A Really Good Day

by Ayelet Waldman

  The source, whom I decided to name Lucy after the product she sells, replied that she could supply the number of doses I requested. She said she would deliver the drugs to me at my home. That was unacceptable to me: I won’t even let someone from Craigslist show up here when I’m selling a sofa; I’d never expose my kids to a drug dealer. I suggested we meet up in the hills where I like to hike. Lucy rejected this and insisted on coming to my house. Against my better judgment, I offered a time when I knew I would be home alone and prayed that she’d turn out to be one of those honest, unarmed drug dealers.

  A couple of hours before Lucy was due to arrive, it occurred to me that she wasn’t likely to accept credit cards. And even if she did, I’d rather not give her mine. I ran down to the corner to the ATM.

  I had just pulled a few twenties out of the machine (it’s amazing how cheap LSD is—fifteen dollars a regular-size dose! That’s a buck-fifty per microdose!) when my phone buzzed. Lucy wanted to know if I’d consider buying sixty doses from her. I stopped in the middle of the street and glanced around, suddenly fearful I was being followed. I’ve seen Goodfellas.

  “Why?” I texted back. “That’s far more than I could ever use. One dose lasts a month. Why would I want enough for five years?”

  She replied. “I wouldn’t know how to divide it. It’s liquid.”

  I tapped out a reply. “Just put a few drops into a dark container. Or bring your bottle when you come and drop them into my little blue bot”—

  I stopped typing.

  When I was a federal defender, I had a client, a Mexican woman in her forties, a mother of five, who’d been abandoned by her husband. On a rare night out, she met a man in a bar. He was from Puerto Rico, and she found his accent beguiling. They exchanged phone numbers, and he began calling her, telling her how beautiful she was, how he couldn’t get her out of his mind. My client was a frumpy little woman, with feet swollen from a lifetime of menial labor and thinning strawlike hair dyed the color of raw beef. She said the last time a man had called her beautiful was on her wedding day, when she was sixteen years old.

  The couple didn’t meet in person again; all their conversations happened over the phone. For days he flirted with her, describing the life they’d have together, how he’d be the father her children needed. Then he asked her if she could help him. He wasn’t a drug dealer, he assured her. But he had an opportunity to make a single score, one that would set them up for their life together. Did she know anyone who had access to methamphetamine?

  My client laughed. She was a domestic worker, a mother. She didn’t know anyone who dealt drugs. But surely she knew some who used drugs, he persisted. She lived in East L.A., a center of drug activity. Wasn’t there someone from the neighborhood who could point her in the right direction?

  Day after day the couple would speak on the phone, and he’d beg her to help him find the methamphetamine. He was curiously specific about the quantity of drugs he desired. At least fifty grams, he said. She told him she had no access to drugs, she wouldn’t know whom to ask. Ask your son! he suggested. Tell him to ask around his high school. Surely, he’d be willing to do this small thing for the sake of his mother and his soon-to-be stepfather’s happiness, for the sake of his own future. Tell him to think of the house the family would move into with the money his new stepfather made from the score.

  My client was torn. Not about whether she’d ask her child to search for drugs—that was out of the question. She was a fond and worried mother who hovered over her children, pushing them to complete homework she couldn’t understand so they would get good grades, go to college, and have the kind of life she could not have imagined for herself when she was their age. But she had fallen hard for the lover from Puerto Rico. She wanted him to love her, and she worried that if she didn’t help him he’d stop calling. She would find some, she told him. She would find methamphetamine.

  Weeks passed, and they spoke every day. The calls were always the same. They began with talks of her beauty and his passion, and moved quickly to the drug deal, with the quantity of methamphetamine the man sought always carefully specified. No fewer than fifty grams, my client’s telephone lover would remind her. She would reassure him that she was looking for the methamphetamine. Someday soon she would find a source.

