You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (65 page)

Our culture has so demonized drug users that entrapment may not even strike Americans as disturbing. However, what if a friend who knew you once cheated on your taxes called you up repeatedly with a great scheme on how to cheat on your taxes. If you then cheated, were caught, and learned your friend had set you up to save her own hide over an audit, would you consider this justice? Would you consider this an efficient use of police resources? It is this sort of police conduct—not protecting violent criminals—that makes “stop snitching” a popular theme in America’s inner-cities.
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At the higher level of snitchery the stakes get bigger and the deception and manipulation get sleazier. Defendants facing exorbitant mandatory sentences are more willing to say anything and set anybody up in order to cut a deal for themselves. In addition, to sweeten the pot for witnesses who are not facing charges, the government resorts to paying them. In 1993, $97 million was spent on paying informants.
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The informants are often worse criminals than the defendants they are testifying against. A former DEA agent has stated that federal agents have allowed “about 15,000 wild, out-of-control informants” to take control of investigations.
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Another unjust repercussion of this snitch culture is that the low-level people who do not have the wherewithal or connections to rat people out are hit with mandatory sentences while the higher-ups walk. For example, college student Kellie Ann Mann bought some LSD to mail to an ex-boyfriend of hers. She was sentenced to ten years despite having never been arrested and having no drug connections outside of the dealer she found at a Grateful Dead concert (likely the informant). Her ex-boyfriend set some people up and received less than three.
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Although there always have been and always will be a
small minority
of cops who abuse their power, the impossible mission of drug enforcement encourages abuse. For example, police officers are prevented by the Constitution from searching citizens willy-nilly. However, it is extremely difficult to pinpoint a drug transaction. All that is seen is money or a tiny package exchanging hands, often from a great distance.
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What frequently happens instead is police will see someone they suspect of dealing and will go up and pat her down and make her empty her pockets. (And no, they are not always gentle.)
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This does not hold up in court so police will testify that the defendant agreed to be searched or that drugs were dropped.

This is known as “testilying” or “joining the liars’ club” and is acknowledged off the record in larger jurisdictions.
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As one Chicago sergeant said, “They lie, so we lie.”
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With an unbelievable number of drugs being dropped in front of police the judges are well aware of these fictions. One Chicago defense lawyer said, “Everybody in the building knows that the cop threw the guy up against the wall and found the shit in his pocket or his shoe.”
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In Chicago, as in many jurisdictions, perjury is considered a more severe crime than drug possession.

Although its current proponents are
not
generally racist or elitist, the war on drugs has racist roots and profoundly classist and racist effects.

First, poor people get shoddier legal representation than wealthy people. In addition, poor people often cannot afford to bail out so they have to await their day in court in prison. This process takes so long that they have often served enough time by the trial date to make innocence a moot point. However, these deficiencies of the criminal justice system are not unique to the drug war.

Because of the consensual nature of the “drug” offenses, drug enforcement is highly discretionary. Drug offenses are caught through proactive searches, pat-downs, sting operations, and informants. People who live in poorer areas tend to have less privacy and more exposure to police. For example, those living in a trailer park or urban subsidized housing (“projects”) will have more police contact simply due to the population density, and also because there is frequently more crime to investigate in poorer areas. In addition, impoverished neighborhoods have more people subjected to the criminal justice system and therefore there are more people looking to set other people up to help themselves.

Some of the hardest-hit areas are poor black urban neighborhoods.
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Unlike poor rural white areas that tend to be in the hinterlands, black urban neighborhoods are perfectly situated to distribute drugs to the wealthy commuters who work in the
city and live in the suburbs. The financial enticement to black youth in the cities to participate in drug dealing is enormous.
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The reason more of America is not irate over the loss of civil liberties is that the war on drugs is not focused on suburbia. Most police know it is much easier to get away with illegal searches of the persons and property of poor groups who cannot afford lawyers. Poor people are also easier to convict. For these reasons, and others, suburban users of drugs are not targeted nearly as frequently.
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This racial divergence is seen in the statistics and even in the laws themselves. Despite the fact that blacks represent only fifteen percent of drug users they comprise seventy-four percent of those imprisoned for drug possession. Although youth of all races use and sell drugs at similar rates, minority youth represent sixty to seventy-five percent of the drug arrests.
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The penalties for blue-collar crack sold on city streets are exponentially harsher than those for the powder cocaine sold in penthouses.

