By Erik Roskes
Therapeutic courts may have consequences not intended by their leaders and participants. Most of these courts begin with noble motives. That said, good intentions can lead in many directions if unchecked by objective reviewers or evaluators.
Read full entry »Nearly every murder, fistfight and rape at the Pine Ridge Reservation starts with a drink. Would lifting the ban on reservation liquor sales make a difference?
Sgt. Kevin Rascher turns his cruiser onto the gravel in South Dakota Indian Country, guns the engine, and races toward an emergency call 20 miles away. The Chevy Tahoe bounces down the back road at 95 mph, sirens howling, past gutted cars and broken beer bottles.
Another drinker. Another fight. Rascher’s shift on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation began two hours ago, and the tribal highway officer has already arrested four Indians on alcohol charges.
Jesse Runs Against 19 stands outside of a home in Manderson, SD. The remoteness of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and its housing clusters can leave youth isolated with not much to do. (Conrad Schmidt)
Alcoholism strikes four out of five families in the nation’s second-poorest county, despite a ban as old as the reservation itself. Police say nearly every murder, fistfight and rape on the Connecticut-sized tribal tract begins with a drink.
Rascher rolls into a tattered neighborhood in Kyle, a reservation town. Through the dust-caked windshield, he spots a suspect.
A man with a shaved head staggers through the cluster of houses, his gray shirt torn and specked with blood. A young girl and boy watch, frozen, as he stumbles into their yard.
‘A HUGE PROBLEM’
Few places in America are as scarred as Pine Ridge, a sunburnt expanse of sand hills and buttes that crumble into the Badlands.
The Oglala band of the Lakota nation, known to outsiders as the Sioux, live today in some of the nation’s worst poverty conditions. The Pine Ridge prairie landscape is scattered with junk cars, rotting trailers and graffiti-laced, 1970s-era federal housing. Beat-up vans rumble down bumpy roads, past sickly dogs and toddlers in the street.
Unemployment hovers around 80 percent, according to tribal census figures, and one-third of those with jobs live below the federal poverty line. Teenagers commit suicide at a rate nearly twice the national average. Life expectancy is lowest in the northern hemisphere, except for Haiti. One in three women have been raped.
Police blame alcohol for many of the problems, but the debate has raged on Pine Ridge for years. Advocates who want to legalize alcohol say the tribal ban buries police in simple possession cases and creates a forbidden allure that encourages binge drinking. Others say lifting the ban would worsen the tribe’s long, ugly struggle with alcohol.
Tribal council candidate Denver American Horse says he will push for a ballot measure if elected in November.
“I’ve always had a lot of faith and confidence in the tribal members,” says American Horse, who stopped drinking 22 years ago. “I feel they can handle alcohol if it’s legalized.”
Alcohol possession arrests inundate the short-staffed, high-turnover tribal police department. The current certified force of 42 would need to at least double before the department could serve all of the reservation’s needs, says Oglala Sioux Public Safety Director Everett Little Whiteman. The alcohol ban is “not working, and has never worked,” Little Whiteman says.
Ninety percent of the 25,000 adult trials and arraignments scheduled next year in tribal court are alcohol-related, and juvenile crime is expected to generate an additional 10,000 cases, says Marwin Smith, the reservation’s attorney general. . Parents, spouses and children endure most of the violence.
Smith says legalizing alcohol would likely not reduce his caseload, but would free police and the courts to focus on more serious offenses. As a tribal council appointee, however, he has remained publicly neutral on the legalization debate. Of the five tribal prosecutors, Smith is the only licensed lawyer.
BOOTLEGGERS
Rascher jumps out of his cruiser and sprints toward the man in the yard. The man turns, stares, and steps back. He twists away when Rascher grabs his left arm, but not quick enough.
Rascher cuffs his catch and loads him into the right-rear passenger seat. His name is Alan Has No Horse – A-Town to his friends – and, allegedly, he punched his brother. Blood seeps from his swollen lower lip. Rascher suspects he is high on methamphetamine, probably drunk.
Somebody stares from a window a few houses down. Bootlegger, Rascher says. Illegal peddlers thrive in the limp economy. Locals who can’t find a seller will drive as far as 60 miles one way for alcohol.
“Legalizing would help, but it would not help at the same time,” Rascher says. “I think it would help as far as the DUIs and car accidents. The ones who (want) alcohol will drive to a border town to buy it, but then they don’t want to wait until they get back to their house to drink. They start drinking in the car.”
Intoxicated men wander the streets looking for a friend with more beer after sunset in White Clay, NE. Fresh sugary does not stop an addict from reaching White Clay, NE for beers with friends. (Conrad Schmidt)
Rascher says lifting the ban would likely increase the number of domestic fights, rapes, assaults and suicides on Pine Ridge.
A few months ago, Rascher stopped a car in the reservation town of Wanblee. In the back, he found a box with 48 travel-sized bottles of Tvarscki 100-proof vodka.
The driver admitted that he bought the box for $120, or $2.50 per bottle, Rascher says.
If other bootleggers in town have alcohol, the driver told him, he peddles the bottles for $5 apiece and a $120 net profit. When competitors run out, he sells them for $10 and takes home $360.
A WAY OF LIFE
Belleron Blue Bird Jr. moans on the gurney and tugs against his wrist restraints. Blood trickles from the crescent-shaped gash above his right eye, down his cheek, and drips on the ambulance floor.
A medic, Neil Phair, wraps his head in gauze. Blue Bird, a skinny 25-year-old with a buzz cut, mustache and “Native Pride” inked on his arm, grimaces when asked what happened.
A fight, he mumbles. Hit with a wooden bat. Been drinking. But I’m tough!
Phair rolls his eyes. It’s 3 a.m. The night so far is slow – one stabbing, two hours earlier – and this call, like most others, began with a beer.
“It becomes a way of life,” Phair says. “They expect it. They’re ready for it. An ambulance showing up at the house is normal.”
The worst drinkers are so addicted, Phair says, that emergency responders adhere to a general rule of thumb. Those who blow above a .450 on a breathalyzer – more than five times the South Dakota driving limit – go to the hospital. Anyone with a lower reading and no other problems goes to jail. Some regulars are known to suffer withdrawal seizures if their level drops below .200.
The ambulance tears down the wind-swept highway at 105 mph, toward Pine Ridge Hospital. Blue Bird bounces on the gurney, clenches his jaw, and closes his eyes.
THE BORDER
Albert Brave Jr. swigs from a black-and-red malt liquor can, a 24-ounce brew with twice the alcohol of a typical beer.
The 46-year-old leaves his reservation home almost daily to wander the dirty border town two miles south of Pine Ridge village. Two women join him on a grocery cart turned on its side. Last night, he says, he slept in the tribal jail.
Whiteclay, Nebraska is a bump-in-the-road prairie town with fewer than two dozen residents, 200 feet south of the reservation border. The main drag leads motorists past a faith ministry, a pawn shop, three grocery stores and four off-sale beer stores that sold 4.6 million cans of beer last year, mostly to Indians. Authorities say Whiteclay feeds the alcoholism and violence on Pine Ridge more than any other town.
Indians slump on doorsteps with worn-leather faces and bloodshot eyes. A graying Native American woman in a T-shirt and dirty jeans lies curled on the sidewalk. Tumbleweeds and a Wal-Mart bag skitter across the road.
Few here are homeless. The regulars of Whiteclay come simply to drink, loiter, laugh, fight, hustle change, and forget their lives. Every Monday through Saturday, they arrive at 8 a.m. for “roll call.” A local faith ministry serves breakfast. Then, drinks. The crowd grows. Two men sneak their booze into a gutted house with a filthy mattress and human excrement on the floor.
Jolene Black Elk points to the scar on her neck, an inch from her windpipe, where she says her boyfriend stabbed her in an alcohol-fueled rage. She talks about her teenage years on “the rez,” drinking and drugging, and the night she was raped. As night descends on Whiteclay, she warns a writer and photographer to stay close: “You guys are gonna get ganged.”
Mike New Holy, a former tribal police officer, slouches on the porch of an empty house with boarded windows. Behind him, in spray-painted blue, are the words, “Live Long. Native Pride.”
The 45-year-old says he arrived in Whiteclay the day before, slept in the grass behind an empty house, and woke up to drink again. By mid-afternoon, he says, he had finished three joints and two beers.
“Look at it,” New Holy says, and nods toward the beer stores. “Everybody’s coming down and buying the booze over there, then they go back and bootleg it. They make money off it.”
Marilyn Lee Sitspoor spent last night in the Pine Ridge tribal offender facility. Her drunken boyfriend kicked her out of bed, she says. A fight ensued, the police arrived, and they both went to jail.
Sitspoor eases herself down, against a grocery store wall. The former dental assistant has come here occasionally since she lost her job and her boy. Her 16-year-old son, Stu, was struck and killed by an unknown motorist in July 2004.
“I’m lonely,” she says. “I miss my baby.”
She stops. Her chin trembles. Flies swirl around her as she reaches for a crumpled tissue. Here, alone in the dirt, the Lakota grandmother lowers her head and cries.