  Meanwhile, she begged her boyfriend to take their relationship to the next level, to meet her in person. He would promise to meet, but not until she had the drugs. Finally, he agreed to take her to dinner, even though she’d as yet been unsuccessful in finding the methamphetamine. The truth, which he didn’t know, was that she had not even bothered to look. She knew no one who had access to drugs, nor did she want to know anyone who did.

  On the evening of their first real date, she opened her door not to her lover, but to a phalanx of DEA agents. The man from Puerto Rico was not her boyfriend; he was an informant. Over the course of many weeks and long conversations about how beautiful she was and how he planned to spend the rest of his life with her, he’d set her up.

  She was arrested and charged with conspiracy to deliver methamphetamine, specifically fifty grams, precisely the amount that would trigger a ten-year mandatory minimum prison sentence.

  In the Criminal Code, the crime of conspiracy does not have as one of its elements the actual commission of the underlying felony; the agreement itself constitutes the crime. It was irrelevant to my client’s case that no actual drugs had been exchanged. By promising to find methamphetamine, she had conspired to traffic. Her sentence would be determined by the quantity of drugs she had agreed to provide.

  The only question that remained for the jury was whether she was entrapped, tricked into conspiring to commit the crime. Central to that question was whether or not my client was predisposed to deal drugs. If she was, then the informant’s trickery was absolutely legal—no harm done. If she wasn’t, then she must be acquitted.

  I had, as you can imagine, a pretty good case, made all the better by what I discovered about the informant’s long and colorful personal and professional history. After being found not guilty by reason of insanity of the attempted murder of his wife, the informant had escaped from a secure psychiatric facility and made his way to Central America, where he ended up in the employ of the CIA. His job with the CIA involved transporting cocaine. The CIA referred him to the DEA, who were even more generous than the spy agency had been. Over the years, the informant, a legally insane attempted murderer, earned hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars. He focused on first-time offenders, setting up one after another. These people inevitably went to jail, most of them for at least ten years. Then, in one of his cases, a large quantity of cash disappeared. The informant denied knowing anything about the lost money, but when his handlers hooked him up to a lie detector, he failed unambiguously. Their response? Not to charge him with a crime, but to move him to a different jurisdiction, where the defense attorneys would have no information about his nefarious past.

  I would have found out nothing about this history but for a mistake in the discovery file the U.S. attorney was required to turn over to me. Though the documents were aggressively redacted, on one page the black pen had slipped, leaving part of a case number visible. It didn’t take me long to tease out the jurisdiction. Half a dozen phone calls later, I had everything I needed to eviscerate the informant on the witness stand. I knew I could convince a jury that his testimony was at best unreliable, at worst criminal perjury.

  When I confronted the assistant U.S. attorney about the man, he just shrugged. Your client is guilty, he said. We have her on tape.

  But the informant! I insisted. He’s a murderer! A perjurer!

  The assistant U.S. attorney was unmoved.

  Furious, I began spreading the word to the community. There’s a man on the street in East L.A. soliciting drugs, I told people. He’s not a buyer or a dealer, but a DEA informant. He’s also easy to recognize amidst the various Latino communities of Los Angeles; he’s got a Puerto Rican accent. Tell everyone you kn
ow.

  Week after week, as I prepared for trial, my client was held in the Metropolitan Detention Center, while her kids struggled to care for themselves, to make it to school on time, the older ones taking responsibility for feeding the younger, working after school to earn money to pay the bills so they wouldn’t be evicted or have the power cut off. And then, one day, I got a phone call from my client’s sister, who lived in San Diego.

  “Your secretary called me,” the sister said.

  “My secretary?”

  “Your secretary says that you’re a government agent. That you don’t really work for my sister, but for the prosecution.”

  “I’m a government employee, true, but I represent your sister. I’m a federal public defender. She’s my client. I do what’s best for her, not for the government.”

  “Your secretary says to fire you. He says he can help me find a better lawyer.”

  My secretary was busily preparing for an elaborate wedding and had no time to talk with my clients’ families about their cases. Moreover, my secretary was a woman.

  “The man who said he was my secretary,” I asked, “did he have a Puerto Rican accent?”

  “Yes.”

