Kick Ass (16 page)

The usual cynics have implied that the czar/task force idea is nothing but a naked grab for publicity, but I don’t buy it.

Ask any expert and he’ll tell you that Gov. Martinez is so right. Winning the war on drugs is easier than any of us dreamed. All we really need is more bureaucracy.

Mason jars won’t make roads safer

February 17, 1989

Great Moments in Urinalysis (continued):

Now Gov. Bob Martinez has proposed drug-testing for all first-time applicants for a Florida driver license. The screening would cost each driver an extra $30 and would be conducted one month before applying.

Again Bladder-Buster Bob has come up with an idea that commands headlines but defies logic and common sense. Our current driver system is hardly a triumph for public safety. Ask any state trooper about the thousands of licensed motorists who are hopelessly impaired without the influence of narcotics. They are simply inept.

Up at Emission Control, Martinez insists that urine tests for Florida drivers will deter drug use and weed out the serious abusers. Yet in its present form, his plan would do neither.

The flaws reflect either ignorance or naivete by two panels, one an “advisory council” and the other a “task force” assigned by the governor to tackle the drug problem. The gaps in the urine-testing program are bad enough, but the premise is based on a fantasy.

There’s not a shred of good evidencemedical, sociological, criminal or otherwise-that mandatory preannounced drug screening either discourages or prevents abuse. Only a half-wit or a hapless addict is going to get loaded on the day before his urine testand most users don’t fall into either category.

Martinez is correct when he says that driving is a privilege, not a right. But he’s daft if he thinks urinalysis of driver applicants is going to make for safer streetsnot unless they invent a car with a spectrom-* eter built into the dashboard; a car that won’t start until the driver fills a specimen jar.

By far the most lethal drug is alcohol, but I didn’t hear the governor explain how his new plan was going to keep drunks off the road. If Martinez is serious, why stop with a urine test? When a driver goes for his license, give him a Breathalyzer, too. It would make about as much as sense as what he’s suggesting now.

In fact, the governor’s urine screen for drivers is not a drug test so much as an intelligence test. Anybody who couldn’t beat it is certainly too stupid to get behind the wheel of a car.

It’s so simple. Lay off the coke for a couple days and your specimen will be as pure as a mountain stream. A month later, when you go for your driver license, your nostrils can sparkle like the valleys of Aspen but it won’t matter, as long as you can parallel park.

And consider the estimated $30 that each driver will pay to get his urine analyzed. Under the most rigid clinical conditions, urinalysis is never error-free. Imagine the quality of the lab work when the state starts handing out contracts to hacks and phonies looking to cash in on the new gold rush.

The governor’s plan to test new drivers means more than a million urine samples a year. At $30 a clip, that adds up to serious money. And in Florida, serious money attracts serious sleaze.

Don’t be surprised if the same guys who used to peddle time shares and oil leases suddenly turn up in Tallahassee with white coats and a van full of Mason jars. And don’t be surprised if they get a piece of the action.

A most mystifying aspect of Martinez’s urine manifesto is that it applies only to first-time applicants for a driver license.

Though the governor exhibits grave concern about our drug-riddled workplaces and neighborhoods, notice that he doesn’t suggest urine testing as a condition of license renewal for Florida’s current 10 million driverswhich would include, coincidentally, most legislators, Cabinet members and Supreme Court justices, not to mention major campaign contributors.

Rather, Martinez’s bold new attack on the drug plague focuses on two nefarious groups of would-be motoristsretirees moving to Florida and teenagers just turning 16.

For years lawmen have been scheming for a way to outwit these dope-crazed renegades, and now they’ve got the break they need.

So you wanna drive, huh? Then line up and tinkle, Gramps.

Cops making crack makes little sense

April 26, 1989

“It’s sort of like making fudge.”

Lab director of the Broward Sheriffs Office, explaining his recipe for crack cocaine.

So Broward County is manufacturing its own crack. Why not? Nothing better illustrates the misguided, haphazard state of the so-called war on drugs.

Talk about mixed-up priorities. Talk about headline-grabbing. Talk about a Keystone Kops mentality. Naturally you’re talking about Nick Navarro, Sheriff Willie Wonka himself.

