CASUALTY IN THE WAR ON DRUGS

Patrick Dorismond Just Said No And Ended Up Dead -- Another Statistic In A
Senseless War

That night after work, they stopped at the Wakamba Cocktail Lounge near
Times Square, a working-class side pocket of a joint in the city's
glittering wardrobe. No velvet ropes or sneering doormen here: Entry is by
buzzer. At a glance, the bartender knew Patrick Dorismond and Kevin Kaiser
were OK, recognizing them and a few other guys from their jobs. It was
late in the evening of March 15th 2000.

The men worked for the 34th Street Partnership, a semiprivate group that
provides neighborhood businesses with services that the government is too
tired or too distracted to provide. One such amenity was a private
security force of uniformed men reassembling police officers, including
Kaiser and Dorismond. They passed their days sorting wheat from chaff,
directing tourists to Macy's in Harold Square or Pennsylvania Station, or
rousting derelicts, dope hustlers and other unsightly nuisances from the
crowded streets.

At home in Flatbush, Dorismond had two kids and a girlfriend. He had grown
up in Brooklyn, the son of Haitian immigrants. At the Wakamba, Dorismond
and Kaiser stayed for two beers, long enough for Wednesday night to roll
into Thursday morning. By 12:30 a.m., they could not face the long,
late-night subway ride back out to their homes in Brooklyn.

"Let's get a cab," Dorismond said. Outside the Wakamba, they stopped at
the corner of 37th Street and Eighth Avenue, watching for a taxi. Dorismond
dialed a number on his cell phone.

"Yo, Yo," a voice called from some shadow. "Yo, homey. Got some weed?"
Dorismond turned. The shadow drifted into shape, a street punk, exactly
the sort he spent his days running off.

"Get the fuck out of here, man," Dorismond said.

"I just want some weed," the punk whined.

"I don't got none. Don't ask for none. Leave. "

Kaiser had turned, noticing that Dorismond was annoyed and that the dirt
bag was not alone. A few other shapes lurked nearby.

By now, the punk was making animal noises, snorting like a bull or
something, trying to turn Dorismond's anger into a joke. Kaiser locked his
eyes on the man and put at hand on Dorismond's shoulder to move him.
Dorismond was pissed.

"Chill. Let it be," Kaiser suggested.

The punk barked. Another man stepped from the shadows. "Take your dog
around the corner," Dorismond said.

"What are you going to do, rob me?" asked the punk.

Bizarre as the questions seemed, Kaiser and Dorismond did not have long to
think about it. The other shadows suddenly took on the form of street
skells, swarming around him. Kaiser yelled, "Get the gun."

At that instant, yet another firefight in the war on drugs -- the American
war that never ends -- erupted around them on that street corner.

A black SUV pulled up to the curb, and men in police windbreakers piled
out, hollering at them to get on the fucking ground, to put their hands on
the wall. Dorismond and one of the shadows shouted and swung at each
other, until the fracas finally found it is punctuation mark: a single,
ringing gun blast.

Dorismond was falling, Kaiser found himself shoved onto the sidewalk, face
down, handcuffs snapped across his wrists.

"Cuff that shot motherfucker, too," ordered one of the officers.

"No, no, that's my friend. Those other guys were bothering us for weed,"
Kaiser tried to explain.

He was told to shut up. He turned his head. Near him on the sidewalk,
Dorismond was trying to roll over. His face an inch above the filthy
sidewalk, Dorismond gasped. Blood streamed from his mouth. Kaiser
shuddered, then screamed Dorismond's name. "Say another word, I'll put
your face on the ground," said a cop.

"It's those other guys, trying to buy weed," Kaiser whispered helplessly.
But the cops were going through Dorismond's pockets, speaking urgent, cop
talk into radios.

His friend had fallen into a terrible stillness. Dorismond, with a bullet
through the chest, was moving fast beyond help. Kaiser was searched,
loaded into a police car and carried it to a precinct station. For the
next 12 hours, he answered questions from detectives, trying to rebuild the
moment. Much of the time, he was cuffed to a chair. Early on, Kaiser
asked about Dorismond, and though the detectives were vague, about his
condition, they told him that he had been shot by a police officer.

"What about the guys trying to buy the weed?" Kaiser asked. "Did you
arrest them?"

