Battlefield Conversions

Reason talks with three ex-warriors who now fight against the War on Drugs

Michael W. Lynch from the January 2002 issue

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McNamara: It has become the priority of police agencies. It's bizarre. We make 700,000 arrests for marijuana a year. The public is not terrified of marijuana. People are terrified of molesters, school shootings, and people stalking women and children. The police are not putting the resources into those crimes where they could be effective if they gave them top priority.

Reason: There's some controversy over whether the arrests for possession are really for possession or if they are for dealing but prosecuted as possession. Do you have any thoughts on that?

McNamara: It's both true and false. Most low-level dealers are users, like the guy that we finally did bust after we let the addict go. He was an addict, too, and he was no better or worse than the guy we let go. But what we had actually done, which is standard operating procedure in the drug war, is let someone go who had committed a crime because they enticed someone else to commit a more serious crime.

Reason: What role does race play in the War on Drugs?

McNamara: The drug war is an assault on the African-American community. Any police chief that used the tactics used in the inner city against minorities in a white middle-class neighborhood would be fired within a couple of weeks.

It was a very radical change in public policy for the federal government to criminalize drugs in the early 20th century. Congress was reluctant to pass it because you had a very small federal government in 1914 and to interfere with the state police powers was a big deal. They couldn't get this legislation passed until they played the race card: They introduced letters and testimony that blacks were murdering white families; the police in the South were having trouble with "Negroes" because of these drugs; there were white women in "yellow" opium dens. The same prejudice popped up in 1937 when they outlawed marijuana.

If anyone tried to pass laws on those same bases today, they'd be condemned. Yet the laws that we have are the last vestiges of Jim Crow. You don't have to identify yourself as a bigot anymore -- you can be for the drug war and you really are getting "them."

Reason: Do you think there's a greater risk in just questioning the operation of the War on Drugs than there is to testilying and going along with it in unethical ways?

McNamara: For police chiefs, there is some wiggle room. They can support sterile needle exchanges, medical marijuana treatment, and education diversion instead of incarceration. But it's asking an awful lot for them to come out and say, "Look, this drug prohibition is a stupid thing we shouldn't have started in 1914 and it gets worse and worse every year." That's a big step for a police chief. That's asking them to commit career suicide.

Reason: Were you frustrated as a police chief with the constraints of the law?

McNamara: Enormously. Police chiefs are sitting on kegs of dynamite. Many of them are really decent, progressive guys. They are worried about the disproportionate racial impact and the corruption. But there's nothing they can do. There's just too much money in it. You don't have the ability, regardless of the propaganda, to eliminate the code of silence. You don't have unlimited power. You have lots of constraints on how the police can discipline themselves, even for chiefs who are legitimately interested in doing so.

The Fed: Michael Levine

Michael Levine was born to fight the War on Drugs. He grew up tough in the Bronx during the 1950s and was an accomplished brawler by junior high school. Though Jewish, he identified with the Puerto Ricans moving into the neighborhood and he picked up fluent Spanish, a skill that came in handy later when he started doing undercover work in Latin America. He was personally motivated to fight drugs: His kid brother was addicted to heroin. "I saw it killing my brother," says Levine, 60. In 1965, Levine started a 25-year career in federal law enforcement that included stints in the Customs Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. He traveled the world and arrested some 3,000 people.

Yet it wasn't long before Levine noticed a gap between the rhetoric and reality of the drug war. Says Levine, "Among DEA agents, the notion of really winning the drug war is so far out of the question that anyone who even mentions it is considered some kind of nut." Today, he serves as an expert witness on all things drug-related and hosts a radio show, Expert Witness, on WBAI, Pacifica Radio, in New York. He's authored and co-authored numerous books, including Deep Cover: The Inside Story of How DEA Infighting, Incompetence, and Subterfuge Lost Us the Biggest Battle of the Drug War (1990) and the novel Triangle of Death: Deep Cover II (1996).

Reason: Why did you want to become a drug agent?