Pubdate: Thu, 20 May 2004
Source: Westword (CO)
Copyright: 2004 New Times
Contact: http://www.westword.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1616
Author: Alan Prendergast
Cited: Sheriff Bill Masters http://www.leap.cc/speakers/masters.htm
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Bill+Masters
THE MAVERICK TELLURIDE LAWMAN
Bill Masters Is No Dope.
So What Turned Him Against the War on Drugs?
In the big city, the search would take him down mean streets, to a ratty
duplex or a motel bathroom or some tweaker's garage. But the resort town of
Telluride has no mean streets, and the rest of San Miguel County, where
Masters has been sheriff for the past 25 years, has almost no streets at all.
But that doesn't mean that this sinfully scenic county is a drug-free zone.
Dope is everywhere, if you want to go hunting for it. On this particular
morning in early May, Masters has solid intelligence about a suspected
methamphetamine operation tucked deep in the woods, and he wants to eyeball
the place himself before sending any of his deputies into harm's way. So he
slips behind the wheel of a 1995 white Bronco -- the oldest vehicle in his
agency's fleet -- and heads for the high country.
"We're going to have to do something about it," he says, negotiating a
steep dirt road north of Telluride. "We're going to have to figure out how
to get in there and bust those people."
It's off-season in southwestern Colorado -- too late for skiing, too early
for the summer crowd. Spring comes late to the San Juans, then seems to
arrive all at once. The snow retreats from the green slopes, the
wildflowers emerge, and the white-capped peaks loom stark and silent in the
brilliant sunlight.
Masters's route takes him through mountain meadows and across the top of a
mesa, past old mining shacks and million-dollar homes. He stops
occasionally to check out vehicles parked by the side of the road,
including a couple of abandoned snowmobiles. Finally, he circles around a
modest two-story house surrounded by aspens at the end of a private road.
The property is littered with debris -- a discarded camper top, tools,
paint cans, a junker with its hood up.
"That's it," he says. "I wouldn't call it a typical meth house, but what's
typical these days?"
A shade of weariness creeps into his voice as he heads back to Telluride.
The sheriff has every intention of seeing this case go down -- meth is
meth, after all, and he's sworn to uphold the law. "If we come across a
situation that we think is dangerous to the community, we're going to take
action," he says. But doing your job isn't the same as believing in the
cause, and when it comes to the drug war, Bill Masters is no longer a true
believer.
His disillusionment has been shaped by his experiences in the trenches of
that war as it's been played out in the Rocky Mountain fantasy camp known
as Telluride.
Masters and Telluride grew up together. He arrived in the rough-and-tumble
mining town when the ski area was just starting, and local bars were often
the battleground between hard-drinking old-timers and hard-drinking,
pot-smoking newcomers. Green and inflexible, Masters became known as a
hardass, eager to rid his community of cannabis, cocaine and any other
controlled substance the ski crowd might bring in.
He ran wiretaps and undercover buys, slapped the cuffs on local drug lords
and respected town officials, worked with strike forces with fancy names,
even copped an award from the DEA -- yet the drugs kept coming. In the
1980s, the increasingly affluent resort town's penchant for recreational
toot was so well-known that it received a nod in Glenn Frey's hit
"Smuggler's Blues":
They move it through Miami
Sell it in L.A.
They hide it up in Telluride
I mean it's here to stay.
For years, Masters fought the coke trade with zeal. But appalled as he was
by the toll of drug abuse, he began to see drug enforcement -- with its
rising corruption and violence, its drain on public resources, its erosion
of civil liberties and hefty contribution to the prison population -- as a
much greater social problem. In 1998, he broke with the state's Republican
leadership over drug policy, becoming the nation's only Libertarian
sheriff. Three years later he published his first book, Drug War Addiction:
Notes From the Front Lines of America's #1 Policy Disaster, blasting the
hypocrisy of interdiction efforts and calling for the warriors'
ever-soaring budgets to be diverted to drug prevention and treatment programs.