Kaiser just didn't get it, so the detectives finally laid it out. The guys
trying to buy the weed, they weren't bad guys. They were police officers,
too. That strange question--What are you going to do, rob me? --was
actually a code for help sent over a radio transmitter to a back up
team. Hearing it, the other undercovers rushed in. In the struggle with
Dorismond, one of these cops fired the shot. It was midmorning before the
detectives told Kevin Kaiser that his friend Patrick Dorismond was now on a
gurney at the city morgue. He was 26 years old.

Today, in the war on drugs, a man ended up dying in the gutter, bleeding to
death from a bullet fired by the good guys. Rarely had the malignant
stupidity of the anti-drug campaign stood in such stark
relief. Dorismond's death was a mistake, but it was also an inevitable
expression of official national policy.

In the fall of 1968, a presidential candidate appeared at Disneyland,
determinedly climbing out of the early and shallow political grave into
which his career had been thrown. If he were elected president, Richard M.
Nixon promised America would face down a new enemy. For months, he had
crossed the country, nimbly defining law and order as the central issue for
a nation heaving with antiwar demonstrations, race riots and cultural
entropy. Speaking at a Republican rally near Disney's Matterhorn ride in
September 1968, Nixon sharpened his focus.

"As I look over the problems in this country, I see one that stands out
particularly," he said. "The problem of narcotics -- the modern curse of
the youth, just like the plagues and epidemics of former years. And they
are decimating a generation of Americans." No longer would the federal
government play and a near-invisible role against narcotics trafficking.
Nixon campaigned on a plan to end one war, in Vietnam, and the dedication
of another -- a siege not against a state or people, but on an eclectic
list of substances called drugs.

Long after Richard Nixon rose, then fell, and finally passed on, the war
against drugs continues. The torch has been passed from Republican to
Democrat and back, and no party or politician has been outfervored in
fighting drugs. Just in the past 10 years, the federal government has
spent $150 billion fighting drugs. The federal anti-drug budget this year
is $17.8 billion, which is more than 220 times greater than Nixon's 1969
budget of $81 million. Compare that with the $22.2 billion spent per year
by the Departments of State, Interior and Commerce combined.

Thousands of tons of illicit drugs have been seized at borders, ports and
warehouses, from secret compartments in trucks, from hollowed-out holy
statues and from the toilets used by human drug mules detained at airports
until they pass the cocaine-packed condoms they swallow. Thousands of
people have died on the streets of American cities, in Colombia and in
Mexico. By uncounted thousands, law-abiding African Americans and Latinos
have been ordered by troopers onto the shoulders of interstate highways,
their cars searched, they're very races transformed into probable cause for
suspicion. Since 1980, the total number of people in prisons on drug
offenses has risen from 50,000 to 400,000, most of them confined at an
annual cost, per-capita, that would pay for tuition, room and board at a
private college.

A milestone in the war on drugs occurred in 1986 when key members of the
House of Representatives, then controlled by the Democrats, saw a chance to
take the sting out of Republican charges that Democrats were soft on
criminals. The plan was to institute mandatory minimum sentences for drug
offenses, a notion that surfaced immediately after the death by cocaine
overdose of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias--in plenty of
time for the November midterm elections. The idea was that anyone
possessing five grams of crack cocaine would serve five years in prison,
with no possibility of parole. Other drugs carried similar mandatory
sentences. Normally, such a drastic revision to the federal code, with
powerful implications for the entire justice system, would not be
undertaken withouta detailed consideration of the impact. For this one,
though, no hearings were called. The Bureau of Prisons was not
consulted. No judges were invited to share their thoughts. Speaker of the
House Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, whose Boston constituents were shocked by the
death of Bias (who had been drafted by the Celtics), helped the legislation
sail through Congress. A new economy was created in the federal courts.
The mandatory minimums can be waived only when the Justice Department
certifies that one criminal offers incriminating information on
another. Incredibly, the sentencing formulas of the supposedly tough
legislation permit the convicts to snitch down the criminal food chain, so
that drug dealers can cut time off their bits by, say, giving up
girlfriends who may have done little more than answer the phones and cook
dinner.

As Eric Sterling, former counsel to the House Judiciary Committee,
documented for a PBS FRONTLINE episode, the doorman in a crack house is now
legally responsible for every flake of cocaine in the House or handled by
the people who run the house. The new legislation lead to an explosion in
the number of federal drug offenders in prison, which increase by 300
percent in six years. Only 11 percent of the federal drug-trafficking
defendants are classified as major traffickers, and more than half are
low-level offenders.

