By Kevin D.
Williamson
Tuesday, August
24, 2021
In 1936, it was Reefer Madness,
Louis Gasnier’s cinematic moral panic about high-school students who descend
into an orgy of rape and murder after being enticed into trying marijuana. The
history of Reefer Madness contains several wonderful bits of
poetic juxtaposition: originally financed by a Christian ministry, the film
became a profitable commodity after it was reworked for the “exploitation”
circuit; it was later embraced by potheads as a kind of unintentional parody,
and it almost certainly is the case that most of the people who have seen Reefer
Madness today are marijuana users or were at one point; best of all,
the film’s scheming drug pusher is played by Carleton Young, who is all but
forgotten except for his immortal turn as the newspaper editor in The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in which his most famous line is effectively
the motto of the various propaganda offices serving in the so-called War on
Drugs: When the legend and the facts are at odds, “Print the legend.”
The spirit of Reefer Madness lived
on and found new energy in Reagan-era anti-drug campaigns, from “Just Say No”
to “This Is Your Brain on Drugs,” in which an egg-frying John Roselius gave a stirring performance much
more memorable than his bit parts in Space Jam and Con
Air. There were endless DARE lectures intended to leave the children of the
Cold War “scared straight,” along with tall tales of the PCP Superman — whose
sudden transformation, physical power, and ungovernable rage mark him as part
of the long literary tradition that runs through Robert Louis Stevenson’s Mr.
Hyde to Stan Lee’s Incredible Hulk — the myth of the “contact high,” legends
about “flashbacks,” and a thousand baseless ghost stories about otherwise happy and
healthy young people who, exposed to some drug or another, suddenly decide they can fly and
fling themselves off balconies to their deaths.
(We even had that story in Lubbock, Texas,
where you’d be damned hard-pressed to find a balcony high enough to kill
yourself jumping off.)
In the 19th century, we had the Yellow
Peril — Chinese immigrants and their opium. In our time, we have the . . . the
other Yellow Peril, or the Yellow-and-Brown Peril: fentanyl, the legend of
which combines old-fashioned Sinophobia with Trump-era Mexicanophobia. Of
course fentanyl is a
real thing. So are illicit Chinese drug
factories and Mexican
cartels. In 2020, nearly 70,000 Americans died of
opioid overdoses, mostly from fentanyl, a figure that was up sharply from the
50,000 opioid overdoses in 2019. Nearly 1
million Americans have died from drug overdoses of all kinds since 1999. (For comparison, alcohol-related deaths in the same time frame amount
to about two-and-a-half times that number.) But as we have seen with everything
from homelessness to violent crime, interested parties will reliably exaggerate
things that are real problems, and, at times, will simply fabricate stories
about them. For example, it is true that there are violent racists in the
world, and it is also true that practically every campus hate-crime incident
you’ve ever heard about is a hoax.
Which brings us to beautiful San Diego.
In early August, San Diego’s sheriff’s
department put out a video purporting to show a trainee overdosing on fentanyl
— and nearly losing his life — after merely being exposed to the stuff while
processing evidence after an arrest. The deputy, David Faiivae, falls to the
ground in a catatonic state after encountering a white powder that the
sheriff’s office later identified as containing fentanyl. The sheriff’s office
put out one of those now-familiar, po-faced propaganda videos, with Sheriff
Bill Gore intoning seriously about the dangers his men face over corny
background music and the usual heroic-cop posturing. The “This Is Your Brain on
Drugs” moment comes when the deputy declares: “I’m Deputy David Faiivae, and I
almost died of a fentanyl overdose.”
Except, he didn’t. Almost certainly.
It is physically impossible to overdose on
fentanyl from the kind of exposure Deputy Faiivae experienced while being
recorded on body-cam video. He was wearing gloves and long sleeves while handing
bagged quantities of drugs. Even if he weren’t wearing gloves, he still
wouldn’t have overdosed that way: Fentanyl cannot be absorbed through the skin
in any significant quantity without some solvent, but even when such a solvent
is present, as with the fentanyl patches that are given to some patients for
pain, it would be practically impossible to overdose from brief accidental
exposure. The same is true of inhalation of airborne particles: A study of
workers in legal fentanyl factories found that at the highest concentrations
found in those facilities, they would have to take off their protective gear
and spend hours standing in a little haboob of opioid particles before even
absorbing a clinical dose of the stuff, much less a life-threatening overdose.
