Pete A. Nicholson

Friday, June 4, 2010

40 Years of The War On Drugs

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South Bronx, early 1970s

A few years ago, I began editing and rewriting the autobiography of a man named Cheech Marrero. The project just fell into my lap; I had never met Cheech before a mutual friend handed me the unwieldy collection of interviews I was asked to turn into his life story.

Cheech, a Puerto Rican New Yorker who lived most of his later life in California, had tried to write his story a number of times, mostly because people who knew parts of it told him he had to. For Cheech, though, mustering the same enthusiasm was always difficult; as I would discover as the project went on, he was possessed of a genuine and deep humility that made the process of trawling through the details of his life uncomfortable for him.

Cheech died last year, after a short battle with liver cancer. He was 75. His story, which will hopefully be published later this year, was full of remarkable battles. He was twice jailed for crimes he didn’t commit, the first time when he was 15; in his second stint, facing life, he taught himself law, tracked down the person who committed the crime he was accused of, and got himself released.

At the end of his second stint inside, Cheech underwent training in addiction therapy. When he got out, he returned to the Hunts Point area in the South Bronx, where he had grown up, and put these new skills to use, working tirelessly to improve the desperate situation of the community’s residents.

At the time, drug addiction and gang violence were rife throughout the South Bronx; Cheech said that the average life expectancy for most kids was eighteen or nineteen. Puerto Ricans in the area had the highest rates of drug addiction anywhere in the world.

‘The population density of the Southeast Bronx — 500,000 people crammed into 5 sq. mi. — is among the nation’s highest,’ a Time article from 1972 read.

‘Housing, health care, employment and education are woefully substandard. Fifty percent of the children under six have never been immunized against polio. Forty percent of the area’s families are on welfare. More than 10% of residents between 15 and 44 are heroin addicts. Says one of Mayor John Lindsay’s minority specialists: “The Puerto Rican experience in New York has been a total disaster.”’

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South Bronx, 1980

The battle to turn things around, Cheech and his associates found, needed to be fought on two fronts: they needed to go after the corrupt politicians who were stealing or misusing all the funds meant for the area, and they needed to stop the supply of drugs coming into the community.

The South Bronx streets were flooded with amphetamines, which Cheech and his associates soon traced back to a number of major pharmaceutical companies. These companies, they found, were basically giving drugs away: procuring them was about as hard as ordering a pizza.

One company, Cheech said, ‘was producing over 140 million barbiturates and amphetamines a month… Any one of us with nothing more then a resale number could, by simply calling an 800 number, order and receive these drugs very cheaply, reselling them on the streets at 10 or more times their cost.’

Cheech and his associates’ first plan of attack was to appeal to the companies themselves. They called each of the companies and told them what was happening. Each time, they were told that their concerns would be taken seriously, and that someone would get back to them. No one ever did.

The next step was to raise their concerns with the Narcotics Commission, who proved similarly unhelpful. Realising they had to change the game, Cheech and co. started contacting producers and anchormen from major TV news shows. A number of networks showed interest in running an exposé on the pharma companies. Within a week, Cheech was informed that funding for the rehabilitation programs he and his organisation had set up — the only programs of their kind in America at the time — was being ‘reviewed,’ and was now threatened.

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141st St, May 1977

Shortly after, the TV stations pulled out, citing the need for documentation that Cheech and his colleagues had already amply provided. ‘We didn’t understand fully what was happening until we were told,’ Cheech said. ‘One of the executives at the New York State Narcotics Commission told us, in no uncertain terms, that if we wanted to continue to be funded, we had to back off.’

After a long fight, and some wonderfully creative acts of civil disobedience, Cheech and co. won the fight to retain their funding. (They also found out who was stealing the area’s sorely needed public funds, tracking down and running out of town a powerful and thoroughly corrupt community organiser who, in addition to ripping off millions of dollars in taxpayers’ money, had also put a hit out on Cheech and two of his colleagues.)

For all their success, however, they could do nothing to change the complete impunity enjoyed by the pharmaceutical companies. ‘We knew that the drug companies were the biggest multi-billion-dollar drug pushers in the world,’ Cheech said. ‘According to our research, these drug companies were spending somewhere between twelve and twenty million dollars to advertise and market a new drug.’ At the same time, the companies ‘contributed almost nothing towards helping drug abuse prevention and treatment.’

I was reminded of Cheech’s fight this week when I came across this remarkable Vanguard report on the rampant prescription drug abuse and trafficking in Florida. (It’s 45 mins long, but entirely worth it.)

In 2008, the number of prescription-drug-related deaths in Florida rose to 3750 — more than 10 a day. The Vanguard report shows drug addicts and dealers travelling from all over America to Florida to shop at one of the state’s ubiquitous ‘Pain Clinics’, which freely dispense, often in massive quantities, some of the most potent narcotics known to man, including most addicts’ drug of choice: Oxycodone.

The Florida county most affected by prescription drug abuse, Broward County, has more of these ‘Pain Clinics’ (or Pill Mills, as they’ve come to be known) than they do burger franchises (115 to 70). A new kind of tourism is developing in the area, as addicts and pushers from all over the country come to south Florida to stock up.

The report follows a number of police and drug enforcement agents, who spend their days tracking and arresting junkies for dealing ‘Oxy’, as it’s known. These junkies cop heavy bids for their trouble, while the companies responsible for producing the drugs, as ever, don’t even warrant a mention, even in this otherwise excellent report. The problem is put down to the lack of prescription drug regulations in Florida, and the low lifes and quacks who have found easy ways to exploit this. The bigger problem, though — the galloping medicalisation of society, big pharma’s ruthless exploitation of every available market — is only touched on once, and even then with an air of complete resignation.

In a telling scene, a Kentucky sheriff, sick of the carnage prescription drug abuse has wrought in his county, tells of his repeated calls to the powers that be — ‘the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency], pharmacy boards, medical boards’ — asking them to do something about the problem. ‘Basically what they told me,’ the sheriff said, ‘in a nice way, is: “Look, you’re a hick sheriff from the hills of Kentucky. Don’t be trying to tell us how to do our job.”’

For the sheriff, as for Cheech four decades earlier, working out just what that ‘job’ is exactly is an almost impossible task. Which is part of the reason why, forty years after Nixon declared The War On Drugs, his use of metaphor seems more apt than ever: in Florida, as in many places around the world, an interminable, muddy battle rages on, moved by unseen hands, with victory, by any definition, little more than a sick joke.


Photos, from top: victortlb, Camilo Jose Vergara

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