‘THIS PLACE AIN’T NORMAL’
State Line Liquor is a metal shack with beer. Outside, a January snow swirls through Whiteclay, past the store’s brown walls and the horse-tie rack out front. Inside, behind the counter, Gary Brehmer waits.
The door swivels open. A stocky, round-faced Indian, someone Brehmer knows, struts inside and slaps the counter.
“Gimme a Black Ice.”
Brehmer balls his fist, pulls it back, pauses. And grins.
“Oh, a Black Ice?” he says. “I thought you said a black eye.”
Two minutes later, the door opens again. The next customer dumps 100-some pennies on the counter and demands a 24-ounce malt liquor.
“It’s $1.50,” Bremer says. “Now, if you want me to get it, that’ll cost you $4.”
In walks a man with tangled black hair, a worn denim jacket and rotten teeth. “I want someone to tell me who the toughest fucking dude in Whiteclay is.”
Brehmer squints, leans forward. “You’re looking at him.”
The banter continues for a straight half-hour, different jokes but the same basic request: A six-pack. Two cans of Joose. A Hurricane High Gravity, some smokes, and a lottery ticket.
State Line sold an estimated 42,200 beer cases in 2009 and still ranks among the smallest operations in Whiteclay, according to the Nebraska Liquor Commission. Brehmer started in town as an auto shop owner. The avid hunter bought a neighbor store’s liquor license in the early 2000s, and let his two sons run the shop on weekdays.
The 57-year-old moved to the Pine Ridge area when he was 5. His father, who worked in construction, enrolled him in a reservation school. Classmates beat him because he was a wasicu, Lakota for white person, which in some circles means “one who steals the fat.”
Despite the problems, Brehmer says, Pine Ridge has plenty of quiet, law-abiding people. The troublemakers steal the attention, he says, and Whiteclay businesses get blamed.
“If I don’t (sell liquor), the next guy will,” he says. “I’m going to have to answer to God, too. At least we can control it. If somebody comes in, and they’ve had enough, or if they drop out there and start rolling around on the street, we go out there and we call the law. We do the best we can.”
The door creaks. A fresh customer breaks his thought. Brehmer recognizes the man, sees his middle finger, and returns the gesture.
“You don’t do this in a normal place,” he says. “But this place ain’t normal.”
A TROUBLED HISTORY
The ban dates to 1832, when Congress prohibited alcohol sales to all American Indians. President Dwight D. Eisenhower repealed the law in 1953, but Pine Ridge, like most reservations, continued to forbid alcohol.
Whiteclay belonged to the Lakota under an 1868 treaty with the U.S. government, as did the western Dakotas, most of Nebraska and parts of Montana and Wyoming.
Pine Ridge was created in 1889, when Congress shrank the Great Sioux Reservation into five separate land tracts. Lawmakers incorporated a 10-mile-long, 5-mile-deep buffer zone, the Whiteclay extension, into the reservation to protect Pine Ridge from illegal whiskey peddlers.
In 1904, over the protests of Lakota elders, President Theodore Roosevelt placed all but one square mile back in the public domain.
White settlers pounced. Bootleggers sold to Indians in Whiteclay until the 1950s, when the state of Nebraska licensed two bars. In the early 1970s, the owners converted to off-site sales only, in response to worsening violence. The state licensed two more.
Nebraska has reaped the cash windfall for years. In 2009, according to state liquor commission, Whiteclay generated $133,700 in alcohol-tax revenue for state coffers.
Nebraska State Sen. LeRoy Louden introduced a bill in January that would have let the Pine Ridge tribal government apply for up to 70 percent of the money generated by the liquor tax each year for health care, public safety and economic development. In 2009, had the bill been law, Pine Ridge could have qualified for $94,500 in financial aid.
But the version rewritten in committee and signed into law instead allows only a one-time payment of $25,000 from the state general fund. The Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs is required to seek private and public money to help the tribe, until the law sunsets in 2018.
THE JAIL
There is one time every year when car crashes rise, assaults surge and the tribal jail floods with drunken offenders.
The Pine Ridge Detention located in Pine Ridge, SD fills up with intocicated persons. Each night the jail fills and each offender of intoxication serves 8 hours and leaves. (Conrad Schmidt)
The Oglala Sioux Nation’s Annual Powwow is the Pine Ridge equivalent of a state fair, a four-day celebration of Indian pride.
Outside, in a dance circle lined with pine branches, young men and women sway and spin to a thunderous drum. A teen dancer ducks and pivots, arms wide, in a feather headdress with a choker and a long-bone breastplate. A wailing, prideful Lakota chant fills the August air.
Half a mile east, in the old Pine Ridge Jail, a guard ushers a one-eyed inmate to his cell. Public intox. A 10-man line snakes from the processing desk to the booking garage. New inmates enter every five minutes, consistently, for an hour straight.
Muffled shouts echo from the holding cells, each with at least a dozen passed-out inmates. A bare-chested, gray-haired man peeks through a window, his belly sagging over his belt. A woman hammers on her door. The block reeks of alcohol, urine, body odor.
Bobby Brown Eyes, a jail trustee, drags a mop past the intake desk. The 19-year-old was arrested three days ago for driving under the influence and disorderly conduct. Two of his buddies are in the holding tank, and a third just arrived.
“Out there, you can’t get nothing,” he says. “You have to get up early, you have to clean, you have to make your bed. Here, you can stay up all night.”
Brown Eyes has worn the black-and-white striped jail suit before. In years past, the 19-year-old served time for public drunkenness, failing to pay a driving-under-the-influence fine, and at least one fight. The trustee job pays $10 a day toward his $35 bond.
The next night, a full day after his release, Brown Eyes roams the grounds with a cigarette between his lips. John Lennon stares from the T-shirt on his gangly, boyish frame.
Tonight, he says, he is looking for his five-month-old and her mother. His ex is with another man now, and Brown Eyes wants a fight.
“Going to get high tonight,” he says. “Probably go drinking.”
THE DEBATE
The Oglala Sioux Tribal Council last considered a ballot issue to legalize alcohol in January 2004, to fatten their tax base and fund treatment programs. The idea died a month later after a public outcry.
Among the supporters was Garry Janis, a former county sheriff, who tried to lift the ban during his time on the council.
“You legalize it, you open up a tribal bar, and you can take the money and put it back into social programs,” Janis says. “It’s here regardless. We spend thousands of dollars in resources combating it, and it doesn’t have to be that way.”
Council member Joseph Rosales says he supports the ban because alcoholism plagues too many of his constituents.
Tribe members who once settled for beer now drink vodka, he says. Others who can’t afford it will drink hair spray, mouthwash, household cleaners, anything with alcohol.
“Our nation’s in a state of denial about the fact that we have a problem,” says Rosales, an alcoholic now 11 years sober. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe if we do legalize it, we can use the money for a treatment center or something else. But I seriously doubt it will help.”
Pine Ridge passed a law to legalize alcohol in 1970. Two months later, a conservative tribal council dominated by Oglala elders restored the ban.
Roughly one-third of America’s 334 Indian nations still ban alcohol. The results of legalization vary by tribe and policy, says Oregon Health and Science University researcher Anne E. Kovas.
Alcohol-related deaths on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation doubled in the 1970s, after the tribe lifted its ban. But other studies show a drop in mortality rates on reservations that legalized, Kovas says.
America’s largest tribal nation, the 180,000-member Navajo Reservation, forbids alcohol except with food orders at casino restaurants. The policy was enacted in 2002 to attract tourists. Few people support full legalization, says George Hardeen, a spokesman for Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr.
Pine Ridge’s closest neighbor, the 21,000-member Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, legalized alcohol sales and possession in 1973.
The Rosebud Sioux Tribal Police Department still receives 25,000 emergency calls per year, about as many as Pine Ridge. But Rosebud Police Capt. Edwin Young says many alcohol cases end peacefully, with an order to leave or an open-container ticket.
A FAMILY, A FIGHT
Dave Glenn lifts his shirt to show the pale, dime-sized spot on his stomach where he was shot.
The 58-year-old Oglala served in Vietnam as a platoon minesweeper, He nearly died when a bullet tore through his intestines. Now, the mechanic with a silver ponytail and bifocals fixes transmissions and tries to survive.
A television hums in the cramped, unkempt, smoke-filled bedroom. Mold spots and black-marker drawings cover the wall. Glenn’s granddaughter, a toddler, squirms into his lap.
“Hiya, monkey!” he says. “This is my monkey, my baby.”
In Lakota, there is a concept – tiyospaye – that requires families to take care of their own. Cousins, sisters, half-brothers, grandparents and friends squeeze into homes that can barely hold a family of four.
Mandy Janis plucks the girl out of Grandpa Dave’s lap, kisses her cheek. Her family moved back to Pine Ridge in August 2009, after a decade in Rapid City. Her husband, Danny Jumping Eagle, works construction for $15,000 a year and mops floors part-time at Big Bat’s convenience store in Pine Ridge. Four of her six children still live at home.
Glenn’s son, Sheldon, walks into the bedroom with a beer. His eyes are glazed, and he scowls at the sight of his father and a visitor.
“It’s about time you guys got out of my fucking room.”
