The War on Drugs: A Special Report

One Wall of Judge Fred Biery's courtroom was fitted with picture windows, and across the plaza I could see Alamo Bail Bonds and Ace Bail Bonds and the dark, sharp-featured Indians shuffling to and fro in a Texas heat that made the whole scene shimmer as if it were painted upon the surface of a pond. On another street, a tiny tailor's shop advertised by means of a hand-lettered sign in the window: We Reweave Bullet Holes. Slumped on the bench behind me was a heavy-set pachuco with his thick brown arms crossed on his massive chest. I sensed that he wasn't the sort of person you would want to stare at, so I allowed myself one quick backward glance. I had the same sensation I might have had looking suddenly over a precipice. A crude blue cross was tattooed squarely between his eyes.

But it was nothing unusual. This was, after all, San Antonio, where even the prosecutors wore cowboy boots into court, where defense attorney Gerald Goldstein carried a copy of Low Rider magazine in his briefcase and where his 18-year-old client faced a prison term for possession of two marijuana cigarettes. Up on the stand, a scientist was making a convincing argument that marijuana was misclassified as a mind-killing narcotic. The skinny, diminutive defendant, wearing a wrinkled blue T-shirt, sat in dazed incomprehension, apparently more than a little disappointed to learn that the cigarettes for which he might go to jail had not contained a mind-killing narcotic.

Still, there was something peculiar in that courtroom--something genuinely out of place--and it was not Judge Biery's yawning at the ceiling, nor the fidgeting defendant's attempts to hide his hands in his armpits. It was not even the gentleman with the cross hammered between his eyes. It was a small group of neatly sculpted Neiman-Marcus housewives--P. T. A. ladies with $120 hairdos and that misplaced, irritated air of Concorde passengers who have just been bumped from their flight. What were they doing in that dingy hole of justice when they could have been out examining marquetries at Sotheby Parke Bernet? Why would they come to sit in this airless room and watch the distasteful business of justice being meted out to the disaffected and disfigured?

"I worry about all those women wanting that kid to get nailed," Goldstein said. "They want to see blood."

Goldstein, who is one of the best criminal lawyers in Texas and a frequent defense counsel in major drug cases, had flown in the eminent scientist now seated on the witness stand to help demonstrate why the state's marijuana law should be overturned. In truth, however, Goldstein couldn't have chosen a worse time to test the law; that was made clear when he'd greeted the ladies in court and they'd recoiled in gaping horror, as if he'd had a sign around his neck that said, Herpes.

The women, you see, were from the Texans' War on Drugs Committee, founded in 1979 to organize antimarijuana parents' groups throughout the state. Rather quickly, the membership reached 1,000,000, which is about eight percent of the population of Texas. Convinced that their children were addicted to marijuana and that marijuana (in addition to being addictive) caused cancer, brain damage and birth defects, these shock-troop moms were highly motivated, heavily funded and carefully organized. In their zeal, they have done more to undermine basic civil liberties than any other movement since Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade.

Although Texas is an important battleground, the war on drugs is hardly a local phenomenon. The fight against marijuana is priority business in both the House and the Senate of the United States. It is the pet project of First Lady Nancy Reagan, as well as of the Attorney General, the Department of Health and Human Services (formerly HEW) and, lately, the FBI. It is also a very convenient political tool for President Reagan. With such conspicuous support, the national campaign has progressed with alarming speed: There are now more than 2000 active antimarijuana parents' groups, an average of 40 per state. (No one is even prepared to guess at the total number of members.) The target is "parents of children ages nine to 14," and the message is always the same: Your kids are on dope / Dope kills.

Prominent Austin attorney Randall Buck Wood has characterized the crusade in his state as a panic campaign. "They've taken Federal money funneled through the state and set up hearings to frighten the hell out of everybody with one horror story after another," Wood says. "They've just inflamed the community and convinced the parents that their kids were probably dopeheads."

The same can be said of the war on drugs as it is being waged at the national level. The strategy and tactics are identical. The money comes out of the same pocket--yours. And the result of creating all this panic is to erode or eliminate basic constitutional protections. Consider, for example, one law that was passed in Texas after the parents had been frightened enough to pressure the legislature into action: It makes it legal for police to break and enter in order to install wire-tapping and room-bugging devices. Due to the wording of the law, these activities can be conducted virtually without probable cause, which directly violates the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure.

Another bill passed about the same time in reaction to pressure from the parents makes oral confessions admissible as evidence in court--in spite of Fifth Amendment guarantees against self-incrimination. Richard "Racehorse" Haynes, the noted defense attorney of Blood and Money fame, offers a new version of the Miranda rights to be used by police in conjunction with this law: "You have the right to remain silent as (continued on page 158)War on Drugs (continued from page 137) long as you can stand the pain."

