THE HEROIN EPIDEMIC

I became a New York City policeman in 1956 and quickly became acquainted with problems of illegal drug use. I was assigned to Harlem. During the late 1950's, we cops watched in frustration as an epidemic of heroin addiction swept a community where limited opportunities created a fertile climate for escaping reality through drugs. Heroin took an awesome toll. Whole families and neighborhoods seemed to fall to addiction. Street corners were filled with young men and women nodding on their feet like zombies. Under the influence of the powerful opiate, they abruptly jerked awake, alert for a few minutes before they again drifted off. Sometimes we responded to reports of an "overdose" and found a muscular teenage boy DOA with the hypodermic needle still in his arm.

One freezing winter night I saw a crowd of fifty people milling about West 125th Street and Eight Avenue close to the famous Apollo Theater. Suddenly, the group dashed to the next block. My partner on radio motor patrol explained, "The Feds made a big seizure. There's a temporary shortage. They're all running because they saw a pusher get out of that cab." I have never forgotten the sight of human beings stampeding like cattle because they craved heroin. As a result of such experiences, cops were willing soldiers at the birth of the "war on drugs" (The term was first used by President Nixon in 1972). The consequences of drug use were devastatingly clear to us. It seemed imperative that the government eradicate the "plague" of addiction. We did what police do. We arrested everyone in sight when we saw a drug violation, and we saw them constantly. However, it did not take long to become disillusioned. Despite enormous increases in arrests, it was apparent that arrests did not cure users nor discourage pushers. The first thing addicts did when they got out of jail was to shoot up. And new pushers were dealing before the cell doors closed on their predecessors. It was easy for working cops to believe that lenient judges and an inefficient correctional system were at fault. After all, we were working hard, making drug arrests. But doubts were growing within the police ranks. We complained of inadequate laws and lenient sentences. The politicians responded.

Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who had presidential ambitions, convinced The New York State legislature to pass laws giving life sentences to drug sellers and providing mandatory civil commitment for addicts. Civil commitment was abandoned within a few years because of its cost and ineffectiveness. To avoid life sentences, drug dealers recruited young boys who could only be charged with juvenile delinquency. The unintended consequence of the get tough policy was to create legions of teenage career criminals. Patrick V. Murphy, the New York City police commissioner had opposed the legislation for this reason, but drug war fever prevailed among the politicians. Civil commitments also collapsed because addicts were penned up and little treatment was provided. Gradually, the courts began to take a dim view of indefinitely depriving people of their freedom without benefit of a criminal trial in the name of non-existent treatment.
Unfortunately, the Rockefeller law's draconian penalties for low-level drug selling still persist in New York. Federal mandatory sentencing and many state laws are equally severe for drug offenses.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF GETTING TOUGH

On the streets of Harlem we saw increases in violence stemming not from the use of heroin but from the commerce in heroin. Most of the users dozed away their lives and were incapable of violence. In fact, some analysts believed that the New York teenage fighting gangs causing great concern during the 1950's disintegrated when the members began to use heroin. In Harlem, and other poor neighborhoods, young boys who had dropped out of school and had little chance for legitimate careers suddenly saw more money than they had dreamed of and were willing to kill rivals who threatened their new affluence.

Human misery can also encourage predators. On one ambulance call we found that a man named Jimmy had been having dinner with his mother. He left the table to answer the door and within moments was dead, stabbed in the heart. During a temporary shortage he had sold fake heroin to desperate addicts. Such behavior called for killing, and addicts sometimes felt so justified that they killed people right in front of police officers, then meekly submitted to arrest.

WHY THE POLICE CAN'T WIN THE DRUG WAR

Street policing isn't conducive to deep thinking about policy. Notwithstanding our growing skepticism, we went about our job. One day, my partner and I came across a drug user. Addicts frequently used top-floor landings in apartment buildings as "shooting galleries." They would use a candle to heat water and a "nickel" bag of heroin in a bottle cap. (In those pre-inflation days a glassine envelope containing enough heroin for a fix cost five dollars - a nickel.) The drug users would then siphon the mixture into a spike - a make-shift instrument composed of an eyedropper - and a needle. They then injected the mix into a vein swollen by the tight strip of elastic they wound around their arms, legs, or wherever they could still find a usable vein. Frequently, they shared needles and as a result suffered from Hepatitis B, syphilis and other diseases. Even before the discovery of AIDS, cops dreaded accidentally pricking themselves with a needle when searching a prisoner. It might be a death sentence.