“You ain’t got no fucking room here,” Glenn says, and points outside. “You’re a worthless fucking drunk. Your room’s out there.”
“Get out of my room,” Sheldon says, his words slurred. “Get. Out.”
In the next room, Bruce Bad Milk sits on an unmade bed and sings a deep-throated Lakota hymn. Janis and three other women sip beer at the kitchen table. On the floor, in a pile of dirty clothes, lies a sleeping Lakota baby.
Sheldon storms into the living room and grabs another beer. Glenn follows him, and the shouting grows louder, a chorus of slurred expletives.
“Fuck you,” Sheldon says.
“Hey, shut up,” Glenn says. “Get your ass out of here.”
Glenn lunges forward and pushes his son. Sheldon flops forward, over the wooden stove, and smacks the floor.
Somebody laughs. The children stare. Sheldon looks up at his father, his face contorted, his eyes welling with tears. Slowly he stands, clutches his hat, and stalks off to the bedroom.
Outside, beyond the dirt yard and barking dogs, in the world where alcohol is banned, a quiet settles over Pine Ridge. A lone police cruiser speeds through town, turns a corner, and disappears into the dark.
Grant Schulte is a reporter for The Des Moines Register and a correspondent for USA Today. He was a 2010 winner of the John Jay Center on Media, Crime and Justice /McCormick Foundation Fellowship on tribal justice reporting.
Read full entry »Doctors have emerged as key figures in Florida's prescription drug abuse crisis, a scourge that now kills seven Floridians a day, reports the St. Petersburg Times. While only a small number of doctors cause problems, one doctor seeing 80 patients a day — not uncommon in some pain clinics — can potentially put 20,000 pills a day in the hands of drug abusers and traffickers. Yet it's not easy to take away a doctor's prescription pad. A Times investigation found that the system for identifying and disciplining doctors is plagued with long delays, light penalties and testy finger-pointing among regulators, law enforcement and lawmakers over who should be doing what.
The Times reviewed the cases of nearly 200 Florida medical and osteopathic doctors accused of inappropriately prescribing pain medications — the 159 doctors who have been disciplined by state health regulators since 2005, plus an additional three dozen who have come to the attention of regulators and law enforcement but have not been disciplined. These physicians are linked to at least 99 overdose deaths, yet the review found that more than a fourth of the disciplined doctors still have clear and active licenses, meaning they can practice and prescribe without restriction; that even a prison sentence is no guarantee a doctor will lose his license; that it takes 18 months or more for the state Department of Health to take disciplinary action, and that the Legislature has dragged its feet in enacting measures to curb prescription drug abuse.
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In 1935, the United States opened the first federal prison to house convicted drug addicts. The "Narcotic Farm" in Lexington, Kentucky soon became an epicenter for drug treatment and addiction research. For forty years it was alsothe gathering place for this country’s growing drug subculture.
Find out more about the the book and accompanying documentary here.
Use the Crime Report for more information on Drugs.
Read full entry »Writing for the Huffington Post, Gabriel Sayegh and Evan Goldstein of the Drug Policy Alliance advocate for smart solutions to the problem of accidental drug overdoses. They write, "New York lawmakers are now considering two very different approaches to address accidental overdose fatalities, but the proposals couldn't be more different: One bill will most certainly make the problem worse, while the other will likely save lives."
The writers explain that a Senate bill "is the familiar 'get tough' approach: if a person who consumes drugs dies, the person who sold those drugs would be charged with manslaughter. This proposal seeks to reduce overdose deaths by using harsh penalties to deter drug sales; unfortunately, it will neither reduce drug sales nor will it reduce overdose fatalities." They called the state Assembly's approach to the problem "a smarter overdose prevention bill." That bill encourages people to call 911 if they believe they're witnessing an alcohol or other drug overdose. It prioritizes saving lives over arrests for drug possession, they writers said.
Read full entry »The Chicago Tribune visits a University of Illinois at Chicago drug clinic in a story that addresses the city's dubious standing as having the nation's most severe heroin problem. The clinic offers clean syringes, HIV tests and other services to those buying $10 baggies of dope on the drug-soaked streets nearby. Some of its patrons are old-timers, weary and bedraggled, their forearms misshapen with the knots and abscesses from years of shooting up. When you imagine an addict, they're probably what comes to mind.
But most who pass through the door are startlingly young: suburban teens and 20-somethings whose dalliance with the drug quickly became a consuming obsession. After looking at hospital admissions, drug test results and overdose deaths, Roosevelt University researchers concluded that heroin abuse in the Chicago region is more extreme than anywhere else in the country. And young suburbanites are a primary reason. They say the drug is alluring because it's cheap and easy to obtain. It's powerful, too, wrapping users in a numbing cocoon that seems to keep their troubles far away. That, of course, is a lie.
South Florida “Pill Mills” have become a booming tourist attraction—and a breeding ground for criminal activity
They arrive at pain management clinics in south Florida by the carload.
Armed with cash and phony MRIs, the out-of-state visitors travel from clinic to clinic with concocted stories of pain. The clinic doctors perform cursory exams before prescribing hundreds of potent pills.
The visitors return to Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia and Tennessee with enough painkillers to get their own fix and sell the rest for a handsome profit. The doctors and clinic owners make out well, too, sometimes pocketing tens of thousands of dollars in a single day.
It’s a booming tourism industry, but one that officials in Florida, the largest state without a functioning prescription drug monitoring program, are scrambling to eliminate. They say many of the state’s 1,000-plus pain management clinics are nothing more than pill mills that operate outside the scope of legitimate pain medicine practices, which are often associated with hospitals and universities, and put addictive painkillers in the hands of drug traffickers, dealers and abusers.
And the doctors who work at them? They are "really a drug dealer with a white coat on,” said Bruce Grant, director of Florida’s Office of Drug Control.
In Florida, six people die each day from prescription drug overdoses, Grant said. That’s more than three times the number of deaths from all other illicit drugs combined.
In Kentucky, where police busted a prescription drug trafficking ring with Florida connections last fall, the number of overdoses is greater than that of highway fatalities.
“This is the number one problem facing America, period,” said Chris Mathes, sheriff of Carter County, Tenn. “People don’t have to do heroin no more. They can go to a pain clinic and get the same high.”
$60 A Pill
Mathes, who served as a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent before becoming sheriff, said his rural county has been flooded with the painkillers that people bring back from Florida clinics.
Users will pay dealers $60 to $80 for a single pill on the street, he said.
In April, the trip south turned deadly for one of the residents of Carter County.
Authorities say Terry E. Williams, 46, of Johnson City, Tenn., drove to Florida with his ex-wife and another man to obtain prescription drugs. Williams’ traveling companions said he often gave them orders and wouldn’t let them do what they wanted to while in south Florida, prompting them to beat and strangle him, according to investigators.
They returned to Tennessee in his truck, taking off with $1,600 of his money and a large amount of oxycodone pills, before getting caught.
Williams’ body was found in a room of a Red Roof Inn in Broward County, Fla., an area that has been described as the nation’s pill mill capital.
Here’s how quickly things went sour in Broward: In 2007, the county had just four pain clinics. By the end of 2009, there were 115.
Officials say the proliferation of Florida pill mills was due in large part to the fact that other states created monitoring programs that curtailed doctor shopping. As of June, 33 states had operational drug-tracking databases that allow physicians, pharmacists and law enforcement officers to track the flow of controlled substances and spot the people who collect narcotics from multiple clinics.
When residents of those states could no longer obtain large quantities of prescription drugs with ease, they went someplace where they still could.
“It’s amazing how much word of mouth has fueled this epidemic,” said Sgt. Richard Pisanti,, who leads a Broward County Sheriff’s unit that fights prescription drug diversion. “People knew to stop in Broward County because they thought it was a gateway.”
Crime spiked around the pain clinics. Users passed out in the parking lots patrolled by armed guards. Though the clinics quickly drew scrutiny from law enforcement, building cases against them proved difficult.
Unscrupulous doctors and their so-called patients claimed the prescriptions were legitimate. Going after the street-level dealers and their buyers had its own set of problems, namely that the pills could be sold and consumed with virtually no evidence trail.
Raids and Moratoriums
But law enforcement officials say they are slowly gaining ground.
As local governments throughout Florida have passed moratoriums on pain clinics, the businesses already in operation have been the target of a number of recent raids.
At one clinic alone, five doctors ordered more than 2 million oxycodone pills in 2009, according to a forfeiture complaint filed in U.S. District Court. Their prescriptions ranked them each among the nation’s top 20 practitioner buyers of the medicine.
In October, Kentucky authorities obtained arrest warrants for more than 500 people involved in a drug trafficking organization that obtained painkillers in Florida and distributed them back home illegally. The roundup, dubbed “Operation Flamingo Road,” was the largest ever in Kentucky.
“It put a small dent into the problem,” said Lieutenant David Jude, spokesman for the Kentucky State Police.
The Florida Department of Health now has about a half dozen investigators working with law enforcement around the state, including one embedded in Broward County since the beginning of this year in an effort to improve communications between the agencies.
And, under a new law passed this spring, the department will conduct annual inspections of the previously unregulated pain clinics. Starting this fall, investigators will be allowed to review medical records and seek legal action against clinics that practice bad medicine.