A second book, The New Prohibition, released this week, takes the case
against the war several steps further. Edited by Masters, who also
contributed an introductory essay, the book features contributions from a
wide range of observers, including Texas congressman Ron Paul, Denver
federal judge John L. Kane, Independence Institute guru Dave Kopel and
three retired police officials -- some provocative and, in many cases,
unexpected dissenters joining the chorus of voices critical of the drug war.
"The only reason why drugs and crime have expanded to reach every Mayberry
village in the country is our blind obedience to misguided laws and police
tactics that just do not work," Masters writes in his essay introducing the
collection. "It is time to admit our own folly and stop our addiction to
the drug war."
He may be only a Mayberry-grade sheriff, but Masters's outspokenness on the
subject has attracted national attention and lecture invitations that
extend well beyond the usual Libertarian crowd -- as well as withering
scorn from Colorado's U.S. Attorney, John Suthers, and other government
officials. But it's the reception his ideas have received from fellow cops
that matters most to Masters.
"I talk to police officers all over the nation," he notes. "Most of them
say, 'I can't say this publicly, but you're right.'"
One lawman who doesn't hesitate to second Masters is Robert Braudis, Pitkin
County's sheriff for the past eighteen years. Policing Aspen and its
environs, Braudis has shunned undercover drug operations and come to the
conclusion that the war on drugs "was lost the first day it started." Their
politics are actually quite different -- Braudis is a liberal from south
Boston, while Masters aligns himself with the conservative wing of
libertarianism -- but Braudis admires his colleague's honesty and fortitude.
"Bill's a veteran of the war on drugs, and I'm a conscientious objector,"
Braudis says. "He's more of a cowboy than I am, maybe because San Miguel is
a little more Wild West than Pitkin is now. He's definitely got the balls
of a burglar to go public with this."
Masters says he's only doing what every police official should do: let the
public know his limitations. To illustrate this, he recounts a story from
early in his career, when he was Telluride's town marshal and the city
fathers came up with a complicated plan for plowing the streets that
required motorists to move their cars to various locations depending on the
day of the month. "I told the town board, 'We can make this happen,'" he
recalls. "But in those days, most people in Telluride didn't know what
month it was, much less what day. We started giving out 400 parking tickets
a month, in a town of maybe 400 cars. We were towing dozens of cars a day.
"People didn't take it out on the people who passed the law; they took it
out on the enforcement people. We had our cars vandalized. People were up
in arms over this stupid parking regulation. Eventually they changed the
law. I should have realized that a good peace officer would have gone to
the town board and said, 'This isn't going to work.' We're the ones out on
the street. We can tell you what can work and can't work. Too often we say,
'We can do it; just give us more money and manpower and jails.' Just to
increase our own bureaucracy, we gladly sign on."
Awards, certificates and other memorabilia attesting to the fact that Bill
Masters is a good peace officer adorn the walls and desk of his office,
along with pictures of his wife, Jill, a paramedic, and their combined
family of four children (two boys now in their teens, two girls in their
twenties). Two other items stand out.
One is a snapshot of several kilos of cocaine piled in a chair, a souvenir
from a sprawling conspiracy case Masters investigated decades ago. The
picture was taken in Colombia; the sheriff came across it while serving a
search warrant in Telluride, but only a fraction of the dope was ever seized.
The second is a battered copy of the state statutes from 1908, found in a
forgotten crevice when workers were remodeling Telluride's old jail. The
book occupies a lonely space on a shelf above thirteen volumes of the
current Colorado Revised Statutes. The juxtaposition makes for a useful
visual aid whenever Masters launches into one of his favorite topics, the
relentless expansion of government over the past century. God gave Moses
ten laws, he notes; the state legislature has given the citizens of
Colorado more than 30,000.
"When you get to that number, lawlessness becomes commonplace," he says.
"We have to triage all this. Which ones do we pick that we're really
serious about?"
Asking hard questions about law enforcement was something Masters was
avoiding when he moved to Telluride in 1974. He was 23 years old but looked
sixteen. A California native and son of a university vice president, he'd
served in the Coast Guard and had a degree in police science from Northern
Arizona University. He'd toyed with the idea of joining the Los Angeles
Police Department but didn't think he was ready yet.