Yet another new Texas law forced through the legislature by the antimarijuana hysterics requires the creation of a computer system to keep track of certain prescriptions. If, for example, your dentist gave you Percodan or Demerol for pain, your name would go into the computer as that of a potential drug abuser. Under the new wire-tapping law, that could constitute probable cause for breaking into your house or office.

Sizing up the combined impact of the War on Drugs legislation, John Duncan, executive director of the Texas Civil Liberties Union (T.C.L.U.), says, "If we're going to create a police state, why do it piecemeal? Let's just tattoo a number on everybody's arm."

The most insidious effect of this nationwide crusade, however, has nothing to do with drugs. It is by focusing on the kids-on-dope theme that the otherwise rational person is lured into an argument about the merits of marijuana. No one in his right mind thinks children should smoke marijuana or take any other drugs. But drugs are not the point. The point is that it is cynical and destructive to frighten parents half to death, then turn them loose on elected officials. The point is that dismantling the Bill of Rights is not the solution to any real or imagined drug problem.

"They have some grandiose schemes," Buck Wood says, "so we can't roll over and play dead. We got over McCarthy, but there was a lot of damage done, a lot of people hurt. I think that could happen again. Whipping the American public into a frenzy, where they're willing to suspend civil liberties--we've got serious problems."

If you live in Texas, the police can now break into your home or tap your telephone virtually at will. The same parents' groups that achieved that are in Washington, D.C., pressuring the United States Congress for equally dangerous legislation. Some bills have already passed the House or the Senate. One would allow the military to begin enforcing drug laws. In other words, no matter where you live, you should be aware of the clear and present danger: Today Texas, tomorrow the world.

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The family ... was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

Some say Texas was a proving ground for the rest of the nation; others say it was simply a textbook example of how the war on drugs must be conducted nationwide. Either way, it is instructive and awe-inspiring to see how much was accomplished there in a very short time by turning the family against itself-- the same basic technique being employed on a national level.

Like many misguided social policies, the Texans' War on Drugs had its genesis in questionable political motives. When William Clements took office as governor in January of 1979, he sent a memo to all his employees. "As a matter of standard policy," it said, "we will be making a security check ... of all personnel who have not previously been cleared." The new governor was apparently unaware that there is no such thing as a state government security check in America and hadn't been in Texas, at least, since Reconstruction ended in 1874. Clements, the first Republican governor since that time, had been Deputy Secretary of Defense under Richard Nixon, however, and his experience in that post no doubt contributed to his confusing the concepts of state police and police state.

Shortly after having been sworn in as governor, Clements began making statements about "legalizing surveillance" and about what a vital law-enforcement tool it was. Observers of his administration say Clements was upset to learn that Texas had no state secrets; it was going to require some rather canny maneuvering to justify surveillance--or wire tapping, as most people call it.

"Wire tapping has never been popular in Texas," Buck Wood says. "But it was always presented as a general wire-tap bill, and you couldn't have gotten it passed if you'd put an atomic bomb under it." Clements, in 1979, was in search of something more powerful than the A-bomb to help him legalize surveillance. What he would ultimately find was that splitting the nuclear family produced more destructive power than splitting the atom. Precisely why wire tapping was so important to Clements remains unclear, though Racehorse Haynes has explained it as a product of the governor's "police state of mind."

The governor found a kindred spirit in the military-obsessed, right-wing radical billionaire Henry Ross Perot. Perot wears no jewelry except his naval academy ring. He owns the original of

The Spirit of '76, by Tompkins Matte-son. He has his offices in the headquarters of Electronic Data Systems (E.D.S.), his computer kingdom, an expensively landscaped patch of north Dallas that is decorated with a copy of the Iwo Jima statue and guarded by a private "security" army. Perot worries a lot about being assassinated.

One of Clements' first acts as governor in 1979--Executive Order number two, in fact--created the Texans' War on Drugs Committee, with Perot as chairman. To fund its activities, Clements gave the committee $584,000 in Federal money from the now-defunct Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. With missionary zeal, the committee set out to spread the word: Your kids are on dope / Dope kills.

The centerpiece of the War on Drugs campaign--not just in Texas but nationally--was a book published by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Now, NIDA is not some obscure fringe group; it is part of the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services. It used your tax dollars to commission Parents, Peers and Pot, whose pseudonymous author, Marsha Manatt, presents in her first chapter a fictionalized horror story about a neighborhood plagued by pot-smoking teenagers. ("Gradually an image of an alien world within their own community began to emerge, populated by their own children.") The book describes how parents took the problem in hand by creating a mini police state: every mom a cop.

