You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (60 page)
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Authors: Robert Arthur
At a 1973 West Berlin Rolling Stones aftershow party, two strippers were simulating sex on a fur coat when a member of the entourage lit them on fire.
Mick Jagger
and
Keith Richards
sat watching high on heroin and exhibited no reaction whatsoever. “They just sat there, radiating this numb, burned-out cool.”
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While cocaine was “evil” enough to provide fodder for Reagan’s drug war, rich white celebrities getting silly did not scare most Americans. This changed in 1985. Just as criminalization led to a 190-proof synthesized hooch called white lightning that could blind or kill, criminalization led to an easily-smoked version of cocaine called crack. Not many blue-collar people could afford cocaine, but they could afford crack. Crack brought cocaine to the masses.
The inner cities were the natural location for this market to pop. White people, the primary crack users, had easy access to the inner cities, and since its inhabitants were poor they were more willing to take the risks involved in selling it. The booming crack market set off a firestorm of inner-city violence as gangs fought for their piece of the crack pie. Predictably, the violence was erroneously attributed to its pharmacology, not its prohibition.
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The big media companies centered in the cities only had to go down the street to get great coverage of the ferocious bloodletting. In 1986, more than a thousand
crack stories ran in the press, with
Time
and
Newsweek
having five crack covers apiece. NBC alone showed more than four hundred reports, while CBS ran a special “two hours of hands-on horror” in the crack “war zone.”
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Whereas wasted rockers and socialites were amusing, young black men running amok with guns was too much for mainstream America.
Like the Use of Alcohol
Harold Dow (Reporter): This is it. The drug so powerful it will empty the money from your pockets, make you sell the watch off your wrist, the clothes off your back . . .
Robert Stutman (DEA Agent): Or kill your mother.
—CBS News, May 27, 1986
The sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh closely observed life in the notorious Robert Taylor housing projects on Chicago’s South Side throughout the 1990s. Although few residents admitted to using crack because of its stigma, he wrote:
After a while it became clear to me that crack use in the projects was much like the use of alcohol in the suburbs where I grew up: there was a small group of hardcore addicts and a much larger group of functional users who smoked a little crack a few days a week. Many of the crack users in Robert Taylor took care of their families and went about their business, but when they saved up ten or twenty dollars, they’d go ahead and get high.
Dominic Streatfeild, an English journalist, spent a day in a South Bronx crack house in the 1990s. He noted that the only shocking thing about watching someone smoke crack was that it was not shocking at all, and compared it to watching someone smoke a joint. From reading he expected the effects of crack to be “pretty serious,” but they were not. Immediately after smoking most would become incoherent and rant a bit, but many were incoherent even before getting high. While high, users would yell out random opinions even though none of them bothered to listen to each other.
The tragic life stories of the crack house patrons depressed Streatfeild. Afterwards he went to an Upper East Side bar to have a beer and contemplate whether a middle-class white guy like himself could possibly understand the desperate conditions of crack den habitués in a lower-class black neighborhood. Behind him at the bar “two well-heeled yuppies in chinos and polo shirts whinged about their lives.” While the yuppies “droned on” about the “misery” of their respectable salaries and golf games, Streatfeild got thoroughly sotted (drunk) and stumbled home to puke.
—Jimmie Reeves & Richard Campbell,
Cracked Coverage
(1994), pp. 130–131; Dominic Streatfeild,
Cocaine
(2001), pp. 316–323; and Sudhir Venkatesh,
Gang Leader for a Day
(2008), p. 55.
This urban mayhem still did not sate the fervor for headlines. The fearmongers’ pantheon of mythic figures would receive its newest member in 1985—the crack baby. Images of shaking emaciated preemies supported by tubes and fancy machines filled the airwaves. Journalists wrote fearfully about a crack baby epidemic brought on by cruel crack moms who despised their offspring. The country would have to financially support this generation of mentally incapacitated children.
From the beginning, there were medical experts who questioned the crack baby phenomenon. An Atlanta specialist from Emory University Medical School,
Claire Coles, told reporters that jittery preemies born to abused women who smoke and drink could not be blamed on cocaine. When she placed the blame on poverty and took away the sensational crack baby icon, reporters stopped interviewing her.
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The crack baby epidemic was traced back to a misquoted doctor and ensuing exaggeration. It was later found that infants born exposed to cocaine fit the normal intelligence curve.
First Lady Nancy Reagan’s famous solution to the drug woes was “Just say no.” According to Nancy Reagan those who said yes were accomplices to murder.
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With that rhetoric from the middle and images of inner-city blacks going gangbusters and birthing crack babies, it is not surprising that drugs took center stage. In 1980 fifty-three percent of the population had supported the legalization of small amounts of drugs. By 1986 this number had dropped to twenty-seven percent.
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In 1985 under one percent of Americans identified drugs as the “number one problem facing the nation today.” By 1989 that number had rocketed to fifty-four percent.
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R
EAGAN AND
B
USH
G
ET
T
HEIR
W
AR
O
N AND
L
OSE
A. Declaring a War on the Coca Plant
In the mid-1980s Reagan decided to cut off the supply of cocaine at its source. DEA agents were first sent into Peru to lead teams armed with weed-whackers. This proved moronic, as the rugged coca plant grows naturally in the Andes and just one valley in Peru covers an area three times the size of Massachusetts. It also became dangerous when rebel guerrillas started attacking them. The Reagan administration hoped to do aerial spraying; however, dumping dangerous chemicals over the vast Andes’ countryside was understandably rejected by Peru. The United States also tried destroying the labs that processed the coca. This too became a hopeless chase as labs were simply rebuilt or moved deeper into the jungles.
After the Reagan fiasco in Peru, America focused on Bolivia. Bolivia was a poorer country and more willing to dance for foreign aid. The United States convinced Bolivian peasants to pull up their coca fields for $800 an acre and plant alternative crops that American experts showed them how to grow. This cut cocaine production in Bolivia temporarily, however, this project failed as well. For example, one group of farmers was persuaded to plant ginger and soon “found themselves up to their asses in ginger.”
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No one knew what to do with forty tons of ginger. Other touted crops such as bananas, grapefruit, and pineapples failed to be profitable as well. Despite spending two billion dollars on the problem, total cocaine output in the Andes increased fifteen percent during President George H.W. Bush’s administration.
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Reagan and H.W. Bush would also try to take down the number one cocaine kingpin in the 1980s, the Colombian Pablo Escobar. Unlike the coca plant, Escobar fought back. Although the parallels between alcohol prohibition and cocaine prohibition were lost on the average American, they were not lost on Escobar.
Escobar idolized Al Capone, and like Capone, he became king by dealing with traitors and opponents ruthlessly. While Capone fought for millions in profit, Escobar fought for billions. Escobar fought harder.
The country of Colombia is strategically located in the geography of cocaine. At the northern end of South America, it sits at the top of the Andes’ cocaine country. With access to both the Caribbean and Pacific oceans it is well situated for smuggling. The Colombian drug traffic had been handled by individual operators and wealthy traffickers who already dealt with the criminal justice system by
plato o plomo
(silver or lead). This meant: if you do what I want I will pay you, if not, I will kill you. But in 1981 an event inspired Escobar to take this further.
A daughter of a major trafficker, Marta Nieves Ochoa, was kidnapped by Marxist revolutionaries. Kidnapping the rich is a common way for Latin American rebel groups to raise funds, but this time instead of paying, the Ochoas called a council of war. Over two hundred criminal organizations were present and they each agreed to donate ten men to a new organization, Death to Kidnappers. They publicly announced the new organization and then proceeded to kill anyone suspected of involvement with the kidnapping. This included “union organizers, old ladies, young children, horses, pigs, and chickens.” Marta Nieves Ochoa was released unharmed without the ransom being paid. This impressive and effective use of force inspired Escobar to form an organization, Medellín & Compañía, with two other powerful narco-traffickers who would consolidate Colombia’s drug trade.
Escobar became one of the planet’s wealthiest people. He became a Robin Hood character in his hometown of Medellín, spending more on public housing there than the government did and planting more than 50,000 trees in the city’s slums. He had sixteen homes in Medellín alone, and his 7,000-acre country manor contained the country’s finest zoo, with a kangaroo that could play soccer.
Escobar also became one of the planet’s most powerful people and that power would soon be felt. The United States leaned heavily on Colombia to extradite Escobar, as it knew that
plato o plamo
would get Escobar out of any fix in Colombia. The decision to extradite Escobar would be handled by Colombia’s supreme court. In November of 1985 the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, Colombia, was occupied by heavily armed guerrillas. In the chaos, eleven of the twenty-two judges on the Supreme Court were killed. All eleven of the dead judges had voted for extradition of Escobar.
When the judges reconvened they found something amiss with one of the signatures on the extradition treaty and declared it unconstitutional.
The White House was enraged, but no one in the Colombian government was willing to die to have Escobar extradited. In Colombia’s presidential election of 1990 there was one extremely courageous candidate named Carlos Galán. He was the only candidate who openly supported extradition of drug lords to the United States and was far ahead in the polls. Galán was constantly under heavy protection and was wearing a bulletproof vest in August of 1989 when seven hit men drilled him.
This murder enraged the populace and emboldened the sitting president to establish extradition by decree. Although Escobar and his associates were abroad, the Colombian army impounded their mansions, ranches, and private islands and arrested 10,000 people suspected of working under the Medellín Cartel. The cartel issued a press release that read “Now the fight is with blood,” and was signed “The Extraditables.”
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The savagery that was about to befall Colombia has been compared to a World Trade Center bombing occurring every couple days for several weeks. In one day, nine banks were dynamited. In September, traffickers started picking off the wives of police and army officers when they were grocery shopping. The Bush administration sent down $65 million in military aid, including five hundred bulletproof vests. However, while they cheered from afar, they pulled all Americans out of the country except for in the heavily guarded American embassy. Bush addressed the United States on September 5, 1989. He promised to stand with the Colombian government and pledged $2 billion in aid to the Andean countries.
Of course, no anti-drug speech is complete without a little dishonesty so he proceeded to hold up a small plastic bag and said, “This is crack cocaine seized a few days ago by Drug Enforcement Agents in a park just across the street from the White House.”
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His point was to show that drugs were everywhere, however he did not reveal that DEA agents had actually lured a teenage dealer there and as the one special agent said, “it wasn’t easy.”
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In Colombia, bombs kept going off. In America the Secret Service extended protection to Bush’s five grown children. Mónica de Greiff, Colombia’s minister of justice, was in Washington at the time asking for aid. Her courage was inspiring considering her two predecessors had been murdered in daylight. She was a media
star but then she received a phone call in which a voice gave a minute-by-minute description of her son’s movements from the day before. She promptly resigned her post and requested asylum in the United States.
DeGreiff’s resignation was a signal of Colombia’s wilting resolve. A surviving presidential candidate who still had three bullets in his body from an earlier assassination attempt began openly calling for dialogue with the traffickers. The question hovered, “Why was Colombia paying such a horrible price because of America’s lust for cocaine?” On the morning of December 6, a truck filled with a half-ton of dynamite went off in Colombia’s capital, Bogotá. It blew the entire front wall from the secret police headquarters and destroyed two square miles of the city. Seven miles away the United States embassy’s windows were shattered. Sixty people were killed and almost a thousand wounded. Bombs were going off in supermarkets, hotels, movie theaters, and even schools.