Rise of the Warrior Cop (27 page)

Nixon had figured out that drugs were the common element among all of his culture war enemies. Reagan’s people took that idea and ran with it. Carlton Turner’s focus on pot was a way to rekindle the culture war. In a revealing early interview with
Government Executive
magazine, Turner lumped pot with rock music, open and abundant sex, and ripped jeans. Drug use, Turner warned, was “a behavioral pattern that has sort of tagged along during the present young-adult generation’s involvement in anti-military, anti–nuclear power, anti–big business, anti-authority demonstrations.” People engaged in this behavior, he explained, “form a myriad of different racial, religious or otherwise persuasions demanding ‘rights’ or ‘entitlements’ politically,” while scoffing at civil responsibility. At a 1981 meeting with his staff, Turner laid out his office’s mission: “We have to create a generation of drug-free Americans to purge society.”

There would be little tolerance for dissent. Turner was especially determined to purge psychiatrists from federal drug agencies. “They’re trained to treat,” he said, “and treatment isn’t what we do.” Methadone was out, so Turner blocked advocates of the treatment who were still in the federal government from speaking about it publicly. He took on the public health crowd at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), working to rid the agency of officials and researchers who advocated a treatment-oriented federal drug policy. In 1982 a Turner ally at the agency sent a letter to libraries across the country urging them to pull and destroy sixty-four prior NIDA publications he’d found that included information that was inconsistent with the new narrative about drugs. In one particularly brilliant piece of propaganda, drug warriors argued that one of the symptoms of marijuana addiction was “refusal to believe the hard medical evidence that marijuana is physically and psychologically harmful.” Questioning the drug war was
in and of itself
a sign of addiction.

Reagan himself delivered the stridently moral message better than anyone. In a 1982 speech to a convention of police chiefs in
New Orleans—his first major crime speech after inauguration—Reagan claimed that a recent study had found that just 250 criminals were responsible for half a million crimes over the course of eleven years. That boiled down to a crime every two days. That may have been possible if all the criminals in the study were drug users and the researchers counted drug use as a crime. But the statistic was given in the context of the harm that criminals do to society. It doesn’t appear that Reagan ever sourced the study, but the notion that a team of researchers just happened to find 250 criminals with that sort of dedication seems unlikely.

In the same speech, Reagan called for expanding the list of crimes for which judges could deny bail, revoking
Miranda
and the Exclusionary Rule, a major new role for the military in fighting the drug war, an overhaul of the federal criminal code to include dozens of new laws, and in general a massive expansion of the powers and authority afforded to police and prosecutors. Without missing a beat, he then explained that America’s crime problem was not only a moral problem, but a problem inextricably linked to . . . the expansion of government.

A tendency to downplay the permanent moral values has helped make crime the enormous problem that it is today, one that this administration has, as I’ve told you, made one of its top domestic priorities. But it has occurred to me that the root causes of our other major domestic problem, the growth of government and the decay of the economy, can be traced to many of the same sources of the crime problem. This is because the same utopian presumptions about human nature that hinder the swift administration of justice have also helped fuel the expansion of government.
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Conservatives had always held the somewhat contradictory position that government can’t be trusted in any area of society
except
when it comes to the power to arrest, detain, imprison, and execute people. But Reagan didn’t dance around the contradiction, he embraced it. He blamed crime on big government—and in the same
breath demanded that the government be given significantly more power to fight it. In words dripping with rectitude, he appealed to morality and defined the greatest challenge of the era as the struggle between good and evil. “For all our science and sophistication, for all of our justified pride in intellectual accomplishment, we must never forget the jungle is always there waiting to take us over,” Reagan said. “Only our deep moral values and our strong social institutions can hold back that jungle and restrain the darker impulses of human nature.”
⁴

T
HE VERY FIRST CHANGE IN PUBLIC POLICY THAT
R
EAGAN
pushed through the Congress was the 1981 Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, a proposed amendment to the Posse Comitatus Act that would carve out a much larger role for the military in the drug war. The White House was particularly eager to use military radar systems to actively search for drug smugglers. Since Nixon’s anticrime push in the early 1970s, the courts had interpreted the Posse Comitatus Act as to allow the military to provide “indirect” assistance to federal law enforcement. Generally, that meant allowing the Navy to tip off the Coast Guard when it spotted vessels that fit the profile of those used by drug smugglers. The amended law encouraged the Pentagon to go further and give local, state, and federal police access to military intelligence and research. It also encouraged the opening up of access to military bases and equipment, and explicitly authorized the military to train civilian police in the use of military equipment. The law essentially permitted the military to work with drug cops on all aspects of drug interdiction short of making arrests and conducting searches.

