WORMSCAN: Z-WAR [PART 2]

Z-Magazine's view of the Drug Wars.

NOTES: I made a few corrections to spellings and grammar.

If you missed previous parts to this part of the WORMSCAN series, you can find it here.

WORMSCAN: Z-WAR [PART 1]

To: drctalk@drcnet.org
Subject: Z Magazine
Message-ID: <199604221101.NAA23816@ZEUS.MONACO.MC>

Letters to:
Lydia_Sargent@lbbs.org
Z Magazine
18 Millfield St.
Woods Hole, MA 02543

LSD, Deadheads, and the Law Psychedelic POWs
By Thea Kelley and Dennis Bernstein
Z Magazine, April 1996
copyright 1996 Z Magazine

After three decades, the traveling village that was the Grateful Dead scene has dispersed. Where will the Deadheads go? For some, it may be a hard choice. Others aren't free to choose. About 2,000 of them are in prison, most for LSD. Most of them are young, nonviolent, first offenders, yet many are doing 5, 10, frequently 20 years — longer sentences than they would have gotten for attempted murder, rape, arson, embezzlement, kidnapping, or child molesting. Captives from one of the strangest battlefields of the Drug War, many call themselves "psychedelic POWs."

The Dead scene meant a lot of things to a lot of people. To drug enforcement it was the best place to find LSD sellers. The law scooped them up, sometimes dozens at one show. It was an abundant source of easy arrests leading to plenty of prison years.

Dose for dose, there are few drugs that carry more federal prison time than LSD. Few bystanders know this; nor did most of the "hippies" who are now behind bars. The U.S. Sentencing Commission has concluded that LSD is less dangerous than cocaine, heroin, or PCP. Yet only one dose of LSD on a sugar cube, or 125 doses on blotter paper, carries the same 5-year federal sentence as several thousand doses of heroin or cocaine. Yes, you read that right. It matters whether it was on sugar or blotter.

Under current law, LSD sentences are computed by weighing the drug along with its "carrier medium," which generally weighs far more than the drug. Hence, many of these 2,000 people are serving sentences based largely on possession and distribution of paper, sugar, gelatin, or water. While the unfairness of crack-versus-powder cocaine sentencing has gained media notoriety, the disparities around LSD aren't as sexy: fewer people are involved, and there's no violence to splatter across the news page.

Unnoticed by the general public, the "carrier weight" law was challenged in the Supreme Court this December, in Neal v. U.S. On January 22, the Court unanimously reaffirmed the law. "There may be little logic to defend the statute's treatment of LSD," the Court admitted. "It results in a significant disparity of punishment meted out to LSD offenders relative to other narcotics traffickers." Nevertheless, the Court stated, "It is the responsibility of Congress, not this Court, to change statutes that are thought to be unwise or unfair."

In rare federal cases where the carrier medium has not been included, the drug has been calculated at eight times its actual weight to allow for the statute's intended application to a "mixture or substance containing LSD."

Heather Silverstein Jordan turned 30 in December in the Federal Prison Camp at Dublin, California. She is a self-described "psychedelic POW." Heather had finally found a "family" in the Grateful Dead scene, she says, after running away from a broken home and spending the latter half of her teenage years in an orphanage. "So when I turned 18," she says, "I didn't have a whole lot to fall back on."

After some time in a commune, she discovered "Deadland," the never-never-land to which so many lost kids have found their way. "I needed a community to grow up in....There's a lot of family there. It was a healing experience."

But the Dead scene was not the only medicine. Even before that, she had experimented with LSD at the age of 15 during a time of "suicidal depression" and reckless use of pills, pot, and alcohol. "With the LSD, I did a lot of inner exploring and thinking about my life," she says, which led to a renewed commitment to living and a big cut in her drug use.

Odd as it may appear, testimonials about decreased overall drug use after LSD are commonplace in the psychedelic community. In fact, the most well-known research on therapeutic use of the drug has centered around treatment of substance abuse.

By the time of her arrest Silverstein Jordan was 25-years-old and well established, with a motor home, close friends, and a business license under which she made and sold hats. And she had a soul mate.

