You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (66 page)

It is unlikely that any media outlets pointed out that Bias did not overdose, but had an allergic reaction. In addition, Bias was having his third convulsion before his friends sought medical attention. As countless others have done, they hesitated before seeking medical attention because they did not want Bias or themselves to be arrested.
⁴⁶

In the mid-1990s nearly twenty teenagers died of heroin-related overdoses in Plano, Texas. Friends of these kids were slow to act as well. When local authorities were asked why they did not announce that anybody reporting a drug overdose would not be prosecuted; their response was that this “would send the wrong message.”
⁴⁷
Since the death of Len Bias, states have passed Len Bias Laws that allow providers of a drug to be charged with homicide if the user dies from its use.
⁴⁸

Almost all drug addicts beat their addictions,
⁴⁹
but criminal records are forever. Jack Cole worked twelve years as an undercover narcotics officer and intimately knew the people he sent to jail. In his words, his job was to “
do whatever was necessary
to become people’s best friend—their closest confidant—so I could betray them and send them to jail.”
⁵⁰

Cole was engaged in over a thousand arrests during that time period and believes he “ruined” the lives of a “huge” number of kids. In Cole’s words most of these young offenders were nonviolent, casual users unlucky to cross paths with him. Convicted young adults may lose eligibility for government student loans and welfare benefits. Perhaps most burdensome, for the rest of their lives they will be marked as a drug user and a criminal in every job interview.

Working as a public defender, I regularly witnessed the shock of suburban parents whose kids were being prosecuted for drug offenses. “My daughter is not a criminal! If she has a criminal record it will ruin her future!” They were amazed that the district attorney had the nerve to prosecute their child. The hypocrisy on the drug issue is stunning. Everyone wants the government to get tough on drug users until it is their loved one. Then all of a sudden they see drug use as a medical issue.

The pinnacle of this hypocrisy was probably the performance of former United States representative from San Diego, California, Randy Cunningham. In 1994, he voted to retain the death penalty for drug traffickers. In 1996 Cunningham wrote an editorial on drug policy that criticized President Bill Clinton’s “soft-on-crime liberal judges,” opposed any reduction in mandatory minimum sentences, and pushed for “a real war on drugs.”
⁵¹

In 1997 his son, Todd Cunningham, was charged with smuggling four hundred pounds of marijuana from San Diego to Massachusetts. The federal mandatory minimum for this charge was five years. At sentencing Cunningham requested mercy from the judge. In tears he said of his son, “He has a good heart. He works hard.”
⁵²
The sentence was half the mandatory minimum. It would have likely been lighter, but Todd had tested positive for cocaine three times while out on bail. Meanwhile, Doug Gray sits in an Alabama prison for the rest of his life for buying a pound of marijuana pushed on him by the government.

As a public defender I noticed that although the drug war’s caricature of the demonic drug user quickly evaporated for parents of kids prosecuted for drug offenses, parents of kids whose drug habits led them to commit other crimes still stuck with the drug war script. Their children, who had committed thefts and burglaries to support habits, were still not bad people. It was the drugs that were evil.

Never did they make the connection that if heroin prices were not inflated to thirty times the price of gold, Suzie would not have been reduced to stealing baby formula from Wal-Mart. If heroin was legal, Suzie would not be subject to the impurities of black market heroin, and instead of being a disgusting walking corpse Suzie would still be a beautiful, healthy, well-functioning woman.
⁵³

The hypocrisy of politicians on the drug issue is rampant. One only has to look at the last three presidential administrations. In 1992 President Bill Clinton told a young crowd that he tried to smoke marijuana but he did not inhale, then added with a smile that he wished he had.
⁵⁴
His vice president, Al Gore, has admitted to smoking marijuana infrequently in college, while serving in Vietnam, and as a young reporter. However, a close friend of Gore from those days says that for periods of time he smoked every day with Gore and that Gore “loved it.”
⁵⁵

President George W. Bush’s brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, has admitted that he smoked marijuana in high school.
⁵⁶
His other brother, Marvin Bush, has used illegal prescriptions to get narcotics. His daughters smoked marijuana at a Hollywood house party.
⁵⁷

Numerous people from W. Bush’s earlier days allege that he used marijuana and cocaine in the past. For example, W. Bush’s co-workers on a 1972 senatorial campaign in Alabama have said that he “liked to sneak out back for a joint of marijuana or into the bathroom for a line of cocaine.”
⁵⁸
His sister-in-law has alleged
that W. Bush and one of his brothers used to snort cocaine at Camp David when H.W. Bush was president. Perhaps most telling is that W. Bush has never denied using drugs, instead saying things like “When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible,” and “If you’re asking me if I’ve done drugs in the last seven years the answer is no.”
⁵⁹

President Barack Obama has admitted to using cocaine and “frequently” smoking marijuana in his youth.
⁶⁰
In his high school yearbook he thanked the “Choom Gang” for all the good times. (Chooming is Hawaiian slang for smoking marijuana.)
⁶¹

The hypocrisy displayed by these politicians on the issue of marijuana is repulsive considering the DEA’s continual prosecution of not only the Choom Gangs, but also of medical marijuana distributors obeying their state laws. As a senatorial candidate in 2004, Obama supported marijuana decriminalization, and as a presidential candidate insisted medical marijuana was best handled as a state and local issue.
⁶²
Yet since becoming president he has overseen so many federal medical marijuana busts that he is on course to surpass W. Bush’s record.
⁶³

During his March 2009 “virtual town meeting” Obama was forced to address the marijuana issue. Obama said with a smirk, “I don’t know what this says about the online audience, but . . . this was a fairly popular question.” The live audience laughed.
⁶⁴
It is unknown how many of the 850,000 people arrested for marijuana infractions that year found it entertaining.
⁶⁵

The DEA and other federal drug toughs do not just run roughshod over the states. They run roughshod over the entire world. This is sorely evident in Latin America.

