BATTLEFIELD CONVERSIONS

Reason Talks With Three Ex-Warriors Who Now Fight Against The War On Drugs

Like any war, the War on Drugs has its good soldiers -- a varied bunch,
coming from all walks of life and filling all ranks. They include eager
volunteers, from the drug czars at the top of the command chain to the beat
cops, Drug Enforcement Administration and Customs Service agents out in the
field. The war also has reluctant conscripts, such as state and federal
judges compelled by mandatory minimum sentencing rules to enforce laws that
many see as counterproductive and unjust.

Increasingly, the War on Drugs also has what its partisans might consider
traitors -- former soldiers who have become convinced that U.S. drug policy
is ineffective, immoral, or some combination of the two. Reason National
Correspondent Michael W. Lynch recently spoke with three such figures who
were once integral cogs in the drug war machine.

The Cop: Joseph D. McNamara

Joseph D. McNamara started out as a grunt in America's battle against
drugs. "It was sort of like the body count in Vietnam," says McNamara about
the petty arrests for heroin he made as a Harlem beat cop in the late
1950s. "The department loved to count these drug arrests and release
statistics to show we were winning the war." In 1969, he spent a year as a
criminal justice fellow at Harvard Law School. Eventually, he ended up
earning a Ph.D. in public administration. "I wrote my dissertation in 1973
and predicted the escalation and failure of the drug war -- and the vast
corruption and violence that would follow," recalls McNamara. "I never
published it because I wanted a police career and not an academic career."

That's exactly what he got. He served as chief of police in Kansas City
from 1973 to 1976. In the bicentennial year, he moved on to become the top
cop in San Jose, California, a post he held until he retired in 1991. He
currently hangs his hat at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, where he
conducts seminars on the War on Drugs for law enforcement officials. The
author of six books, including the drug war detective novel Code 211 Blue,
the 66-year-old McNamara is working on a new book titled Gangster Cops: The
Hidden Cost of America's War on Drugs.

Reason: How did you get involved in what is now called the War on Drugs?

Joseph D. McNamara: I got involved as a foot patrolman in Harlem way back
in 1957. A few years later the heroin epidemic swept through Harlem and was
devastating. And so the police did what the police do: We arrested everyone
in sight. It soon became apparent that it wasn't reducing drug use or drug
selling. My eyes were really opened one day when my partner and I arrested
a heroin addict. The addicts gathered on the top floor landings of
buildings, which we referred to as shooting galleries. We used to routinely
bust them for possession of hypodermic needles and also for the big crime
of having cookers with residues of heroin.

One day an addict asked if we could give him a break. He said, "I'll give
you a pusher if you let me go." We followed him down Lenox Avenue in
uniform and in a marked police car. As he talked to one man after another,
it struck me how little impact the police had on the drug problem. If we
hadn't known what he was talking about, we would've thought they were just
two men talking sports or the weather or whatever.

Reason: Is this why police rely on informants and sting operations?

McNamara: Since the police can't do their job the way they do it with other
crimes, they resort to informants and to illegal searches. This is a major
problem underlying police integrity throughout the United States.

Last year, state and local police made somewhere around 1.4 million drug
arrests. Almost none of those arrests had search warrants. Sometimes the
guy says, "Sure, officer, go ahead and open the trunk of my car. I have a
kilo of cocaine back there but I don't want you to think I don't cooperate
with the local police." Or the suspect conveniently leaves the dope on the
desk or throws it at the feet of the police officer as he approaches. But
often nothing like that happens.

The fact is that sometimes the officer reaches inside the suspect's pocket
for the drugs and testifies that the suspect "dropped" it as the officer
approached. It's so common that it's called "dropsy testimony." The lying
is called "white perjury." Otherwise honest cops think it's legitimate to
commit these illegal searches and to perjure themselves because they are
fighting an evil. In New York it's called "testilying," and in Los Angeles
it's called joining the "Liar's Club." It has lead some people to say
L.A.P.D. stands for Los Angeles Perjury Department. It has undermined one
of the most precious cornerstones of the whole criminal justice process:
the integrity of the police officer on the witness stand.