Heather Silverstein and Pat Jordan fell in love at a Dead show in 1990. The whirlwind romance that followed was brought to an abrupt halt when Pat was busted for selling "a few hits" of LSD. Desperate to bail him out, Heather started scrambling for money in the fastest way she knew, selling LSD. When he got out five months later, he became involved in the deals. Not long after, their main customer snitched on them and they were both arrested.

"They make movies about hippies being arrested by Bubba out in the middle of the southern states," Heather says, "and it wasn't that far from the movies. In the first jail I was infected with scabies. The second wouldn't give me medical attention for it. The third place, people kept escaping, so they moved me from there. The fourth place, somebody died because they wouldn't give them their insulin."

At another jail she was beaten by a "huge football player" of a guard, she said. "One officer held me down and the other punched me in the face." The one holding her had not known the other officer was going to hit her, and later tried to testify on her behalf. He was immediately fired, she said. "They pressed assault charges against me to cover for them. It was dropped."

Heather and Pat were married in a county jail, with glass between them, in red prison jumpsuits. The only people in attendance were a Unitarian minister, their lawyers, and the guards. "They would not let us have any contact," said Heather. "I had flowers. I cried the whole time. And that was pretty much it. They took us back to our cells." Pat and Heather were sentenced to eight and ten years, respectively, with release dates in 1998 and 1999.

Heather and Pat are active networkers, and both are frequent columnists for the Midnight Special, a Deadhead prisoner newsletter. Heather was one its earliest editors, pasting it together with toothpaste in a county jail cell. The Special is soon to be a World Wide Web page.

Community has always been the name of the game among Deadheads. Among the prisoners, the camaraderie springs not only from love of the music, but also from a shared sense of persecution. Deadheads have been pulled over and searched because of their bumper stickers, had their stickers and tie-dyes used as evidence against them in court, and classified in prisons as a member of a "gang."

Drug Enforcement Agency officials have repeatedly insisted that they do not specifically target Deadheads, while admitting that "We go where the drugs happen to be — at the concerts," said Michael Heald, spokesperson for the DEA in San Francisco.

Why is law enforcement so keen on busting acid-heads? Michael Levine, a highly decorated 25-year veteran of the DEA, regularly testifies as an expert witness for both defense and prosecution at drug trials. "You have a bureaucracy that has to prove itself constantly, year by year, to an electorate, to taxpayers," he says. "They do that by numbers of arrests," he said, "and by racking up the extraordinarily long sentences common with LSD."

"It's just like a predator," says Ed Rosenthal, an expert witness at numerous drug trials. "A predator goes for the vulnerable. That's exactly who gets picked off in these Dead concert raids: naive, often troubled young kids who are trusting."

Mark Kahley was 23 when he was first busted at a 1992 Dead show at Nassau Coliseum. "I had 47 doses in my pocket. Their sole reason for searching me was because I was a white man with dreadlocks," Kahley asserts.

Kahley was given five year's probation, and went to live with his parents in Kentucky where, according to his mother Doreen Kahley-Bradshaw, he was doing well and even had a 4.0 average in college.

"Part of the probation was that I had to go to narcotics anonymous meetings", Kahley says. "There I meet this guy who, like, befriends me and is the only person I know there."

His "friend," it turns out, was an informant who was attending meetings specifically to set him up. Kahley says the snitch sold him marijuana to gain his trust (a maneuver known as a "reverse sting"), then lured him into selling 800 doses of LSD to an undercover state trooper.

His lawyer and stepfather, Les Bradshaw, feels that there was "a form of entrapment" in the sting. "He was trying, and they targeted him the moment he got here. A New York DEA agent called and told the local officers to try and get him, and they did."

For his second offense, Kahley was sentenced to ten years in prison, plus eight years supervised release. The state trooper who had arrested him, Mark Lopez, was later indicted on charges of forgery and implicated in an array of felonious behavior including stealing official evidence and drug trafficking. While Kahley sits in jail, Lopez has yet to come to trial.

