DRUG WARRIORS - DEA, FBI, Customs & U.S./Mexico Police

ROBERT STUTMAN

When did you first hear about crack?

It was sometime in October, 1985. The guy . . . who ran our joint task
force walked in and said, "Boss, we're finding this shit all over Harlem.
We have no idea what it is, but it's got to be bad, because there's lots of
stuff going around there." He showed me this little vial. I had no idea
what it was. I said, "What do they call it." He said, "Crack." And then I
asked him where the name "crack" came from. Allegedly, the name actually
comes from the fact that crack looks like little pieces of plaster that
fall out of the cracks in the ceiling in the Harlem tenement houses. And I
said, "What do they do with it?" He said, "They smoke it. It's some kind of
cocaine."

I called up DEA headquarters. I asked, "What do people know about this?"
They said, "It's some kind of freebase. It doesn't amount to much. It's
been around for years." That was the answer I got. I called up one of our
chemists, and I gave her this stuff. I said, "Do me an complete analysis of
this." She came back and she said, "It's basically cocaine, but in smoking
form. There's nothing really magic about it, but it will probably cause a
real addiction problem." I asked her why, and that's when she explained to
me how much more potent the drug was when you smoked it, rather than
inhaling it.

Cocaine certainly developed to be the drug of choice amongst the yuppie
culture. One of the things we forget about culture, about cocaine, is that
we believed that cocaine was a fairly benign substance until 1986. Peter
Bourne said that. He said, "Cocaine is one of the most benign substances
available on the streets of America today. And we should seriously think
about legalizing it." Not marijuana, but cocaine. The problem with
cocaine--and I don't want this to sound like it's an advertisement for its
use--is that it feels great in the beginning. It feels great in the beginning.

A user gave me the best description ever given to me about beginning
cocaine, and really summed it up well. "The problem is, that by the time
you realize it's a problem, it's a problem." It's a very deleterious drug.
So we had whole huge amounts of people using this crap, saying it feels
great. Everybody is telling you there is nothing wrong with it. And someone
would think, "Hell, I'm a bright guy making two million bucks a year. I can
control this." And it became the drug of choice that way. We didn't believe
it was bad stuff until--literally, the earliest--was 1985.

And people always say to me, "How did cocaine take over in the United
States?" Two reasons--very simple. It felt great, and everybody said, "It's
okay, so why not?" And that's exactly what happened. That all sort of came
together, and that was the mentality of the country, until two things
happened at the same time: Len Bias dying, and crack.

How bad did it get?

Crack literally changed the entire face of the city. I know of no other
drug, except maybe LSD in its heyday, that caused such a social change. I
know of no other drug that caused the social change that crack caused. You
can't name another drug that came close. Street violence had grown. Child
abuse had grown hugely. Spousal abuse. I had a special crack violence file
that I kept to convince the geniuses in Washington who kept telling me it
wasn't a problem. We had a crack violence file made up of just clips. It
got that thick--horror stories that you couldn't believe.

Jack Lawn called me up one day and said that William Friedkin, the guy who
did "The French Connection," wanted to come to New York, and they wanted me
take him out for a week and let him ride. Fine. He comes in and I meet him.
We have a crack raid that is going to go down in a house in Washington
Heights a day later. So I said, "Fine, he'll come with me." So we gather up
for the raid and I say, "I am keeping you outside until the house gets
secured." So we keep him outside.

The first mistake we made was that we underestimated the number of people
in the house. We go in with eight agents. There are probably 15 bad guys
and we, of course, want to outnumber them two-to-one, for psychological
purposes. They go in and there is a bash going on. I think it is over, and
like a dummy, I walked in with Friedkin, and there is still fighting going
on. There was about a little six-year-old kid sitting on the couch in one
of the rooms. There were literally fights going, and somebody blows off a
shotgun by mistake. Now, it didn't hit anybody. It went off in the ceiling,
but the noise was horrendous. This kid sat there reading a comic book.
Didn't blink an eye. I will never ever forget him looking up, and I was
literally on the floor, wrestling with somebody. And I am saying if this
kid is used to this level of violence, what the hell is he going to be when
he grows up? I'll never forget that scene until the day I die.

If crack wasn't pharmacologically any different than cocaine, why did it
have such a profound effect on society?

Because even though pharmacologically it is not different, the method of
ingestion, by smoking, means that more of the drug hits the brain faster.
It is the only difference. If you inhale crack, you lose a lot of the
cocaine in the process of getting to the brain. By smoking it, a far higher
percentage of the drug gets to the brain, and it gets there immediately.

With cocaine, the high usually onsets in three to six minutes, depending on
the person. Crack's high onsets in about ten to twenty seconds. It is also
a far more intense high. The two basic physiological symptoms of cocaine
use are, number one, the superman syndrome--"I am the toughest S.O.B. in
this world. Nobody is as bad as I am." And number two, the ascent of
paranoia. Now you don't have to be a psychiatrist to figure out that
somebody who thinks they are extremely tough and thinks everybody else is
picking on them is a very dangerous guy. And that is exactly what happened
with cocaine and crack.

Who do people who are paranoid pick on first? They don't pick on strangers.
They pick on family and friends, and that is really what began to happen in
the crack community. The level of violence amongst families that we saw
just exploded. Before the advent of crack, most drug addicts were men.
Statistically, women didn't become drug addicts. What crack did was make
women into drug addicts, which meant that a society which was dominantly
matriarchal no longer had a natural head of the family, because the natural
head of the family became a junkie. And that caused unbelievable social
changes in the inner city. These kids no longer had a mother who was the
head of the family, because mommy was a junkie. So who was taking over the
family? The grandmothers.

And what we had in the Bushwicks and the Bed-Stuys and the South Bronxes of
the city and other cities in the United States was that, all of a sudden,
that generation of mothers disappeared, because they became crack addicts.
Grandmothers were dealing with little kids, and a lot of times these
grandmothers couldn't handle it. What it did to those families was
horrible. So I always try to remind myself, most of these people are hard
working, God-fearing, trying to do the right thing, and they got hit by a
plague.

How did crack spread?

It was in October of 1985, and it just kept building. We started seeing it
move downtown, and you could literally follow it block to block, going from
125th Street all the way down to Alphabet City, which is the other side of
New York, the southern tip of Manhattan. From 1985 to 1987, maybe 1988,
there were no real major organizations. We used to joke that we had 25,000
crack cottage industries in New York. Anybody could buy a pound of coke.
They whacked it up, they made it into crack, they would add some chemicals,
burn it down, put it out in vials.

And even if you bought coke at the retail level, you could triple your
money in two days. Now you're making a $100,000 investment and you're
walking away with a quarter of a million dollars in two or three days and
you're nobody. You're some dope peddler on the street who buys cocaine
retail and sells it retail. They're making huge amounts of money.

Crack brought on a new kind of organization, which was a straight-up
organization. Remember, almost the other drug organizations were controlled
from the top down. With either the Medellin or the Cali cartel, in order to
be a mid-level member or above, even in New York, you had to have a
relative in Columbia. That is how tight they had to know you, and if you
played games you knew and they knew who your relative was in Columbia.

With the crack organization, it started street-up. I remember the street
guys were the cowboys. These were the guys who traditionally went around
shooting and carrying guns. These were the kids who, at age eight, nine and
ten, were hawking for the drug traffic. So they grew up with this stuff.
They were now 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22. They were starting to control their
own little organization. So it grew from the cowboys up, as opposed from
the businessmen down. The Colombian traffickers, even the Medellin people,
were basically business people selling the commodity of drugs. But the
crack traffickers were the violent arm of this.

It was literally like cowboys and Indians. I had one group that worked on
middle-level cocaine cases. That's all they did. And these guys had guns
drawn every night of the week. When they went in certain areas, they would
wear flak jackets and helmets, because it was like a war zone. It was
absolutely like a war zone.

New York was like a shooting gallery for a while. At the same time, the
rest of the country said, "This can never happen here. It's only you crazy
New Yorkers." It was absolutely accepted that crack would never spread
beyond the borders. Three years later, it was the drug of choice in
virtually every city in the United States. St. Louis was taken over by
crack. Houston had crack houses all over the place.

You literally had thousands of these guys who were selling crack that way.
And, of course, the question always used to be, "Fine. If I make a case on
Joe Smith, who does that lead us to? Where does it go, how is he tied to
Colombia, how is he tied to Mexico?" And the answer to all those questions,
in honesty, in the beginning was that he isn't. And the answer back was,
"Then forget about it."

In the 1990s, the issue of crack may have been overplayed and hyped, in
that it was portrayed as a growing problem, when in fact it was a leveling
off and a declining problem. We now say that it had declined fairly
significantly. But that certainly wasn't true in the beginning. In the
beginning, we didn't pay enough attention to it, and that is how it got
where it was.

In the beginning, I believe, that one of the single biggest reasons that
crack became a national drug of abuse in virtually every other city in the
United States is that the politicians said, "It can't happen here, not us."
The mayors said, "Not us." That is one of the reasons that they got hit
with crack--they weren't prepared for it. The first battle was to get us to
realize it was a national problem and not a localized problem.

Back when crack was just becoming a problem, was it difficult to get people
to pay attention?

They said two things. Number one, crack is a local problem and it is
clearly not DEA's mandate to play with a local problem. We will get our
head handed to us. Number two, they said that crack has been around for a
lot of years. It was called different things. It was called freebase or it
was called rock. It had been around since 1972 in Miami, 1974, 1975 in Los
Angeles.

They underestimated the marketing genius of the New York dope peddlers.
What the New York traffickers did was take a drug that heretofore was out
of reach of many people. Before the advent of crack, the least cocaine you
could buy was a gram of coke, and it cost you, depending on who your
connection was, between $80 and $100 a gram. They then whacked that up into
crack and they sold them for $3-$5 a vial. So now, all of a sudden, you
have got a product that is saleable to a mass new audience. And that is
what the New York drug peddlers did. They mass-merchandized cocaine. My
argument was this drug was so different, that the old rules can't apply.
And some of the guys at headquarters said that the old rules do apply,
because we have seen it before and it ain't too different.

How did New York law enforcement combat the crack epidemic?

Operation Pressure Point took place in Alphabet City, which is basically
the little area north of the East Village, lower Manhattan. And the
argument was that around that area, probably twenty square blocks, drugs
were so open it was like a bazaar. You could walk down the street and
people would hit on you: "Hey, man, you want to buy some crack, want to buy
some crack?"

So Ben Ward, at that time the Commissioner of the NYPD, started Operation
Pressure Point. He literally put a cop on every single corner in twenty
square blocks, almost 24 hours a day. And the idea was to arrest street
traffickers.

Well, it did two things, unfortunately. It brought up the real estate value
in the lower East Side because all of a sudden we went from the dirtiest
streets in the world to the cleanest streets in the world. And, of course,
all we did was move the dope peddlers five blocks over, and so clogged the
New York City criminal justice system that nobody ever got convicted of
anything, because there was simply not enough judges and not enough
bailiffs. We overwhelmed the system.

There weren't organizations to go after. Traditionally, when you have a
problem in a neighborhood, you go after the organization that controls that
neighborhood. And you take off the top three or four people, you clean up
the neighborhood. There were no top three or four people. In that twenty
square blocks, there were probably 5,000 "organizations," quote unquote.
And the organization was a 20-year-old guy and three ten-year-old kids.
That was the organization. Well, hell, you can take off a thousand of those
and it makes no difference.

Was massive police action the correct response to the problem?

We, as a nation, should have learned the lesson a long time ago that you
cannot depend on law enforcement to solve the problem. The problem is that
generally the majority of dollars that the US government spends in dealing
with the drug issue is interdicting the drug traffic. Even if you are
wildly successful, you are not going to stop drug trafficking in the United
States.

You build a 12-foot wall around the United States, and the old joke goes,
it will take the dope peddlers 60 seconds to realize that a 13-foot ladder
gets over a 12-foot wall. And then what do you do? Build a 13-foot wall?