The next year Reagan pushed for more. He wanted the Posse Comitatus Act amended yet again, this time to allow soldiers to both arrest and conduct searches of US citizens. He also made official his desire to repeal the Exclusionary Rule, which would essentially free police to violate the Fourth Amendment at will. Republican senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina introduced
a bill to accomplish both of those goals, in addition to other items on the White House wish list, such as expanded wiretapping powers. Reagan also wanted to expand asset forfeiture power to make it even easier for the government to take property away from people who had never been charged with a crime. The 1978 law had exempted real estate from the types of property that could be seized. Reagan wanted that distinction removed. He also wanted the standard of proof for confiscation lowered to a mere “suspicion” that the property had been used in a drug crime, and to permit the government to take property before even issuing an indictment. The aggressive legal minds at DOJ also invented a new type of forfeiture called
substitute assets
. This would allow prosecutors to estimate the amount of money a suspect had made in the drug trade, then confiscate a portion of his property equal in value to their estimate, even if they couldn’t meet the already low standard for showing that the specific property they were eyeing was connected to any crime.

Unfortunately for the Americans who would later be victimized by these new crime-fighting techniques, there were no Sam Ervins left in Congress to protect them. The Democrats were eager to eliminate the perception that they were softer on crime than the Republicans. Senators Joe Biden and Hubert Humphrey preempted the White House–sponsored bill with a bill of their own. The Biden-Humphrey bill gave Reagan everything he wanted.
⁵

On September 30, 1982, the crime bill loaded up with most of the provisions Reagan wanted passed the Senate 95–1.

Two weeks later, Reagan gave another speech at the Department of Justice with new proposals—most of which he could enact without authorization from Congress. The speech began and ended with Reagan’s now-familiar invocations of good and evil, then made the connection between drug trafficking and the mob. He praised America’s great crime fighters, politicians, and journalists who’d had the courage to take on the mafia over the years—including, notably, Eliot Ness, the federal agent who enforced alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. He laid out an eight-point plan to fight drug trafficking and organized crime.

One of the proposals was to set up antidrug task forces all along the border. In fact, one of Reagan’s first initiatives was to establish an initial task force in southern Florida. He asked Vice President George Bush to oversee it. The concept was almost identical to Nixon’s ODALE strike forces. The mission was to put money, drugs, and guns on the table—to generate photo-op busts to show that the government was hard at work fighting drug dealers. The task force didn’t do much to stem the south Florida drug trade, but it was enormously successful at producing headlines. So Reagan created twelve new task forces just like it.

Like Nixon, Reagan planned to enlist governors and state legislatures to pass laws that mirrored the laws and policies of the federal government. So he promised to create new commissions, training programs, and intelligence-sharing infrastructure to merge federal, state, and local law enforcement into a single drug-fighting army. Finally, he explained that America’s jails and prisons would soon need “millions of dollars” to prepare for the inevitable surge of new inmates that would follow.
⁶

S
INCE THE RAID THAT ENDED THE LIFE OF
D
IRK
D
ICKENSON
, marijuana had become a lucrative cash crop in Humboldt County. It wasn’t just biker gangs and seasoned drug traffickers anymore. By the 1980s, some in the county’s green and granola community were also getting rich. That attracted the attention of the pot warriors and hippie haters in the Reagan administration. And so drug-fighting helicopters would again take flight in Humboldt County. But not just one. This time there would be dozens.

The project was called the Campaign Against Marijuana Production, or CAMP. It was a joint operation dreamed up by Carlton Turner and California attorney general John Van de Kamp. The plan: bring in the National Guard to search for, find, and eradicate the marijuana fields popping up all over northern California. The program began in the summer of 1983, when the federal government sent U-2 spy planes to glide over the area in search of pot.

That’s worth repeating. The government
sent U-2 spy planes
to the state of California to search for marijuana. Then they sent the helicopters. In all, thirteen California counties were invaded by choppers, some of them blaring Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” as they dropped Guardsmen and law enforcement officers armed with automatic weapons, sandviks, and machetes into the fields of California.

William Ruzzamenti, the DEA official in charge of the operation, explained to reporter and drug law reformer Arnold Trebach in 1984 why the helicopters were important. “The helicopters have provided us with a sense of superiority that has in fact established a paranoia in the growers’ minds. . . . When you come in with a helicopter there’s no way they’re going to stop and fight; by and large they head for the hills.”
⁷
It’s probably worth emphasizing again that Ruzzamenti wasn’t talking here about the Viet Cong or the Sandinistas. He was talking about American citizens.

In CAMP’s first year, the program conducted 524 raids, arrested 128 people, and seized about 65,000 marijuana plants. Operating costs ran at a little over $1.5 million. The next year, 24 more sheriffs signed up for the program, for a total of 37. CAMP conducted 398 raids, seized nearly 160,000 plants, and made 218 arrests at a cost to taxpayers of $2.3 million. The area’s larger growers had been put out of business (or, probably more accurately, had set up shop somewhere else), so by the start of the second campaign in 1984, CAMP officials were already targeting increasingly smaller growers. By the end of that 1984 campaign, the helicopters had to fly at lower and lower altitudes to spot smaller batches of plants. The noise, wind, and vibration from the choppers could knock out windows, kick up dust clouds, and scare livestock. The officials running the operation made no bones about the paramilitary tactics they were using. They considered the areas they were raiding to be war zones. In the interest of “officer safety,” they gave themselves permission to search any structures relatively close to a marijuana supply, without a warrant. Anyone coming anywhere near a raid operation was subject to detainment, usually at gunpoint.