When Congress considered mandatory minimums for methamphetamine they excluded Ecstasy. One of the few elected officials willing to discuss drug decriminalization, former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, explained: “Obviously, we know whom Ecstasy is going to hit. If we started putting mandatory minimum sentences on Ecstasy and the prisons started loading up with suburban Jane and John Doe’s children, there might be a major change in drug policy.”
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Politicians love to talk tough about the drug war. They beat their breasts and brag to nanny and pappy on the campaign trail that they are expanding mandatory minimum sentencing and pouring money into the war so little Suzie will never be able to get high. The same brazen pompousness is demonstrated by the law-and-order political pundits who blame the country’s problems on “liberal” judges, even though the last four presidents have pushed “liberal” judges to near-extinction.
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As someone who has met some of the next generation of drug dealers, I can tell you they are not scared. The drug war has made drug dealers romantic heroes to many in the ghetto, just as prohibition did for gangsters in the 1920s.
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The music of the ghetto, rap, has taken the ethos of the inner city worldwide and mainstream. And although it is not readily apparent to the outsider this culture is heavily influenced by the drug trade.
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Inner-city style is built for dealing. Hoodies and hats worn low prevent identification. Baggy clothes hide drugs and weapons. The involved handshakes can disguise hand-to-hand transfers. Hanging out on the corner masks working the corner. The strict use of nicknames, such as rapper’s titles, can hide identities from outsiders, including the police. As a public defender, I was involved in several cases where the police were still looking for characters only known by nicknames like “Bugsy.” When I taught in the inner city, some students were upset when I used full names when taking roll. They preferred that their surname, or in their words their “government,” not be known by their peers.

These kids did not fear jail. Obscene mandatory minimum sentences have made jail a rite of passage for impoverished inner-city blacks.
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One in three black men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine are either on probation, on parole, or in prison.
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A stint upstate is like going to college. They gain connections, learn from veterans how to hone their game, and by doing time they gain street credibility by proving they will not snitch. When I was teaching, the kids would know exactly when the county prison was on lockdown because so many of them had cell phones and incarcerated relatives.

These kids are not stupid. They learn about the drug world firsthand, not from the media and the government’s propaganda. They know that crack and heroin users are not out-of-control demons their incarcerated relatives have pushed drugs on. They know that these users are usually functioning, often well-functioning, citizens who sought their drug-dealing relatives out.
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They know the complexion of the buyers and they know the complexion of the prison population. They know how abusive and dishonest the police can be when fighting a frustrating and impossible battle.
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And they definitely know that none of their jailed relatives were out in “white man’s land” pushing dope on little Suzie in her playground.
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(Only one percent of illegal drug users were introduced to drugs by a dealer.)
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Although the lack of opportunities for inner-city youth is highly publicized, I dare to suggest that many of these kids choose this life and it is not an irrational decision. It has been estimated that
street
dealers face a twenty-two percent chance of imprisonment in the course of a year of part-time selling, and that they could expect to spend a third of their selling career behind bars. However, broken down to single drug transactions the risk of imprisonment per cocaine sale is about one in 10,000.
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On the other hand, dealing is an extremely lucrative and easy job with the adrenaline-popping risk and rebel cachet youth crave. Although the economics are different in the open-air drug markets (the streets’ version of Wal-Mart),
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for a smart and careful indoor dealer who runs a solo venture with a number of regular customers, a
relatively
safe and profitable living can be had.
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Growing up in a blue-collar town with a good school system in the 1980s and early 1990s, many of my peers followed their parents into factory jobs. Although some able kids furthered their education for higher-paying careers, many able kids did not. They liked their parents’ lifestyle and chose to follow them.
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If they were inner-city youth they probably would have entered the drug business for exactly the same reasons.

What is particularly galling about the drug war is that it is defended on the basis of problems that
the war has caused
. The most poignant example of this is fatalities caused by illicit drug use. I have already covered how decriminalization could wipe out heroin overdoses, and cocaine deaths could be avoided as well.
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Cocaine deaths are extremely rare. Fatalities are frequently linked to respiratory failure, because the drug substantially increases the heart rate. In users with healthy hearts, death can still occur because, as with peanuts and Ecstasy, a minuscule percentage of people are allergic to cocaine. This was the case of college basketball great Len Bias. His death in 1986 following his drafting by the professional basketball team the Boston Celtics was used to launch a media blitz against cocaine, and take the drug war “nuclear.”
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In the month following Bias’ death the network stations aired seventy-four evening news segments about crack and cocaine.
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