Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

  The Anti-Drug Abuse Act 1986 stipulated that defendants would no longer be eligible for bail or parole. Prosecutors would be able to appeal sentences, a right that had previously been reserved for the defence. Congress also made twenty-six crimes, all related to drug sales and distribution, punishable by a mandatory minimum sentence. This proved to be the single most dramatic change ushered in by the anti-drugs legislation of 1986, one that inadvertently sent a generation of black American men to prison. Mandatory minimum sentences had first been passed by Congress for the crime of piracy in 1790. The fifty-eight mandatory minimum sentencing laws passed between then and 1986 are an indicator of the crimes most feared and loathed in their day, from ‘the practise of pharmacy in China’ in 1915, to ‘treason and sedition’ in the McCarthy era, to ‘skyjacking’ in the 1970s. After 1986, anyone found in possession of more than five grams of crack cocaine—even first-time offenders—was sent to prison for at least five years. The same defendant would have to have sold half a kilogram of cocaine powder to receive the same sentence. Bill Clinton’s older brother Roger was sentenced to two years in prison in 1984 for selling cocaine. Had his case come to court after the mandatory minimums for crack- and cocaine-selling were made law, he would have received a ten-year term without parole. Had he sold the same quantity in crack form, he would have been looking at a life sentence.

  There had been a clear need to set a benchmark because until 1986 judges had handed down wildly varying sentences for drug offences, usually according to the judges’ political sympathies. But mandatory minimum sentences effectively took all power of discretion away from the judges. Mitigating factors such as a defendant’s role in the crime, and the likelihood of recidivism were deemed unimportant. All power now rested with the prosecutor, who decided which charge to bring to court. Mandatory minimums were further encouragement for law enforcement agencies’ targeting of the low-level foot soldiers of the cocaine economy instead of the major crime syndicates: less than 2 per cent of federal crack defendants were high-level suppliers of cocaine.39 Thanks to this discrepancy in sentencing, small-time crack dealers regularly go to prison for longer than wholesale suppliers of cocaine powder. This has had a disproportionate impact on black drug sellers, because 88 per cent of those sentenced for crack distribution are black, whereas blacks make up only 27 per cent of those who go to jail for powder cocaine distribution. Mandatory minimums turned small-time drug dealers into lifers.

  ‘I went to Sing Sing, a maximum security prison in upstate New York,’ said Tony Papa, who was convicted on charges of distributing cocaine in the early 1970s. ‘It was a total madhouse. I didn’t know how I was going to survive. But I did, and in time I became a jailhouse attorney. Most of the guys were doing fifteen years to life, and they were either murderers or drug dealers. I thought, “This is crazy. This murderer got the same sentence as me.” I met hundreds and hundreds of people that had been involved in drug activity, but I never met a kingpin or a high-end drug dealer. I just met a lot of pawns, who had been juggling to put food on the table for their families.’

  Former Congressman Daniel Rostenkowski was given an insight into the effects of the mandatory minimum sentences that he had voted for in 1986, when he began a term in federal prison for mail fraud. ‘I asked this young man, “What did you do that was so bad?” “Oh, I transported drugs,” he said. I said, “Why would you do such a thing?” and he said, “Well, I was going to school, and I needed the money.” “OK. And what was the price you sought for moving these drugs?” And he said, “$10,000.” And I said, “What was your sentence?” and he said, “Seventeen years.” And I said “My gosh!” The whole thing is a sham in my opinion. It’s this “get ’em” idea. I was swept along by the rhetoric about getting tough on crime. Few of us had the patience or the courage to point out to the public that there was relatively little that changes in federal laws could do to reduce the violent crime in their neighbourhoods. So we acted, took our low bows and went on to other topics.’40