The text goes on to present as scientific fact a number of frightening effects of marijuana. It threatens mothers, for example, with the possibility that their male children will grow breasts from smoking pot. It further warns that marijuana causes abnormalities in sperm cells, sexual dysfunction and a wide variety of other reproductive-system problems. Parents are told that marijuana interferes with the body's natural immune response, making smokers more vulnerable to disease. Moreover, "permanent changes in deep-brain areas that affect emotion and behavior" have been discovered in the laboratory. All of that is couched in careful language and attended by the appropriate caveats. But following hot on the heels of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers--style first chapter, only the loaded message came through: Pot will turn your beautiful boy into a mindless homo with breasts.

In 1979, while this book was being distributed all across the nation, the campaign in Texas was intensified by the political ambitions of Clements and the fervor of Perot. Perot took $16.000 of the Federal tax money and paid Baylor law school to draft a series of bills for (continued on page 200) the upcoming 67th legislative session. Not surprisingly, the flagship bill was Clements' own wire-tapping law.

Meanwhile, fear was a wedge being driven between parent and child. Literature from Texans' War on Drugs told them, "If your child denies using marijuana but your suspicions tell you otherwise, then you face the next very difficult step. You simply must invade his privacy and carry out a thorough search of his living space and other areas, and do it more than once." That particular bit of advice was endorsed by the governor himself, as if to encourage legalized surveillance at every level.

The power released by striking directly at the family bonds was indeed impressive; in a single day, Texans' War on Drugs acquired a legion of new recruits when Texas P. T. A. president Connie Miller turned over her 700,000 troops to Perot.

Perot's committee engineered a 12-page tabloid supplement that appeared one October Sunday in 1980 in newspapers all across Texas. Stamped with the state seal and endorsed by a letter from Clements, it was an expensive and professionally produced piece of work entitled "How to Get Your Child off Marijuana." Aimed at mothers who were both afraid for their children and innocent of any scientific knowledge about drugs, the tabloid would have been funny had it not been so cruel in effect and cynical in conception.

"It was a joke in the legislature," Buck Wood recalls. "People carried copies of it around to show one another for a big laugh."

But while lawmakers were snickering behind their hands, Perot invited their wives to Austin's most fashionable hotel, the Driskill, where he wined and dined them and captured their imagination with titillating stories. This time, Perot himself was picking up the tab for the lobbying effort, supplying their favorite drug of abuse, alcohol.

When the package of proposed laws Perot had paid Baylor to write finally landed before the lawmakers in early 1981, shock ran through the capitol. The laws were blatantly unconstitutional, and a number of legislators said so; they soon found themselves deluged with mail from parents who'd been told that they were in cahoots with dope pushers. The message was clear: To oppose the Texans' War on Drugs would be political suicide.

In an episode now referred to as The Bong Show, mothers stormed the legislature, armed with satchels of drug paraphernalia supplied by Perot's committee. You are either for our children, lawmakers were told, or for the dope pushers. When the wreckage was cleared from the capital, some legislators didn't know what had hit them. Lynn Nabers, head of the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, says, "I've never seen anything as organized, in depth and scope, and covering this much area ... in this short a time."

Or, as Gerald Goldstein puts it, "It was like being on an airplane that crashed with no survivors."

The most immediate victims--the mothers of Texas, the very ground troops of the war--were left believing they'd done something to save their children, when actually the only measurable effect had been to expand police powers beyond acceptable bounds.

One day, not long after the great siege of the legislature, John Duncan and I went up to the Texas state capitol building. There must have been ten 18-wheeler tractor trailers parked in front of the main entrance, with electrical cable snaking among them, black and thick as a man's wrist. Duncan and I had been discussing one of the new drug laws, under which an attorney whose client is convicted of trafficking can be imprisoned for 99 years and fined $1,000,000 for accepting tainted money as a fee. It is a bizarre statute that forces a suspected drug pusher either to incriminate himself or to be denied counsel, which violates the Fifth or the Sixth Amendment, depending upon which option the suspect chooses. As we passed among the towering trailers, I asked Duncan what all the trucks might mean, parked so audaciously at the front door of Justice.

"It's The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," he said. "They're filming it here." As we entered the great rotunda of the state capitol, which was laced across with a chaos of cable and hung with lights and reflectors, Duncan stopped in the center of the 12-foot seal inlaid in the floor, defaced now with silver gaffer's tape. He gestured in a great arc around us. "This," he announced, "is the best little whorehouse in Texas."

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The story really began in the middle Sixties, the period of the great purges in which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for all.

It was in the middle Sixties that middle-class Americans began openly using drugs on a large scale for the first time. It was also in the middle Sixties that the first earnest attempts got under way to create and use the fear of drugs to justify profound expansion of police power and social controls.

