Rise of the Warrior Cop

by Radley Balko

  The administration would focus most of these efforts on marijuana, on the theory that (1) marijuana is a “gateway” to harder drugs, and (2) people using cocaine and heroin are already too far gone to bother saving. There was also a strategic advantage to going after pot: successfully targeting and demonizing the least harmful illegal drug would push any talk of decriminalizing the others outside the realm of acceptable debate.

  But if this was going to be a real war, Reagan would need to secure his role as commander in chief. He couldn’t have Congress or rogue bureaucrats going off-message or questioning or holding up his initiatives. Here again, he took a play from Nixon’s playbook. Reagan created a new office—a more czar-ish sort of drug czar. The position would report directly to him and would coordinate and oversee all antidrug efforts throughout the executive branch.

  At the suggestion of billionaire data-processing mogul and future presidential candidate H. Ross Perot, Reagan chose Carlton Turner to be his new, even czar-ier drug czar. Turner was a native Alabaman who, oddly enough, had spent years running the country’s only legal marijuana plot, at the University of Mississippi. That experience with pot gave Turner a convincing air of authority that would become particularly important when he started making patently absurd statements about the drug. Turner had no specialized knowledge of other illicit drugs, but that didn’t matter much at the time. Pot was really all that was important.

  By the time Reagan publicly announced the appointment in June 1982, Turner was already a favorite among the increasingly dogmatic anti-pot parent organizations proliferating in the suburbs. His appointment was also an early indication that the federal government’s new drug war would no longer pay much attention to treating addicts. In previous administrations, the “drug czar” had been a treatment-oriented position. Under Turner, it became an enforcement office.

  Underlying all of this focus on pot was a surge of cultural conservatism into positions of power in the new administration. The late 1960s and early 1970s had seen the emergence of a movement of conservative intellectuals. Periodicals like Commentary, The Public Interest, and occasionally National Review were featuring think pieces from people like Robert Bork, Ernest van den Haag, James Q. Wilson, and James Burnham. Where someone like George Wallace openly appealed to base prejudices, and the Moral Majority might openly cite the Bible as an authority when discussing public policy, the right’s emerging tweed caucus intellectualized the culture wars. They made essentially the same points that Nixon political strategists had made among themselves in memos and behind closed doors, only with more erudition, and more for public consumption. Their general message was that some people are simply “born bad” and there’s just no helping them. Talk about root causes, social intervention, or curing or rehabilitating deviancy was a futile attempt to debate away evil. Rioters, drug pushers, drug addicts, career criminals—these people were beyond redemption. The only proper response to evil was force—and then only to keep the evil from harming the good. These ideas found a home in the Reagan administration, where many of the people who had been advancing them found high-ranking appointments.

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

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

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

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

  A tendency to downplay the permanent moral values has helped make crime the enormous problem that it is today, one that this administration has, as I’ve told you, made one of its top domestic priorities. But it has occurred to me that the root causes of our other major domestic problem, the growth of government and the decay of the economy, can be traced to many of the same sources of the crime problem. This is because the same utopian presumptions about human nature that hinder the swift administration of justice have also helped fuel the expansion of government.3

  Conservatives had always held the somewhat contradictory position that government can’t be trusted in any area of society except when it comes to the power to arrest, detain, imprison, and execute people. But Reagan didn’t dance around the contradiction, he embraced it. He blamed crime on big government—and in the same breath demanded that the government be given significantly more power to fight it. In words dripping with rectitude, he appealed to morality and defined the greatest challenge of the era as the struggle between good and evil. “For all our science and sophistication, for all of our justified pride in intellectual accomplishment, we must never forget the jungle is always there waiting to take us over,” Reagan said. “Only our deep moral values and our strong social institutions can hold back that jungle and restrain the darker impulses of human nature.”4

  THE VERY FIRST CHANGE IN PUBLIC POLICY THAT REAGAN pushed through the Congress was the 1981 Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, a proposed amendment to the Posse Comitatus Act that would carve out a much larger role for the military in the drug war. The White House was particularly eager to use military radar systems to actively search for drug smugglers. Since Nixon’s anticrime push in the early 1970s, the courts had interpreted the Posse Comitatus Act as to allow the military to provide �
�indirect” assistance to federal law enforcement. Generally, that meant allowing the Navy to tip off the Coast Guard when it spotted vessels that fit the profile of those used by drug smugglers. The amended law encouraged the Pentagon to go further and give local, state, and federal police access to military intelligence and research. It also encouraged the opening up of access to military bases and equipment, and explicitly authorized the military to train civilian police in the use of military equipment. The law essentially permitted the military to work with drug cops on all aspects of drug interdiction short of making arrests and conducting searches.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Describing the 1984 operation, the journalist Dan Baum writes, “For a solid month, the clatter of helicopters was never absent from Humboldt County. CAMP roadblocks started hauling whole families out of cars and holding them at gunpoint while searching their vehicles without warrants. CAMP troops . . . went house to house kicking in doors and ransacking homes, again without warrants.”

  In his book The Great Drug War, Arnold Trebach writes that in 1983 and 1984 Ruzzamenti claimed that the entire town of Denny, California, was so hostile to the drug warriors that he’d need “to virtually occupy the area with a small army.” Denny residents Eric Massett and his wife Rebecca Sue told Trebach that when they pulled out of their driveway during a CAMP raid in 1983, there were six men in camouflage pointing rifles at them. They fled into town, where CAMP officials then put up roadblocks to keep everyone in town while they conducted their eradication campaign. When CAMP left, a military convoy drove out of the small village, guns trained on the townspeople. The couple told Trebach that one of them was waving a .45 as the others
chanted, “War on drugs! War on drugs!”8

  But CAMP was just the marijuana eradication program in California. The Reagan administration had begun similar federal-state programs all over the country. In 1984 the federal-state marijuana eradication efforts conducted twenty thousand raids nationally, resulting in the destruction of 13 million plants (many of them wild) and around five thousand arrests. The following year, newly appointed attorney general Ed Meese put his own stamp on the program by ordering the largest armed law enforcement operation in American history. On the morning of August 5, 1985, Meese flew to Harrison, Arkansas, to kick off Operation Delta-9, code for the scientific name (delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol) of the psychoactive chemical in marijuana, more commonly known as THC. The plan was for Meese to take part in the raid of a pot grower in the Ozark National Forrest. Unfortunately, the fifty-four-year-old politician’s plan to cast himself as a heroic drug cop fell short when bad weather got in the way. Heavy rain, fog, and flash flooding reduced Meese’s role to photo-ops of him observing hillside pot growth from a helicopter and, during a press conference, inspecting the catch that other agents had brought back. Operation Delta-9 sent 2,200 drug cops on simultaneous eradication raids in all fifty states over two days. It was mostly for show, of course. Even the most feverish of drug warriors had to know that at best the massive effort would register as little more than a blip in the market for pot.9

  THE SUPREME COURT ALSO DID ITS PART IN THE 1980S TO dismantle civil liberties for the cause of saving the country from drugs. In 1983 the Court heard oral arguments in Illinois v. Gates.10 At issue was whether information gleaned from an anonymous letter sent to police was enough to establish probable cause for a search. Under the existing law and the Exclusionary Rule, the case should have been open and shut. Since a 1969 Court decision, police had had to meet a two-pronged test to determine if information provided by an informant was reliable enough to establish probable cause for a search warrant. They first had to demonstrate to a judge that the informant was credible. Second, they also had to show that there was a factual basis for the informant’s allegations. In Gates, the police had no way of knowing whether the informant was credible. They only had the letter that the informant had sent to the police department.