One of the problems with what Bill Bennett did, and what a lot of people
did, was we became a drug-specific war. The issue is that significant and
growing number of kids in this country feel they have to leave reality on a
regular basis. Now to me it is not a hell of a lot different if they leave
reality sniffing hairspray or using cocaine. It is the issue of 12-, 13- or
14-year-olds who feel that they have to leave reality that we are not
addressing. Instead we addressed the chemical. We addressed cocaine. Can
you beat the cocaines? Of course you can, if you put enough time and effort
and money. So what happens? The Medellin and the Cali cartels figure out
that cocaine is on the decline, and they figure out that every nose in the
United States that can be stuffed with cocaine is now stuffed with it.

You have a fantastic distribution system. You have got a product that is
not as popular. What do you do? Dismantle the distribution system? Of
course not. You switch products. And that is what we are living in the
middle of right now. Five years from now, maybe three years from now, the
Colombians will be the majority controller of heroin in the United States.
Eight years ago, Colombians never heard of heroin, that is, they never grew
opium in Columbia. I believe they will control the opium traffic or the
heroin traffic in the United States in the near future.

What factors, then, caused the steady decline of crack use over the years?

In my opinion, law enforcement, although it had something to do with . . .
the lessening of crack--not the demise--it had far less to do with it than
the fact that the people who crack affected have simply said, "Enough." I
think that it is the indigenous population that was integrated into the
crack users who have said, "We've had enough of this crap. We've had enough
of kids getting shot, beaten. We have enough spousal abuse." I think the
biggest war against crack was won by the people that were affected by
crack, not by law enforcement.

How did law enforcement measure success?

For years, we were measured by the number of arrests we made. Well, I'm
head of the New York office. I would guarantee you that I could turn those
500 DEA agents and cops in New York loose and say, "Make 10,000 arrests,"
and we can make them in five days--absolutely meaningless arrests. So what
we did as an agency was to come up with a new measurement, which is
price/purity, meaning the price and purity of the drugs you seized, or the
organizations that traffic in a certain drug. What price did you pay for a
milligram of pure drugs?

In other words, say that organization A was selling cocaine and when you
took all of the diluents out of it, you ended up paying a dollar for an
ounce of cocaine. Say that, with organization B, after you took all of the
diluents out, you were paying two dollars for an ounce of cocaine. Clearly
organization A was more important, because they were selling more drugs
cheaper. And that's how we measure price/purity. All of the drugs that were
received, we would say, "This is 80 percent, we paid ten dollars. What is
the price/purity of the drug?" And what we wanted to do was get to the
organization that sold the purest drug at the cheapest price, because they
were clearly responsible for more drugs.

That is how we measured our success. As the price purity went down, we
declared success. I think it was a healthy change from the number of
arrests. But in fact, we really didn't control the price/purity. Did you
have a bad crop of opium in Southeast Asia that year? That had a far more
important effect on price/purity than whether or not we arrested some
Chinese dope peddler. There were so many things we couldn't control. We
were lucky. When we started utilizing price/purity, the price/purity was
going down. So we looked good.

Can you explain the difference between the drug war situation in Mexico and
Columbia?

Both Colombia and Mexico are basically controlled by narcotics traffickers,
and I think they may deny it. But anybody who knows it, knows it. They got
there by very different means. And therefore I look at the countries very
differently. I think basically, for years, the Colombian government and
Colombian officials have tried to fight the cocaine war. They are simply
out-gunned, and out-manned. We have had God knows how many Colombian cops
killed. Nine Supreme Court justices were killed in Colombia.

I look at that country very differently than I look at Mexico, which has
been bought off. To me there is a world of difference. In Mexico the issue
is simply corruption. There are some exceptions, obviously. There are cops
in Mexico who died fighting this, and I'm not denigrating those individual
cops. The system never tried to fight cocaine in Mexico. In Colombia, they
fought it, and they're basically losing. I won't go to Mexico. I have
disdain for the system there. That doesn't mean individual Mexicans. It
means the system that has allowed itself to become so corrupted. . . for
the politicians to deny it. That's making politics more important than kids
dying of drugs.