The charitable explanation of what
happened with Deputy Faiivae is that it was a mistake. The less charitable
explanation is that it was a hoax.
The case for being charitable is not very
strong here.
Among other things, the sheriff’s
department did not bother to collect a sample from Deputy Faiivae for
toxicological examination — after an episode that allegedly had him at death’s
door. Think on that: A law-enforcement officer was, if this story is to be
believed, almost killed in the line of duty, and the law-enforcement agency for
which he works neglected to perform the most elementary investigation. The guy
was dosed with Naloxone, a powerful drug used to counteract heroin overdoses.
But the rest of the overdose protocol — breathing support, for instance — was
completely ignored.
Why? Most likely, because he was not
having an overdose.
Never mind the criminal question: Surely
the insurance office would be interested in what happened —
and it was only a few years ago that a San Diego
sheriff’s deputy was charged with felony fraud for misrepresenting his physical condition for insurance purposes.
No physician ever diagnosed Deputy Faiivae
with a drug overdose — the “diagnosis” came from the sheriff. Deputy Faiivae
did not display any of the typical symptoms of a fentanyl overdose. Add all of
that to the fact that he was never in a position to experience a fentanyl
overdose to begin with, and it is difficult to credit the good faith of the
sheriff’s department here.
So, what the hell is going on?
“There is a public-relations motive,” says
Sheila P. Vakharia, deputy director for research and academic engagement at the
Drug Policy Alliance. “If we see police out there putting themselves at risk,
courageously exposing themselves to scary chemicals and drugs, then we think,
‘Obviously, these are good people doing good work.’ It motivates and sustains a
commitment to the drug war. It gets people scared and angry, and this mobilizes
people to support expanding police budgets, to make sure there are cops on the
street, to spend any amount of money — whatever is needed to find these drugs
and the people selling them and get them off the street. It mobilizes people’s
emotions to get them to act in ways that are aligned with their agenda.”
It is a mistake to take police or
prosecutors at their word in
any matter — but especially in this one, where the record of fabrication and
misinformation is so long and shameful. But the underlying political dynamic
should be obvious enough: I’ve never met someone involved in issue advocacy who
has said that the problem they were working on has been solved — they almost
always say the opposite, that thus-and-such a problem has never been worse,
that immediate action and massive spending are needed, etc.
You’ll never hear Randi Weingarten say
that we are spending enough on schools, you’ll almost never hear a secretary of
defense or a flag officer say that the military budget is too big and bloated,
and you’ll rarely if ever hear a cop or a prosecutor say that the drug
situation is anything other than a crisis and the worst that it ever has been.
The same pattern holds true in politics: Every election, you’ll hear that the
Other Party is the most dangerous it has ever been, that we are one election
away from sliding into communism or fascism or whatever.
And it is all — all of it — bull.
It is lies and nonsense and self-serving
dishonesty. Police departments will lie to you for the same reason a
presidential campaign will lie to you: for money, power, and status. We should
be clear-eyed about this. Our police departments and prosecutors’ offices are
rife with misbehavior, some of it criminal, with abuses of power ranging
from dangerous
buffoonery to outright
corruption. Conservatives tend to understand this
easily when it comes to government schools or the IRS but are instinctively
protective of police and military agencies. But a bureaucracy is a bureaucracy
is a bureaucracy, and the same dynamics of institutional self-interest operate
in all of them to some degree. On top of the usual interest in salaries,
benefits, and pensions, police departments suffer from a terrible addiction:
Police are hooked on being thought of as heroes. And some of them are heroes.
But most of them are, most of the
time, something
closer to tax-collectors. There
isn’t anything inherently dishonorable in that. There’s a job that has to be
done. It is what it is.