  In 1993, the United States Sentencing Commission, which administers federal prison sentencing guidelines, tried to get Congress to return to the topic of mandatory minimums, when it proposed reducing the discrepancy between the prison terms given to crack sellers and the terms given to powder cocaine sellers. The Commission argued that crack was not appreciably different to cocaine powder in either its chemical composition or the physical reactions of its users. But for the first time in its history, Congress overrode the Commission’s recommendation. Bill Clinton, who was President at the time, has since admitted his regret at not having done more to end the disparity in sentencing of powder and crack cocaine offenders, and has even said that he would be prepared to spend a significant portion of his life trying to make amends.41 Not until 2007 did the Supreme Court rule that federal judges could impose shorter sentences for crack cocaine offences.42 In an appeal case that came to court that year, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that a fifteen-year jail term given to Derrick Kimbrough, an African-American veteran of the first Gulf War, was acceptable, even though mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines called for Kimbrough to serve between nineteen and twenty-two years behind bars for his role in a crack-dealing operation. In the second case decided by the court, which did not involve cocaine, the justices upheld a sentence of probation for Brian Gall, who was white, for his role in a conspiracy to sell 10,000 ecstasy pills. There are no mandatory minimums for the possession or sale of ecstasy.43

  Even without the system of mandatory minimum sentences, this inconsistency in the way the police and judges treat cocaine and crack cocaine dealers is apparent in the United Kingdom too. Julian de Vere Whiteway-Wilkinson was sent to prison for twelve years in 2004 for running a cocaine dealership from the old Truman’s brewery in east London with three of his friends. Their computer records showed that they spent £7.6 million on cocaine in the course of a year. At their trial, the court heard that Whiteway-Wilkinson came from a prominent Devon family which had made its money in clay mines. Although he part-owned a plane, which he used to fly drugs into the UK, and drove a BMW, his declared earnings for 2002 were just £24,267. One of his partners, Milroy Nadarajah, told the Inland Revenue that he earned just £7,943 that year, despite having bought a £1.2 million house which the prosecution described as ‘palatial’, in front of which he parked his Porsche and his Jeep. Nadarajah owned a record label, and two recording studios where the theme tune for a James Bond film was recorded, set up with financial backing from Warner Brothers. In the house of the third partner, James Long, police found £1,000 in banknotes scattered over the floor; Long was said to find coins vulgar. Outside court, Detective Sergeant Mark Chapman said it was ‘quite extraordinary’ for men from such salubrious backgrounds to have become so deeply involved in the drugs trade.

  Then you have the drug dealers whose involvement in the drugs trade the police do not find ‘quite extraordinary’. In 2006, fourteen members of the ‘Bling Bling’ gang were jailed for smuggling about £50 million worth of cocaine into the UK in just two years.44 The gang’s members were mostly of Guyanese and Caribbean descent, but, as befitting their moniker, they had bases in London, Paris and New York. The gang brought the cocaine into the UK from the Caribbean, with the aid of either an accomplice working for DHL courier services or drug mules on passenger flights. Their mules used specially adapted shampoo or perfume containers and bottles of rum to smuggle the cocaine into Britain. Around three mules would be sent on each assignment; if one was picked up, the gang could still profit from the successful passage of the other two. Then they smuggled tens of thousands of pounds back to the Caribbean. The gang used their profits to fund a lavish lifestyle, buying diamond jewellery, designer cars and clothes, and villas in the Caribbean and West Africa. Police said that they had recovered receipts for goods totalling £450,000. Sixty-five of the gang’s members around the world were imprisoned, including seventeen in the United Kingdom, twenty-five in France, thirteen in Guyana and ten in the United States. Ian �
�Bowfoot’ Dundas-Jones, judged to be the ringleader of the operation, was given a twenty-seven-year sentence and recommended for deportation. Judge Timothy King said the gang was part of a ‘global conspiracy motivated by greed’ that had created ‘untold misery and human degradation’.