"I came up here to ski for a year," he says. "That was my plan. I keep
telling people I've never made enough money to leave."
Masters found a job as a lift operator with the new ski resort. In the
summer he cleared trails with a chainsaw. One day he was hitchhiking home,
covered in grease and dirt, when Jim Hall, the town marshal, offered him a
ride. Masters happened to mention his interest in police work, and Hall
promptly offered him a job as a deputy. At the time, the marshal was a
one-man department, and he was desperate for relief. The chief requirement
wasn't training -- that would come later, Hall explained -- but that
Masters bring his own gun when he reported to work.
The town board's only reservation about the new deputy was his gung-ho
attitude on the drug laws. As a lift operator, Masters had followed company
policy to the letter, shutting down the lift if someone tried to get on
while smoking a joint. His confrontational attitude rubbed some people the
wrong way.
Hall wasn't much older than Masters. He was a conservative Mormon, but he'd
also worked as a police officer in a college town and had experience
dealing with boisterous young people. Like Andy counseling Barney, Hall
urged his deputy to polish his "people skills," but Masters had trouble
adjusting to the situation.
"I didn't know how to deal with people," he says now. "Why they didn't run
me out of town the first year, I don't know. I didn't explain myself or
conduct myself properly. Jim tried to show me, but in a two-person
department, it was really difficult.
"I was astounded at the number of times he would turn his back on drug
usage. There was a fair amount of pot smoking, nothing really serious. But
when I put on the badge, I said, 'There's no more of this going to be done
around me.' I thought if people were threatened with arrest enough, they
would stop using drugs. But they didn't feel they were doing anything wrong."
It was a tumultuous time in Telluride. The miners were cashing in on rising
real-estate values and pulling up stakes. Entrepreneurs were flooding into
town, eager to transform the funky Victorian enclave at the end of a box
canyon into the next Aspen. Generally, drugs weren't frowned on -- but drug
busts, and the accompanying bad publicity, certainly were. Somehow Masters
weathered his first year and went off to the state police academy to learn
how to be a real cop. While he was gone, Hall resigned in order to take a
better-paying position in Grand Junction. Masters found himself appointed
town marshal.
"I was grateful the town put their faith in me," he says. "But looking back
on it, I think some of the townspeople thought, 'This guy's perfect for the
job because he doesn't know what he's doing. If he was a real professional
cop, God knows what would happen.'"
Over time, Masters learned to moderate his stance toward casual marijuana
use. Cocaine was another matter. After three years, he left the marshal's
job to become the undersheriff for San Miguel County. When Sheriff Fred
Ellerd moved into a county commissioner's seat in 1979, the 27-year-old
Masters was appointed to replace him. He was soon embroiled in one of the
largest cocaine conspiracy cases the county has ever seen.
The case concerned a group of locals who were altering trucks, driving to
Colombia or Bolivia, picking up their loads, then shipping the trucks back
to the States by freighter. A state drug task force spent half a million
dollars on wiretaps of suspected dealers. But the targets knew enough about
court rulings to realize that the surveillance had to be broken off if the
first three minutes of conversation failed to mention drugs; the mountain
of tapes that resulted from the eavesdropping contained a lot of chitchat
about sexual exploits and precious little about cocaine.
After months of dogged investigation, though, Masters and the state
crime-busters had enough evidence to move on the ring. They found a gram of
coke at one house, several ounces at another -- and the snapshot of the
elusive kilos that now graces Masters's office. The team ended up busting
Masters's successor as town marshal, two town boardmembers, several other
prominent citizens and the reputed "kingpin" of the operation -- the head
of the local cable-TV company.
"Telluride had a cocaine problem, no question about it," Masters says.
"This needed to be done. But my people got stuck with more of the burden of
that case than anybody else. The drug task-force folks all left and were
drinking beer in Denver, and we were left holding the bag. People were
burning me in effigy. Some places in town were refusing to serve us. I felt
alienated from the community. I really thought I was going to lose the next
election."
The kingpin got eight years. Six months later, after a reconsideration of
his sentence, he was free to return to town.
