Words&Dirt

“The new administration also wanted to do away with the Exclusionary Rule, override Miranda, abolish bail and parole, douse pot farms with herbicides, put far more focus on enforcement and far less on treatment, and, perhaps most radically of all, enlist the military in the war on drugs.

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 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 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 the 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.'”

––Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, by Radley Balko, pg. 141-3

“The best technicians available to the national DAs’ convention in Vegas apparently couldn’t handle it.  Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S. Grant might have triggered up to address his troops during the Siege of Vicksburg.  The voices from up front crackled with a fuzzy, high-pitched urgency, and the delay was just enough to keep the words disconcertingly out of phase with the speaker’s gestures.

‘We must come to terms with the Drug Culture in this country!…country…country….’ These echoes drifted back to the rear in confused waves.  ‘The reefer butt is called a “roach” because it resembles a cockroach…cockroach…cockroach…’

‘What the fuck are these people talking about?’ my attorney whispered.  ‘You’d have to be crazy on acid to think a joint looked like a goddamn cockroach!’

I shrugged.  It was clear that we’d stumbled into a prehistoric gathering.  The voice of a ‘drug expert’ named Bloomquist crackled out of the speakers: ‘…about these flashbacks, the patient never knows; he thinks it’s all over and he gets himself straightened out for six months…and then, darn it, the whole trip comes back on him.’

Gosh darn that fiendish LSD!  Dr. E.R. Bloomquist, MD, was the keynote speaker, one of the big stars of the conference.  He is the author of a paperback book titled Marijuana, which––according to the cover––’tells it like it is.’  (He is also the inventor of the roach/cockroach theory…)

According to the book jacket, he is an ‘Associate Clinical Professor of Surgery (Anesthesiology) at the University of Southern California School of Medicine’…and also ‘a well known authority on the abuse of dangerous drugs.’  Dr. Bloomquist ‘has appeared on national network television panels, has served as a consultant for government agencies, was a member of the Committee on Narcotics Addiction and Alcoholism of the Council on Mental Health of the American Medical Association.’  His wisdom is massively reprinted and distributed, says the publisher.  He is clearly one of the heavies on that circuit of second-rate academic hustlers who get paid anywhere from $500 to $1000 a bit for lecturing to cop-crowds.

Dr. Bloomquist’s book is a compendium of state bullshit.  On page 49 he explains, the ‘four states of being’ in the cannabis society: ‘Cool, Groovy, Hip & Square’––in that descending order.  ‘The square is seldom if ever cool,’ says Bloomquist.  ‘He is “not with it,” that is, he doesn’t know “what’s happening.”  But if he manages to figure it out, he moves up a notch to “hip.”  And if he can bring himself to approve of what’s happening, he becomes “groovy.”  And after that, with much luck and perseverance, he can rise to the rank of “cool.”‘

Bloomquist writes like somebody who once bearded Tim Leary in a campus cocktail lounge and paid for all the drinks.  And it was probably somebody like Leary who told him, with a straight face, that sunglasses are known in the drug culture as ‘tea shades.’

This is the kind of dangerous gibberish that used to be posted, in the form of mimeographed bulletins, in Police Department locker rooms.

Indeed: KNOW YOUR DOPE FIEND.  YOUR LIFE MAY DEPEND ON IT!  You will not be able to see his eyes because of Tea-Shades, but his knuckles will be white from inner tension and his pants will be crusted with semen from constantly jacking off when he can’t find a rape victim.  He will stagger and babble when questioned.  He will not respect your badge.  The Dope Fiend fears nothing.  He will attack, for no reason, with every weapon at his command––including yours.  BEWARE.  Any officer apprehending a suspected marijuana addict should use all necessary force immediately.  One stitch in time (on him) will usually save nine on you.  Good luck.  

The Chief”

––Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, by Hunter S. Thompson, pg. 138-9