  The explosive growth in the number of prisons in the United States is not the result of a campaign against misery and degradation, however, but of a rush to punish the poor. In 1990, the House Armed Services Committee demonstrated some of the vindictiveness that drives the war on drugs when it came up with the idea of shipping convicted drug offenders to the tiny Pacific islands of Medway and Wake. Citing the ‘shortage of space available for convicted drug offenders’, the committee proposed that the islands be turned into drug prisons where inmates could be put to work. ‘There’s not much chance they’re going to get anything but rehabilitated on two small islands like these,’ said Richard Ray, the Democrat Congressman who first floated the idea. ‘They won’t be interrupted by families coming to visit every weekend.’45

  In the early 1970s there were 200,000 Americans in jail. Today there are 1.8 million,46 and another 5 million are either on probation or parole. This makes the American penal system the largest in the world, and indeed, the largest in history.47 Twenty-five per cent of the world’s prisoners are American, even though Americans only make up 5 per cent of the world’s population. Half a million Americans are in prison on drugs-related charges, which exceeds the number of people serving sentences in European prisons for all crimes—and Europe has 90 million more people than the United States. In cities like El Paso, where cocaine trafficking is rife, the proportion of prisoners serving time for drugs offences rises to 70 per cent.48

  The combination of police anti-drug operations focused on the inner city, and long mandatory sentences for those found guilty of crack distribution offences, has ensured that nearly all of the drug prisoners in the state of New York are black or Latino.49 By the millennium, a third of all African-American men in the US were in prison, on probation or parole or under some other form of criminal justice system supervision.50 The proportion of black Americans behind bars is larger than the proportion of black South Africans imprisoned by the apartheid regime in South Africa. In 2008, more black men in their twenties were under the control of the nation’s criminal justice system than the total number in higher education.

  More than half of the United States’ prisons have been built in the last twenty years and the prison system has developed its own peculiar self-perpetuating dynamic as it has grown to become a major employer. One of America’s best-known crack dealers is Kenneth ‘Supreme’ McGriff. McGriff is held in ADX Florence prison in Colorado, a maximum security facility that was opened in 1994, at a cost of $60 million. Although Fremont County already had nine prisons, hundreds attended the ground-breaking. The lure of 900 permanent jobs, in addition to another 1,000 temporary jobs to be had in building the prison, encouraged local residents to set the ball rolling by raising $160,000 to purchase 600 acres for the new facility. ‘Some of those upstate New York towns like Clinton Dannemora are built around the prison,’ Tony Papa told me. ‘You know, the prison came first, then the town. They were built mainly in Republican territories, and you have generations of prison guards in those towns. So they fed their communities by filling the prisons with people from the inner cities. It became their cash cow and politicians used to fight each other to build the next prison. That’s why the laws are very hard to change.’

  Incarceration might satisfy the punitive zeal of American politicians. It certainly provides employment to plenty of their electors. But it does not deter people from using drugs. Doris was a daily cocaine user in Harlem, New York City, for twenty years. ‘I hear stories of people sitting on the bar-stool, with their pinky up in the air, or of how cocaine was glamorous at first but then it changed, but I never had a glamorous drug story. Mine started out in the basement with hard-core junkies. From the age of nineteen to the age of thirty-nine, I was a daily user, shop-lifting, going in and out of detoxes, treatment centres and jail, doing what we call skid bids. If the last one was four months, the judge would say, “this time you’re getting six months!” I’d get out of jail, and go right out and get high again.’

  Nor does incarceration seem likely to deter people from selling drugs. When the breadwinner goes to prison, families are broken up. Single-parent families find it particularly hard to avoid falling into poverty: as bills go unpaid and debts mount, people move house, resulting in less cohesive neighbourhoods.51 Children whose parents are in prison often feel shame, humiliation and a loss of social status. Many of those children begin to act up in school or distrust authority figures, who represent the people who took their parent away.52 The negative consequences of high incarceration rates in some communities may actually lead to increases in crime in those communities as the children of the incarcerated join the next generation of offenders.

  I asked Luis Rodriguez, a former gang member from Los Angeles, about how the mania for incarceration had affected his neighbourhood. ‘The prison system just seems to be a boot on the neck of these poor communities. Drugs continue. You can get drugs anywhere, any time. The law doesn’t stop that. It just puts away a lot of people who shouldn’t be in prison. There’s no rehabilitation, no training, no real education for the most part, so these guys just get trained to become even better at the drug trade. Our tax dollars are just going to the training of more sophisticated criminals!’