The fiasco didn't deter Masters. But he was beginning to question the
methods of the drug warriors. Months of effort -- for what? All the arrests
seemed to do was make the business more attractive to new players. "If you
bust a burglary ring, there's relief on the street," he notes, "but if you
bust a drug dealer, somebody immediately takes their place."
The Reagan era was awash in federal grants for police agencies, provided
the money was earmarked for drug enforcement. Masters learned to play the
game. He teamed up with "elite" drug squads that never lacked for work
because there were always plenty of people to arrest. He went before the
county commissioners and made impassioned pleas for more money to fight the
scourge of cocaine in the county, and his budget swelled.
He shelled out cash to informants, turning a blind eye to their criminal
enterprises in exchange for busting their rivals and suppliers. He put
undercover officers on the street with no particular target in mind, simply
to make random arrests of any slob looking to score. He busted a deputy
district attorney, one of his own deputies, a local newspaper editor,
construction workers, housewives, high school kids -- all the time
recognizing that they weren't master criminals, just addicts and fuckups.
His frustration mounted, but what could he do? They were writing songs
about his town and its cokeheads. He had to do something.
"'They hide it up in Telluride' -- they sure were," he remembers. "It got
to the point where I was convinced that anybody who had any money was a
drug dealer. That's how warped it got."
His hardnosed approach, so unpopular just a few years before, was now,
perversely, in vogue. Federal agents slapped him on the back and handed him
good-conduct medals. He routinely won re-election -- less, perhaps, for his
drug crusades than for his reputation as a level-headed fellow who'd never
fired a shot in anger. (He'd once wrestled a shotgun from a suicidal man
dressed in camouflage and felt the blast brush through his hair, a maneuver
that he now says was one of the foolhardiest of his career.) He was
fighting the good fight, just saying no. But he couldn't escape his
uneasiness about the whole business.
Even his own public-relations programs bothered him. He'd hired a DARE
officer to go into the schools and talk about drugs, hoping to get the
message out that the San Miguel County Sheriff's Office was truly concerned
about young people going astray.
"This one mother came up to thank me because the program was teaching the
kids about drugs," he recalls. "As she was talking, it dawned on me that
I'd taken on her role as a parent. Now it was my responsibility to teach
her children about drugs.
"I started looking at it differently. Just what is my role in all this? Now
when parents want to know why we're not doing more about drugs, I tell
them, 'Listen, if you rely on me to deal with this, you're going to be
disappointed. Law enforcement has failed miserably at controlling this, and
we're going to continue to fail.'"
According to research cited in The New Prohibition, state and federal
authorities spend more than $9 billion a year to imprison close to half a
million drug offenders. More people are sent to prison for drug offenses
than for violent crimes, a trend that's been consistent since 1989. The
overall cost to the justice system of arresting, convicting, punishing and
supervising drug offenders stands at about $70 billion a year.
Yet most street drugs, including heroin and cocaine, are far more available
now, in purer form and at a cheaper price, than they were twenty years ago.
And a new plague of hard-to-track product, from high-tech designer drugs to
home-cooked meth, has defied conventional drug-busting efforts to contain it.
The emerging big picture wasn't easy to grasp from his vantage point in
Telluride, Masters says. As the drug war dragged into the '90s, he was
becoming increasingly cynical about the value of his efforts, but it wasn't
as if he had a sudden blinding moment of revelation. It took two
high-profile homicide cases, the only murders he's ever had to investigate,
to decisively change his focus and his priorities.
On August 6, 1990, the body of 44-year-old Eva Berg Shoen was found by her
two young children in their home in the Ski Ranches, an affluent
development on a hillside above Telluride. She'd been dead for hours, shot
in the back by a .25-caliber pistol.
Sam Shoen, Eva's husband, was the oldest son of L.S. Shoen, the founder of
the U-Haul empire -- and a key litigant in a nasty court battle over
control of the company that had divided the founder's twelve children into
warring factions. Speculation began immediately that the murder had
something to do with the high-stakes family feud, and Masters found himself
under pressure from all sides to investigate various Shoens as prime
suspects in the case.