Snitch culture shaped U.S. foreign policy on Manuel Noriega, the hoodlum
Panamanian dictator. By occasionally dishing up the shipments or names of
cocaine smugglers who used Panama as a transshipment point, Noriega earned
a batch of hero-grams from U.S. drug enforcement authorities. The feds
were happy for the collars; Noriega was content to have the yanquis weed
his garden of cohorts or rivals who displeased him. Oliver North provided
another coating of Teflon when Noriega promised North help with the Contras.

Inevitably, a narcoindustrial complex has risen behind the colossal
government expenditures. The Coast Guard deploys high-speed patrol boats,
Customs flies early-warning surveillance planes, the DEA uses
radar-equipped balloons to watch the Mexican border and local police get
grants for narcotics enforcement operations. All these funds stitch the
nets that haul in some real drug dealers -- and the Patrick Dorismonds of
the world.

Earlier this year, President Clinton announced he was sending $1.6 billion
in military aid to fight drugs in the jungles of Columbia. The Colombian
government will receive 60 new helicopters and enough money to fund two
battalions. The aid will help the Colombian government attack just about
any opponent or challenger to its authority -- and, possibly, pinch off the
traffic until it relocates once more.

"As in Vietnam, the policy is designed to fail," says Sylvester Salcedo, a
retired naval lieutenant commander who worked for three years in the
mid-Nineties as intelligence officer on a joint drug task force. "All
we're doing is making body counts, although instead of bodies, were
counting seizures -- tons of cocaine, kilos of heroin. "After learning of
the new bolus of money being hurled at Columbia, Salcedo composed a letter
of protest to President Clinton and returned the Navy and Marine Corps
Achievement Medal he received last year for his work on the task force.

No one involved denies that the seizure scorecard is the body count of the
drug war. And no one argues that seizures crimp the supply of drugs on the
street.

Today, after three decades of blood and money, neither supply nor demand
has flagged. Cheap, potent cocaine, heroin and marijuana remain abundant.

"It would be hard to think of any area of U.S. social policy that has
failed more completely than the war on drugs," writes Michael Massing,
author of THE FIX, an insightful book critical of the drug war.

The futility of the drug war does not make drug abuse any less
regrettable. For the poor and working poor, the fallout from addiction
runs to child abuse, disintegrating families, inability to hold jobs, and
crimes large and small. Of the nation's estimated 4 million hard-core drug
users, only about half have access to treatment. While the rich go to
Betty Ford, the poor go to jail--particularly African-Americans. Though
most drug offenders are white, black men are sent to state prisons at 13
times the rate of white men.

In the early days of the drug war, criminalization was seen as a dead-end
street. After Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, his domestic policy
advisers approached America's drug use primarily as a public health issue,
not a law-enforcement program. A Nixon aide, Egil "Bud" Krough, designed a
model program for the District of Columbia based on drug treatment and
addiction alternatives. Only half of Nixon's federal drug budget was spent
on law enforcement; the remainder went to treatment. By the late Eighties,
when drugs replaced communism as the most reliable enemy in U.S. domestic
policy debates, the Reagan and Bush administrations repudiated treatment as
a policy initiative, and about 80 percent of the money was spent on
enforcement. Today, treatment still isn't a priority. Two out of every
three dollars are spent on enforcement.

* In October 1998, 30 years after Nixon declared the drug war, another
Republican politician on the rise flew to North Carolina to make a speech,
exasperated by what he saw as a lack of effort by government.

"We get to a Drug free America," Rudolph Giuliani said, "by arresting the
people who are selling drugs, putting them in jail for a very, very long
time, and recognizing the fact that people who sell those dangerous drugs
are very much like murderers because they take people's lives from them."

People simply are not trying hard enough, argued Giuliani. A complicated
figure, clownishly belligerent at times, brilliant at others, Giuliani,
along with former Senator Alfonse D'Amato, once made a spectacular public
relations foray into the Washington Heights section of Manhattan at the
height of the crack era, both dressed in their versions of street
duds. Giuliani campaigned for mayor in 1993 as a man who would crush New
York's drug problem with intensive policing -- and also by providing
treatment facilities. He kept virtually none of his treatment promises.