But that job has to be done honestly and
competently, with high degrees of transparency and accountability.
There is reason to doubt that that is what
is happening in San Diego.
This “overdose” drama requires independent
investigation as a potential criminal matter. If the San Diego sheriff’s
department staged this episode — which appears to be at least possible if not
likely — then losing their jobs is the least Sheriff Gore, Deputy Faiivae, et
al. should face. An open society cannot tolerate police who stage crimes or
fake on-the-job medical traumas for public-relations purposes.
We can be confident that an overdose is
not what happened in this case.
So, what did happen?
In Other News . .
.
On the subject of drugs and drug policy, I
was not persuaded by Aron Ravin’s piece, “Libertarians Were Wrong about
Marijuana Legalization.”
Part of my criticism is alluded to above —
taking police and prosecutors at their word that things are, invariably, worse
than they have ever been — but part of it is that I don’t think Ravin quite
gets what libertarians actually think about marijuana-legalization projects
such as the one in Colorado.
There are, of course, utopians and ideologues,
who insist that legalization is all upside and no downside, that it will end
criminal cartels and produce enough tax revenue to provide free false teeth to
every needy mouth from sea to shining sea. But that does not capture the
fullness of opinion or analysis. As I argued in a 2015 National Review cover story on the Colorado project, legalization will always be a mixed bag, and partial legalization will
be a very mixed bag in that the “presence of black markets in prohibition
states ensures the presence of black markets and gray markets in legalization
states.” Which, as Ravin notes, is something that has come to pass.
A useful point of comparison is
Nevada’s limited
legalization of prostitution. By most accounts, the sex business as practiced in Nevada’s legal
brothels is better and safer for both sellers and buyers than is the criminal
sex business on the streets, in casino bars, etc. But the legal-prostitution
business in Nevada is very limited and very highly regulated, and, hence, much
more expensive and less easily accessible than is illegal prostitution. It has
had very little discernable effect on street-level prostitution in Las Vegas
(prostitution is not legal in Las Vegas, in spite of what some poorly informed
tourists believe) or throughout the rest of the state. From that point of view,
Colorado is sort of Pahrump writ large: an improvement for those who buy and
sell marijuana on the legal market, but not large enough to overcome the
economic forces of the black market — or, more precisely, of the various black
markets.
As many libertarian-leaning critics predicted,
organized-crime penetration remains an issue in the upstream supply chain,
where it is relatively easy to divert a few hundred pounds of legally grown
marijuana here and there for very profitable black-market profit margins, and
legalization creates special problems in nearby prohibition states. Those
idiots getting arrested bringing Colorado marijuana into Nebraska are not
getting caught with amounts that can legally be purchased in Colorado, but
often with hundreds of pounds or more.
This is no surprise: The presence of Las
Vegas and a thousand smaller gambling destinations has not eliminated illegal
gambling in the United States. It hasn’t even eliminated illegal gambling in
Las Vegas. There remain black markets in alcohol, tobacco, and other legal products,
driven in part by taxes and regulations. There are licensed gun dealers and
illegal gun traffickers, licensed bus operators and outlaw bus operators. (And,
no surprise, there is some real overlap
between the unlicensed gun merchants and the unlicensed bus outfits.) We should expect that there will always be illegal marijuana sales —
for example, sales to minors.
It took decades to break the grip of
organized crime on Las Vegas. It will take some time for corporate producers to
squeeze the cartels out of the marijuana market — and it is possible that they
will never squeeze illegal producers out entirely, because it is relatively
easy to grow marijuana. Note that fentanyl is produced both legally for medical
purposes and illegally for recreation and profit. The question is not whether
legalization delivers some utopian transformation of unhappy social realities —
it won’t, and most libertarian critics understand that — but whether the best
harm-reduction strategy in the case of marijuana is sticking a gun in
somebody’s face with a hearty “Just Say
No!”
Our experience with that strategy so far
suggests very strongly that it is not the most reliable one, and that it brings
along with it some fairly terrible unintended consequences, on display in San
Diego and elsewhere.