Besieged by reporters, private investigators hired by U-Haul and other
self-styled crime "experts," Masters decided to use the massive publicity
to try to shake loose some leads. Sam Shoen offered a $250,000 reward for
information leading to his wife's killer, and Masters pushed the offer in
press interviews and on the television program Unsolved Mysteries, which
twice aired a segment on the case. After almost three years of absurd tips
and conspiracy theories, the blitz finally produced a solid suspect: the
brother-in-law of Frank Marquis, a paroled rapist living in New Mexico,
claimed that Marquis had bragged to him about the slaying.
Marquis had no connection to the Shoen family feud, but a check of old time
sheets at a body shop where he once worked led Masters to Jeff Beale, who'd
driven with Marquis to Telluride the weekend Eva Shoen was murdered. After
some hedging, Beale told the sheriff that Marquis had tossed clothing out
the car window on the road back to Santa Fe. A painstaking search of a
lonely stretch of highway collected mounds of trash -- including a
weathered piece of cloth that, under lab analysis, yielded a single blond
hair belonging to Eva Shoen.
"We arrest Marquis and bring him back here to stand trial," Masters
recalls. "He refuses to make a statement until he gets a plea bargain for
24 years, and then he gives us this bullshit story that he broke into the
house to steal things and walked up the stairs to a lit bedroom --
something a burglar would never do -- where he was surprised to find this
woman. I'm convinced he was there to commit a sexual assault."
Every year, Masters and Sam Shoen attend Marquis's parole hearing,
determined to see that he serves every day of his sentence until his
mandatory release date. For Masters, one of the most outrageous aspects of
the case is that Marquis was out on parole at the time of Eva's murder.
He'd been charged with ten counts of sexual assault in New Mexico but
pleaded to one count and served only nine years. What kind of country lets
rapists go free, he wondered, because its prisons are overloaded with drug
offenders?
The true turning point for Masters came in the course of a subsequent, even
more emotional murder investigation. Buffy Rice Donohue, an
eighteen-year-old girl fighting a cocaine problem, had disappeared from
Montrose in 1993; her skeletal remains were found in San Miguel County
eighteen months later. Through physical evidence and witness interviews,
Masters built what he calls a "great case" against David Middleton, an
ex-cop from Miami with a history of sexual violence. But by that point,
Middleton was on his way to death row in Nevada for the brutal rape and
murders of two other women, and the Montrose district attorney refused to
take the case.
"It would have been a lot of work, and the county couldn't afford it,"
Masters says. "I gave the district attorney's office $50,000 in
drug-seizure money, no strings attached, just because I wanted him to think
about prosecuting this case. He spent it on something else."
In 1997, Masters attended a summit at the FBI training academy in Quantico,
Virginia, that allowed investigators from different jurisdictions to
compare notes on Middleton's cross-country rampage of rape and murder. The
sheriff was disappointed to discover that the bureau's famed team of
serial-killer trackers and profilers, celebrated in books and movies,
consisted of a few agents and clerks, loaded down with more files than they
could possibly manage. He took some comfort in seeing all the young faces
around the building, bright-eyed agents in training who, Masters hoped,
might someday catch violent men like Middleton before their assaults turned
deadly. Then it was explained to him who all those young people really were.
"They weren't FBI agents at all," Masters says darkly. "They were DEA
agents, more fodder for the drug war. We'd spent days going over all these
pictures of murdered girls, all these unsolved cases. And I'm thinking,
'What do people really worry about? The people smoking pot in their
basements, or some weirdo kidnapping your daughter?' Statistically, of
course, that's not much of a possibility, but that's still more of a
concern of mine than all the potheads put together."
A few months later, Masters parted company with Colorado's Republican
leadership over what he regarded as similarly skewed priorities: the GOP's
opposition to legislation that would allow needle exchanges for drug
addicts, to discourage the spread of AIDS and other blood-borne diseases.
"There was a message sent out that any Republican who supports this bill
will face a Republican challenger in the primary. That was the final straw
for me," he says. "I was too conservative for the Republicans and too
liberal for the Democrats."
An admirer of Barry Goldwater in his youth, Masters had joined the
Libertarian Party when he first arrived in Colorado in the early 1970s,
only to cast that affiliation aside when he became a public official. Now
he went back to the Libertarians. He crushed a Republican challenger in his
1998 race for re-election, commanding more than 80 percent of the vote.