  I don’t remember if I said “Fuck” out loud, but chances are good.

  Then my client’s sister said, “I recorded his call on my answering machine. Do you want to hear the tape?”

  What I wanted was for her to get in her car and drive it to me. “Do not speed,” I said. “Do not get in an accident. Do not give the tape to anyone but me. I will be waiting in the street in front of the federal building.” Hoping I don’t get shot by that fucking madman, I thought to myself.

  Two and a half hours later, a battered minivan pulled up to the curb. A sweet-faced young woman, short like my client but not carrying the weight of five pregnancies, peered at me from behind the steering wheel. Wisely, she insisted on seeing my picture ID before she handed me the tape. I ran with it up to the U.S. attorney’s office.

  As he listened to the tape, the AUSA’s sneer curdled.

  “Well?” I said.

  “How did you get this?” he asked me.

  I held his gaze. “Well?” I repeated.

  He threw up his hands. “We’ll dismiss.”

  Twenty years later, as I stared at the text from Lucy, I thought of this informant and his deliberate specificity about the quantity of drugs he wanted my client to produce. I had asked for a few doses, a quantity that I felt comfortable arguing was for personal use, a quantity I felt would limit any penalty to one I was willing to risk in order to preserve my emotional well-being and the stability of my family. But sixty doses? What court would ever believe that a single person intended to use sixty doses? Sixty doses didn’t add up to possession for personal use. Sixty doses added up to intent to distribute.

  I was suddenly certain that Lucy was no friend of a friend of a friend. She was a confidential informant, or maybe just a cop. Remember that scene in Pulp Fiction where Vince (John Travolta) calls Lance the drug dealer (Eric Stoltz)? Realizing that Vince is calling about a girl who has ODed and might die, Stoltz shouts into the phone, “Prank caller! Prank caller!” and slams the phone down. That was me on the street corner.

  A bead of sweat trickling down my forehead. Fingers trembling, I typed, “No thanks. I’m only interested in a small quantity for PERSONAL USE. I wouldn’t know what to do with more than that.”

  I hit “send,” then deleted the text stream from my phone. I would not be buying LSD from Lucy or from anyone else.

  Shaking, I walked home and tried to prepare myself. It mattered not at all that I’d never bought the drug. The crime of conspiracy lies in the agreement, not the action. It wouldn’t take them long. Meditation, it turns out, does little to calm the nerves when one is waiting to be arrested.

  Spoiler alert: I’m still here.

  What I won’t be doing ever again, however, is buying illegal drugs. So I suppose that means the next Microdose Day will be my last.

  Day 27

  Normal Day

  Physical Sensations: None.

  Mood: A little irritable.

  Conflict: Yup.

  Sleep: Better than last night.

  Work: Day off.

  Pain: Minor.

  Today I was doing a fund-raising event for my kid’s school, a Moms’ Sunday Brunch in which each attendee received a copy of my book Bad Mother. As the assembled moms picked at fresh strawberries and scones and drank lukewarm Peet’s coffee, I talked about modern motherhood’s minor calamities and occasional moments of grace. I’ve given this talk hundreds of times; it goes over well. People laugh, maybe they tear up a bit, every once in a rare while they disagree, but it’s always friendly and supportive. That is the message of the book—that as mothers we are far too hard on both ourselves and each other, that we need to cut ourselves and each other a break.

  In a portion of the talk during which I railed against the parental anxiety that has caused us to lock our children in our houses, letting them outside only for playdates and other adult-mediated activities, one of the moms interrupted me. She lived with her family in an affluent and safe part of Berkeley, she said, but she had only just begun to let her thirteen-year-old go on her own to the nearby shopping district. To get there the girl had to cross a busy street, she explained. Mom was very worried that she’d get hit by a car.

  “Exactly!” I said. “That’s exactly what we all do. We are so plagued by unrealistic fears that we treat our preteens like toddlers! We forget that a child of seven, even five, can learn to cross the street safely. We indulge our panic at the expense of their independence.”