Reason: What role do institutional interests play in the drug war?

McNamara: One year when I was police chief in San Jose, the city manager
sent me a budget that contained no money for equipment. I politely told him
that when you have a police department, you have to buy police cars,
uniforms, and other equipment for the cops. He laughed, waved his hand, and
said, "Last year you guys seized $4 million dollars. I expect you to do
even better this year. In fact, you will be evaluated on that and you can
use that money for equipment." So law enforcement becomes a revenue-raising
agency and that takes, in too many cases, precedence over law enforcement.

Reason: From the perspective of the working police officer, how has the

War on Drugs changed over the years?

McNamara: It has become the priority of police agencies. It's bizarre. We
make 700,000 arrests for marijuana a year. The public is not terrified of
marijuana. People are terrified of molesters, school shootings, and people
stalking women and children. The police are not putting the resources into
those crimes where they could be effective if they gave them top priority.

Reason: There's some controversy over whether the arrests for possession
are really for possession or if they are for dealing but prosecuted as
possession. Do you have any thoughts on that?

McNamara: It's both true and false. Most low-level dealers are users, like
the guy that we finally did bust after we let the addict go. He was an
addict, too, and he was no better or worse than the guy we let go. But what
we had actually done, which is standard operating procedure in the drug
war, is let someone go who had committed a crime because they enticed
someone else to commit a more serious crime.

Reason: What role does race play in the War on Drugs?

McNamara: The drug war is an assault on the African-American community. Any
police chief that used the tactics used in the inner city against
minorities in a white middle-class neighborhood would be fired within a
couple of weeks.

It was a very radical change in public policy for the federal government to
criminalize drugs in the early 20th century. Congress was reluctant to pass
it because you had a very small federal government in 1914 and to interfere
with the state police powers was a big deal. They couldn't get this
legislation passed until they played the race card: They introduced letters
and testimony that blacks were murdering white families; the police in the
South were having trouble with "Negroes" because of these drugs; there were
white women in "yellow" opium dens. The same prejudice popped up in 1937
when they outlawed marijuana.

If anyone tried to pass laws on those same bases today, they'd be
condemned. Yet the laws that we have are the last vestiges of Jim Crow. You
don't have to identify yourself as a bigot anymore -- you can be for the
drug war and you really are getting "them."

Reason: Do you think there's a greater risk in just questioning the
operation of the War on Drugs than there is to testilying and going along
with it in unethical ways?

McNamara: For police chiefs, there is some wiggle room. They can support
sterile needle exchanges, medical marijuana treatment, and education
diversion instead of incarceration. But it's asking an awful lot for them
to come out and say, "Look, this drug prohibition is a stupid thing we
shouldn't have started in 1914 and it gets worse and worse every year."
That's a big step for a police chief. That's asking them to commit career
suicide.

Reason: Were you frustrated as a police chief with the constraints of the law?

McNamara: Enormously. Police chiefs are sitting on kegs of dynamite. Many
of them are really decent, progressive guys. They are worried about the
disproportionate racial impact and the corruption. But there's nothing they
can do. There's just too much money in it. You don't have the ability,
regardless of the propaganda, to eliminate the code of silence. You don't
have unlimited power. You have lots of constraints on how the police can
discipline themselves, even for chiefs who are legitimately interested in
doing so.

The Fed: Michael Levine

Michael Levine was born to fight the War on Drugs. He grew up tough in the
Bronx during the 1950s and was an accomplished brawler by junior high
school. Though Jewish, he identified with the Puerto Ricans moving into the
neighborhood and he picked up fluent Spanish, a skill that came in handy
later when he started doing undercover work in Latin America. He was
personally motivated to fight drugs: His kid brother was addicted to
heroin. "I saw it killing my brother," says Levine, 60. In 1965, Levine
started a 25-year career in federal law enforcement that included stints in
the Customs Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. He traveled the world and arrested some
3,000 people.

