what he was talking about, we would've thought they were just 
two men talking sports or the weather or whatever.

Reason: Is this why police rely on informants and sting operations?

McNamara: Since the police can't do their job the way they do it with other 
crimes, they resort to informants and to illegal searches. This is a major 
problem underlying police integrity throughout the United States.

Last year, state and local police made somewhere around 1.4 million drug 
arrests. Almost none of those arrests had search warrants. Sometimes the 
guy says, "Sure, officer, go ahead and open the trunk of my car. I have a 
kilo of cocaine back there but I don't want you to think I don't cooperate 
with the local police." Or the suspect conveniently leaves the dope on the 
desk or throws it at the feet of the police officer as he approaches. But 
often nothing like that happens.

The fact is that sometimes the officer reaches inside the suspect's pocket 
for the drugs and testifies that the suspect "dropped" it as the officer 
approached. It's so common that it's called "dropsy testimony." The lying 
is called "white perjury." Otherwise honest cops think it's legitimate to 
commit these illegal searches and to perjure themselves because they are 
fighting an evil. In New York it's called "testilying," and in Los Angeles 
it's called joining the "Liar's Club." It has lead some people to say 
L.A.P.D. stands for Los Angeles Perjury Department. It has undermined one 
of the most precious cornerstones of the whole criminal justice process: 
the integrity of the police officer on the witness stand.

Reason: What role do institutional interests play in the drug war?

McNamara: One year when I was police chief in San Jose, the city manager 
sent me a budget that contained no money for equipment. I politely told him 
that when you have a police department, you have to buy police cars, 
uniforms, and other equipment for the cops. He laughed, waved his hand, and 
said, "Last year you guys seized $4 million dollars. I expect you to do 
even better this year. In fact, you will be evaluated on that and you can 
use that money for equipment." So law enforcement becomes a revenue-raising 
agency and that takes, in too many cases, precedence over law enforcement.

Reason: From the perspective of the working police officer, how has the

War on Drugs changed over the years?

McNamara: It has become the priority of police agencies. It's bizarre. We 
make 700,000 arrests for marijuana a year. The public is not terrified of 
marijuana. People are terrified of molesters, school shootings, and people 
stalking women and children. The police are not putting the resources into 
those crimes where they could be effective if they gave them top priority.

Reason: There's some controversy over whether the arrests for possession 
are really for possession or if they are for dealing but prosecuted as 
possession. Do you have any thoughts on that?

McNamara: It's both true and false. Most low-level dealers are users, like 
the guy that we finally did bust after we let the addict go. He was an 
addict, too, and he was no better or worse than the guy we let go. But what 
we had actually done, which is standard operating procedure in the drug 
war, is let someone go who had committed a crime because they enticed 
someone else to commit a more serious crime.

Reason: What role does race play in the War on Drugs?

McNamara: The drug war is an assault on the African-American community. Any 
police chief that used the tactics used in the inner city against 
minorities in a white middle-class neighborhood would be fired within a 
couple of weeks.

It was a very radical change in public policy for the federal government to 
criminalize drugs in the early 20th century. Congress was reluctant to pass 
it because you had a very small federal government in 1914 and to interfere 
with the state police powers was a big deal. They couldn't get this 
legislation passed until they played the race card: They introduced letters 
and testimony that blacks were murdering white families; the police in the 
South were having trouble with "Negroes" because of these drugs; there were 
white women in "yellow" opium dens. The same prejudice popped up in 1937 
when they outlawed marijuana.

If anyone tried to pass laws on those same bases today, they'd be 
condemned. Yet the laws that we have are the last vestiges of Jim Crow. You 
don't have to identify yourself as a bigot anymore -- you can be for the 
drug war and you really are getting "them."

Reason: Do you think there's a greater risk in just questioning the 
operation of the War on Drugs than there is to testilying and going along 
with it in unethical ways?

McNamara: For police chiefs, there is some wiggle room. They can support 
sterile needle exchanges, medical marijuana treatment, and education 
diversion instead of incarceration. But it's asking an awful lot for them 
to come out and say, "Look, this drug prohibition is a stupid thing we 
shouldn't have started in 1914 and it gets worse and worse every year." 
That's a big step for a police chief. That's asking them to commit career 
suicide.

Reason: Were you frustrated as a police chief with the constraints of the law?

McNamara: Enormously. Police chiefs are sitting on kegs of dynamite. Many 
of them are really decent, progressive guys. They are worried about the 
disproportionate racial impact and the corruption. But there's nothing they 
can do. There's just too much money in it. You don't have the ability, 
regardless of the propaganda, to eliminate the code of silence. You don't 
have unlimited power. You have lots of constraints on how the police can 
discipline themselves, even for chiefs who are legitimately interested in 
doing so.