Broken families, snitching, and excessive sentences are among the damage done by the Drug War's most potent weapon: mandatory minimums. The federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 created minimum sentences for drug crimes, based solely on the weight of the drug — or in the case of LSD, the "mixture or substance" containing the drug. One gram gets five years, ten grams gets ten years; double it for a second offense. Other than the standard 15 percent reduction for good behavior, the law forbids parole. There is no consideration of character or circumstances. The judge may not even consider the defendant's role in the crime — mastermind or messenger, if a gram was involved, everybody gets five years. The only way around the minimum is to give "substantial assistance," i.e. to snitch. Since the passage of mandatory minimums the number of drug convicts in the U.S. has more than tripled.

A breathtaking list of organizations have come out in opposition to mandatory minimums, including the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the Federal Courts Study Committee, the American Bar Association, the National Association of Veteran Police Officers, and the American Civil Liberties Union.

"There is no single issue affecting the work of the federal courts with respect to which there is such unanimity," According to Judge Vincent Broderick, chair of the Criminal law Committee of the Judicial Conference of the U.S. "Most federal judges ... believe ... that mandatory minimums are the major obstacle to the development of a fair, rational, honest and proportional federal criminal justice sentencing system."

At least one federal judge has resigned in protest. Reagan appointee J. Lawrence Irving left the bench in 1991 because he felt that the drug sentences he was forced to impose were often "Draconian." "The sentences are too long; there is no logic to them," he told us. "I just hope that sometime Congress comes to their senses and changes the laws."

Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens has written that the law's consequences for LSD defendants are "so bizarre that I cannot believe they were intended by Congress."

Eric Sterling, former counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, helped write the law. He now calls it "frighteningly unjust" and says Congress's primary aim when it rushed to pass the legislation was "to vaccinate the Democrats against soft-on-crime charges after Reagan had pounded them on the issue in 1984." Today he is president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation in Washington, DC.

LSD was more or less an afterthought during the four-week period in which Congress held a series of show hearings, according to Sterling, leaving representatives to "just willy-nilly pick numbers out of the air" in determining mandatory sentences. There was virtually no debate on the LSD carry weight issue or expert testimony about the drug.

Leigh A. Henderson, co-editor with William J. Glass of LSD: Still With Us After All These Years, agrees that legislators have appeared uninterested in the facts. Hardly a wild-eyed radical, Henderson is a consultant to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration. The book concludes that adverse health effects of LSD, whether physical or psychiatric, are rare.

Despite compelling research findings, the DEA insists LSD is "a very dangerous drug." Other news sources have quoted administrator Robert Bonner saying, "It once was referred to as 'do-it-yourself brain surgery' ."

Meanwhile, taxpayers pay dearly to fight this "very dangerous drug." At more than $20,000 a year, a 20year sentence will run up more than a quarter of a million dollars in basic prison costs. Add to this the costs of law enforcement, courts, and social services to inmates' dependents. Roberta Goodman, 32, is currently serving a staggering 72 years, according to news reports, for several counts of LSD. Locked up in the maximum-security Tennessee Prison for Women, she says, "There are women in here who have killed people, and they're not in for as long as I am. One woman has 57 counts of child abuse — burning a child with cigarettes, curling irons. She got 15 years." Goodman has served that much time already and will not be eligible for parole until 2007.

"You know, we're having a civil war here," says Goodman. War destroys families and pits people against their own friends and relatives. Drug prosecutors use children as a wedge to force parents to become informants, according to Virginia Resner, FAMM's San Francisco coordinator. "They pressure women by saying, 'We'll take your children and put them in foster care,' that women will even make up information about people."

Conspiracy laws originally intended for use against racketeers have found greatly expanded use in the drug war, Resner says. "In this drug war, you never have to touch any drugs to become culpable."

Nicole Richardson was 20-years-old and living with her boyfriend Jeff, a small-time LSD dealer. An informant called their home and asked where he could find Jeff. She knew the caller wished to buy LSD and she answered his question. This was her entire involvement in the conspiracy. Nevertheless, Nicole was sentenced to 10 years based on the quantity of her boyfriend's subsequent drug deal. He, meanwhile, helped the prosecutor with other drug busts, and got off with five years.

"Acid has been demonized," says Dennis McNally, the Grateful Dead's publicist. "The government doesn't have communism to kick around anymore; they had to choose something," so drug users were scapegoated. He is appalled by the "McCarthyite" suppression of dialogue on drug issues. The band members have not been immune to this climate of fear, and have been noticeably quiet on the subject, limiting their actions to private lobbying, contributions to FAMM, and exhortations to fans not to sell drugs at shows.