Although the United States Supreme Court has ruled that being an addict, having the substance in your blood, is not a crime (1), the residue in the bottle cap constituted possession of an illegal substance and called for a six-months jail term, as did possession of a spike. The police lab always confirmed that the bottle cap contained a faint residue of heroin. So, we, drug warriors, racked up another "drug arrest," although the milky stain in the bottle cap was no longer capable of being used. Drug arrest statistics serve the same purpose as enemy body counts did during the Vietnam War and are equally dubious in justifying claims of victory.

That day in Harlem, the addict we arrested was cooperative. He surrendered the needle hidden in his belt where it would be difficult to find. He pleaded with us. He was just a junkie. He couldn't take a bust right now. If we let him go he would "give" us a pusher. He would make a drug buy and when he and the pusher went into a hallway to exchange money for drugs we would arrest the pusher in the act and let the addict go. To my surprise my partner agreed. Since he was senior, I reluctantly went along. We put the bottle cap and needle in the glove compartment of our police car and followed the addict. It was a warm summer day and there were lots of people on Lenox Ave as we coasted along, never more than ten feet from our prisoner. I had my hand on the door handle ready to bolt after him if he decided to break the agreement. But he was good to his word. He walked down the street talking to one person after another. The third dealer agreed to sell. When they went into a hallway we charged in and arrested the dealer. The addict "escaped."

It amazed me that in bright daylight the man had talked to pushers about buying illegal drugs with a marked police car and two uniformed policemen ten feet away. None of the men had been deterred by our presence. The first two dealers weren't being careful, they had already sold their supply. They found no reason to be hesitant. If we had not known what the addict was doing, we would have guessed they were talking about cars, girlfriends, sports, politics, or other innocent things.

For the first time, I realized how truly ineffective the police are in preventing drug use through enforcement of criminal statutes. Unlike traditional mala-in-se crimes (wrong in themselves) where a victim who is robbed or assaulted comes to the police and criminal justice system for redress and protection, drug dealing and drug use are confidential, consensual transactions between people who treasure their privacy. Everyday, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of drug crimes occur and the police have no way of knowing about them, let alone the ability to prevent them. Consequently, the potential of being arrested and punished is far less than in other crimes and is not a credible deterrent to the millions of users of illegal drugs in America. And, of course, truly hard-core drug users discount the threat of arrest in proportion to their need for drugs.

THE COSTS OF TRYING TO DO WHAT CANNOT BE DONE

The federal budget for the drug war in the first year of the new millennium is $17.8 billion (2). In 1972, when President Richard Nixon called for a war against drugs, the federal drug war budget was roughly $101 million. Such numbers can be difficult to comprehend. The magnitude of this increase can be better understood if we consider that in 1972, the average monthly social security retirement check was $177, rising to approximately $900 in 1999 (3). If social security benefits had increased at the same rate as drug war spending, the monthly benefits would now be $30,444. Similarly, the average 1972 salary of $114 per week would have soared to $19,608 a week. And if your monthly rent or mortgage payment in 1972 had been $408, housing would now cost you $68,800 a month.

So it is fair to ask what we got for our money.

President Clinton assures us we are winning against drugs, as did his predecessors. Yet people in law enforcement and local communities are unconvinced, and for good reason. Although it appears that casual illegal drug use has declined in recent years, regular use has not. More young people are using drugs and starting use at an earlier age.

Furthermore, the decline in casual drug use may be unrelated to the war on drugs. Cigarette smoking, and consumption of hard liquor and high cholesterol food - all as dangerous as illegal drug use - declined because of greater awareness of health dangers, not because consumers were jailed or because the government reduced the supply of these substances.

During the past decade, opium production has more than doubled in Southeast Asia and cocaine production grew by a third in Central and South America. 80-90% of illegal drugs shipped to the country arrives undetected (4). The United States, indeed the world, is awash in illegal drugs.

The vast profits resulting from prohibition-a markup as great as 17,000% - have led to worldwide corruption of public officials and widespread violence among drug traffickers and dealers that endanger whole communities, cities, and nations. The United Nations reports that there is a $500 billion international black market in drugs. In our own country, drug-related overdose deaths and emergency room visits have increased. Half all high school seniors surveyed, report using an illegal drug (5) and 85% of them say illegal drugs are easier to obtain than beer (6). This, despite the fact that we have 1.8 million Americans behind bars and another 4 to 5 million under parole or probation. Roughly 400,000 are imprisoned for drug crimes (7), and the illegality of drugs is related to the criminal careers of many other inmates.