  She smiled beatifically. No, she insisted. I misunderstood. She wasn’t confessing to maternal failing but bragging about maternal competence. She was keeping her children safe. What I was advocating was irresponsibility. I might be a Bad Mother, but she certainly wasn’t.

  I wonder what would have happened if she’d learned not only that I am an irresponsible parent who advocates letting thirteen-year-olds cross streets all by themselves, but that I’m also “on drugs”? Was she the type who had Child Protective Services on speed-dial just in case she passed a bunch of kids playing alone outdoors while their lazy mom knocked back Chardonnay (or LSD) in the kitchen?

  I must, however, confront the truth about why I find myself so annoyed by this woman: I am defensive. I am defensive because part of me agrees with what I imagine she would think of me. Part of me feels that what I’m doing is irresponsible. It’s irresponsible for a mother to do a microdose experiment. Not because the experiment itself is risky—I am satisfied with how carefully I approached microdosing, with the research I did and the precautions I took. Moreover, after nearly a month, the only negative things I’ve experienced are a slight increase in insomnia and an occasional irritable mood on Microdose Day, neither of which is worse than anything I regularly suffered before. The experiment is irresponsible not because of the drug itself, but because it is a crime, just like my botched attempt to buy LSD.

  It’s a crime, but it really shouldn’t be.

  Ever since I experienced the War on Drugs firsthand as a public defender, I have been an advocate for drug policy reform. This endless war has led to terrible injustices, far worse ones than the potential prosecution of a middle-class white lady for microdosing with LSD. It has resulted in the incarceration of millions of people, primarily black and brown. It has, as the law professor Michelle Alexander illustrated so beautifully in her revolutionary book, The New Jim Crow, been as effective at the immiseration and oppression of communities of color as segregation ever was. And yet it has failed to achieve even its most basic goals. People still use drugs. In fact, drugs like cocaine and heroin get ever cheaper, proving economically the fruitlessness of interdiction campaigns. When one drug proves harder to make or market, a more dangerous drug takes its place.

  The effects of criminalization reverberate throughout the world. The United States has compelled most co
untries to sign on to international treaties committing them to criminalize the same drugs we do.*1 With well-regulated pharmaceutical companies out of the business of producing certain drugs, the way has been cleared for the proliferation of criminal enterprises, most of which generate the bulk of their profits right here in the States. The illegal drug market is the most profitable commercial enterprise in the world—more profitable than Apple and Walmart. Drugs that cost pennies to produce in developing countries sell for vast sums on the streets of America and Europe, thus crowding out all other products those countries might otherwise have grown or produced.

  Horrific violence has periodically broken out in the United States, with waves of gang- and drug-dealing-related turf wars, but the bulk of drug-trafficking misery has been experienced abroad. Drug cartels have undermined democratic institutions in Latin America, taking over local governments with catastrophic results. In Mexico, for example, narco-traffickers have murdered as many as 120,000 people and caused the disappearance of 25,000 in the last decade alone.

  Given the myriad injustices of mass criminalization and mass incarceration, and given the astonishing financial rewards that have accrued to violent criminal syndicates by our current policy, it’s time to consider a change. In May 2014, Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, a conservative who is the most-cited legal scholar of the last century, published a book review in the New Republic in which he argued for the decriminalization not only of marijuana, but of all drugs, including LSD. Posner argued that decriminalization would alleviate the deplorable conditions in prisons caused by overcrowding:

  The sale and possession of marijuana are en route to being decriminalized; and I am inclined to think that cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, LSD, and the rest of the illegal drugs should be decriminalized as well—though not deregulated. They should be regulated by the Food and Drug Administration for safety, like other drugs, and they should be taxed heavily, like alcohol and cigarettes. Alcohol and cigarettes are “recreational” drugs, too—and quite possibly more destructive of the users than the illegal drugs are, and, in the case of alcohol, also of acquaintances, family members, drivers, and pedestrians. The revenue from a sales tax on marijuana alone would pay for a substantial chunk of the cost of our prison system.*2