"We made a conscious decision," says Dennis McNally, "that to lead a political struggle, which we could not win, would only serve to bring more heat on the Deadheads."

The tragedy of the psychedelic prisoners is a cause for which it is hard to find a champion. Pat Jordan feels that a lot of apathy comes from the fact that "the casual user...does not see the Draconian sentencing practices as being their problem...You know — 'Gee, that guy with 25,000 hits of acid, well, he asked for it!' The moral issue, though, is that casual use causes the market, which in turn creates the dealer."

Inmate Tim Clark wrote to Deadhead magazine Relix, which publishes a list of prisoners in every issue. "To me the worst part of the country's stand on drugs is not the unfair laws like the mandatory minimum and the carrier weight issue, or even what it does to people's families, [but] what is happening to our society as a whole. Neighbors telling on their neighbors. Friends telling on friends. And law enforcement doing whatever is needed, legally and illegally. I think we as a country should declare war on the 'War on Drugs,'" wrote Clark.

FAMM has been doing just that, through projects such as its participation as a "friend of the court" in the Neal case. Neal's defeat, according to president Julie Stewart, means that "we have to take our fight to Congress. Unfortunately, the timing is bad. Rumor has it that the Republicans plan to use drugs as their primary platform during this election year, citing how little President Clinton has done to 'solve the drug problem' ."

The psychedelic POWs are scapegoats, distractions from society's real ills, says Sterling. Calling their persecution a "culture war," he has gone so far as to suggest that a war crimes tribunal may be in order and that he himself has wrongs to atone for.

The psychedelic prisoners should all be freed, he said, "because you may not like their lifestyle, but it is their lifestyle. The choices they've made about drug use do not warrant prison — not in a free society."

Z Magazine

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 08 May 1996 15:02:33 +0000
From: Peter Webster
To: drctalk@drcnet.org
Subject: POLICE DIRTY DEEDS
Message-ID: <199605081301.PAA00199@ZEUS.MONACO.MC>

Police Crime
By Christian Parenti
Z Magazine March 1996
Lydia_Sargent@lbbs.org

After the videotaped beating of African American motorist Rodney King, and the toxic ranting of Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman, mainstream America has finally begun to address the question of police racism and brutality. But at the same time, there is mounting evidence of a nationwide plague of police criminality. From San Francisco to New Orleans to Cleveland to Philadelphia to New York City, police are being indicted on charges of extortion, robbery, perjury, and weapons and narcotics trafficking. In city after city the old maxim that "the cops are the biggest gang in town" is truer than ever.

It is clear from the patterns of police crime — which usually hits impoverished neighborhoods of color — that the inherent racism of the war on crime has paved the way for police gangsters. The 1980s war on drugs and today's more generalized war on crime have imbued many American's, regardless of their skin color, with intense fear and frustration. People want results — even if cops have to bend the rules. The crime wars have also intensified racist notions that communities of color are naturally or entirely criminal. This has allowed police to act with relative impunity to brutalize, rob, and frame innocent residents of high crime neighborhoods. In the past police corruption generally consisted of cops taking pay-offs. Today's criminal police are actively generating crimes of their own.

Rotten Apples

In New York City three years ago, in the Bronx's 48th precinct, a racially-mixed working class area, the police used to began their night shift at the local bars — not rousting "perps" (perpetrators) and restoring order but getting drunk, taking drugs, and plotting their next eight hours of robbery, graft, and brutality. That was until May 3, 1995, when most of the night shift — 16 officers in all — were arrested and indicted on charges ranging from falsifying evidence to stealing weapons and money from illegally-raided apartments.

According to Internal Affairs investigators the 48th's night shift was run not by the sergeant in charge but by the notoriously brutal officer Richard Rivera. "He did a lot, got away with a lot, [and] did it in front of his supervisors," said an internal affairs investigator who worked on the 18-month long investigation. "And in a real, sad sense he was the leadership."

