Two very different (and very depressing) stories that are distinct imprints of drug war carnage
The Alabama Justice Project has obtained documents that reveal a Dothan Police Department’s Internal Affairs investigation was covered up by the district attorney. A group of up to a dozen police officers on a specialized narcotics team were found to have planted drugs and weapons on young black men for years. They were supervised at the time by Lt. Steve Parrish, current Dothan Police Chief, and Sgt. Andy Hughes, current Asst. Director of Homeland Security for the State of Alabama. All of the officers reportedly were members of a Neoconfederate organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center labels “racial extremists.” The group has advocated for blacks to return to Africa, published that the civil rights movement is really a Jewish conspiracy, and that blacks have lower IQ’s. Both Parrish and Hughes held leadership positions in the group and are pictured above holding a confederate battle flag at one of the club’s secret meetings.
The documents shared reveal that the internal affairs investigation was covered up to protect the aforementioned officers’ law enforcement careers and keep them from being criminally prosecuted. Several long term Dothan law enforcement officers, all part of an original group that initiated the investigation, believe the public has a right to know that the Dothan Police Department, and District Attorney Doug Valeska, targeted young black men by planting drugs and weapons on them over a decade. Most of the young men were prosecuted, many sentenced to prison, and some are still in prison. Many of the officers involved were subsequently promoted and are in leadership positions in law enforcement. They hope the mood of the country is one that demands action and that the US Department of Justice will intervene.
As addiction specialists look back on the current heroin addiction crisis — which the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention calls the “worst drug overdose epidemic in [US] history” — most agree that the whole operation started out as the sort of marketing scheme Don Draper might have dreamed up. “[The marketing effort for opioid sales] was a promotional campaign unlike we have ever really seen,” says Dr. Andrew Kolodny, the chief medical officer for the Phoenix House treatment centers and co-founder of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing. “Drug reps were going to family care doctors, and insisting that OxyContin had no real risks — only benefits. What they were selling was the idea that pain was a disease, and not a symptom.”…
What followed was not all that surprising. Many grew addicted to the opioids, and when the prescriptions ran out, they turned to heroin because of its availability and relatively low cost. The Mexican drug cartels saw this trend and promptly began growing their opium plants, which they consciously made purer and less expensive. And those cartels targeted the suburbs, where those introductory OxyContin prescriptions were being filled — and where the money was.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, some 2,000 people died in 2001 from heroin overdose in the U.S. By 2013, that number had climbed to about 8,000. Coinciding with that rise: the number of opioid deaths caused by prescription drugs like OxyContin. About 6,000 deaths from opioid prescription drug overdose in 2001 spiked to roughly 15,000 by 2013. Over two million Americans are currently addicted to opioids, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, and 467,000 are addicted to heroin. What makes those numbers even more startling: Four out of five heroin users reportedly started out on opioids.
The issues and problems discussed in both theses stories are, obviously, about a whole lot more than just the impact of criminal prohibition and intense criminal prosecutions of persons involved with certain controlled substances. Nevertheless, stories like these remind me that the long-run “war on drugs,” like so many other wars, has produced an array of unexpected consequences and collateral damages that must should not be overlooked whether we consider whether and how to continue to use massive criminal justice systems to deal with drug use and abuse.