Most of his supporters don't give a damn about his party affiliation; they
vote for him because they know him.
"He's a good sheriff, no question about that," says Vern Ebert, the
Republican county commissioner. "He may think that the mandatory sentence
for some offenses is too much, but he and his deputies go out and enforce
the law. I'd be the first to kick his butt out if he didn't."
"I've always been very impressed with Bill," says Art Goodtimes, the Green
Party county commissioner. "He doesn't believe in the drug war, but if
there's a complaint, he follows it up, no matter who it is."
"He doesn't put himself in other people's business," says Rob Schultheis, a
Telluride-based journalist and author who's known Masters for twenty years.
"At the same time, he's a super cop. The town has changed a lot, but his
approach has always been pretty much the same. I have a low tolerance for
other people's flaws, but I think the world of him."
In 2002, Masters ran unopposed. By that point, the six-term sheriff had
published his first volley at federal drug policy, Drug War Addiction. He'd
also watched, bemused, as the drug warriors scrambled to protect their
budgets in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Building on evidence that various
extremist groups finance their activities through narcotics trafficking,
DEA officials put forth the proposition that the war on terror and the war
on drugs were essentially intertwined; the Office of National Drug Policy
even produced a series of radio and TV spots stating that drug users were
supporting terrorism.
But Masters insists that the drug war is primarily focused on locking up
American citizens -- and, in the process, squandering resources and
manpower that could be better devoted to homeland-security interests.
"A quarter of the FBI case filings in the year before 9/11 were drug
cases," he says. "Who was looking after the terrorists? Nobody. We have
10,000 DEA agents. Is it more important to prevent the next terrorist
attack or to bust Cheech for having a bong? In the year before 9/11, we
arrested almost 750,000 people for possession of marijuana -- and one
foreign terrorist."
He shakes his head in disgust. "You'd think real conservatives would be
looking at what works, what's the best result you can get for the money,"
he says.
A day after the sheriff's reconnaissance mission on the suspected meth lab,
the case goes down. Two deputies stop by the house in the woods to inquire
about the abandoned snowmobiles down the road. They see a marijuana plant
on the porch -- a gorgeous, kind-bud invitation to obtain a search warrant.
Inside the house, investigators find a grow operation encompassing a couple
dozen pot plants. The meth lab is in the basement. The haz-mat team uses
200 pounds of cat litter just for the initial mop-up of the toxic spills;
dismantling the whole lab takes two days.
The rest of the house isn't in much better shape. The septic system isn't
working, possibly because of lab chemicals being dumped there. "People were
crapping in buckets," Masters says. "It was one of the filthiest places
I've been in."
Three suspects are arrested: a sixty-year-old grandmother, her 27-year old
son and his 22-year-old girlfriend. Grandma is a former high school
chemistry teacher from California. They're booked on charges of suspected
manufacture of methamphetamine and marijuana cultivation.
This was Masters's first lab bust, and he brought in a few trusted
colleagues -- a Colorado Bureau of Investigation agent, members of a
regional drug task force -- to help out. He used to share information about
drug investigations more freely with other agencies, but that was before
the Great Ouray Meth Scandal of '99; the debacle opened his eyes to the
extent of police corruption engendered by the drug trade, even in isolated
places like southwestern Colorado.
Six years ago, Masters had a tip about a load of meth on its way to Ouray,
and he alerted the sheriff's office in Ouray County. The smugglers
mysteriously changed their route. Months later, a grand jury indicted
nineteen people in connection with meth distribution in the county,
including Ouray's undersheriff, his wife and brother-in-law, the sheriff's
two daughters and another deputy.
Sheriff Jerry Wakefield pleaded guilty to eleven counts of embezzlement and
theft, admitting that he'd kept illegal guns and other property seized in
investigations over two decades, and received probation. His undersheriff
got nineteen years. The other implicated deputy, facing eighteen years in
prison, hanged himself in his cell.
Masters testified against the ring in court. To him, the fallen officers
are yet one more example of the collateral damage wreaked by the drug war.