The Fed: Michael Levine

Michael Levine was born to fight the War on Drugs. He grew up tough in the 
Bronx during the 1950s and was an accomplished brawler by junior high 
school. Though Jewish, he identified with the Puerto Ricans moving into the 
neighborhood and he picked up fluent Spanish, a skill that came in handy 
later when he started doing undercover work in Latin America. He was 
personally motivated to fight drugs: His kid brother was addicted to 
heroin. "I saw it killing my brother," says Levine, 60. In 1965, Levine 
started a 25-year career in federal law enforcement that included stints in 
the Customs Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of 
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. He traveled the world and arrested some 
3,000 people.

Yet it wasn't long before Levine noticed a gap between the rhetoric and 
reality of the drug war. Says Levine, "Among DEA agents, the notion of 
really winning the drug war is so far out of the question that anyone who 
even mentions it is considered some kind of nut." Today, he serves as an 
expert witness on all things drug-related and hosts a radio show, Expert 
Witness, on WBAI, Pacifica Radio, in New York. He's authored and 
co-authored numerous books, including Deep Cover: The Inside Story of How 
DEA Infighting, Incompetence, and Subterfuge Lost Us the Biggest Battle of 
the Drug War (1990) and the novel Triangle of Death: Deep Cover II (1996).

Reason: Why did you want to become a drug agent?

Michael Levine: I believed that it was the number one national security 
threat. I saw heroin killing my brother. I saw people around me dying. I 
saw the crime rate skyrocketing. I fell into the same trap that we are in 
right now. I blamed everything on those evil drug dealers.

Reason: After a quarter-century as an agent, how have you seen the drug war 
change at the agent level?

Levine: It has become murderous. I remember back to the beginning of the 
Drug Enforcement Administration, which was founded in 1973 by President 
Richard Nixon. At that time, three agents went into the wrong premises in 
Collinsville, Illinois. They were prosecuted for breaking down the wrong door.

I was involved as an expert witness in the Donald Carlson case, which was 
on 60 Minutes. In that case, a multi-agency task force, outfitted in 
high-tech guerrilla gear, crashed into the home of a Fortune 500 executive 
and shot him down in his own living room on the basis of the word of an 
uncorroborated informant. Nobody was penalized for it. In fact, the people 
who did it were eventually promoted.

As the expert witness, I had access to all the reports and I recommended 
that these people be prosecuted. They paid no attention to the man's civil 
rights. He had no record or reputation for drugs. They did nothing but 
crash through his door on the basis of an informant's say-so. The drug war 
has succeeded in militarizing police against their own people.

Reason: At what point did you start to question the War on Drugs?

Levine: I was sent undercover to Bangkok during the Vietnam War. I was 
hanging with Chinese drug dealers in Bangkok. They were smuggling heroin 
into the U.S. in the dead bodies of GIs who were transshipped through 
Thailand. The Chinese drug dealers invited me to go to the factory up in 
the Golden Triangle area in northern Thailand, where much of the heroin 
sent to the United States originated.

All of a sudden I was cut off from logistical support. I was given no money 
to pay my hotel bills. There were these snafus going on with administrative 
stuff. They were so strange and inopportune that the dealers were starting 
to suspect me. It started to get really dangerous. A CIA agent informed me 
that I wasn't going undercover to the factory. I asked why. First he told 
me it was dangerous, that we had lost people up there. But I insisted. 
Finally, he said, "Levine, our country has other priorities." That was the 
first time I heard that phrase. That was the beginning of me doubting the 
intentions of our leaders in the drug war.

Reason: What year was that?

Levine: That was 1971.

Reason: And yet you continued on.

Levine: I was a good soldier. I had come out of the military. My brother 
was still a heroin addict. At that point, I thought my experience in 
Thailand was an isolated incident here in Southeast Asia. I couldn't 
conceive of my country lying to me.

Reason: In the chapter you contributed to After Prohibition: An Adult 
Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century (Cato Institute), you argue 
that drug agents have come to recognize that their efforts ultimately have 
no impact on the drug trade. What's the mindset of agents in this war?

Levine: Before you become an agent, you're bombarded with stories of drug 
war victories. It's painted as heroic -- guys in guerrilla outfits and 
jungle gear fighting the drugs everywhere. You want to do something for 
your country. Then when you get in, the first thing you discover is that 
you can't touch some of the biggest drug dealers in the world because 
they're protected by the CIA or they're protected by the State Department. 
Everyone from Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico to Manuel Noriega to the 
contras in Nicaragua to the Mujahedin in Afghanistan. Those of us who work 
overseas realize that this whole thing is a three-card monte game, that 
it's a lie.