Virtually every administration has gone up there and testified that Mexico
is cooperating with us. That is such crap, it's a joke, and every DEA agent
knows it. But the argument that DEA agents would give you is--and it's a
legitimate one--is that if we get up there and publicly say that, then the
Mexicans will kick us out of the country, meaning kick out the DEA agents
who are down there. Therefore, we would be worse off than we are now. That
is absolutely a legitimate argument. But it means we perpetuate the myth
that Mexico is really cooperating. The problem with Mexico is you don't
know who the bad guys are.

There are cops who die. There are policemen who I know in Mexico who are
incredibly honest and hard working, who risk their lives, but the system
doesn't encourage that. That's the difference. The system encourages the
corruption in Mexico, because nobody gives a damn.

There had been successful moments with Mexico, but there has never been
more than a moment that has been successful. I think Mexico is probably the
worst-case example of the drug problem. I don't mean all Mexicans, but the
system doesn't care. All the system cares about is, "How much money can I
get out this?" Politicians and law enforcement officers have become
multi-millionaires from drugs in Mexico.

Explain the different strategies of the war on drugs.

The interdiction policy, the strategy, basically says, "Let's close the
borders, let's keep drugs out of the United States." It's an absolutely
foolhardy strategy. It doesn't happen in a constitutional democracy. It
doesn't even happen in police states. So I think the interdiction
strategies, of all of the strategies, is the most foolhardy, because it
literally takes money and throws it against the wind. There is no way you
close the borders.

The kingpin strategy makes a lot more sense. That's the strategy of going
after the organizations that control major amounts of drugs, generally on
an international scope. But kingpin strategy depends on extradition,
because almost always the kingpins are overseas. We could indict a lot of
cartel heads in the world, but we have no chance in the world of getting
them here. So without extradition, the kingpin strategy fails.

When was the last time we saw major numbers of either one of those
countries extraditing their major traffickers to us? I think you saw three
Colombians in the early 1990s. I don't think you've ever seen a real
Mexican trafficker extradited to the United States. It's a joke. Most major
cartel figures, when they go to jail in foreign countries, they run their
organization from jail without skipping a heartbeat. They have their own
cooks there. They literally bring in their own cooks, their own
girlfriends, their own everything.

What would be an effective way to wage the war on drugs?

I think the winning strategy hasn't changed. It hasn't changed for 15
years. We never have adopted it. You give every kid in the United States
meaningful, mandatory substance abuse education, starting in kindergarten.
And by the time they reach the tenth grade, there are studies that show
that 15 percent less of them will experiment with drugs. Now, that doesn't
win the ballgame, because you'll never stop everybody. But it makes a far
greater dent in the ballgame than what we have done now.

The RAND Corporation has done two or three studies showing that dollars we
spend on treatment and prevention give us a far greater return than dollars
we spend on enforcement. The general point is that we have never adopted
the strategy that a lot of people think is truly a winning strategy. No one
has yet demonstrated that enforcement will ever win the war on drugs.
Enforcement will make a difference. It will fight a holding action. But it
will never win the war on drugs, meaning that we will do away with drug
availability. That's the objective of enforcement, and it's an unobtainable
objective.

Why don't we implement a "winning, treatment-oriented" strategy?

That's really the big question--why isn't it implemented? I would guess
that it's pandering to the voters when you don't have to pander to the
voters. I think most politicians at the local, state or federal levels
think to themselves, "I can't say that I'm pulling money away from
enforcement and giving it to treatment and prevention, because that is not
what a bloc of our voters want. A bloc of our voters want us to go in and
kick in doors and take names and arrest people."

PBS Frontline Series Follow Up by Tom O'Connell, Kevin Zeese, Doug McVay,
and Eric Sterling:
http://www.drugsense.org/dsw/2000/ds00.n170.html#sec1

Campaign for the Restoration & Regulation of Hemp's HempTV website has the
full, two part, total of almost 4 hours of video of the PBS Frontline "Drug
Wars" available on the web for free video streaming using the Real Player 8.

To watch Part one of Drug Wars, go here:

http://www.crrh.org/hemptv/docs_drugwars1.html

To see part 2, go here:

http://www.crrh.org/hemptv/docs_drugwars2.html

Click this link for an index to this series:
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n1551.a01.html