The foundations for this fear had been laid as early as the Twenties, when outrageous stories about a new drug called diacetylmorphine, or heroin, were being bandied about in the popular press. (It was said, for example, that heroin addiction spread from one person to the next faster than anthrax and that Western civilization was on the point of collapse as a result.) But Nelson Rockefeller began the first true war on drugs when he created panic about heroin addicts in his successful 1966 campaign for re-election as governor of New York. By skillful use of propaganda and manipulation of the press, Rockefeller was able to convince voters that nearly all crime in New York was committed by junkies. Armed with fictional statistics and unencumbered by facts, he achieved radical alterations in social controls (addicts could be detained for up to five years without trial under one new Rockefeller law).

When Nixon came to power in 1968, he had two overriding priorities. One was to make good his campaign promise to reduce crime in the United States, so that he could be re-elected; the other was to establish a Federal agency under direct White House control that could be used to spy upon and neutralize his enemies. (His Deputy Secretary of Defense, William Clements, would share his concern a decade later and borrow from Nixon's bag of tricks.)

Nixon hadn't been President for long when his Attorney General, John Mitchell, pointed out to him that the Federal Government has no jurisdiction over robbery, rape, mugging and murder, except in the District of Columbia itself. It was this problem--the inability to reduce crime--coupled with the desire for a national police force he could control that led Nixon to a war on drugs. Since the Federal Government was empowered to combat drug traffic, it would be a simple matter to blame all crime on drugs--as Rockefeller had--and then attack that problem to give the appearance of fighting crime. Furthermore, if sufficient fear could be generated, the Administration could justify extraordinary expansions of police powers.

In his book Agency of Fear, Edward Jay Epstein succinctly sums up the strategy that guided the first nationwide war on drugs--the model used later by Clements and Perot and now by President Reagan:

If Americans could be persuaded that their lives and the lives of their children were being threatened by a rampant epidemic of narcotics addiction, Nixon's advisors presumed they would not object to ... no-knock warrants, pretrial detention, wire taps and unorthodox strike forces.... To achieve this state of fear required transforming a relatively small heroin-addiction problem ... into a plague that threatened all. This in turn required the artful use of the media to propagate a simple but terrifying set of stereotypes about drug addiction....

The cynicism of Nixon's war on drugs was scarcely believable. In a puzzling effort to address a problem it had taken such care to inflate, the Administration resorted to distributing an equally addictive form of synthetic heroin, called methadone. By 1973, the United States was subsidizing the distribution of 7,500,000 doses a year of this drug. In 1974, death by methadone overdose far surpassed death by heroin overdose as the new drug menace.

The public, however, was kept largely innocent of these machinations, and by 1973, Nixon had consolidated his national police force under the name Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which incorporated scores of warriors from other bureaucracies. He was very close to achieving what amounted, in Epstein's words, to "an American coup d'état." The reason he failed was the Watergate scandal, during which all the bureaucrats Nixon had estranged in his wild scramble for power turned on him. In the purges that followed, the war on drugs was set back about five years and the DEA was forced to maintain a very low profile to give public temper a chance to cool.

After Nixon resigned, there followed a gradual acceptance of marijuana in America--to the point where it became a nonissue. There were 26,000,000 people who used it regularly and no one much cared. By 1978, in fact, ten states had decriminalized possession of small amounts of grass. But that summer, two events made it possible to bring back the war on drugs--to allow the troops that had been driven into the hills to come down and form columns and raise some dust upon the great central plains.

The first event occurred on July 19, 1978, when The Washington Post carried this headline: "Carter Aide Signed Fake Quaalude Prescription." The aide was Peter Bourne, the White House drug advisor. The very next day, Jack Anderson reported that Bourne had sampled cocaine at a party. (Bourne denied the allegation.) Although Carter had previously informed Congress that he favored decriminalizing marijuana, the Bourne affair tied his hands concerning drug policy until re-election (which, of course, was never forthcoming).

The second event was The Symposium on Marijuana, funded by NIDA and organized by Gabriel Nahas (see box, page 136), a well-known antimarijuana crusader. Held in Reims, France, in July 1978, the conference did for marijuana what Rockefeller and Nixon had done for heroin. Only the name of the menace had changed.

Although little in the way of supportable evidence was presented in Reims, this fact never came across in the tidal wave of publicity that followed. One week after the symposium, The Washington Post published a lengthy article by Peggy Mann describing the proceedings. Despite her complete lack of scientific qualifications, Mann billed as new and definitive the Reims symposium findings. Among them were claims that marijuana caused brain damage, birth defects and cancer--claims that have since become standard in the new war on drugs.