ORIGINS OF WAR

As we approach the year 2000, we should be mindful that the drug war started roughly 100 years ago. Protestant missionaries in China and other religious groups joined with temperance organizations in convincing Congress that drugs were evil and that drug users were dangerous, immoral people. On December 17, 1914, the religious groups got their version of sin outlawed in the Harrison Act. Until this federal law, the nation had viewed drug use as a social and medical dilemma. Making possession of certain chemicals a federal crime was a radical change in policy (8). It certainly did not solve the drug problem but it did give birth to unanticipated social damage. It is unthinkable, that the Congress of 1914 would have passed the Harrison Act if it could have envisioned today's gigantic federal and state law enforcement, prison, and treatment bureaucracies. Ironically, however, those calling attention to the negative results of an unprecedented assumption of power by the federal government in 1914, and calling for reform of drug policies are denounced as radical "legalizers."

I was a policeman for thirty-five years of this century. As a beat officer in New York's Harlem, and as police chief in Kansas City and San Jose, I caused many drug users to be locked up. I have come to believe that jailing people simply because they put certain chemicals into their bloodstream is a gross misuse of the police and criminal law. Jailing drug users does not lessen drug use, and incarceration usually destroys the person's life and does immense harm to their families and neighborhoods. And justifying jail sentences by claiming that users would likely commit other crimes if they remained free is a flagrant rejection of a fundamental American right: the presumption of innocence.

RACIAL DISPARITIES

Low-income Americans and non-whites have borne the brunt of the punishment for drug offenses even though most drug use is by whites. Alfred Blumstein, former president of the American Society of Criminologists, described the drug war as "an assault on the African-American community"(9). The current protests over racial profiling by the police are a reflection of the damage that an ill-conceived law-enforcement war against drugs has on the ability of the police to win the cooperation that they need to do their job.

Because drug transactions are consensual, the police do not have a victim, witnesses, and physical evidence that help them solve crimes like murder, assault, robbery, rape and burglary. And under the Fourth Amendment, the police, with few exceptions, are not allowed to search people or their homes without a warrant. Yet, last year, state and local police in the United States made approximately 1,400,000 arrests for illegal possession of drugs (10). Overwhelmingly, these were minor arrests and rarely involved a court-approved warrant.

The inescapable conclusion is that in hundreds of thousands of cases, police officers violated their oath to uphold the Constitution and often committed perjury so that the evidence would be admitted. The practice is so prevalent that the term "testilying" is often substituted in police jargon for "testifying." The injury that unlawful searches and perjury by the police does to the credibility of our justice system is immeasurable.

Just as damaging is the destruction of trust that follows exposure of gangster cops who have robbed drug dealers, sold drugs, and framed people in the communities that they swore to protect. Police perjurers by far outnumber those cops who are predatory drug criminals; still, there have been thousands of drug-related police crimes since the 1972 declaration of a drug war.

REFORM

The nation has been unable to face the failure of our drug policies and to examine alternatives that would lessen dangerous drug use. We are still captive to the myths about drug use and the false stereotypes of drug users created a century ago by religious zealots. All drugs, including aspirin, present an element of danger to users and deserve caution. But in a free society, adults should be seen as capable of making informed decisions about their own lives and safety without the need to fear imprisonment by the government if they make unpopular or even unwise choices of which chemicals they put into their bloodstreams.

The new millennium provides the opportunity for reflection and change. Marijuana should be decriminalized. There is no record of anyone dying from marijuana or committing a murder under its effects. Any number of scientific studies have indicated that in some cases it may be an effective medicine. We would eliminate almost 700,000 arrests a year, which would save money and ruin fewer lives.

In addition, our country should revert to the pre-Harrison Act principle that no one should be arrested if their only crime is putting certain chemicals into their bloodstream. As to the "harder" drugs, we should reject the inane demagogic slogan "a drug-free America," and accept the reality that drugs will never be eradicated from our society. Drug users should be dealt with justly and humanely. If society feels compelled to intervene in individual choices of which chemicals are appropriate for use, voluntary treatment should be substituted for arrests.

Once we are beyond the emotional straightjackets imposed by the Harrison Act lobbyists, we can study how other countries minimize the harm of drugs. The Swiss, for example, found during a five-year experiment that providing heroin to addicts actually reduced heroin use and significantly reduced the crime committed by the addicts. The Netherlands regulates and controls the distribution of small amounts of hashish and marijuana and has a lower per capita use of drugs, and lower crime rates than the United States.

There is no panacea, but it is clear that continuing to do more of what has not worked to control drugs during the past century is not the way to start a new millennium. It is strange that in the land of the free and the home of the brave, individual freedom of choice is so terrifying that we are willing to incarcerate, often under barbarous conditions, people whose only crime is an unconventional lifestyle.

Dr. Joseph D. McNamara is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is a retired deputy inspector of the New York City Police Department, and former police chief of Kansas City, MO. And San Jose, CA. His forthcoming book is "Gangster Cops: The Hidden Cost of America's War on Drugs."