The new law also bars people convicted of drug felonies from owning clinics, and limits doctors to dispensing no more than a 72-hour supply of painkillers to patients who pay by cash, check or credit card.
And in December, Florida is slated to finally join the ranks of states that have prescription drug monitoring programs in operation. Nationwide, 42 states have enacted legislation for drug-tracking databases. Arkansas, Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska and the District of Columbia have no such programs, while legislation is pending in Delaware and New Hampshire.
Grant, the director of the Florida’s drug control office, doesn’t expect the pill mill problem to vanish overnight. But he is optimistic that the tougher restrictions will deter some, shut down others and keep new clinics from opening.
“Hopefully,” he said, “they’ll scatter like roaches in the night when you shed a light on them.”
Colleen Jenkins covers criminal justice issues for the St. Petersburg Times.
Photo by quimby via Flickr.
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The problems of mentally ill offenders really start once they leave prison
Five years after Victor left New York’s Downstate Correctional Facility, he tried to kill himself by drinking a container of bleach.
It was July 2006, and the 43-year-old Bronx resident had just lost his third job. Believing that he would never be able to make a living, and feeling that his family had lost hope in him, he considered suicide the only option left to him.
“Some days I thought I was invincible, like I couldn’t be touched,” he recalls. “I couldn’t control my temper. One minute I’m all right, the next I’m real angry. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me or what I’m going to do day to day, second to second.”
Victor, who asked not to use his last name, has been diagnosed with depression and bi-polar disorder. But in three separate stints behind bars, all of them for drug-related offenses, his illness has never been treated.
If anything, the prisons dealt with the symptoms—rather than the man himself. At Downstate, where he spent seven years, Victor lived out much of his sentence in the special housing isolation unit, where he said he landed after repeated fights with other inmates and guards.
For such prisoners, release without the promise of any hope of medical attention amounts to a kind of sentence itself.
More than 16 percent of state prison inmates have a mental illness, according to the Department of Justice. Compared to the general population, four times as many men and eight times as many women in jail suffer from a mental illness.
‘The Next Criminal Justice Challenge’
Eugene O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer and prosecutor, calls the growing number of mentally ill inmates released into the community “potentially the next big criminal justice challenge.”
“We need a major strategy to deal with this, and I don’t see that happening,” says O’Donnell, who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Mentally ill inmates leaving prison face many of the same challenges reintegrating into society as other released prisoners, such as lack of housing and marketable job skills. But psychiatrists and other specialists say their problems are exacerbated by the stigma of their illness, their need for consistent medial treatment and their difficulty accessing community services.
“They are often triply stigmatized,” says Dr. Merrill Rotter, a forensic psychiatrist who has studied re-entry among mentally ill ex-offenders. “Because of their mental illness, they are seen as dangerous when they may or may not be; the vast majority of the mentally ill in the criminal justice system are substance abusers; then there’s the third stigma of having been in prison.”
Department of Justice surveys suggest that, once in prison, mentally ill offenders are more likely to be victims of physical and sexual abuse than other inmates—and misunderstanding or misdiagnosis of their problems often lands them longer prison sentences or turns them into repeat offenders.
The lack of treatment and attention paid to the special needs of mentally ill offenders has triggered a federal lawsuit in New York, which charges that prisoners with psychiatric disabilities are the victims of “revolving door” justice.
Without adequate support, medical treatment and accommodations once they get out, they are often re-arrested for the same acting-out behavior – or worse – that landed them in prison in the first place.
Activists in several other states, including Ohio, have filed similar lawsuits seeking to force the government to provide greater assistance to prisoners with mental illness as they leave prison. Although New York’s prisons have a pre-release planning program for mentally ill inmates, the lawsuit alleges that it is far too small. Talks have been underway on a settlement for the last two years. Spokespersons for the state division of parole and the New York Attorney General’s Office, which are defendants in the suit, declined to comment.
But the statistics are hard to argue with. The mentally ill are more than twice as likely to have their probation or parole revoked, according to a 2009 report from the Council of State Governments. A recent study in Utah found that ex-offenders with serious mental illnesses were re-incarcerated an average of a year earlier than other offenders.
A Life Sentence
“These guys are serving a life sentence, 90 days at a time,” said one parole officer who supervises a group of mentally ill parolees..
There is comparatively little research on what works to reduce recidivism for the mentally ill. But existing studies suggest that a holistic approach has benefits.
“Mental health treatment doesn’t stand out as main defense against recidivism,” says Dr. Frederick Osher, director of health systems and services policy at the Justice Center of the Council of State Governments. “The current thinking is that not all treatment is the same.”
Osher, who has written a guide to improving probation and parole for mentally ill offenders, adds: “Just sending someone to a community health center doesn’t mean that they’re getting the right treatment, in the right dose.”
The story of Debra Edwards, a New York mother of five with bipolar disorder, offers an instructive example.
Edwards, 52, says she had been arrested nine times, mostly for drug related crimes. Like many people with mental illnesses, she self-medicated: heroin when she was up; cocaine when she was down.
Some mornings, she said, she was so depressed she couldn’t get out of bed. Once, she disappeared for three days. She said she felt as if she were underwater, seeing and hearing what was going on around her, but unable to interact with her surroundings. She awoke three days later on a park bench in the Bronx.
During several short stints in jail, including a year in New York’s Rikers Island facility, Edwards said she did not receive any assistance in planning for her release and life outside of jail. She recalled that on the day she was released she felt both happy and depressed at being back outside.
”You know where you’re going – you’re just going back…to your regular life again,” says Edwards.
Within two months, Edwards was indeed back in the same situation. Her drug use increased, and her mental illness left her so feeling so paranoid that she spent most days in bed with her head under the covers. Her next arrest, however, turned out to be her last.
In 2006, a judge placed her in an alternative treatment program. But since the program focused on her addiction rather than her mental illness, it was of limited use—until she discovered a Harlem-based program called Howie the Harp which provides training in basic life and work skills for former offenders with mental illnesses and places them in internships. It turned her life around, she said.
John Williams, program spokesman, said more than 80 percent of Howie the Harp graduates keep a job for at least a year after leaving the program.
“If I had my bi-polar under control, I wouldn’t have been doing drugs,” Edwards says. “We need to find out why we feel the way we feel and not be ashamed of it.”
Meanwhile life on the outside continues to be a struggle for Victor. Although he has managed to avoid prison, he is still without a job. But he believes a little extra help for his illness would have gone a long way.
“For years I said I ain’t got no problems, that there’s nothing wrong with me,” he says. “But I needed a lot of help. If somebody had talked to me about my problems and how to control myself, I think things would have been different for me.”
Scott Michels is a freelance writer in New York City.
This piece is one of a series of original criminal justice journalism projects around the country produced by 2010 John Jay/H.F. Guggenheim Fellows. They were coordinated with editorial input by Joe Domanick, Associate Director of the John Jay College Center on Media, Crime and Justice. We thank the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for their generous support of this project.
Photo by Pacha Mama Photography via Flickr.
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Welcome to the Bay Area, where Grape Diesel is on sale and the police call pot shops “good neighbors.” Part Two of a Special Report.
The Harborside Health Center occupies one end of a low stucco building in a small office park overlooking Oakland’s Embarcadero Cove. Sailboats sway on slight waves on one side of the street, and on the other side, a steady stream of men and women (black, white, Hispanic; old and young; dapper and down-trodden) step up to the front entrance.
“Is this your first visit?” John, a burly twenty-something in shorts who checks ID at the front door, asks an African American woman in nursing scrubs. He’s wearing a baseball cap with the California bear and a pot leaf on it. The woman nods her head.
John hands her ID back with a smile. “Welcome back, ma’am.”
The woman climbs a short staircase and steps through a metal detector — where her ID is checked again, this time by a Filipino man in a Cheech & Chong T-shirt. Inside, Harborside feels like a yoga studio or new-age herbal medicine store. With big windows facing the harbor, the center is flooded with natural light; and the shop smells faintly of marijuana.
As it should. This is one of Oakland’s central dispensaries for medical marijuana, legal since 1996, in the state of California. Although Los Angeles has more dispensaries than the Bay Area, the city of Oakland last July became the first place in the U.S. to levy a tax on the drug: for every $1,000 of marijuana sold here and at the three other dispensaries in the city, $18 goes to the city. I visited what marijuana activists wryly call “Oaksterdam” as part of The Crime Report’s two-part investigation into the status of the nationwide movement for legalization of the drug.
Kronic Krispies
At Harborside, patients check in at the front counter, then step into a long, open room with five glass cases that display dozens of varieties of marijuana buds, as well as tinctures, pot-infused honey and oils, and other “edibles,” including “Kronic Krispies” and ginger snaps by a company called Butter Brothers. Across from the display cases is a corner with nearly a hundred small potted pot plants. A very pregnant woman works behind the counter, dispensing growing advice along with the clones.
My tour guide, a young woman named Dani Geen, tells me that all 80 employees are “patients.” That’s mainly defined by the fact that they have a physician’s recommendation for medical marijuana which in California you can obtain from a doctor for dozens of ailments from anxiety to migraines to sinusitis.