Shortly after Reims, Nixon's old DEA administrator, Peter Bensinger, rose to the surface like a body that had been improperly weighted. He spoke of the "real perils of marijuana smoking." DEA's public-relations arm also swung into action to distribute the "evidence" and newspapers happily published it. The bad news about pot appeared in McCall's, Mademoiselle, Harper's Bazaar, Time, Newsweek, Seventeen, National Enquirer, The Reader's Digest and on television. The refutations appeared in scientific journals the public never saw.

Flying the kids-on-dope banner, the war on drugs had become a juggernaut by the end of 1978: It drew blind devotion and crushed people beneath it. With President Carter's hands tied, there was no effective opposition. The press now had to go to the man who replaced Bourne at the White House, Lee Dogoloff, for any information about Carter's drug policy. Since there was no drug policy left, Dogoloff talked a lot about a group of parents in DeKalb, Georgia, who were so upset about two drug-related murders and the existence of paraphernalia shops in their community that they banded together to do something about it. So the press wrote about the parents in Georgia, and pretty soon there were other groups of parents following their lead.

Where no parents' groups existed, NIDA provided how-to assistance and served a vital function as a "networking" center for all the little organizations. If the individual community groups were the rays of hope in the midnight horror of kids on dope, then NIDA was going to be the dark projector at the center of the planetarium giving their light focus and meaning. And NIDA had the wherewithal to make this happen: Between 1979 and 1980, the budget of its Prevention Branch (which creates, coordinates and supports parents' groups) rocketed from $6,000,000 to $13,000,000.

This period of time coincided with the Texans' War on Drugs, which based the local hysteria it created on the same "scientific information" presented in Reims. The Texans' War on Drugs, then, in a very real sense, formed a bridge between Nixon's war on drugs and the new national campaign. Nixon's first attempt to set up his own White House police agency was funded by the same agency (Law Enforcement Administration Agency) that provided the $584,000 grant Perot used in Texas. The man who allowed Perot to have this money was Nixon's Deputy Secretary of Defense, William Clements. Nixon's number-two man in the FBI, Jim Adams, was brought to Texas by Clements to head the Department of Public Safety--the very agency designated to receive the newly created wire-tapping authority. The real difference between the Texans' War on Drugs and Nixon's war on drugs is that there has not yet been a Watergate to bring Clements and Perot down. Nor any to stop Reagan from succeeding where Nixon failed.

Having crossed the bridge between the two drug wars, the present Administration has learned from Nixon's failure. In addition to being more sophisticated than earlier efforts, this new crusade is based on broad public support generated by masterful use of propaganda. This support is vital, for it guarantees that abuses of power will be tolerated. Nixon, though ultimately stopped by Watergate, also failed to create the requisite level of hysteria--he generated fear, but not enough and not close enough to home. The threat of heroin was too remote for most voting parents, who could readily see that their children didn't have needle marks running up and down their arms. Without mass-scale fear, there was no mass support, so the deadly antics of Nixon's DEA caused nothing but public outrage. By contrast, the antimarijuana campaign now under way has succeeded in convincing parents that their children are on dope. And parents concerned for the welfare of their children will do anything they believe might help.

Unfortunately, most people aren't aware that when they suspend the constitutional rights of suspected criminals, they suspend their own constitutional rights as well.

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To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies ... that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.

This year, the Congress of the United States is beginning to resemble in a peculiar and discomforting way the Texas legislature of last year. While in 1980-81 there were moms and experts crawling all over Texas lawmakers screaming brain damage and birth defects, something of uncanny similarity seems to be happening now at the Federal level. In both the Senate and the House, there are already scores of bills that threaten to disembowel the Constitution in the name of saving the nation's children from marijuana. As in Texas, the moms are the ground troops. Their titular leader in the national war is the President's wife, Nancy Reagan.

Much of the legislation currently under consideration in Washington was inspired by the recommendations contained in a report issued last August by the Attorney General's Task Force on Violent Crime. Following the time-honored gambit of declaring a drug epidemic and then blaming violent crime on it, the report attacked the inhibiting effects upon law enforcement of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, as well as the exclusionary rule, the Tax Reform Act, the writ of habeas corpus, the Freedom of Information Act and the Posse Comitatus Act--all of which the task force proposed to alter in the name of full-scale war on drugs.

Out of 64 recommendations concerning "violent crime" in the report, 32 involved references to drugs or narcotics. One of them called for using the military to enforce domestic law. This would violate the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which was designed to prevent abuses of military power and even the mere appearance of a police state. T. C. L. U.'s John Duncan explains it this way: "That runs against every precept of civil liberties we have. We have never given the military any police authority other than in an emergency in a very restricted geographical area. Because by putting the military in charge, you suspend the Bill of Rights and all its protections."