The United States has used the threat of withdrawn aid and financial sanctions to get Latin American government officials critical of the drug war canned.
⁶⁶
It absurdly accused these officials of being in cahoots with the drug cartels.
⁶⁷
(Legalization would put cartels out of business.) The DEA also runs raids in these countries with little respect for their respective governments,
⁶⁸
and works with these countries’ criminals.

In 1990 the DEA was impatient with the Mexican government’s extradition of a
Mexican doctor suspected in the torture and murder of a DEA agent. The DEA paid a bounty to have the doctor kidnapped and brought to America. This egregious disregard of Mexican law ended with the doctor being acquitted by a federal judge because the case against him was so weak.
⁶⁹

The audacity of these actions is demonstrated when the roles are reversed. If the European Union used its political influence to defeat American politicians supporting the death penalty, would it not be considered meddling? If Saudi Arabia financed the fumigation of American farms that it believed were supplying barley and hops for beer being smuggled into its country, would that not be deemed ridiculous? If Iran offered a bounty for the kidnapping of an American suspected of murdering an Iranian, would Americans not be aghast?

The growing economic strength of Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil has weakened the United States’ ability to intimidate Latin America into silence. The former presidents of these three countries are now leading the global push toward drug decriminalization, and they have been joined by the current presidents of Colombia and Guatemala, Juan Manuel Santos and Otto Perez Molina.
⁷⁰

A United States Representative described the federal drug war as “essentially a jobs program.”
⁷¹
As a judge observed, if drugs were legalized the two hardest-hit groups, which would suffer almost equally, would be organized crime and law enforcement.
⁷²

However, law enforcement workers are not the only government employees to benefit from the drug war.
Every single
federal agency gets substantial extra funding to carry out the drug war.
⁷³
This includes agencies such as the Department of Land Management and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Congressmen have said off the record that all of our federal agencies are addicted to the War on Drugs funding and do not want to give up that money.
⁷⁴
It is not surprising that in 2003 the federal government revamped the way it accounted for money spent on drug control to effectively hide over a third of drug spending that year and an unknown amount henceforth.
⁷⁵

In 1972, the director of President Richard Nixon’s drug abuse commission observed that four years earlier, $66 million had been spent in the drug abuse area,
that the budget was now approaching the one billion dollar mark, and when that point was reached, “we become, for want of a better term, a drug abuse industrial complex.”
⁷⁶
(In 2003 the federal drug budget was almost $20 billion.)

The strength of the industrial complex was evident in California’s 1988 election. The correctional workers’ association was the number-one donor to legislative races and provided the fiscal muscle for the passage of California’s medieval three-strikes sentencing policy.
⁷⁷

Narco-dollars have so overwhelmed and infested the Latin American governments and their relatively minuscule budgets that it is questionable who is actually in charge. Drug corruption does not appear to have reached into the upper levels of the United States’ government. However, one reason for this could be that the higher-ups in the federal hierarchy are unnecessary.

Between 1993 and 2000 the number of American law enforcement officers sentenced to federal prison increased 600 percent.
⁷⁸
The corrupt have included notables such as DEA supervisor Rene de la Cova, who was famous for bringing Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega into custody, and they have included large groups. In New Orleans, an FBI sting investigation led to roughly 200 police officers being fired for violence and theft of cocaine from drug dealers.
⁷⁹

In 1999, a LAPD officer confessed that he and fellow officers had been stealing drugs and money from drug dealers, using prostitutes to sell the drugs for them, planting evidence, and committing perjury repeatedly in court. Further testimony revealed that he and a fellow officer had shot and killed a suspected drug dealer for merely leaning into their undercover police car. At another time they shot an unarmed black man already in handcuffs who they suspected of drug dealing. To cover this up, they planted a sawed-off .22 rifle on him and testified the man had assaulted them. That man is wheelchair-bound for the rest of his life, and had already served three years of a twenty-three-year sentence when this testimony released him.
⁸⁰
This type of police behavior should make the Los Angeles jury’s decision to acquit O.J. Simpson of murder less puzzling to those living outside of the inner city.

The corrupt Americans who have been caught include officials of every sort—
judges, police commissioners, mayors, former Justice Department lawyers, FBI agents, border guards, military personnel, immigration inspectors, and criminal prosecutors.
⁸¹
This should not be surprising. The war on drugs has made the drug business arguably the most profitable venture in the world. A United States customs inspector can easily double his annual income of $45,000 by merely choosing to search truck A as opposed to truck B in the never-ending flow of trucks coming across the Mexican border. Two El Paso inspectors charged with assisting traffickers in 1995 had reportedly pocketed $1 million.
⁸²