By January 2000, Giuliani was being celebrated around the world for the
rebirth of New York. He was a candidate in one of the most heavily watched
Senate campaigns in modern history: Rudy the crime buster verses Hillary
Rodham Clinton, first lady. But he had a problem. After seven years of
decline, the murder rate in New York had crept up in 1999 and was starting
to jump again in 2000. In mid-January, Mayor Giuliani and his police
commissioner effectively declared a public safety emergency, quietly
authorizing virtually unlimited overtime for the police department. Its
mission: Attack drug dealing, anywhere anytime. The mayor was certain that
earlier drug crackdowns--not demographic or other social changes -- had led
to the drop in crime. And he would do it again, harder.

The new program was called Operation Condor, and it sent a flood of street
wretches sloshing down the chutes of precinct houses, holding cells and
criminal courts. "In order to continue working the overtime, you are
expected to produce," says Tom Scotto, president of the Detective's
Endowment Association.

The official quota, say the undercovers, was five collars per tour for each
team. No one sweated about the quality of the arrests. A man selling
tamales on the street was busted for not having a permit. Another was
grabbed for spitting on the sidewalk. Nearly 80 percent of all the Condor
cases were misdemeanors or low-level violations. "We are spending all our
time locking up three guys for smoking a joint, and there are no
large-scale investigations going on," says one undercover sergeant in the
narcotics division. All Patrick Dorismond had to do that fateful evening
was surrender a joint, if he had had one, and he would have had a night in
jail instead of the morgue.

With crime already low in New York City, the use of undercover officers to
arrest people for minor infractions seemed to be a dangerous tactic. "If
this is the safest large city in America, where are they finding all these
people to arrest?" asked Bill Bratton, the former police commissioner who
was given credit for driving down the city's crime rate. "In the early
Nineties, making arrests was like fishing in a stocked pond. Eventually,
you started to have fewer fish. Instead of reducing the number of people
fishing in the pond, they actually increased them. So there reeling out
smaller and smaller fish."

Two months into Operation Condor, Police Commissioner Howard Safir declared
it a success. The city's murder rate, however, was still climbing. A
member of the City Council stated that the name Operation Condor was also
the name used for a death squad in Latin America.

"In case you didn't know, a condor is a bird," Safir replied.

Actually, Condor stood for Citywide Organized Narcotics Drug Operational
Response. "They should call it Operation Band-Aid," remarked the narcotics
sergeant.

In the two months since Operation Condor started, police had averaged 350
arrests per day. On the night of Dorismond's death, a Condor team had
arrested eight men near the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42nd
Street. With the police van nearly full, the team was just about ready to
bring in the night's haul to central booking.

Patrick Dorismond just wanted to catch a taxi. But the drug warriors
refused to listen to him. They wanted to make some overtime. The mayor,
who got them the overtime money, wanted better crime statistics -- and to
win another election. And Dorismond ended up dead.

Within hours of Dorismond's death, the mayor and the police commissioner
unsealed Dorismond's 13-year-old juvenile court record. "I would not want a
picture presented of an altar boy, when, in fact, maybe it isn't an altar
boy," said the mayor. It turned out Dorismond had been an altar boy -- and
that he and Giuliani had both been students at Bishop Loughlin High School.
Nevertheless, the mayor hurled abuse at the dead Dorismond and at people
who did not have respect for the dangerous jobs performed by police
officers -- for flailing at everyone, it seemed, except himself. Even the
police officer who shot Dorismond sent regrets and condolences to the
victim's mother.

In May, sick with prostate cancer, his poll numbers collapsing after the
Dorismond killing, his marriage dissolving, Giuliani pulled out of the
Senate race against Hillary Clinton.

One might have thought that the Dorismond shooting would have occasioned
soul-searching about the tactics of Operation Condor. But just 11 days
after Dorismond died, a team of Condor cops was in the Bedford-Stuyvesant
section of Brooklyn, on the prowl for drug offenders. In pursuit of a
suspect, cops in an unmarked van swerved into a tree outside a crowded
schoolyard, and some of the students thought the noise of the collision was
a gunshot. Then the kids, hundreds of them, had more to worry about. The
suspect ran through the schoolyard and, eyewitnesses reported, as many as
five undercover cops, at least one with a visible drawn gun, followed. One
child got cut on the leg and another had an asthma attack in the panic that
engulfed the playground. The police got their man, a 19-year-old who, they
said, had sold some dope to another young man not far from the school. It
was another point tallied on the drug war's endless scoreboard.

"The whole purpose of an action like that," Mayor Giuliani explained, "is
to remove drug dealers from the areas around schoolyards and playgrounds
because of the great damage that drug dealers do, and the police want to do
that without creating disruptions, problems or difficulties for children."

Mission unaccomplished.