Many patients use that recommendation to get a medical marijuana ID card, which is issued by both the state and individual counties and looks a little like a drivers license: typically it displays the patient’s name, address and photograph, an expiration date and a seal to make it more difficult to counterfeit. According to Stephen DeAngelo, executive director of Harborside, some patients choose not to get the card because it can cost up to $150, which is why most dispensaries also accept a copy of a doctor’s recommendation (which they then verify with the prescribing physician).
Dani tells me she got her medical marijuana card four years ago to obtain relief from fibromyalgia. She rarely uses the word marijuana; instead, it’s “medicine.” And patients don’t smoke or get high, they “medicate.”
Harborside sees 600 to 800 patients a day, of whom as many as 80 are new ones. According to DeAngelo, the dispensary last year grossed $20 million, $2 million of which went back to the government in sales taxes. The clinic is open seven days a week, between 11am and 8pm. A sister store recently opened 40 miles south in San Jose.
I remark on how airy and inviting the place feels, and Dani smiles, flashing a silver tongue stud: “We’re definitely out of the shadows.”
In addition to pot, Harborside offers Reiki, massage, substance abuse counseling and acupuncture. But politics is not forgotten: there’s a computer terminal in the waiting area which patients are encouraged to use to write letters to their political representatives supporting medical marijuana, as well as correspond with the movement’s “prisoners of war” – those behind bars for marijuana offenses. One hour of such volunteer time earns a free gram of medicine.
DeAngelo says the employees, most of whom are full-time, start at $14 an hour; they also receive health insurance, a 401K plan, and a free gram of medicine for each shift they work. To work at Harborside, you have to be a patient.
After showing me the small library, where books about how to roll a joint, the history of the marijuana movement, and cannabis horticulture can be checked out by patients, Dani takes me to a counter manned by Seth Rogers, a young man with shaggy brown hair, who sports a hemp necklace and tortoise shell eyeglasses.
Seth walks me though the wares in the display case, where each “strain,” which is how the dispensary refers to the different varieties, is carefully marked with prices, item numbers and bar codes. Harborside sells marijuana by the gram and the ounce. Prices vary, but typically an eighth of an ounce costs between $45 and $55, with some as low as $20. On the day I visited, there was a sale on Grape Diesel.
Patients are limited to buying two ounces per week. According to DeAngelo, Harborside sells about eight pounds of medical marijuana each day, and keeps about a week’s worth in storage. Security is tight: to get to the back room, you need to pass through a fingerprint identification system.
Oakland’s dispensaries consider themselves upstanding members of their city’s business community. The pathbreaking municipal decision to levy taxes on medical marijuana sales was the result of lobbying by DeAngelo and other dispensary directors. “We saw that the city was struggling, and looking at closing institutions we care about, like the Children’s Hospital,” says DeAngelo. “We thought we could assist.”
Checking for Quality
According to DeAngelo, Harborside gets its marijuana from between 300 and 400 “vendors,” all of whom are patients, which allows them to grow a certain amount of the weed legally. Typically, these vendors bring about one pound per month each to Harborside.
In Oakland, according to the non-profit marijuana advocacy group NORML, the law permits patients to grow 20 plants outdoors and 72 inside. But in late January the California Supreme Court affirmed a district court ruling that such limits were an unconstitutional amendment of the 1996 Compassionate Use Act, so private marijuana growing may soon expand.
DeAngelo concedes that the system is imperfect. Vendors with grow rooms have had house fires and been the victims of armed robbery. But he argues that it is necessary, because federal law levies stiff mandatory minimum sentences on people who are found growing more than 100 plants. Currently, DeAngelo is working with the city of Oakland to develop a larger scale grow operation which Harborside can run on its own.
After the marijuana is brought to Harborside, a sample of it is sent to the Steep Hill Medical Collective, a lab based in Oakland that tests for mold and other imperfections. DeAngelo tells me that the collective is currently trying to develop marijuana strains with more anti-cancer properties, in response to requests from many of their gravely ill patients.
I ask Dani what her parents think of her working with pot for a living. “My dad just left (the center),” she says, laughing. “He’s a patient, too. And my mom smoked while she was pregnant with me. So they’re cool with it.”
Smoking (excuse me, medicating) and cell phone use are not permitted inside Harborside, and Dani scolds me a bit when mine rings. DeAngelo tells me that, while they are not allowed to medicate in the clinic, employees can come to work medicated. If their state hinders their job performance—which DeAngelo says is rare—they’ll be pulled aside and asked to adjust their dose.
After the tour, I sit outside on one of the benches in the parking lot for a few minutes and watch the steady flow of patients exiting—each with their medicine inside a plain white paper bag. One man makes the mistake of placing a joint between his lips and flicking his lighter as he steps outside.
“I’m sorry, sir,” says John, the ID checker. ”There’s no smoking right here.”
He directs the patient across the parking lot to a wooded median where another patient is sitting on a bench, enjoying the sunny day with his skinny cigarette. There isn’t a uniformed cop in sight. But even if there were, it’s unlikely he or she would make much fuss. In theory at least, if a patient with pot can is also in possession of a valid medical marijuana ID or doctor’s recommendation, he or she shouldn't be subject to arrest.
I ask John about other medical marijuana dispensaries in the Bay Area. Are they all this…nice? He says that Harborside is high end, and tells me to check out a smaller place in San Francisco called HopeNet.
The 420 Room
HopeNet is a small dispensary located in a railroad-style floor-through on a low-rent block in the city’s SOMA district. Steel bars cover the display window and front door. A light-skinned man of indeterminate race greets patients and checks for medical marijuana ID.
I have no such ID, and unlike at Harborside, had no appointment. So the man (who I soon learn is called Silver) is skeptical when I say I’m a reporter and would like to look around. He pulls up a stool and tells me to wait a minute near the front desk in a small room that, like the rest of the place, is swirling with marijuana smoke.
After a few minutes, a middle-aged woman, followed by a German Shepherd, comes out to greet me. The woman is owner Cathy Smith, a former Bangor, Maine policewoman- turned-cannabis activist whom the patrons refer to as “mom.” The dog, Sugar, is part of the security team.
Like Dani and Seth, Cathy refers to pot as “medicine” and her clients as “patients.” But unlike the earnest young people at Harborside, Cathy has a healthy sense of humor about the new lingo.
“We’ve had to re-educate ourselves,” says Cathy. “We’re our own spin doctors.”
Cathy leads me into what she calls “the 420 Room,” where patients are encouraged to medicate. With a giant bud leaf tapestry on one wall and two low couches and a coffee table opposite, the room feels like the basement of that kid in high school whose parents didn’t have rules. Just off the 420 room is a tiny atrium with (non-medical) plants, a bench and an open sky light so patients can smoke “outside.”
On one of the couches, a man with deep brown circles beneath his eyes holds a two-foot glass bong on his lap. As Cathy tells me about the events they sponsor through HopeNet—Bingo, movie night, open mike, homeless outreach—the man listens, and chimes in.
“I want you to know,” he says slowly, “that this woman here is probably the kindest person to veterans in the whole city.” The man pulls a long suck of smoke from his bong. Next to him, a younger woman smokes a blunt and watches us silently.
Cathy smiles at the compliment. Others apparently agree. On the wall of the back room where the medication is sold is an award from the National Association of Professional Women, honoring Cathy for her work in the community. Among the civic contributions the association had in mind may be HopeNet’s policy of providing free marijuana to about 100 patients in hospice care nearby, including some veterans.
The plastic bins of buds in the back room are neatly marked. As Cathy shows me the microscope used to check for mold, an employee and patient light up. “Whoa, that’s some real Sour Diesel,” says the patient, sounding just like stoner-icon Jeff Spicoli, of the movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” “That’s better than the Sour Diesel at some other clubs.”
I ask Cathy if there are drawbacks to smoking on the job and she shrugs. “Most everyone here is stoned and everyone is working,” she says. And indeed, the employees, while somewhat glassy eyed, are alert, friendly, and seem to be engaged in their tasks. “I was high when I was working in Maine,” she continues, prompting one male employee to pipe up: “It’s better than being all pilled out.”
That was Cathy’s motivation as well. She obtained her medical marijuana card 11 years ago to relieve the chronic pain suffered as a result of a major car accident when she was a teenager (she’s now 54). “I used to be addicted to Percodan,” she says. “I tried everything, but finally found that marijuana worked best. I know it sounds hokey, but getting my medical prescription was life-changing.”
Though San Francisco technically allows some dispensaries to remain open 24 hours a day, Cathy closes up shop at 7 pm. “I don’t want my clients wandering the street here at night,” she says, adding with no apparent irony, “In this neighborhood, there’s a lot of drug use.”
Policing Pot
After visiting both dispensaries, I call the San Francisco Police Department and speak with Public Information Officer Boaz Mariles.
“The police culture has changed in terms of understanding that [for some people] it’s not just weed, it’s medicine,” explains Mariles. “The public has spoken and it’s our job to work with the marijuana dispensary clubs to keep them and the community safe.”