Yet it wasn't long before Levine noticed a gap between the rhetoric and
reality of the drug war. Says Levine, "Among DEA agents, the notion of
really winning the drug war is so far out of the question that anyone who
even mentions it is considered some kind of nut." Today, he serves as an
expert witness on all things drug-related and hosts a radio show, Expert
Witness, on WBAI, Pacifica Radio, in New York. He's authored and
co-authored numerous books, including Deep Cover: The Inside Story of How
DEA Infighting, Incompetence, and Subterfuge Lost Us the Biggest Battle of
the Drug War (1990) and the novel Triangle of Death: Deep Cover II (1996).

Reason: Why did you want to become a drug agent?

Michael Levine: I believed that it was the number one national security
threat. I saw heroin killing my brother. I saw people around me dying. I
saw the crime rate skyrocketing. I fell into the same trap that we are in
right now. I blamed everything on those evil drug dealers.

Reason: After a quarter-century as an agent, how have you seen the drug war
change at the agent level?

Levine: It has become murderous. I remember back to the beginning of the
Drug Enforcement Administration, which was founded in 1973 by President
Richard Nixon. At that time, three agents went into the wrong premises in
Collinsville, Illinois. They were prosecuted for breaking down the wrong door.

I was involved as an expert witness in the Donald Carlson case, which was
on 60 Minutes. In that case, a multi-agency task force, outfitted in
high-tech guerrilla gear, crashed into the home of a Fortune 500 executive
and shot him down in his own living room on the basis of the word of an
uncorroborated informant. Nobody was penalized for it. In fact, the people
who did it were eventually promoted.

As the expert witness, I had access to all the reports and I recommended
that these people be prosecuted. They paid no attention to the man's civil
rights. He had no record or reputation for drugs. They did nothing but
crash through his door on the basis of an informant's say-so. The drug war
has succeeded in militarizing police against their own people.

Reason: At what point did you start to question the War on Drugs?

Levine: I was sent undercover to Bangkok during the Vietnam War. I was
hanging with Chinese drug dealers in Bangkok. They were smuggling heroin
into the U.S. in the dead bodies of GIs who were transshipped through
Thailand. The Chinese drug dealers invited me to go to the factory up in
the Golden Triangle area in northern Thailand, where much of the heroin
sent to the United States originated.

All of a sudden I was cut off from logistical support. I was given no money
to pay my hotel bills. There were these snafus going on with administrative
stuff. They were so strange and inopportune that the dealers were starting
to suspect me. It started to get really dangerous. A CIA agent informed me
that I wasn't going undercover to the factory. I asked why. First he told
me it was dangerous, that we had lost people up there. But I insisted.
Finally, he said, "Levine, our country has other priorities." That was the
first time I heard that phrase. That was the beginning of me doubting the
intentions of our leaders in the drug war.

Reason: What year was that?

Levine: That was 1971.

Reason: And yet you continued on.

Levine: I was a good soldier. I had come out of the military. My brother
was still a heroin addict. At that point, I thought my experience in
Thailand was an isolated incident here in Southeast Asia. I couldn't
conceive of my country lying to me.

Reason: In the chapter you contributed to After Prohibition: An Adult
Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century (Cato Institute), you argue
that drug agents have come to recognize that their efforts ultimately have
no impact on the drug trade. What's the mindset of agents in this war?

Levine: Before you become an agent, you're bombarded with stories of drug
war victories. It's painted as heroic -- guys in guerrilla outfits and
jungle gear fighting the drugs everywhere. You want to do something for
your country. Then when you get in, the first thing you discover is that
you can't touch some of the biggest drug dealers in the world because
they're protected by the CIA or they're protected by the State Department.
Everyone from Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico to Manuel Noriega to the
contras in Nicaragua to the Mujahedin in Afghanistan. Those of us who work
overseas realize that this whole thing is a three-card monte game, that
it's a lie.

Reason: You say the cartel responsible for much of the cocaine in the U.S.
during the '80s not only didn't fear the drug war but that they counted on
it to increase the price and to weed out smaller dealers. What is your
evidence for that?

Levine: It's 1987 and I'm posing as Luis Miguel-Garcia, an undercover Mafia
don who's half Sicilian and half Puerto Rican. I'm in a meeting at a
restaurant outside of Panama with another undercover customs agent and the
ruling faction of La Corporacion, the Bolivian cocaine cartel. They invited
us to Bolivia to look at their production facilities. At that time, the
U.S. had begun its paramilitary operations in Bolivia, which are now in
Colombia.

So as a pretext, I told the man that we can't go down there because we read
in the newspapers that the U.S. military is down there. He laughed and
said, "That's just for the gringos. That's not real." And his hand slid up
and down above the table. He said, "They have helicopters that go up and
that go down. We know what they are doing before they do." That's the
reality of the drug war. It's completely fictitious. It's only for the
American people.

Reason: You think that's still the case?

Levine: It's absolutely still the case.

Reason: You say, in your experience, that 90 percent of drug users member
who is both willing and able to take custody of her children, they are very
likely going to be adopted by somebody else by the time she gets out of
prison. She dissolves into tears.

Taxpayers can start to dissolve in tears, also. Because for the next year
they're going to spend $25,000 of taxpayer money to keep this mother of two
in prison. We're going to spend upwards of $5,000 a month to keep each
child in a group home until they are finally adopted by somebody else. So
that's $60,000 a year per child, plus $25,000 for the mother. We are
spending $145,000 of taxpayer money to physically separate a mother from
her children. It just doesn't make any sense.

Reason: You write about a drug exception to the Bill of Rights.

Gray: When I graduated from law school in 1971, it was illegal for a police
officer, even after arresting you, to search anything that was outside of
your grasp. If you can reach over to something, then you could search it.
But if a suitcase you were carrying was locked, the police could not go in
there unless they got a search warrant first. They couldn't go into the
trunk of your car, they couldn't go into the glove compartment, and they
couldn't go into the backseat.

That has totally been reversed. The police not only can search you and
everything in your car, but they can also search your passengers. They can
search your mobile home, which is in effect a home on wheels. They can go
through and search everything.

Reason: There's a debate over whether the arrests for drug crimes are
casual users for possession or dealers who are charged with possession
because it's easier to convict. Have you thought about this?

Gray: Basically, I think that the prosecutors are right. We have people who
are so overwhelmed that they have to reduce the sentences by
plea-bargaining. However, they are all small pushers. They are all little
guys. And a lot of them are selling small amounts of drugs in order to
support their habits, because the drugs are so artificially expensive.

Reason: What has been the response of your colleagues to your speaking out
on this issue?

Gray: Anyone who talks about it with me in the elevator or in the judges'
lunchroom agrees that what we're doing is not working. Publicly, judges are
pretty conservative people. A lot of them don't see themselves as social
workers. A lot of them are concerned about their effectiveness and getting
reelected, so they are just not going to say publicly what they believe
privately.

That was really brought home to me when I gave four forums sponsored by the
American Bar Association. After doing so, I received a letter from the
present chief justice of the Supreme Court of a Southern state. He wrote,
"Dear Jim: You're right. The War on Drugs isn't working. You're also right
that it's fully appropriate for a sitting judge to discuss it because of
what our position is in society. And I see these cases all the time coming
across my desk. What we are doing simply isn't working. But I gave up a
lucrative law practice for this present job. I love my job and if I were to
speak publicly, I would have to spend all my time justifying myself. I just
don't think I could do it."

Reason: You write that the only people whose positions have improved under
the drug war are those who make more money selling drugs and those who make
money enforcing the drug laws. Are you alleging a sort of
bootlegger-Baptist coalition, where lawbreakers and prohibitionists end up
on the same side of an issue?

Gray: De facto, yes. It was not set up that way. Just like it wasn't set up
to discriminate against minorities. But it has evolved into an amazing
alliance between the drug lords on the one hand, who are making just
obscene amounts of money, and various officials who are getting paid money
to enforce this. They both have a financial interest and incentive in
continuing with the status quo.

When I was running for Congress a few years ago, I met individually with
two sitting congressmen from Orange County to try to get their support.
They both said that the War on Drugs isn't working, but the problem is even
worse than I thought because most federal agencies get extra money to fight
the War on Drugs. It's not just the obvious ones like the U.S. Customs
Service and the DEA. It's the little guys too, the Bureau of Land
Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They are addicted to drug war funding.