The task force called for other radical alterations in the basic protections from Government enjoyed by Americans. In doing so, it made generous use of the kids-on-dope call to arms. That, of course, is the genius of the war on drugs: the extent to which its unsupported and inflated discourse has managed to deflect public attention from the real effect of the campaign--to undermine civil liberties. The kids-on-dope idea is brilliant precisely because it makes it impossible for anyone opposing the crusade to sound reasonable; at the same time, it confounds to the maximum degree any attempts to think clearly on the matter of drugs and appropriate social controls. The loaded language of the task-force report makes it impossible to keep your eye on the ball. Kids on dope is not the issue. The children are being used as a weapon.

As in Texas and in Nixon's war on drugs, once the hysteria is created, a great deal can be accomplished that would be impossible if one had to deal with people who hadn't been relieved of their ability to reason. Under the guise of combating drugs and crime, for example, Nixon used the staggering power of the IRS "net-worth audit" as a weapon against his political enemies. The net-worth audit, simply put, makes it possible for the IRS to seize everything you own, even if you've committed no crime. The Attorney General's Task Force now recommends doing away with the Tax Reform Act, which was passed in response to Nixon's abuses of the IRS.

The task force also recommends doing away with the exclusionary rule, the only protection U. S. citizens have against violations of the Fourth Amendment. Perhaps the single most important constitutional guarantee, the Fourth Amendment ensures the right of privacy and forbids unreasonable searches and seizures. This means that the police can't simply bust into your house and ransack the place--as Nixon's private police did on several infamous occasions. The exclusionary rule prevents evidence obtained during an illegal search from being used in court. Seymour Wishman, author of Confessions of a Criminal Lawyer, says the Supreme Court "knew that there was no other way to prevent police from becoming bands of marauding hoodlums."

Now the task force has asked that the exclusionary rule be modified to let evidence stand in court as long as the officers act "in good faith," even when they "unwittingly blunder" in deciding what constitutes probable cause. An example of how the police actually make such delicate judgments is illuminating. When called upon to explain in court his probable cause for making a search and seizure at a Florida airport, DEA agent Paul J. Markonni said, "We do see some real--I hesitate to use the word--slime balls, you know, some real dirt bags, that obviously could not afford, unless they were doing something, to fly first class."

The Slime Ball/Dirt Bag Test, as it has come to be called by defense attorneys, is only one of many factors that may arouse suspicion in the minds of police. One woman, for example, was arrested because she appeared "extremely calm." Others are routinely searched and their property seized for appearing nervous, for using a pay phone immediately after deplaning, or for taking public transportation away from an airport. The Attorney General's Task Force is arguing that cases such as these should not be thrown out, as long as any criterion such as the Slime Ball/Dirt Bag Test is administered in good faith. As with many of the task-force recommendations, this would have no effect on crime--fewer than two percent of criminal cases lose evidence due to the exclusionary rule; even fewer are thrown out of court altogether.

In a broader political context, it's not surprising that such recommendations were made by Ronald Reagan's Justice Department. The President signaled his position on constitutional rights last April when he pardoned FBI agents who had violated Fourth Amendment rights of Weather Underground members. More recently, he has given the CIA illegal and unprecedented domestic powers. Reagan apparently shares Governor Clements' publicly stated view that criminals have no constitutional rights.

Dismantling the Tax Reform Act and the Fourth Amendment are merely two examples in a sweeping attack on civil liberties by the Reagan Administration. And a frightened American public, spurred on by the ghoulish eidolon of kids on dope and unable to foresee the consequences, is bringing pressure to bear on lawmakers in Washington to do something.

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They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them.... They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

A short Senate-subway ride from the Capitol, in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Senator Gordon Humphrey was holding a hearing last fall on the health effects of marijuana on kids. As chairman of a subcommittee on alcoholism and drug abuse, Humphrey had a bill before the Senate that would give $15,000,000, through NIDA, to antimarijuana parents' groups and other drug-abuse programs.

The Senator sat behind a vast, semicircular wooden bench, presiding over the hearing. As in the Texas state capitol, thick black cable snaked this way and that and banks of searing television lights set the room ablaze. Above, dramatic as a firmament of snow, the ceiling was decorated with bas-relief signs of the zodiac, each one struck as sharp as the image on a newly minted coin. Before the bench, sitting at long wooden tables, were those offering testimony. The rest of the great room was crowded with spectators in rows of chairs, and there was an unnerving familiarity about the ranks of women sitting mannequin straight, watching with that eager, almost sexually whetted zeal. They might have been viewing pornography in order to outlaw it.

A woman named Carol Grace Smith was testifying that marijuana causes fetal deaths, stillbirths, interference with placental functioning, permanent infertility. She spoke quickly, almost breathlessly, but in bursts of adrenaline it became clear that, although little scientific evidence existed to support her predictions, something dire was about to happen. As she spoke of these grisly matters, a tremulous ebb and flow of energy could be felt among the neatly sculpted women in the audience, and I suddenly realized why they seemed so familiar. They could have been clones of the Texas mothers I had seen in Judge Biery's San Antonio courtroom. Only this wasn't some obscure and backward outpost of frontier justice, it was the United States Senate; and the people listening and believing weren't pachucos with crosses tattooed between their eyes, either. They were doctors, lawyers, Senators.