Of all the goofball stunts he’s tried (including his comical TV partnership with Geraldo Rivera), a crack factory is the screwiest of all.

In a seventh-floor lab of the Broward Sheriffs Office, a county chemist cooks up a plate of fresh crack cocaine. The crack is cut into $20 rocks, packaged in tiny plastic baggies and sold on the streets. Sold by cops. When people come up to buy, they get busted.

You might wonder why no other law enforcement agency in the country has tried this clever scheme. There are plenty of reasons, starting with common sense.

The technique by which undercover cops “sell” drugs is known as a reverse sting, tricky enough under the best of circumstances. Typically, police officers posing as drug sellers must display or “flash” a package of real dope to the prospective buyers. Once the deal is made and money changes hands, the cops can make the arrests.

The danger is obvious: rip-offs. The bad guys arrive not with cash, but with guns. The plan is to steal the cocaine and take off. This is what happened when Miami Beach officer Scott Rakow was murdereda reverse sting gone bad. Years ago, DEA agents nearly lost a truckload of marijuana when a reverse sting turned into a bloody rip-off at a South Dade warehouse.

Suppose a Broward Sheriff’s Office deputy trying to sell dope gets robbed, and suddenly some dirtbag is loose on the street, peddling Navarro-brand crack to school kidscrack manufactured by the same people who are supposed to be taking it off the streets.

Why is Broward cooking its own? Officers say they aren’t confiscating enough crack to use in big drug stings. Not enough crack? Other urban police departments have no trouble seizing plenty. There’s not exactly a shortage of the stuff, especially in South Florida.

Another problem is honesty. The Broward crack lab relies on the assumption that every officer who comes in contact with the cocaine will be straight and pure. In a dream world this might be true, but virtually every local law enforcement agencyfrom the DEA to the Sweetwater policehas suffered the scandal of drug corruption.

All it takes is one crooked cop and you’ve got more dope on the streets. Grade-A government dope.

An experienced DEA agent voices a different concern about cops making their own crack: What will happen when these cases go to court? If a fed-up judge trashes the Navarro scheme, it could affect all reverse-sting operations. Such a court decisionover a lousy $20 rockcould cripple many multimillion dollar cocaine investigations.

A second-year law student could have a field day attacking the crack lab: “And where did these drugs come from, Deputy Smith?”

“Uh, we made it ourselves.”

“Really? So you manufactured the cocaine. You took it out on the street. You offered it to my client for sale. Yet my client is the one who gets arrested!”

The question that inevitably will be raised in court: By creating the drugs, are the cops creating the crime? Have they crossed the line between enforcement and entrapment? And for what15 seconds of glory on the local news.

Imagine, in the days of Prohibition, if the government decided to open its own distillery. Brewed up a batch of hooch, bottled it, parked a truck on the streets of Chicago and offered everybody a snoot. You don’t think the jails would have overflowed in two hours?

Blockbuster statistics, sure, and big headlinesbut absolutely no dent in the problem.

Everybody expects cops to seize dope. Nobody expects them to make the stuff. Just try to convince a South Florida jury that there isn’t enough crack out there already.

U.S. murder of drug lords invites chaos

June 12, 1989

Your Tax Dollars at Work (continued):

Last week, it was revealed that U.S. authorities are considering the launching of hit squads to assassinate drug kingpins in foreign countries.

A day later, the U.S. Customs Service announced that it had foiled an assassination attempt on the life of Colombian cocaine lord Pablo Escobar Gaviria.

I wish they’d make up their minds. Either it’s all right to murder these guys, or it isn’t.

In the first case, a couple of fine upstanding South Floridians were arrested on the turnpike with 23 MAC-11s, 18 AR-15 assault rifles, five machine guns and assorted other party favors, recently purchased from a Palm Beach County arms dealer.

The government says the weapons were on their way to Colombia to be used in an elaborate plot to snuff the elusive Mr. Escobar, a leader of the Medellin cocaine cartel. The killing was allegedly ordered by the rival Cali cartel, with whom Escobar has had long-running business disputes.