  ‘You can get over an addiction, but you’ll never get over a conviction,’ Jack Cole of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition told me. ‘Every time you go for a job, it’s hanging over your head like a big ugly cloud. The only place that wants you is right back in the drug culture, the very group that we say we’re trying to save you from!’ Three and a half million people will be released from prisons in the United States between 2000 and 2010, and an additional 500,000 each year thereafter. Such large-scale releases of prisoners, many of whom are unskilled, some of whom cannot even read and write, is bound to have a negative impact on wages. Wages are already low in deprived urban areas since reform of the welfare system in 1996 severely reduced former felons’ access to welfare money.53 By sustaining poverty, marginalization and neglect, the war on drugs perpetuates the very problems it was supposed to alleviate.

  ‘I joined the Department of Corrections in Florence, Arizona, in 1973,’ Rusty told me. ‘Then I went out and worked the oilfields, but I went back into the system in 1988 to run the narc dog team and the track attack dogs. The dogs were there to try and keep the drugs out of the prison. My mind was good with that—you’ve already made a mistake, you’re in prison, and you’re not allowed those things. Now, we had forty-foot walls, gun towers, every technology known to mankind, but drugs were still the number one problem we had in the joint. If you can’t keep them out of a totally controlled environment, how realistic is it to tell the American people that we can keep them out of the country? That’s straight-up bullshit.’

  Yet that is the fundamental premise of the war on drugs. President Nixon spent $16 million a year on his war on drugs in the early 1970s. In 2007, President George W. Bush’s government spent more than $18 billion fighting the same war.54 Spending on anti-drugs policies increased by a third under the Bush administration, and half of that was spent on domestic law enforcement. Combined expenditure by federal, state and local governments on counter-drugs programmes currently exceeds $30 billion a year, and that doesn’t include the cost of incarcerating drug offenders.55 All told, over the past thirty-five years, the United States has spent approximately $500 billion fighting its war on drugs.56

  The highest cost of the war on drugs, however, is not economic but political. Once out of prison, felons find themselves politically as well as economically marginalized because the United States is the only industrial democracy that denies ex-prisoners the right to vote. In Southern states, as many as 30 per cent of black men are barred from voting. This has ensure
d that arch-conservative candidates have won successive elections in the south. Felony disenfranchisement was the key to George W. Bush’s victory in the presidential elections of 2000, which hinged on a recount of 537 disputed votes in the state of Florida. Two hundred thousand Floridians had been denied the vote that year. Most of them were black, and most of them would in all likelihood have voted for the Democrats’ candidate, Al Gore.57 Had so many Democrats been denied the vote in 1961, J. F. Kennedy would not have been elected President. ‘It’s modern-day slavery,’ Kenneth, a former crack seller from Dothan, Alabama, told me. ‘I don’t care how they cook it, slice it, bake it, sauté or simmer it, that’s what it is.’

  The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 gave the police and the courts licence to prosecute a war on the suppliers of drugs. But it also sidelined doctors and teachers from the making of drug policies and replaced them with ‘drug warrior’ politicians. The mundane job of educating drug users about the risks they incur when they take drugs was deemed to ‘send the wrong message’. The ‘right message’ was the one carried by Parents Against Drugs, whose head, Dr Donald Ian MacDonald, went on to head the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration. MacDonald was a staunch drug warrior with no training in or experience of drug treatment, who was nevertheless made drug tsar in 1987. Like many conservatives of his generation, he saw drug use as a cultural affliction, part of a wider challenge to authority inculcated at Woodstock. This outdated and simplistic explanation of the demand for drugs did little to address problematic drug use while making teenagers with any experience of drugs even more mistrustful of the little drug education they received. Very often, that education extended no further than a repetition of the ‘Just Say No’ mantra.