The program had begun with NIDA director William Pollin and two of his deputies. (NIDA, remember, would administer Senator Humphrey's $15,000,000 in grant money.) The single organization with the power to come shrieking to the rescue of the beguiled Senator was doing worse than nothing--it was promoting the deception. In fact, the program was so loaded with NIDA speakers that no other point of view was presented.

There came then before the Senator a pediatrician named Donald MacDonald, who described the hordes of children he'd seen with vague symptoms that every doctor should learn to recognize as those of marijuana poisoning: dress habits change, grades slip, disaster follows. Déjà vu: The Sunday supplement of the Texans' War on Drugs had warned parents to watch for just such symptoms of marijuana toxicity. Now MacDonald was telling Humphrey that the leading cause of death among high school students was suicide. "A lot of our kids," he said, "are not going to make it."

No one leaped to his feet to scream in outrage. A ragged ribbon of lightning didn't uncoil from the zodiac ceiling to strike these people down for their misdeeds. No one even cleared his throat and suggested that all this nonsense was still no reason to dismantle the Bill of Rights. Senator Humphrey merely pursed his lips and nodded gravely. A little surge of concupiscent energy twisted through the audience. And somewhere between the clifflike Senate podium and the agitated face of MacDonald there hovered an almost palpable incipience equal to $15,000,000.

The moment came and went without finding repose in the tangible, but it was distinctly there and as poignant as any explanation of why the war on drugs existed at all. Here we had employees of NIDA (whose very lifeblood is grant money) testifying to a Senator who was sponsoring a bill to give NIDA more money. We had parents' groups whose hysteria was sustained by NIDA grants and whose very existence depended upon such money. And together all these people were creating a sort of short-circuit mob politics that ran around at a fevered pitch, consuming money and producing nothing but more fear.

An individual doctor or parent might be excused on grounds of ignorance (as one Dr. Ingrid Lantner might be, who came before the Senator and said that kids who smoke marijuana forget their birthdays, so befuddled do they become), but NIDA has had a history that is too cynical to overlook. When the Federal drug bureaucracy was in the antiheroin business, it was supporting scientists who were quite casually recommending that marijuana be decriminalized. At the time, it was of no survival value to have a "marijuana problem." Now, however, those who have followed NIDA's progress perceive in the increasingly alarmist propaganda pouring forth from its offices a familiar bureaucratic syndrome. At a time when its funding may succumb to budget cuts, NIDA is certainly capable of mustering out a few troops to go before a Senator who's willing to commit $15,000,000.

While a variety of motives can be ascribed to individuals within the war-on-drugs network, the larger system demands a more general explanation. It seems to have been provided, ironically, in its most clearheaded form by a group called the Shafer Commission, which was appointed by Nixon and which backfired on him. The commission's report from 1973 could be reissued, stamped 1982, and it would require no revision. Under the heading, Perpetuating the Problem, the report says:

Because of the intensity of the public concern and the emotionalism surrounding the topic of drugs, all levels of government have been pressured into ... reaction along the paths of least political resistance. The recent result has been the creation of ever-larger bureaucracies, ever-increasing expenditures of monies and an outpouring of publicity so that the public will know that "something" is being done.

Perhaps the major consequence of this ad hoc policy planning has been the creation ... of a vested interest in the perpetuation of the problem among those dispensing and receiving funds.... During the last several years, drug programing has become a multibillion-dollar industry, one administering to its own needs as well as to those of its drug-using clientele. In the course of well-meaning efforts to do something about drug use, this society may have inadvertently institutionalized it as a never-ending project.

This describes what Shafer Commission members called the Drug Abuse Industrial Complex (see box, page 137) and explains quite simply that it can do anything except stop.

The current war on drugs is most certainly a part of the phenomenon. Multibillion-dollar industries don't simply vanish overnight when they're no longer needed. As the central organizations of the Drug Abuse Industrial Complex, NIDA and DEA have major vested interests in perpetuating a drug problem&--or at least the appearance of one. And the easy vulnerability of millions of mothers who fear for the welfare of their children has made the war on drugs a spectacular success.

At Senator Humphrey's hearing, there was a table covered with pamphlets from various parents' groups. Among them was a newsletter sporting an endorsement by Henry Ross Perot and a front-page picture of Nancy Reagan being served coffee by a tuxedoed Negro. Above it, President Reagan was quoted as saying, "We need to mobilize our religious, educational and fraternal groups in a national education program against drug abuse.... This Administration will do all in its power to encourage such efforts." The newsletter went on to describe precisely what had happened in Texas--only this time the staging area was the United States Congress. "The education of our Senators and Congressmen that has gone on in their local districts and here in Washington is proving successful...."