In announcing the weapons seizure, Customs officials conceded that a larger public service might have been achieved had the assassins been allowed to carry out their mission. However, there are still a few gun laws left in this country, and Customs felt morally compelled to enforce a couple.

In the meantime, U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen (who had called his own press conference to announce the capture of another alleged cocaine gangster) went out of his way to chastise Customs for “leaking” the details of the Escobar escapade. This snippy exchange typifies the sort of selfless commitment and close interagency cooperation that has helped make the drug war the raging success that it is.

The joke of the week, though, belongs to those geniuses at the National Security Council who are now mapping plans to sneak into South America and murder suspected drug leaders. This ought to be a riot.

The idea is that by knocking off a couple of Escobars and Ochoas, we throw the cartels into chaos and disrupt the flow of cocaine. Absolute nonsensebut exactly the sort of James Bond theatrics that would appeal to desperate bureaucrats who don’t know any better.

Certainly the cartels are led by evil, violent men, and certainly they have inflicted unfathomable misery on this country, as well as their own. But killing them will achieve nothing except to bring vicious retaliation against U.S. drug agents, diplomats and civilians in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia.

A man such as Escobar already lives in constant fear of being murdered by his own colleagues. He is protected by armed bodyguards, as well as by crooked cops and soldiers. Assuming a U.S.-backed hit squad could even get to him, it would almost inevitably cost American lives.

And for what? Within days of Escobar’s death, there would be a new face at the top of cocaine’s corporate ladder. The crops would still grow, the labs would still cook, the planes would still fly.

Look at the infamous Carlos Lender. He was captured, extradited to America, tried, convicted, locked up foreverall without causing even the slightest dip in the supply of cocaine. Shooting him wouldn’t have been any more effective. To the cartel, he was totally disposable.

Beyond the practical problems of a U.S. drug assassination are the diplomatic ones. In Bogota, sovereignty remains a passionate cause among lawmakersif the overnight extradition of Lender caused an uproar, imagine the reaction to the arrival of American killer commandos. Indeed, how would we react if the Colombian president sent undercover assassins to Florida?

William Bennett, the new drug czar, favors U.S. military strikes against foreign “narcoterrorists.” If he thinks a hit squad in Medellin is going to solve the crack problem in Washington, he is sadly, pathetically deluded.

To put it in perspective: If Lee Iacocca dropped dead tomorrow, the Chryslers would keep on rolling off the assembly lines. The same holds true for Pablo Escobar and the busy cocaine factories of South America.

Bush fails to pay price of drug war

September 5, 1989

The good news is, we’ve finally got a president who seems to comprehend that cocaine poses a greater threat to this country than communism ever will.

The bad news is, we still don’t have a president willing to pay for a real war on drugs.

Most of the $8 billion pledged by George Bush this week was already in the new budget. He asked for about $716 million in additional fundspeanuts, really, if you’re seriously talking war.

Amazingly, Bush’s budget director, Richard Barman, has suggested most of the new money should come out of social programs: aid to immigrants, grants for juvenile justice programs and subsidies for federal housing projects.

Brilliant thinking, Dick. Of all the places to scrounge for drug-fighting money, pilfer it from those most brutalized by crack: the young, the poor and minorities.

It’s not like we don’t have the funds for an all-out drug war; the money is there, and in sums greater than you can scarcely imagine. Billions and billions of dollars$290 billion, as a matter of fact. Easy to find, too, right across the Potomac from the Capitol. Huge building called the Pentagon.

They’ve got one little program over there called the Strategic Defense Initiative, otherwise known as Star Warsspace lasers that are supposed to shield us from a nuclear attack. Lots of top-notch scientists don’t think SDI can ever be made to work; others say it will be obsolete by the time it’s ready to be implemented, well into the next century.

President Bush wants to spend $4.6 billion on Star Wars in the coming year, an increase of $600 million over the 1988 budget. What would happen if we put this program on hold for 12 months and used that money for the drug war?

Any way you cut it, $4.6 billion represents a substantial commitment. Think of all the prosecutors you could hire, all the prison cells you could build, all the rehab counselors you could train, all the children you could reach through new educational programs.