DowWorld, war on drugs corrupts America

[fran7371@uidaho.edu (John Francis)]

Canyon County's use of dogs is predictable and will probably spread.  Here
is a career police officer's compelling argument against the war on drugs.
It appeared in Harpers, 7/97.



	Michael Pollan's essay on poppy cultivation and the government's
blundering policy ["Opium Made Easy," Folio, April 97] might be appreciated
for its whimsy and humor were it not also a chilling reminder of the
incremental totalitarianism that the war on drugs has produced.  During my
thirty-five year career I served in the New York City Police Department and
as chief of police in Kansas City, Missouri, and San Jose, California.
Since my retirement in 1991, I have tried to expose the hypocrisy,
corruption, violence, and racism inherent in America's doomed war against
drugs.

	It is difficult to generate a rational debate on our national drug policy,
because the issue is largely religious in nature.  The groups who
successfully lobbied to criminalize drugs a century ago saw drug use as
sinful and succeeded in codifying their religious view in the nation's
penal statutes.  This is that drugs and drug users have been demonized.
The prohibition of alcohol resulted in violence, corruption, and widespread
disrespect for the law.  So has the prohibition of other drugs.  In the
best Orwellian tradition, drug war hawks call for ever more severe
punishments while turning a blind eye to institutionalized corruption,
official perjury, and the increasing erosion of civil rights in America.
As a result of draconian criminal penalties, $500 worth of drugs in a
source country brings $100,000 on the streets of an American city.  All the
cops, prisons, and armies in the world cannot overcome such a profit
margin.

	The first casualty in war is truth.  It is one thing for the DEA to lie
about how opium is produced and its effect on users but quite another to
put hundreds of thousands of people in jail using illegal police methods.
In 1995 police made roughly one million arrests for possession of drugs.
Such arrests should require a search warrant, yet very few warrants were
used.  In hundreds of thousands of cases, otherwise honest police officers
feel justified in illegally searching people and then lying about it under
oath.  They call it "testilying" or "white perjury."  In cities all across
the country, thugs with badges have planted evidence, sold drugs, and
committed other drug related crimes that are often protected by a police
code of silence.

	Pollan is right to fear government reprisal for his writing.  Despite my
years in policing, some top law-enforcement officials have wondered out
loud whether I have "gone over to the other side" and started using drugs
since my retirement.  I have been labeled an enemy simply for criticizing
antidrug paranoia.  In the minds of many law-enforcement officers, the
enemy is automatically guilty and must be destroyed.   Some of the
officials reading Pollan's article will undoubtedly believe that his future
gardening should take place on a prison farm.  I hope he has a good lawyer.

Joseph D. McNamara
Stanford, Calif.
[Harper's Magazine, July 1997.  p. 6]

John Francis
311 East 6th St., #2, Moscow, ID 83843
(208) 883-0105     fran7371@uidaho.edu