In early 1994 — stung by criticism from community activists and the recently convened Mollen Commission which investigated police corruption — Internal Affairs, the police unit which investigates police wrong-doing, busted Rivera. Contrary to the officer's tough street persona, Rivera, after only three hours of interrogation, agreed to turn states evidence and spy on his colleagues. His services revealed a pathological brood of drug addicted sadistic cops who did whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted.

The most mind-blowing charge of all was that one officer, Michael T. Kalanz, kept $1 million dollars cash in his police locker as part of, what federal investigators said was, a Cali drug cartel money laundering operation. Most of the other indicted officers were charged with "booming doors," i.e., raiding apartments and robbing the occupants and beating innocent residents with their radios, clubs, and flash lights.

The busts in the 48th precinct are only the latest in a string of police criminality cases. The most recent revelations began surfacing in May 1992 when Michael Dowd and five other members of a police gang from the 75th precinct in Brooklyn were arrested for cocaine trafficking in Suffolk County Long Island. It was only due to the intervention of Suffolk County Police that New York City's police corruption became a public issue.

Before Dowd's bust on Long Island there had been 16 complaints alleging that he dealt cocaine and robbed street dealers. None of these complaints were investigated, despite the fact that Dowd drove a new, bright red Corvette and frequently had limousines pick him up at the station house and chauffeur him to Atlantic City for gambling trips.

The arrests of Dowd and his six colleagues led to the creation of the Mollen Commission to investigate allegations of widespread police crime. By the end of the summer of 1992, Dowd and his cronies had been charged with wholesale narcotics trafficking, extorting drug dealers and even robbing drug affiliated grocery stores. Dowd, who snorted cocaine off the dash board of his cruiser, received payments of between $4,000 and $8,000 a week from dealers. In exchange, he tipped off his clients to police raids.

In March 1994 the Mollen Commission, having heard testimony from Dowd and an anonymous, hooded former officer from Manhattan's Lower East Side 9th Precinct, produced its first indictments. A police gang known as the "Morgue Boys" was uncovered operating in Brownsville's 73rd precinct. Three young cops were charged with dealing drugs while on duty, extorting dealers, and robbing civilians.

Later investigation by the Mollen Commission showed that the "Morgue Boys" had dropped even the pretense of law enforcement, spending much of their on duty time in a secluded part of the precinct drinking, snorting cocaine, meeting their girlfriends or prostitutes, and shooting their guns.

Shortly after this first show of force by the Mollen Commission, which many feared would also be its last, three officers in Harlem's 30th Precinct were videotaped beating neighborhood residents and stealing drugs and cash. The epicenter of the scandal was a gang of cops called "Nannery's Raiders," after the leader Kevin Nannery, who used to place fake 911 calls to justify raiding drug dealers apartments.

Eventually 29 officers from the "Dirty 30" were charged with crimes including perjury, assault, extortion, and wholesale drug trafficking. In one case an office was accused of shooting a dealer who could not make extortion payments.

Along with Dowd's gang, the "Morgue Boys" in the 73rd, the madness in the "Dirty 30," and the misadventures of the 48th's night shift, numerous other precincts, including the 109th in Queens and the 9th in Greenwich Village, were hit by revelations of police criminality. Yet the New York City's Patrolmen's Benevolent Association spokesperson, Joseph Mancini, insists that: "The New York City Police department is the most closely monitored organization in the world" and that corruption is relatively rare.

However, the Mollen Commission's 1994 final report found that corruption was widespread, well organized, and permitted by the "willful blindness" of Internal Affairs investigators and high level police officials. The Commission's report found that virtually all corruption " . . . involved groups of officers — called 'crews' that protect and assist each other's criminal activities." The "crews" averaged 812 officers, with set rules, group names, and worked in flexible networks, planning and coordinating their criminal raids with the help of department intelligence, communications, and special equipment.

Cocaine & Brotherly Love

A similar pattern of police gangs and brutal armed robbery by cops has emerged in Philadelphia's 39th police district and among an elite highway patrol unit. In the 39th district officers behaved much like their colleagues in New York. Federal prosecutors charge that the officers — some of whom were known to North Philadelphians as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — used their police powers to locate crack houses and drug distribution hubs which could then be raided for cash, cocaine, and weapons. The cocaine was then used to pay informants, setup suspects, bribe witnesses, and buy sexual favors.