Mariles says there has been no spike in thefts or violent crime—or even in DUI arrests—in the areas surrounding the city’s 26 dispensaries: “It’s just the opposite,” he says. “People are taking ownership. Now they’re stakeholders in the community. If we do our job right and they do theirs, crime should go down.”
He adds that dispensary owners and employees have “done their part” by keeping the sidewalks outside their businesses clean, discouraging loitering, and generally acting as friendly neighbors.
That sounds familiar. Rick Holman, Chief of Police in the ski resort of Breckenridge, Colorado, where locals passed a bill last year legalizing pot for adults, told me during a telephone interview that he had seen “very little negative impact” from the law.
“We haven’t seen an increase in criminal activity around dispensaries and haven’t seen a real impact from decriminalization.” Holman went on: “We don’t see people walking around in a stupor.”
But Holman is still a cop. During our conversation, he admitted that he was having a hard time accepting the notion of legalized marijuana. “(But) whether I agree or not, the will of the people of Breckenridge is that private possession is not a municipal crime,” he said.
Still, having been in law enforcement for more than 30 years, he says he “doesn’t associate” with people who smoke pot—as far as he knows.
Back in California, voters are now being asked to take an even more dramatic step than tiny Breckenridge by approving The Regulate Control and Tax Cannabis Act, an upcoming referendum that would legalize and tax the drug. Even if it wins passage, Holman’s unease illustrates how difficult it may be to duplicate California’s laissez-faire attitude about marijuana in the rest of the country.
HopeNet’s Cathy Smith says she thinks the movement will have a tough slog nationally. Indeed, in Washington State, a man was killed last week when he tried to protect his pot plants from theft, and a marijuana activist who grows pot at home is under arrest for shooting intruders. And in Canada, often considered more socially progressive than the U.S., the prime minister recently shot down hopes of legalizing the drug.
“I see this as a civil rights fight,” Smith says, comparing the marijuana movement to the gay marriage movement. “But just like Proposition 8, I worry that at the last minute the conservative forces will come out and crush [the cannabis act].”
Harborside’s DeAngelo believes that the key to keeping the movement growing is to make sure that regulation, including “reasonable” caps on the number of dispensaries and a rigorous screening process for owners, is built into new laws. He observes there is a vast difference between Oakland’s four tightly regulated dispensaries, and the sea of cannabis outlets on “virtually every corner” in Los Angeles.
“There are all sorts of nefarious characters running those places,” says DeAngelo. “Hopefully, the rest of the country can learn from Oakland’s example.”
Both Smith and DeAngelo think that, eventually, medical marijuana will be legal and accessible nationwide. Smith estimates that within ten years, two-thirds of the states will have passed laws allowing medical marijuana, which she hopes will spur the federal government to action.
“Sometimes the government lags behind what the people want,” she says. “But they’ll come around—it’s a domino effect.”
If she’s right, that will mean an historic transformation of the country’s attitude towards marijuana—and perhaps of some of the underlying concepts of the long (and ineffective) war on drugs.
Julia Dahl is contributing editor of The Crime Report
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Will Marijuana Ever Be Legal in the U.S.? Part One of a Two-Part Special Report.
Last fall I interviewed George Washington University law professor and former federal prosecutor Paul Butler about his 2009 book, Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice. In the book, Butler muses on the unplanned consequences of the drug war, such as ensnaring large numbers of young men of color into the justice system following their arrest for marijuana possession.
I asked him whether he thought marijuana would be legal in his lifetime, and his response surprised me: “I think it’ll be legal in 10 years,” he said.
That got me thinking: what is the outlook for the marijuana movement? In the past 18 months, Colorado, New Jersey, Michigan and Massachusetts have all passed significant marijuana reforms, either decriminalizing small quantities of the drug for personal use, or expanding access to medical marijuana.
In January, I set two Google alerts: one for “medical marijuana” one for “marijuana decriminalization.” The stories rolled in—at least a dozen a day over the next two months—and they demonstrated how far the movement has already come. Some highlights: on February 23, the Washington D.C. city council met to discuss a decriminalization measure, and not a single person testified against the proposal; in late February, the Iowa Board of Pharmacy recommended that the state legalize medical marijuana, prompting the state’s legislature to set up a committee to study the issue; and in early March, in two suits filed against the state of California, two dispensary owners in Los Angeles claimed their constitutional rights had been violated when the city capped the number of medical marijuana dispensaries at 70.
But one story overshadowed everything else. In November, Californians will vote on a groundbreaking measure* which would establish a tax and regulatory system for the drug. Could this initiative pass? A Field poll last year showed that 56 percent of state voters supported legalization. That by no means makes it a sure bet, but the initiative's Facebook page currently has more than 36,000 online fans.
And if the measure does pass, it could galvanize the national movement for reform. Polls last year from Gallup and ABC News already indicate that nearly three-quarters of Americans think medical marijuana should be legal, and that the number of people who approve decriminalization of the drug is inching toward 50 percent.
But marijuana reformers are not ready to celebrate yet.
Trouble Ahead?
Indeed, there are signs that point to choppy waters ahead. In California, the attention to the regulation initiative coincides with growing concern about the boom in the cannabis dispensary business in Los Angeles. In a state where activists have paved the way in transforming marijuana from its association with a seedy subculture on the margins of society into a source of comfort for the desperately ill, opposition to strict regulation and control of dispensaries (as evidenced by the Los Angeles suits mentioned above) has pitted former allies against each other.
And continued hostility from law enforcement could sabotage even the most modest reform measures. Since 1977, possession of 25 grams or under of marijuana has been a violation, like a traffic infraction, in New York State, punishable with a $100 fine. But since at least 1996, New York City police may have been using even these liberalized statutes to harass young people. The charge comes in a 2008 Queens College (CUNY) study, which claims that police have been "tricking and intimidating" youths stopped in the street to inadvertently display their pot by asking them to empty their pockets—and then charging them with a misdemeanor under a part of the law that prohibits marijuana "burning or open to public view." Such tactics, which Queens College Professor Harry Levine, the study's author, wrote reflected a police "crusade" against young people of color in particular, contributed to the surprisingly high number of marijuana possession arrests recorded in the city—nearly 40,000 in 2007 alone, up from just 3,200 in 1987, according to the study. The Crime Report contacted the NYPD for comment, but the department did not respond to the query.
According to the most recent FBI's Uniform Crime Report, 44 percent of all 1.7 million drug arrests in 2007 were for marijuana possession.
Such cases demonstrate that translating liberal public opinion into more lenient marijuana policies won’t be easy. Decriminalization, says Ethan Nadelmann, Executive Director of the Drug Policy Alliance, and one of the country’s foremost advocates for an end to the drug war, is “not inevitable – it’s not going to happen on its own.”
Pro-marijuana activists aren’t likely to get much help from the White House, even though President Barack Obama is the first commander-in-chief to unambiguously admit to using marijuana for recreational purposes. The messages from Washington so far have been mixed.
Last October, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice would no longer raid or harass dispensaries, growers and users who are otherwise complying with state law. Many marijuana advocates interpreted Holder’s decision as a sign that the federal government was bending their way, and expected that the White House would follow up, for example, by asking the Food and Drug Administration to provide a definitive judgment on the health benefits of marijuana—a position supported by no less an establishment group than the American Medical Association.
Nevertheless, a few days after Holder’s announcement, Obama’s new drug policy czar, former Seattle police chief R. Gil Kerlikowske, undermined any hope of major federal marijuana reform when he issued a statement calling medical marijuana legalization a “non-starter” that “isn’t even on the agenda” for the Administration.
The statement extinguished any lingering doubts about what federal drug bureaucrats thought about the claims of medical benefits, by pointedly placing quotes around “medical” marijuana wherever it used the phrase. Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that in 2009, Obama’s first year in office, Drug Enforcement Administration agents seized nearly twice as much marijuana as they did in 2008.
From Reefer Madness to Referendums
And that shouldn’t really surprise anyone who has studied the history of the issue. Marijuana has been illegal in the United States since 1937. Attitudes to the drug were then largely framed by the 1936 film “Reefer Madness,” which depicted high school students driven to manslaughter, suicide and rape by their addiction to marijuana.
The counter-culture movement of the 1960s helped to dispel some of the most outlandish myths about cannabis, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that political momentum to decriminalize marijuana picked up traction. In 1973, Oregon made possession of one ounce or under punishable by a $500-$1,000 fine and effectively became the first state to decriminalize the drug.
By 1979, 11 states had passed similar laws. The issue briefly appeared in presidential politics when President Jimmy Carter endorsed decriminalization in 1977—only to do nothing about it while in office. Still, the late 1970s saw some strides in the movement to allow marijuana for medicinal use. In 1976, after a series of lawsuits, the federal government agreed to provide marijuana (which the government has been growing on a farm at the University of Mississippi since 1968) to a small group of patients suffering tumors, glaucoma and other painful ailments. But the movement went into deep freeze during the Reagan Era, and the so-called Compassionate User Program was officially closed to new patients in 1991.
A decade later, the AIDS epidemic created the opening for the next wave of marijuana activism. In 1996, efforts by AIDS activists in San Francisco to legalize medical marijuana gathered support from wealthy progressives like George Soros, Men’s Warehouse founder George Zimmer and University of Phoenix benefactor John Sperling. Following a campaign steered by Nadelmann’s Drug Policy Alliance, Proposition 215, otherwise known as the Compassionate Use Act of 1996, passed in California with 56 percent of the vote.
“That,” boasts Nadelmann, “was when we realized we could play ball in the big leagues of American politics.”
After the California victory, Washington, Nevada, Oregon and Maine passed bills legalizing medical marijuana. However, the bills, which had been prompted by the passage of statewide referendums or initiatives, left patients, doctors and dispensaries vulnerable to federal authorities—since marijuana continued to remain a Schedule I narcotic under the 1970 federal Controlled Substances Act.
Smoke Signals
Marijuana still makes politicians nervous. And especially at a time when the political scene is increasingly polarized, federal lawmakers seem loath to challenge prevailing popular opinions about its use and dangers—even though support for drug decriminalization in general (and for ending the so-called “war on drugs”) comes from both the left and right.
All the same, according to NORML, a non-profit group that advocates for marijuana legalization, more than a dozen states have bills on medical marijuana pending—and the odds are that at least some of them will join the roster of 14 states that have already legalized medical marijuana. Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a research group advocating reform of the criminal justice system, argues that increasing support from state legislators is a sign that the ground is shifting. For evidence, he points to the fact that, these days, pro-marijuana lawmakers are often the butt of “stoner” jokes. “Nobody jokes about abortion, or gun control,” says Sterling.
In New Jersey, Democratic State Assemblyman Reed Gusciora’s bill legalizing medical marijuana had been stalled for several years before finally passing in January. Gusciora says the bill, which allows use of the drug for only a small number of ailments and does not permit patients to grow their own pot, gained support from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle after dramatic testimony from patients, especially those suffering from cancer.
“There was an educational curve for some of my colleagues,” says Gusciora. “But as more and more learned about the benefits of the drug, they saw that it was the way to go.”
Though support for legalizing medical marijuana does not necessarily translate to support for decriminalizing the drug for adult recreational use, several advocates told The Crime Report that the conversation surrounding the weed’s medicinal uses has allowed legislators and the public at large to talk about marijuana in a serious way, which they see as having a positive effect on future efforts to loosen restrictions.
Marijuana reform advocates also point to a key demographic factor which they say could turn things around: the increasing political influence of baby boomers who grew up in an era when casual use of marijuana was part of the cultural climate. Nadelmann argues this has led to “increasing realism” on the subject of marijuana by baby boomer parents.
“My bottom line as your parent who loves you to death is not ‘did you or didn’t you [smoke pot at a party]?’ says Nadelmann, who has a 21-year-old daughter and admits to being an “occasional” marijuana smoker. “It’s ‘did you come home safely at the end of the night and are you going to grow up and make me healthy grandkids?’ ”
The change is evident in popular culture, particularly in TV and movies. Even though the use of a tobacco cigarette in a film can draw huge protests, there seems to be a bit more tolerance for cannabis. Mainstream sitcoms and dramas are increasingly addressing medical and recreational use of marijuana. HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “The Simpsons,” and “Family Guy” have all screened medical marijuana episodes. Meryl Streep and Steve Martin got high in last year’s romantic comedy, “It’s Complicated” (Tellingly, the movie reportedly received an R rating because their pot smoking did not have any negative consequences). And then, of course, there is Showtime’s Emmy-winning “Weeds,” an entire series devoted to the adventures of a pot-dealing suburban mom.
Ironically, as cultural forces seem to be moving toward a loosening of marijuana laws, advocates seem to be becoming more comfortable talking about the dangers of the drug. The movement, says Alison Holcomb, an attorney with Washington State’s ACLU, has historically avoided “open and honest discussion” about the health and dependency risks associated with recreational use of marijuana, especially for young people.
“We’ve responded to the fact that the opposition has inundated the public with misinformation” about the drug, she explains. “We’ve tried to hold down the pendulum by saying the risks are overstated, but we need to help parents navigate the real risks of drug abuse. If we continue to ignore those risks, we’re not being any more honest than the opposition.”
Another factor, oddly enough, touches directly on the fears of violence associated with the drug trade. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Mexican drug gangs received nearly 60 percent of their profits from marijuana sales in the U.S. Even in conservative regions of the country, decriminalization is perceived as a means of combating organized crime. Last month, El Paso, Texas City Council Member Beto O’Rourke received support for his legalization views from over half the participants in an online chat with voters.
And finally, there’s the issue of money. At a time when even “tough-on-crime” lawmakers in many states are contemplating measures like releasing inmates in order to fix gaping budgets, questions about the value of spending millions of dollars to enforce marijuana prohibitions have come to the fore.
On the federal level, however, it remains a tough slog. In an e-mailed statement to The Crime Report, the House Judiciary Committee’s ranking Republican, Lamar Smith (R-Texas), made that crystal clear. “Federal drug laws clearly prohibit the distribution of marijuana for any purpose, including state approved medical use,” Smith said. “By directing law enforcement officers to ignore federal drug laws, which were enacted by Congress to protect the American people, the Administration is promoting the use of marijuana.”
Smith concluded with this blunt message: “Federal law enforcement officials have a responsibility to enforce the laws passed by Congress, including those that prohibit the distribution of marijuana.”
Many law enforcement authorities are, not surprisingly, uncomfortable at being caught between federal and state priorities in the drug war. I asked Steven Demofonte of New Jersey’s Fraternal Order of Police what his members thought of his state’s new medical marijuana law, which legalizes the drug for certain patients, such as those suffering from cancer and multiple sclerosis. His emailed response was that the measure was “disappointing” to FOP members.
“When problems related to the law arise — and they will — we in law enforcement will be the ones to shoulder the burden,” he added. “Any state considering legalizing marijuana should look very closely at what has happened in California.”
But what has happened in California? Last month, I made a trip to San Francisco to see for myself.
THURSDAY: Oaksterdam: California’s Experiment with Legal Marijuana.
Julia Dahl is a contributing editor at The Crime Report.
Photo by Fulvio Minichini via Flickr.
* The first version of this story incorrectly referred to the upcoming California initiative as AB 390. AB 390 was an earlier version of AB 2254, a legislative bill that would legalize cannabis sponsored by Assembly Member Tom Ammiano. The initiative that will be voted on in November has yet to be given a number. The Crime Report thanks reader Doug McVay for spotting our error.
Read full entry »Mississippi narcotics officials say they look forward to July 1, when a law restricting the purchase of medications with pseudoephedrine to prescription only takes effect, reports the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. Ephedrine, an essential ingredient in meth, is found in cold-symptom remedies like Sudafed. For the past few years, the so-called precursor law has put limitations on the sale of those products. Officials say meth is the fastest-growing drug threat in Mississippi. Last year, at least 620 seizures of meth laboratories were made, more than double the number in 2008.
"Meth overtakes people," said Judge William Skinner. "Parents who have been on marijuana or cocaine will try to do all the things they must do to get their children back from state custody. I haven't had one crystal-meth parent even try."
Read full entry »Senior Vice President
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Deaths due to accidental drug overdose New York City in 2008 were at their lowest since 1999, according to a new report from the city's health department. In 2006, 874 city deaths were attributed to overdose, and in 2008 that number fell 27 percent to 666. Still, drug overdose is the third leading cause of death for New Yorkers aged 25-34, and was a factor in 55,000 hospital emergency admissions in 2007.
Click here to read the entire report.
Photo by arbyreed via Flickr.
Read full entry »Read more of Mark's work at his blog D.A. Confidential.
There has been much talk of closing prisons here in Texas. The Crime Report covered that issue a week or so ago, and the local paper has also written about it. From what I've read, the move seems budgetary rather than a result of some philosophical shift, and as I sit down to contemplate the subject a case that came up in court this week seems like a good representation of how I feel.
Several years ago, a couple of guys arrived at a business here in Austin and robbed it at gunpoint, tying up the proprietor, who was terrified beyond belief. A woman drove the getaway car, but did not go in. They were caught and the gunmen got prison, she got probation. This week, she was before the court because, not for the first time, she’d violated the terms of her probation by using an illegal substance. Each time, she’d been continued on probation rather than having it revoked and being sent to prison. Mostly because the violations weren’t that bad, the minimum prison term for her is five years, she has several children, and is pregnant with another. Today, she wept and told the court that she’d smoked weed, yes, but done it because when she smoked the beatings she got from the man she lived with hurt less. A made-up story for sympathy? Sounds like it, except she went to SafePlace (a shelter for abused women) and told them the same thing before being picked up for the probation violation. As frustrated as we might have been with the violation, she bought some sympathy and credibility by her admission, and by her admission that she wanted treatment for her drug use
So it became a stark choice: either she gets prison for a bad act followed by repeated failures to abide by probation conditions, or she is left on probation in the hope that the reasons (or excuses, depending on your perspective) stop. I think it’s fair to say that most of us (except the defense lawyer, I guess) were tired of excuses, aware of the serious underlying offense, and starting to wonder if it was impossible to make someone take hold of their life and turn it around. But we all agreed, ultimately, that this time prison wasn’t the answer so she was sent to in-patient treatment for her repeated drug use, somewhere she’d be safe from abuse, where she could work on the many issues she obviously has. Make no mistake, she’s on thin ice and knows it, I’m guessing she won’t get any more breaks if she doesn’t get her act together. After all, there’s only so much the state can do when it comes to offering a helping hand. But I think it was the right thing to do, for her, for her children, and also when you look at the cost of imprisoning someone like her. Would prison make her a better member of society when she gets out? Unlikely. Is she a danger to those around her? Certainly not, if she takes to the treatment.
