Read Online Breaking Rank by Norm Stamper - Free Book Online

crime and drug use suggest a reduction of 35 to 50 percent in those crimes alone.
    Legalization would arguably wipe out at least one variety of structural racism, as well as class discrimination. A sad but safe generalization: poor blacks smoke cheap crack, upscale whites snort the spendy powdered version of cocaine. And who goes to jail? For longer periods of time? Blacks, of course. Nowhere is this more evident than in Texas where, according to the Justice Policy Institute, blacks are incarcerated at a rate 63 percent higher than the national rate . . . for blacks! (Nationally, according to the Bureau of Justice statistics, 12 percent of all African-American men between the ages of 20 and 34 are in prison versus 1.6 percent of white men). More than half of these African-Americans are in prison for nonviolent offenses, mostly drug-related. Needless to say, this same group is grossly underrepresented in drug treatment programs.

    Before I became a cop I didn’t think about any of this. I’d seen Reefer Madness , and a detective once brought marijuana to school to show us what it looked like—so we wouldn’t accidentally smoke it and rot the membranes of our noses. ( Pot , he’d said, would do that.) But, except for underage alcohol bingeing, I wasn’t interested in illegal drugs so the scare tactics were wasted on me.
    Then I became a cop. In my first year I kicked in a dozen or so doors, charged into people’s homes, scooped up their weeds, seeds, and pot pipes, and carted these “felons” off to jail in handcuffs. It was fun for a while. But it got old.
    Patrolman “Mike Jones,” who worked a beat near mine, lived to pinch druggies. He wasn’t a narc, just a uniformed patrolman like me. But for some reason he had a hard-on for anyone holding. He’d twist and bend the U.S. Constitution left and right to get a “consent” search on everything from traffic stops to loud-party calls. Then he’d rip out back seats, riflethrough drawers, and stuff his hands into people’s pockets until he’d come up with half a baggie, or a seed. A seed! Since Jones drove the police ambulance, I usually wound up transporting his prisoners—older teens and young adults mostly, not likely to make anyone’s “most wanted” list. They’d sit in the back seat of my cage car, mumbling, “Oh wow, man. Oh wow.” Or, “This cage is weird , man.” Or, “Hey, you got any Fritos?” I had plenty of other things I could—and should—have been doing. Like arresting wife beaters and child abusers, giving rides to real criminals.
    By then I was convinced that drug abuse was a medical problem. I found myself debating fellow cops, arguing that society ought to help abusers get off drugs. I won few converts. Most of my colleagues thought drug users should rot in hell and traffickers lined up and shot. But a few showed compassion, and some actually tried to get medical assistance for the strung-out junkies on their beats. The best we could do for them was to haul them to County Hospital for a stomach pump, or attempt to sneak them into the East Wing, known in those days as the “psycho ward.”

    Today, in these more “enlightened” times, the most caring cop would still be hard-pressed to find adequate services for those in need. Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Drug Policy Institute, says he does not favor broad legalization of drugs. But he does advocate, forcefully, “harm-reduction.” Writing in the January/February 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs , he defines the strategy:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Harm-reduction innovations include efforts to stem the spread of HIV by making sterile syringes readily available and collecting used syringes; allowing doctors to prescribe oral methadone for heroin addiction treatment, as well as heroin and other drugs for addicts who would otherwise buy them on the