But this is just what the Shafer Commission described: political pressure, reaction along the paths of least political resistance, the appearance of doing something. Legislators respond in the only way they know how: They introduce legislation. Hastily conceived, badly written and based on a muddled understanding of the limits of police power set out in the Constitution, these laws and the atmosphere of anxiety out of which they grow tend to get people hurt. Oliver Bruce Moorer. for example, got hurt on April 23, 1981. According to his family, Moorer was asleep at about three A.M. when the police raided his Saginaw, Michigan, home to seize drugs. The probable cause for the raid was the word of an informant who said he had smoked a joint with "an unknown Negro" in Moorer's house. Prior to entering, the police prepped the house by pouring gunfire into it for approximately five minutes. The question of Fourth Amendment violations was never raised, on account of the fact that Moorer was dead.

&2022;

The Ministry of Truth ... was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air.

As you travel north from the hot black edges of the District of Columbia, you enter upon an unbroken white fabric of unilevel industrial sprawl that reaches all the way to Rockville, Maryland, and beyond. There are few buildings taller than 20 or 30 feet, shopping centers most notable among them. One day, I went up to visit NIDA in Rockville. It is housed in a building that can be seen from the next town--a massive gray steel-and-glass structure that sticks out of the ground as if it has yet to leave the drawing board and commands your attention long before you reach it.

Around the first floor of the building are enormous block letters advertising, Drug Fair, in what is surely one of the most remarkable coincidences of joint tenancy in existence. (Ironically, Drug Fair, a chain of pharmacies, was recently given the Silver Anvil Award by the Public Relations Society of America for converting the prescription department in every one of its stores into drug-abuse information centers and "community-outreach facilitators," whatever those are.)

NIDA is a monstrous bureaucracy with endless corridors and countless little plaques bearing the titles of departments, divisions, branches, subbranches and microdepartmental modalities. I had gone there to see the head of the Prevention Branch, who was quite eager to talk about his work and equally eager not to have his name in print. He was ardently enthusiastic about the parents' movement against marijuana. "It's big," he said, almost breathlessly. "It's the biggest thing I've ever seen. And you want to know something? California is the hottest state for these family groups." He recomposed himself and shifted in his chair with a kind of impatient and restless zeal. I asked him about possible budget cuts that could threaten his work. The muscles of his face leaped to form a smile, as if they had been artificially stimulated, one by one, with electrical current. "We'll get the money from somewhere," he promised. "We'll get the money. Next we want to start a national youth movement on drugs." He leaned in a little closer and added, "With SWAT teams on drug-using teens."

And I thought he was probably right; he would get the money. As long as whatever was eating him from inside continued its invisible work. As long as there were moms such as the ones I had seen in that Texas courtroom and at Senator Humphrey's hearing, willing to get right down in the gutter with the prisoners of war. As long as Nancy Reagan--the First Mom of the nation--remains the Joan of Arc of the war on drugs. Just recently, she went on the Good Morning, America show for the second time to promote the war on drugs, and David Hartman seemed to have swallowed the propaganda. His attention was riveted on her with such earnest intensity, it appeared his face might turn inside out. He asked Nancy what everyone could do about this terrible problem. She grinned and apologized for all the mail Hartman had received after her first appearance on his show. This time, she said, parents could write directly to her and she would put them in touch with the group in their area that was fighting the war on drugs. And upon the screen there appeared a card:

Nancy Reagan, The White House, Washington, D.C. 20530

After leaving NIDA headquarters, I rode the subway in Washington to the Metro Center Station. When I reached the street level, there was a radio blaring out onto the busy boulevard and people were hesitating, listening, then walking on. A shrill, military newscaster's voice was proclaiming that NIDA director Pollin had just announced that marijuana use leads to cocaine and harder drugs. I stopped, not quite ready to believe what I was hearing, and then thought of all the slogans I had seen hammered into the white stone Government buildings around the city. On the National Archives: Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Freedom. On the Justice Department: Where Law Ends Tyranny Begins. And: Law Alone Can Give us Freedom. With the radio blaring its announcement of such obvious misinformation, I couldn't help remembering another set of slogans: War is Peace / Freedom is Slavery / Ignorance is Strength, which appeared on buildings in London in a mythical time so far in the future it was once considered mere allegory. The epigraphs for this article are, of course, from that time and place--1984, which may come to be known as the only Government project that was ever completed on schedule.

A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

"Only the loaded message came through: Pot will turn your beautiful boy into a mindless homo with breasts."