Censorship, Part I

Michael Pollan's essay on poppy cultivation and the government's blundering
drug policy ["Opium, Made Basy," Folio, April] might be appreciated for its
whimsy and humor were it not also a chilling reminder of the incremental
totalitarianism that the war on drugs has produced. During my
thirtyfiveyear career, I served in the New York City Police Department
and as chief of police in Kansas City, Missouri, and San Jose, California.
Since my retirement in 1991, I have tried to expose the hypocrisy,
corruption, violence, and racism inherent in America's doomed war against
drugs.

It is difficult to generate a rational debate on our national drug
policy, because the issue is largely religious in nature. The groups who
successfully lobbied to criminalize drugs a century ago saw drug use as
sinful and succeeded in codifying their religious views in the nation's
penal statutes. Thus it is that drugs and drug users have been demonized.
The prohibition of alcohol resulted in violence, corruption, and widespread
disrespect for the law. So has the prohibition of other drugs. In the best
Orwellian tradition, drug war hawks call for ever more severe punishments
while turning a blind eye to institutionalized corruption, official
perjury, and the increasing erosion of civil rights in America. As a result
of draconian criminal penalties, $500 worth of drugs in a source country
brings $100,000 on the streets of an American city. All the cops, prisons,
and armies in the world cannot overcome such a profit margin.

The first casualty in war is truth. It is one thing for the DBA to lie
about how opium is produced and its effects on users but quite another to
put hundreds of thousands of people in jail using illegal police methods.
In 1995, state and local police made roughly one million arrests for
possession of drugs. Such arrests should require a search warrant, yet very
few warrants were used. In hundreds of thousands of cases, otherwise honest
police officers feel justified in illegally searching people and then lying
about it under oath. They call it "testilying" or "white perjury." In
cities all across the country, thugs with badges have planted evidence,
sold drugs, and committed other drugrelated crimes that are often
protected by a police code of silence.

Pollan is right to fear government reprisal for his writings. Despite my
years in policing, some top lawenforcement officials have wondered out
loud whether I have "gone over to the other side" and started using drugs
since my retirement. I have been labeled an enemy simply for criticizing
antidrug paranoia. In the minds of many lawenforcement officers, the enemy
is automatically guilty and must be destroyed. Some of the officials
reading Pollan's article will undoubtedly believe that his future gardening
should take place on a prison farm. I hope he has a good lawyer.

Joseph D. McNamara,

Stanford, Calif.