I also think that her case is emblematic of how the criminal justice system has been going lately, certainly in my county. Just the other day I ran into a reporter who was gathering information for a story about all the programs running in the county that work to “fix” people, rather than imprison them. Drug courts, DWI courts, all those.
Make no mistake, there are times when people have been offered help, assistance, support, and treatment. Times when we offer mercy and what we see as justice, but they see as weakness. Some people won’t help themselves, they just don’t want to put in the time and the effort.
They don’t seem to realize that life is hard for all of us, we all have to work and make sacrifices. They have, and I’ve seen it, a sense of entitlement and for them leniency is just a way of amassing convictions without prison time. I have no problem with the criminal justice system keeping a hammer in its back pocket for those cases. But in general, as happened this week, I am inclined to think that a few helping hands will fix more problems than prison, and cost us less to boot. A long- and short-term savings, coupled with the salvation, if you will, of individuals has got to be a good thing, right? With prisons closing, perhaps we can make the rehab thing work. One just hopes that those in charge of the purse-strings don’t look for a cut in those other programs, too, because I’m certainly not in favor of opening up the prison doors just to save money, with nothing else to keep our streets safe. But here’s a quote from the Austin American Statesman’s story:
“Closing prisons? It's absolutely on the table,” said House Corrections Committee Chairman Jim McReynolds, D-Lufkin, whose panel oversees the state-run system of lockups. “As tight as our budget situation looks, we cannot unravel the fledgling system of diversion and treatment programs that are paying big dividends now for the states. And there’s only one other place to look — prison operations.”
So maybe a budget crunch is just what we needed. I know at 160-odd cases that I’m handling, a wee drop in customers would be more than welcome.
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Drug courts and similar alternatives to traditional courtrooms are skyrocketing around the US. But some argue they are “wrong-headed” policy.
One Friday in 2002, I spent several days in a drug court in San Jose, California. It was not a typical drug court. All 50 defendants had been diagnosed as mentally ill and seriously addicted. The grinding poverty and degradation of their lives was on searing display that day: etched in crumbled, pain-filled, black faces; in the slumped shoulders of battered, middle-aged Mexican-American men with blank eyes who knew they were already dead; and in the rotting teeth and thigh-wide arms of pasty, bloated white women woefully old before their time.
But sprinkled among them were others who had completed court-mandated rehab programs and had come to their graduation ceremony to receive an official hug from the judge and freedom from his judicial oversight, instead of being sent off to yet another stint in prison.
The experience was a revelation. I was completing a book about California’s three- strikes law, and was reeling under the weight of writing about people receiving 25-years-to-life sentences for possessing amounts of cocaine measured in milligrams, or three dollars’ worth of a controlled substance while in jail. And here was a court whose operating philosophy was that drug addicts were not criminals to be punished, but people with a disease that needed treatment; and that it was the job of a judge—working with a team of criminal justice and drug treatment professionals—to fully engage in helping desperate people kick their habits and reclaim their lives.
Given the mandatory-minimum drug sentences then in vogue, the drug court seemed a remarkably innovative and humane step forward, and one I never questioned until I attended a panel discussion entitled “Re-Thinking Courts: Problem-Solving Justice” at the 5th annual Harry Frank Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America at John Jay College this month.
While the panel didn’t shake my faith in the great work done in drug and other problem-solving courts, the discussion nevertheless raised some critical questions about the stunning growth and sweeping nature of drug courts and similar alternative forms of jurisprudence in America today.
Treatment or Jail: A Fair Choice?
They were raised by panelist Rick Jones, director of the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem (NY). He called the courts “exercises in wrong-headed policy” and questioned whether drug treatment should even “be housed in the criminal justice system.” He also asked whether people should “be forced to go into treatment or face jail or prison.”
These were provocative questions. After all, according to a 2004-2007 longitudinal study conducted by the National Drug Court Institute, an advocacy and research group which provides technical support to drug and other problem-solving courts, “drug courts significantly improve substance abuse treatment outcomes, substantially reduce crime, and produce greater cost benefits than any other justice strategy.”
Another panelist, Valerie Raine, underscored that study’s conclusions. A former public defender and now the Director of Drug Court Programs at the Center for Court Innovation in New York, Raine said that while voluntary “treatment retention rates are 10-30 percent, comparable [mandated] drug court rates are 60 percent nationally.”
“Drug courts also reduce recidivism rates of all drug court participants – success and failures –by between 10 to 13 percent nationally,” she continued, adding that for “graduates of adult drug courts, the number shoots up to 66 percent.”
Since the inception of drug courts in Miami-Dade County, Florida in 1989, drug courts have grown exponentially. In 1995 there were just 75 in the U.S. By the beginning of 2008, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the number had skyrocketed to 2,140, with an additional 280 in the pipeline.
There are also Community Justice Courts, such as the one run in Red Hook, Brooklyn, by another panelist, Judge Alex Calabrese. They try to solve community problems by providing treatment, job training and a wide range of social services in lieu of incarceration. When combined with drug and other “problem-solving courts” such as DWI, family treatment, juvenile treatment, domestic violence, mental health and reentry courts, there are now well over 3,200 such courts in the U.S.
Another of the panelists, Chandlee Johnson-Kuhn, Chief Judge of Delaware Family Court, is even pioneering a gun court that she says will allow her “to keep more kids in juvenile court” if the shooting did not result in an injury—thus insuring that the juvenile won’t have to simply sit in jail for six months awaiting trial, but instead, can immediately access a wide range of rehabilitative services.
But the arguments on the other side of the drug court debate make compelling reading.
NACDL Study
Jones’ critique was based on a groundbreaking study on drug courts, mental health courts and other forms of problem-solving courts, which scholars group under the category of “therapeutic jurisprudence,” commissioned by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL). As co-chair of the study, he spent nearly a year holding hearings in seven major cities and taking testimony from over 130 witness. The report, America’s Problem Solving Courts: The Criminal Cost of Treatment and the Case for Reform,” was published in August 2009. “As much as I respect Valerie Raine,” said Jones, “I hope she’s wrong when she says that the ‘verdict is in,’ and that the discussion is closed on whether or not drug courts work. [Because] drug courts are wrong-headed social policy for the country. Addiction is an illness [that shouldn’t] be dropped at the door of the criminal justice system.”
Instead, argued Jones, people should be receiving non-mandated, readily-available treatment in widespread community-based treatment centers.
Jones used the example of a fourth member of the panel, Tina M. Dixons, to illustrate his point. An ex-offender and recovering drug addict, Dixons, now the Regional Coordinator of Dental Services for Phoenix House of New York and Long Island, led a harrowing life of addiction, homelessness, prostitution and multiple arrests beginning at age 13, before finally turning around her life in Judge Calabrese’s court at age 33.
“The moral of Ms. Dixons’ story,” said Jones, “is that I’m glad she’s now [recovered], but that she lost 20 years of treatment opportunities she could have gotten if meaningful community treatment had been available when she was 13. We might have nipped her addiction in the bud, and she won’t have had [to endure] over 20 arrests and become a high-risk addict.”
Then he leveled another criticism: “Often, only first-time offenders or those with no history of violence are admitted into the courts.” Such barriers exist, Jones contended, so that prosecutors and judges can boast of success rates as high as 80 or 90 percent. However, “the vast majority of people who are first time offenders and are caught with small amounts of a controlled substance are never going to become addicts,” said Jones. “We are diverting people [into drug courts and drug treatment] who don’t need diversion, and who wouldn’t otherwise be in the criminal justice system.”
Judge Calabrese responded: “I think a lot of your criticisms are accurate, but the problems are real and they are dropped at the backdoor. [In my court] we’re looking at people who have been addicted for 10 or 20 years to heroin, and we’re demanding that they stop. Well I’ve tried different diets for 10 or 15 years, and I’m only trying to stay away from cheese burgers – not heroin. Sometimes the only way you’re going to [stop people with serve addictions from using drugs] is if the alternative is a jail sentence. I’m a big believer in mandated treatment.” (Which, as Dixons pointed out during her panel presentation, is exactly the threat that Calabrese used to keep her on the road to eventual recovery.)
The discussion concluded with Jones agreeing with Calabrese (sort of). “If a drug court has a 90 percent success rate,” said Jones, “then that court is skimming, and taking only the easy cases. Otherwise their success rates should only be about 30 percent, tops. We need to focus our drug courts on only high-risk people who need the thread of incarceration. That will give us the most bang for our buck.”
Joe Domanick is Associate Director of the Center for Media, Crime and Justice, and West Coast Bureau Chief of The Crime Report
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