PANELISTS PLAY THEMSELVES IN FICTITIOUS DRUG RAID

What to do when people can't talk openly about an important subject? Joe
McNamara, the feisty excop turned public intellectual, forces them to play
their own roles.

Before CSPAN cameras and an audience of 100 law enforcement officers,
elected officials and health professionals involved in treating drug
problems, McNamara badgered some prominent players in the nation's drug war
on Thursday, Nov. 6. He asked them to explain how they would behave during
a fictitious drug raid planned for a Monday morning in a fictitious
American city. Perched with a microphone on a TV host's stool in Stauffer
Auditorium, the former police chief of San Jose and Kansas City made up the
scenario as he went, piling on details that made it difficult to duck some
of the problems involved in fighting a drug epidemic with law enforcement.
The discussion was part of a twoday Hoover Institution conference designed
to elicit "pragmatic solutions to urban drug problems."

First on the spot was Bernard Parks, police chief of Los Angeles, who said
he would first try to verify the anonymous tip received by police that drug
dealers were holed up in a city housing project with a large quantity of
drugs. If the tip held up to more scrutiny, Parks said he would have "no
choice" but to seek a warrant authorizing a police raid, but he would try
to make it as safe as possible by first evacuating the surrounding housing
project. Such a raid is "inherently dangerous," he said, and could never be
declared a success until after it ended without injury or loss of innocent
people's lives.

McNamara then turned to Mayor Susan Hammer of San Jose, pressing her to say
what she would do about Parks' plans for the fictitious raid in her city.
Hammer said her job was to "support the chief," that she expected him to
take precautions to minimize loss of life or injury, and that she might go
on television after the raid to "reassure the public." Unlike Parks, she
said she didn't expect that capturing the supply of drugs would affect
street sales, but "I don't know how you don't do the raid and have any
credibility in the community."

Next was district attorney Terence Hallinan of San Francisco, who said it
was not his job to decide if a raid was too dangerous. He would not do
anything to block it if police had sufficient probable cause.

Turning to Tommy Fulcher, a Silicon Valley community activist who formerly
directed the local NAACP, McNamara asked if he would or could do anything
to stop the raid. Fulcher said he very likely wouldn't know about it in
advance and wouldn't want to because "if anything went wrong, the police
would blame me." After the fact, he said, he would "second guess" the
police, but he noted that many citizens in druginfested urban
neighborhoods want the police to do more to roust drug dealers.

There was Ira Glasser, executive director of the American Civil Liberties
Union ("practically since the Lincoln administration," McNamara joked).
McNamara tried to get him to say whether the ACLU would file a formal
complaint about the raid. Glasser never really answered that question, but
implied that if it was a success and the vast majority of the citizens in
the endangered community approved of it, ACLU lawyers would be reluctant to
help a complaining citizen file a lawsuit. He spoke of the difficulties his
organization has protecting citizens' Fourth Amendment rights against
search and seizure when so many of their fellow citizens approve of police
trampling on the rights of suspected drug dealers or addicts.

Next was U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet of New York, whom McNamara asked
to sign the warrant authorizing the police to make the "noknock" raid.
(Such search warrants are granted for drug raids because of the likelihood
that a knock would prompt the drug dealers to dispose of the evidence down
the toilet.) "I might not be back from my weekend yet," the judge quipped.
Turning serious, he said he and most judges are concerned about the drug
wars eroding Fourth Amendment rights to privacy, but they also normally
"second guess" the police after the fact, rather than being cautious in
authorizing "noknock" searches.

Ron Rose, a defense lawyer McNamara described as "beloved among the many
drug dealers he has gotten off," was even less convinced than Hammer that
the raid would impact street sales because of the tremendous profits his
clients earn from drugs. Even if their father, brother and uncle have
landed in jail, he said, drug dealers always think they are smarter or have
learned enough from their predecessors' mistakes to make the gain worth the
risk. Hurricanes and other natural disasters do more to affect the street
market for drugs than police, he said.

McNamara elicited agreement from panelists on one key point they do not
weigh the risks of the raid against the dangers of the particular drug
involved. It didn't matter, they agreed, whether the illegal stash was
Valium, marijuana or cocaine. It also didn't matter if the alleged drug
dealers were juveniles or adults, panelists said. "The risk of violence
associated with illegal drug sales by wellarmed dealers is the factor"
driving the raid, Parks said.

Yet all the military assault weapons that the suspected dealers possessed
were legal, McNamara pointed out, to which Fulcher added that, from his
experience, they were less deadly than the weapons that some lawabiding
citizens would possess in the same neighborhood.

McNamara, a research fellow at Hoover, is among a core of strange
bedfellows who for the last few years have been advocating an end to the
drug war. Many of them say that the profits of an illegal drug industry are
so enormous that there is no chance of success without legalizing drugs to
remove the profits and to reduce the crime connected with prohibition.
There are political liberals and conservatives in this camp, but opinion
polls indicate they are still a minority of the American public.

With that in mind, several speakers, such as former Secretary of State
George Shultz, a Hoover fellow and Stanford professor emeritus, and Ethan
Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith Center, a New Yorkbased think tank
on drug issues, advocated retaining the legal prohibition but adopting new
strategies of "harm reduction" strategies that appear to be working in
some other countries to both curb addiction and reduce drugrelated
violence.

Nobel economist and Hoover Fellow Milton Friedman, who first warned of the
drug war's moral hazards in a 1972 Newsweek essay, however, was less
reconciled to halfway measures, and Edwin Meese, a Hoover fellow and
former attorney general, advocated continuing the law enforcement approach
to drugs, although he said he opposed current policy that allows the Drug
Enforcement Administration and local police to confiscate the property of
people only accused of drug crimes.

Friedman listed "immoral consequences" that he said flowed from the basic
moral flaw of the drug war: its refusal to acknowledge that human beings
have "no right to prevent a fellow man from committing suicide by alcohol
or drugs." Friedman was willing to concede a possible exception for
children.

Among the immoralities flowing from the basic moral flaws, he said, are
high levels of corruption generated by the use of informers; an eightfold
increase in the prison population since the federal drug war began under
Nixon; racist enforcement leading to incarceration rates of black men that
are higher than South Africa's under apartheid; disproportionate treatment
of ethnic minorities and whites with drug problems; and the destruction of
inner cities and "tens of thousands of murders" in foreign countries that
are tied to the highly profitable export of drugs to the United States.

Jeff Tauber, a judge from Oakland, Calif., who is president of the National
Association of Drug Court Professionals, disputed Friedman's view that
inner cities would be better off after decriminalizing drugs. Oakland needs
more money for prevention and rehabilitation, Tauber said, but babies born
with fetal alcohol syndrome and crack addictions would not decline in
depressed neighborhoods simply from drugs being legal and cheaper. In a
similar vein, Parks disputed Rose's contention that inner city youth are
drawn into the drug trade for high profits. It is more typical for youth to
earn $25 a day from drugs to supplement the family income than to earn
large amounts for luxuries, he said.

Shultz suggested people move away from discussing legalization and
prohibition and instead talk to each other about incremental "operational"
changes that could be made, such as needle exchange programs or replacing
the current policy of treating users as criminals with one that treats them
as people with health problems. That could be combined, he suggested, with
more consistent, harsh penalties for peddlers.

Nadelmann suggested to law enforcement officers in the audience that they
support needle exchange programs while still continuing to enforce drug
laws. "You in law enforcement are crucially important to the public and
politicians, who look to you for leadership, guidance and political cover."
He also urged citizens to press elected officials to define the goals of
drug policies. Without criteria now, the de facto measure of success or
failure, he said, has become "how many people broke the drug law last week,
last month or last year." Success should be measured, he contended, by
reductions in drug use and by reductions in the "death, disease, crime,
suffering and taxpayer dollars associated with our drug prohibition."

Conference participants also heard from medical practitioners and
researchers in the field of drug treatment. Dr. Peter Beilenson, director
of public health for the city of Baltimore, went undercover, pretending he
was an addict seeking treatment, in order to see the system from a
different perspective. Even at his own clinic, he said, he was treated
badly by medical professionals who, he contended, make it difficult for
addicts to voluntarily seek treatment. Dr. Robert Newman, a professor at
Yeshiva University and president of Greater Metropolitan Health Systems,
called coerced treatment by the legal system a violation of medical ethics.
There are five times as many volunteers for treatment as there are
facilities to treat them, he said.

The conference included medical practitioners and elected officials,
McNamara said, because several police officers who had attended a similar
conference at Hoover several years ago suggested a broader set of public
policy makers should be involved. "I think our panel discussion [of the
fictitious drug raid] showed that normally there is not a lot of
communication between various public officials involved in drug policy.
They just go ahead without thinking, why are we doing this raid? What's the
goal here?"

Not everyone was happy about media involvement at the twoday conference,
however. "One police chief jumped me at lunch and said why is the media
here," McNamara said after the conference. "He felt that police chiefs and
mayors who disagree with the current policy couldn't be candid because the
media might quote them. There is a kind of McCarthyism surrounding this
topic."

Shultz agreed, telling conference participants that he was surprised when
he was "denounced by the White House" eight years ago for saying he favored
legalizing drugs to reduce profits. Politicians who agree with him
privately do not yet feel they can say so publicly, he said, because it
might hurt their reelection chances. "It's up to people like Milt and me
and others to point up the realities, and then you will see a shift."