So far six officers have been indicted, five have plead guilty and more indictments are expected soon. Over 50 drug convictions have been overturned due to perjured testimony or police-planted evidence. A grand jury is investigating over 100,000 other arrests.

"What's most disturbing about the Philly corruption," says Lynn Washington, legal scholar and editor of the Philadelphia New Observer, " is that the DA knew what the cops were up to, but tolerated their use of planted evidence because it boosted conviction rates." Like many other observers, Washington blames much of the current police criminality on the anti-crime and anti-drug frenzy of the 1980s and 1990s.

"No one from the judges on down wants to look soft on crime, so everybody has turned a blind eye to police misconduct...", says Washington.

The war on drugs and the proliferation of the narcotics trade has also provided police with nationwide opportunities for more lucrative forms of criminality. Today corruption is large scale, proactive, and intimately involved with the narcotics trade. While much police robbery may focus on cocaine and heroin dealers, their terrorism can be quite inclusive. In Philadelphia the police even managed to frame Betty Patterson, a 54-year-old, church-going grandmother, who was recently acquitted.

Same Thing: Different City

Police criminality is not limited to large northeastern metropolitan departments. Throughout the country there is growing evidence of widespread police gangsterism. The following is just a partial survey:

Los Angeles 1990 — seven sheriff's deputies, members of an elite narcotics squad, are found guilty of stealing $1.4 in confiscated cash.

Cleveland 1991 — 30 police officers are among forty seven individuals indicted for extortion, obstruction of justice, narcotics dealing, and gambling.

Gary, Indiana 1991, the entire vice squad is indicted on charges of extortion, dealing narcotics and robbing drug dealers during phony drug raids, as well as one count of murder.

Detroit 1991 — the former police chief, William Hart, and his deputy chief, Kenneth Weiner, are found guilty of embezzling $2.6 million from a special fund for undercover investigations.

Camden, New Jersey, 1991 — Detective Allen R. Schott is arrested and charged with robbing two banks . In 1995 officers in Jersey City, New Jersey are charged with selling themselves 113 impounded cars at discount prices. Newark's chief of police is suspended while under investigation.

New Orleans 1994 — ten officers, from what is ranked as the most brutal police department in the country, are indicted for dealing drugs and guns. One officer is charged with arranging the murder of a woman who filed brutality charges against him. The next year, officer Antoinette Frank is found guilty of robbing a restaurant and murdering three people in the process, one of whom is her own off-duty partner.

Greenpoint, New York — 1994, the entire police department (nine officers in all) is disbanded due to corruption, ineptitude, and widespread drug and alcohol abuse by on-duty officers.

San Diego 1995 — an officer is caught on video and convicted for breaking into and robbing a software firm.

These are just a few abridged examples of police criminality. Civil libertarians and police accountability activist's think these cases are just the tip of the iceberg. "Police corruption and criminality is notoriously hard to prove," say Jon Crew of the San Francisco American Civil Liberties Union. But Crew does point out that, "It is, in fact, quite routine, to see clients who have lost cash and property to the police. Whether things are stolen or just unaccounted for is hard to prove."

Despite the difficulties in proving police criminality, three San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) narcotics officers were recently indicted by a Grand Jury on charges of perjury, soliciting perjury, wrongful arrest, and stealing from suspects, many of whom were not charged with any crime. The pattern is familiar: doors are kicked in and alleged dealers are relieved of their valuables. The Grand Jury indictments do not seem to be isolated incidents.

In another case that has not gone to court, a white professional whose home was raided for methamphetamine and mescaline, lost $3,000 dollars worth of video and computer equipment to a SFPD narcotics squad. A 1995 New Year's Eve raid on an AIDS benefit in San Francisco's SOMA district reveals a similar pattern of missing cash, computers, and video equipment. The victims of that raid — mostly white political activists — are suing and the 21 cops who conducted the raid are being investigated. But as criminal defense attorney Rose Braz points out, "most people are too scared and too poor to press charges when the police rip them off. And most juries and judges think the cops are the only thing between them and chaos."

Z

Christian Parenti is a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics.