Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (20 page)

But here, again, I was forced by Leigh—and by the facts—to see that this is not a simple story, with straightforward heroes and villains.

I was inclined to assume that this hugely disproportionate rate of arrest of black men is due to naked racism on the part of cops. But Leigh is not a racist. We know this because she risked her life to expose violent racism. And most of her colleagues, she said with confidence, were not racist, and they would have been appalled if any of their colleagues made racist statements. Yet Leigh was—as she would see later—acting as part of a racist machine, against her own intentions.

Around this time, other police officers across the United States were trying to figure out how this works, too. Matthew Fogg is one of the most decorated police officers in the United States, responsible for tracking down more than three hundred of the most-wanted felons in the country—from murderers to rapists to child molesters. But he was bewildered as to why his force only ever goes to black neighborhoods to bust people for drugs. He went to see his boss to suggest they start mounting similar raids in white neighborhoods.

He explained in a speech that his superior officer told him: “Fogg, you know you’re right
¹²
they are using drugs there [but] you know what? If we go out and we start targeting those individuals, they know judges, they know lawyers, they know politicians, they know all of the big folks in government. If we start targeting them, and their children, you know what’s going to happen? We’re going to get a phone call and they’re going to shut us down. You know that, Fogg? You know what’s going to happen? There goes your overtime. There’s the money that
you’re
making. So let’s just go after the weakest link. Let’s go after those who can’t afford the attorneys, those who we can lock up.”

I kept trying to understand this dynamic, and the more cops I met—people who were not racist, but had produced a racist outcome—there more it came into focus. More than 50 percent of Americans have breached the drug laws. Where a law is that widely broken, you can’t possibly enforce it against every lawbreaker. The legal system would collapse under the weight of it. So you go after the people who are least able to resist, to argue back, to appeal—the poorest and most disliked groups. In the United States, they are black and Hispanic people, with a smattering of poor whites. You have pressure on you from above to get results. There has to be a certain number of busts, day after day, week after week. So you go after the weak. It’s not like you are framing them—they are, in fact, breaking the law. You keep targeting the weak. And you try not to see the wider picture.

But then, for some people, it becomes inescapable.

Leigh started to ask herself: How can you continue with this? But she felt an intense loyalty to her fellow officers, whom she knew to be good people. They were being increasingly sued by the American Civil Liberties Union—often personally—and her reflex was to defend them. These were the men she had faced gunfire with for years. How could she walk off the battlefield?

We humans are good at suppressing our epiphanies, especially when our salaries and our friendships depend on it. She knew that a big chunk of her police department’s budget ran on the money they got from seizing drug suspects’ property. What would happen to all their jobs if that were taken away from the cops? She deliberately kept herself so busy that “I just didn’t have any time to think about it.”

As she explained this to me, I realized that for Chino and for Leigh, all the incentives laid out by prohibition were to keep on fighting their wars and shooting their guns and ignoring their doubts.

But on I-95, Leigh began to see the act of pulling over a car to search it in a new way. Once, she saw this scene as a soldier in a just war approaching the enemy. Now she sees it as a meeting of people who are surrounded by ghosts. As he approaches the car, the police officer has ranged behind him the ghosts of all the cops he has known, “all the funerals he’s been to, all the people who’ve been killed in traffic stops—because it’s a lot,” she says. And then “there’s also this poor black kid” in the car. Sitting in the passenger seats behind him are his ghosts—all of his relatives and friends who have been killed in police raids or vanished into the American prison system.

Neither can see the other side’s ghosts. They can only hate.

One day, Leigh discovered she was not alone. A friend told her about a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an organization of cops and judges and prison officers fighting to end the drug war so they can bankrupt the drug gangs. She was intrigued. She needed to find an answer to a question that was plaguing her: What had been the practical effect of all the policing she has done over the years?

She decided to venture out into the drug war zones of Baltimore, not in uniform this time, but as a civilian. She looked at the kids in the city, and talked with them. She discovered “they are growing up in war zones. There’s no doubt about it.” There were prohibition-related killings almost every night, and “the kids see it. All the kids know this. It traumatizes you to a point you can’t begin to imagine.”

But perhaps most important, once you have been busted
¹³
for a drug offense—at fifteen or seventeen or twenty—you are virtually unemployable for the rest of your life. You will never work again. You will be barred from receiving student loans. You will be evicted from public housing. You will be barred from even
visiting
public housing. “Say your mother lives in public housing, and you get arrested for possession, and you go visit her,” Leigh says. “If the housing authority find out you’ve been there [they will say] you’ve violated the lease and they’ll kick [the whole family] out.” I kept meeting people like this across the United States—second-class citizens, stripped even of the vote, because at some point in the past, they possessed drugs.

Leigh was amazed to uncover all this. She explains: “When I was a police officer nobody ever trained me on the collateral consequences of marijuana arrests. I had no idea . . . It’s not something they’re made aware of. It’s—go out and get numbers. Do your job.”

Just as Jimmy Fletcher—the agent sent by Harry Anslinger to break Billie Holiday—never forgave himself for what he ended up doing to her, Leigh Maddox never forgave herself for what she had done to all the kids she arrested over the years. It was not enough, Leigh decided, for her to say she’s sorry. You have to make amends. So she completed her retraining as a lawyer, quit her job as a cop, and started providing services in Baltimore to help the very people she had been busting and breaking before. She set up a low-cost legal clinic called Just Advice, where she and her students fight to have the arrest records of accused drug offenders expunged any way they can. She writes to universities imploring them to provide access to scholarships to students with drug convictions. She defends drug users in court. This is Leigh’s life now.

It sounds like a neat ending to her story, but Leigh is more downbeat and humble than that. She can’t say, in all honesty, that she has found any redemption for herself, she tells me. No—because she keeps meeting “the people you can’t help [under prohibition]. The guy who comes in and he’s forty-five years old . . . and he has his criminal record with him and he wants to get it expunged and [all you can say is] ‘Sorry . . . you’re out of luck’ . . . To see that kind of distress in their eyes.” She is up against a legal system in which even a famously liberal judge like Justice Thurgood Marshall
¹⁴
would openly brag: “If it’s a dope case, I won’t even read the petition. I ain’t giving no break to no drug dealer.”

In 2011, Leigh drove to the city where Harry Anslinger launched this war long before—Washington, D.C. Not far from the old Federal Bureau of Narcotics building, she delivered a speech.

“To those who urge the United States not to wave the white flag of surrender, I say—what white flag?” she asked. “Your white flag
¹⁵
is now a red flag . . . A red flag, sullied and stinking from countless deaths of good guys and bad guys and simple people caught up in the crossfire.”

Chapter 7

Mushrooms

Without really thinking about it, I guess I have always assumed that the people who die in the drug war are those who choose to enter it—dealers and users and cops. But I soon found out there is another category all together. In Baltimore, I learned, they call them “mushrooms.”

Tiffany Smith was playing on the sidewalk
¹
as the light faded on a hot July night in West Baltimore in 1991. She was playing with her doll, Kelly, and her best friend, Quinyetta. They were outside Quinyetta’s house, where they were going to have a sleepover. Her parents were watching from the porch.

The
Baltimore Sun
recorded the details in the days that followed. It had been a fun day.
²
They had been singing and clapping at a block party, then they danced along to antidrug songs performed by the group Parents, Students Moving Against Drugs, and now this: sitting up in the heat with her doll and her friend. Tiffany’s hair was tied into pigtails. In a few weeks, she was going to be seven years old.

Except she wasn’t. We don’t know if Tiffany saw the two young men at the corner. We don’t know if Tiffany knew what a “drug turf war” is. We don’t know if she heard the gunshot.

Unlike Chino and Leigh and all the other people in this book, Tiffany didn’t get to formulate a position on the drug war. I got a message through to her parents. They didn’t want to talk.

They call them mushrooms because they can pop up anywhere.

They renamed the block
³
where she died Tiffany Square. Today, it is a place where dealers openly sell drugs.