Reason: You say the cartel responsible for much of the cocaine in the U.S. 
during the '80s not only didn't fear the drug war but that they counted on 
it to increase the price and to weed out smaller dealers. What is your 
evidence for that?

Levine: It's 1987 and I'm posing as Luis Miguel-Garcia, an undercover Mafia 
don who's half Sicilian and half Puerto Rican. I'm in a meeting at a 
restaurant outside of Panama with another undercover customs agent and the 
ruling faction of La Corporacion, the Bolivian cocaine cartel. They invited 
us to Bolivia to look at their production facilities. At that time, the 
U.S. had begun its paramilitary operations in Bolivia, which are now in 
Colombia.

So as a pretext, I told the man that we can't go down there because we read 
in the newspapers that the U.S. military is down there. He laughed and 
said, "That's just for the gringos. That's not real." And his hand slid up 
and down above the table. He said, "They have helicopters that go up and 
that go down. We know what they are doing before they do." That's the 
reality of the drug war. It's completely fictitious. It's only for the 
American people.

Reason: You think that's still the case?

Levine: It's absolutely still the case.

Reason: You say, in your experience, that 90 percent of drug users member 
who is both willing and able to take custody of her children, they are very 
likely going to be adopted by somebody else by the time she gets out of 
prison. She dissolves into tears.

Taxpayers can start to dissolve in tears, also. Because for the next year 
they're going to spend $25,000 of taxpayer money to keep this mother of two 
in prison. We're going to spend upwards of $5,000 a month to keep each 
child in a group home until they are finally adopted by somebody else. So 
that's $60,000 a year per child, plus $25,000 for the mother. We are 
spending $145,000 of taxpayer money to physically separate a mother from 
her children. It just doesn't make any sense.

Reason: You write about a drug exception to the Bill of Rights.

Gray: When I graduated from law school in 1971, it was illegal for a police 
officer, even after arresting you, to search anything that was outside of 
your grasp. If you can reach over to something, then you could search it. 
But if a suitcase you were carrying was locked, the police could not go in 
there unless they got a search warrant first. They couldn't go into the 
trunk of your car, they couldn't go into the glove compartment, and they 
couldn't go into the backseat.

That has totally been reversed. The police not only can search you and 
everything in your car, but they can also search your passengers. They can 
search your mobile home, which is in effect a home on wheels. They can go 
through and search everything.

Reason: There's a debate over whether the arrests for drug crimes are 
casual users for possession or dealers who are charged with possession 
because it's easier to convict. Have you thought about this?

Gray: Basically, I think that the prosecutors are right. We have people who 
are so overwhelmed that they have to reduce the sentences by 
plea-bargaining. However, they are all small pushers. They are all little 
guys. And a lot of them are selling small amounts of drugs in order to 
support their habits, because the drugs are so artificially expensive.

Reason: What has been the response of your colleagues to your speaking out 
on this issue?

Gray: Anyone who talks about it with me in the elevator or in the judges' 
lunchroom agrees that what we're doing is not working. Publicly, judges are 
pretty conservative people. A lot of them don't see themselves as social 
workers. A lot of them are concerned about their effectiveness and getting 
reelected, so they are just not going to say publicly what they believe 
privately.

That was really brought home to me when I gave four forums sponsored by the 
American Bar Association. After doing so, I received a letter from the 
present chief justice of the Supreme Court of a Southern state. He wrote, 
"Dear Jim: You're right. The War on Drugs isn't working. You're also right 
that it's fully appropriate for a sitting judge to discuss it because of 
what our position is in society. And I see these cases all the time coming 
across my desk. What we are doing simply isn't working. But I gave up a 
lucrative law practice for this present job. I love my job and if I were to 
speak publicly, I would have to spend all my time justifying myself. I just 
don't think I could do it."

Reason: You write that the only people whose positions have improved under 
the drug war are those who make more money selling drugs and those who make 
money enforcing the drug laws. Are you alleging a sort of 
bootlegger-Baptist coalition, where lawbreakers and prohibitionists end up 
on the same side of an issue?

Gray: De facto, yes. It was not set up that way. Just like it wasn't set up 
to discriminate against minorities. But it has evolved into an amazing 
alliance between the drug lords on the one hand, who are making just 
obscene amounts of money, and various officials who are getting paid money 
to enforce this. They both have a financial interest and incentive in 
continuing with the status quo.

When I was running for Congress a few years ago, I met individually with 
two sitting congressmen from Orange County to try to get their support. 
They both said that the War on Drugs isn't working, but the problem is even 
worse than I thought because most federal agencies get extra money to fight 
the War on Drugs. It's not just the obvious ones like the U.S. Customs 
Service and the DEA. It's the little guys too, the Bureau of Land 
Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They are addicted to drug war funding.
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