RESEARCHER DELVES INTO DRUGS, POLICE

Interest In The Great Drug War Debate Grows Apace.

Mel Taylor, executive director of The Council on Alcohol and Drugs
Houston, offered a setting: "We have full sound and related media
equipment, room for more than 250, ample free parking, and it seems
appropriate to hold the discussion here at Houston's oldest
55-year-old drug and alcohol education agency."

Local attorney Mark Bennett said: "The Harris County Criminal Lawyers
Association would love to sponsor or co-sponsor your proposed debate
on the merits of the drug war." And he included taking care of
administrative details in his offer.

So I won't have to worry about my part of organizing the debate. If
there is one. As mentioned in previous episodes, a fellow in a
powerful drug-war-waging position issued the challenge. But when I
responded, he said he couldn't accept my acceptance until clearing it
with his bosses, which he hadn't done first. Later he said his Houston
honchos said OK, and now we are waiting for it to be cleared by
Washington brass.

Recommended Far And Wide

Meanwhile, people have e-mailed from about the nation to provide
information and advice and to volunteer or nominate someone else to
serve on the debate team. But skepticism is running about as deep as
interest. Many people believe the challenger will be required to
withdraw. They tell of other failed efforts to debate the drug war.

But if it does happen, one man with multiple recommendations as an
ideal member of the debate team is Joseph McNamara. He is a research
fellow at the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, Calif., but that
follows a 35-year career in law enforcement. He started as a beat
patrolman in Harlem, was police chief in Kansas City, Mo., from 1973
until 1976, when he became chief in San Jose, Calif., retiring in
1991. He has worked as an instructor and lecturer at many
universities, has written a text on crime prevention and is author of
several successful detective novels.

Here is a comment from his testimony at the Citizens' Commission on U.S.
Drug Policy convened in May 1999 in California by the Washington-based
Institute for Policy Studies:

"The United States is awash in illegal drugs, awash in illegal drug
corruption, and awash in illegal drug violence, and we are trying to
export this to every nation in the world. I would suggest that one
reason that we are in this fix is that we have not been able to have
an objective debate over why our society chooses to lock people up
because they put certain chemicals into their blood."

He said his theory of why objective debate has been lacking is because
of something he learned when researching how the nation's first drug
laws were passed: "The congressional record is full of testimony that
is totally racist and false ... ."

One of McNamara's special interests has been how the drug war has
corrupted cops. He said traditional police scandals involved gangsters
paying off cops, but all too often in drug war corruption, "the police
were the gangsters -- on duty committing armed robberies, at times
murder, stealing drugs, selling drugs, framing people, and committing
predatory crimes. Now, this was not an aberration limited to one city.
This was something that occurred all across America, from big towns,
to small towns, sometimes from the chief down to the beat officer."

Corrupt Cop Caught By Banker

One of a great many specific examples of corruption McNamara cites
involved the DEA agent who put the handcuffs on General Noriega after
U.S. troops had stormed Panama City.

That same agent was arrested about a year later in Los Angeles, "when
he stole $720,000 in laundered drug money," McNamara said. "He
probably worked 35 years, could have looked forward to a pension of
perhaps $35,000 a year, and suddenly sitting on his desk is $720,000,
tax-free. He knew he wouldn't be caught, and indeed he was not caught
by the DEA. His banker turned him in -- unusual fluctuations in his
account."

Despite the famous "code of silence" that discourages honest cops from
busting the corrupt ones, McNamara said he knows of "a few hundred
dissident cops who think the drug war is asinine, and some of them are
willing to put their name behind it and we're beginning to build some
momentum."

Anyone interested in reading more of his testimony at the commission can
find it in "The War on Drugs: Addicted to Failure," a report published by
the Institute for Policy Studies.