The havoc extends from crooked cops to cops killed in drug raids to
innocent bystanders, such as Ismael Mena, the Mexican national killed by
Denver SWAT officers in a no-knock raid at the wrong address; Roni Bowers,
a Baptist missionary who was killed, along with her baby, when her plane
was shot down over Peru by a task force hunting drug smugglers; and
Esequiel Hernandez, a young goatherder mistakenly killed by Marines on an
interdiction mission in south Texas. (The release date of Masters's latest
book, May 20, is the anniversary of Hernandez's death.)
The human toll of the drug war isn't a series of random misfortunes that
can be corrected through better training or more vigilant police work,
Masters insists. It's part of the package, built into the deal, in much the
same way Al Capone was an inevitable spawn of the Volstead Act. "When you
look at the old records on Prohibition, the number of cops who were dirty
is so similar to what we have now," the sheriff says.
The only path out of the mess, he contends, is to take the profits out of
the illegal drug trade through decriminalization and, ultimately,
legalization. Treat drug use as a health issue, not a criminal offense,
borrowing from the lessons learned through treatment and education programs
launched in Europe, Canada and even America's own distant past.
"Right now, illegal drugs are in a state of anarchy, and criminals love
anarchy," he says. "They make a tremendous amount of money out of it. The
last thing they want is to see people in rehab."
It's a familiar argument, but not one you usually hear from a man with a
badge. That's part of what's refreshing about Masters's message, as well as
that of most of the other contributors to his new book: The writers'
condemnation of drug-prohibition efforts contains no hint of approval of
drug use.
"The central mistake is to treat all moral issues as if they should be
political issues," says Ari Armstrong, a Libertarian activist who served as
assistant editor of The New Prohibition and also contributed an essay to
the volume. "One great value of Bill's work and of the new book is that it
continues to break down mistaken conceptions of politics and morality."
Masters doesn't believe that legalizing drugs would make his citizens less
safe. People who get caught driving drunk or stoned in his county don't get
any lenient treatment from him, and that would still be the case. But, he
says, putting the brakes on draconian possession laws would free up money
for treatment programs. He's already taken a modest step in that direction
himself, diverting $10,000 in seized money for a loan fund available to
addicts who want to seek treatment.
So far, no one has taken him up on the offer; Masters thinks he hasn't
publicized the program enough. But the offer may have too many catches for
the average junkie. For one thing, defendants already facing court-ordered
treatment programs aren't eligible for the loans. For another, the money is
expected to be paid back, as part of what Masters describes as the
recovering addict's "commitment to assume personal responsibility for his
behavior."
The term "personal responsibility" comes up frequently in Masters's
conversation and his writing. More than a Libertarian mantra, it's at the
core of his ethos. It's why he drives the oldest heap in the parking lot,
silencing any deputies who want to bitch to him about their patrol
vehicles. It's why he takes an entire morning to go check out a suspected
meth house himself, to make sure there's no stretching of the warrant, no
wrong address, no mistakes of any kind when the case goes down. And it's
also why he feels compelled to break ranks in order to deliver an unpopular
message about drugs and police work.
Masters has kept spreading the word, even though he would rather talk about
his wonderful wife, his "really good" kids ("We've been lucky with them so
far; there's a lot of pressure on them"), living in a town where you don't
have to lock your doors all the time, and going to work in a uniform that
consists of jeans and a black T-shirt. Or the executive- and
celebrity-protection service he's launched in his spare time, with an eye
toward the day he retires. His $65,000-a-year sheriff's salary makes him
one of the highest-paid public officials in San Miguel County, but it's
still well below what a fellow with college-aged children needs to earn to
survive in Telluride.
A few weeks ago, in the course of a cocaine investigation conducted by the
Telluride town marshal and the CBI, officers came across a copy of Drug War
Addiction in the suspect's home. Pointedly, they left their search warrant
tucked into the sheriff's book.
Masters took the jab in stride. He's not ready to retire yet, he says. He
knows just how traumatic that decision could be -- not just for him, but
for his town.
"There is nothing more dangerous," he says, "than a new sheriff."
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake