Stephen Downing was a member of the Los Angeles Police Department during the birth of the War on Drugs, but it only took a brief instant for his mind to be forever changed about it’s merit. One moment in particular stands out when the nation’s misguided drug policy became painfully evident to Downing. It was 1973, and an undercover sting operation resulted in Detective Gerald Sawyer being shot and killed.
Downing spent more than 20 years in Law enforcement, including time leading a drug task force that partnered with the DEA. He retired as deputy chief of the drug task force that partnered with the DEA, and is now a spokesman for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
Marijuana Venture: What’s been the reaction from fellow law enforcement personnel that you’ve taken this stance against prohibition of drugs? Where do a lot of the law enforcement personnel you’re connected with stand on the subject?
Stephen Downing: It’s varied and it goes across the board. I find that the guys I knew that I considered to be real thinkers, independent thinkers, see the logic of it. Many, of course, who have retired have joined ranks with it or at least supported it philosophically. Those who agree with it inside (law enforcement) will quietly say to you that they’re supportive, but it’s still a situation where it’s a career killer if you come out too strongly for it.
I’ve had a lot of them say it would be insane for me to come out strongly supporting ending the War on Drugs, especially these days where there is so much money that goes straight into law enforcement coffers, and basically it’s money that they can spend in a pretty free way. A lot of chiefs and sheriffs that are hardcore prohibitionists, they like that money. And prosecutors like that money, and city councils like that money. As you know, we found out that a lot of cities depend on asset seizure money and COPS Grants to supplement their budgets. I believe that if they didn’t have that money, they would be forced to take a hard look at the value of their resources in devoting so many resources to narcotic enforcement.
An acquaintance of mine did a study for the DPA (Drug Policy Alliance) recently that shows the asset seizure practices of many law enforcement agencies in California. Some of these smaller agencies are dragging down millions more than the largest agencies, and what that tells you is that they’re devoting significant resources to asset seizure. … I know in some police departments, the chief will say ‘I want $10 million in my budget this year,’ and the city manager will come back and say, ‘Okay, you’ve got the $10 million, but you’ve got to earn a million of it.’
What that means is that the chief has to take resources that should be devoted to community policing, property crimes, crimes against person, and devote them to asset seizures. As we know, in over 80% of the cases with asset seizures, a criminal filing is never made, so they’re just out after the money. It’s a very, very corrupting process.
The Drug War in general is a very, very corrupting process for local law enforcement. The Fourth Amendment has been shredded by police officers.
Make enforcement of street-level drugs the lowest priority.
Make your highest priority interaction with the community to leverage community support for property crimes and crimes against person. Most of this always goes on in minority communities. Black people go to jail four times more often than white people for drugs. That’s because the focus is on minority communities.
If government regulated all drugs, instead of the cartels and the gangs, we wouldn’t have to be worrying about street corner drug sales. If we were health-centric, rather than criminal justice-centric, people with drug problems — addiction and family problems associated with drugs — they could voluntarily go and get help.
I just read in the paper, the chief of police in a small town somewhere back east, he’s having a little rash of overdose deaths. The dirty little secret in policing is that every time there’s a major drug raid in the community, the immediate aftermath is a spike in violent crime, because the void is being filled by other drug dealers, and a spike in overdose deaths, because the addicts or the users of those drugs have to adjust to a new strength, so to speak, because nobody knows for sure what they’re getting.
This chief of police back east put out an announcement to all addicts. He said, ‘If you come in and turn in your drugs and voluntarily enter a treatment program, I’ll leave you alone. You will not be prosecuted.’ He got 17 replies. Seventeen people came in and did that, three times more than the drug overdose deaths that started the program. And look what it means to the police. They’re not processing dope in their lab for 17 people. They’re not booking them and putting them in the criminal justice system. We’re not having to pay $50,000 a year to incarcerate them. If they’re going off to a health treatment program, if it’s tax supported, which it probably is in that case, it costs a fraction of what incarceration costs.
So what have we gained? We’ve gained quite a bit from that approach.
MV: Was there a defining moment that shifted the way you approached this issue?
Downing: My opinion grew and grew as I woke up to looking at narcotic enforcement in a totally different light. When I was commander, we had a rule that any time we had an undercover buy of $100,000 cash or more, we supervised from the air. We had an undercover buy (in 1973) and the crooks were really more interested in a rip-off, so when the officer flashed the money, rather than the crook coming up with the dope, he brought out a gun and basically executed the officer and took the money.
We had people in rooms on all sides. Of course the guy was caught and he was prosecuted for murder, but the jury found him not guilty. There was outrage. The judge was outraged, the DEA was outraged, the police were outraged, I was outraged. The crooks defended themselves by thinking they were dealing with another crook who was armed. So they put up a self-defense (argument) and basically what’s in the mind of the jurors is that these are two thugs looking at each other. Nobody knew they were killing a policeman. Even though what they were doing was against the law, as far as first-degree murder, the jury didn’t buy it.
And so now I’m looking at a young police officer that had a few years on the job and we put him on narcotics and then we made him an undercover cop, and all that’s very sexy for a guy, but he had two kids and a wife.
So I’m saying, what in the world are we accomplishing by using law enforcement resources this way and seeing our young people killed for some goddamn dope? A kilo of dope when it’s coming into this country by the warehouse full. Pardon my expression, but we’re shoving sh*t against the tide.
In those days, when we first started, we would do a big show-and-tell for the media when we’d seize a couple kilos, a few thousand dollars and a couple handguns. Now, the show-and-tells are warehouses full, military-level weapons they’re seizing and they’re seizing millions of dollars. We have not made a dent in 40 years. We keep doing the same thing, and it’s stupid. It’s a waste of money.
We’ve spent over a trillion dollars in the last 40 years enforcing this insane thing, and we’ve incarcerated more Americans than any civilized country of the world. We are 5% of the world’s population and we have 25% of the world’s prisoners. That doesn’t say much for a county that’s based on individual freedom, now does it?
It’s absolutely nuts.
Since we’ve started this Drug War, over half the women in prison are here for drugs. … The statistics just blow your mind. I spent 12 of my 20 years working in South Central Los Angeles. I saw what this Drug War is doing. First, we arrest somebody for a drug offense. If he’s a father, we’re taking a father out of the home. Then when he’s done his sentence … he comes out with the drug offender’s scarlet letter and he can’t get work. If the family is in public housing, he can’t go back in the home. If the mother gets arrested, or anything happens in that context, the children go to foster care. Most of foster care is mercenary oriented, and so a lot of these kids run away from foster care. Now they’re dealing dope on the corners to survive and it’s just a vicious, dark circle that tears the fabric of these communities apart.
I think we’re starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel. We’re doing things like ending mandatory minimum sentencing. I don’t care what subject you’re talking about, if you look real hard, the spigot for all of these harms is the Drug War. Look at marijuana. Marijuana is almost half of the cartel and gangs’ income. If we finally get some good regulation and control by the government, you take away half of their business and they go under.
Marijuana growers in Mexico are starting to switch to heroin. So some bad heroin is coming in and people start overdosing from heroin. The circle on that is that in this country, a bunch of OxyContin users start overdosing, because they’re getting more than they should get from the doctors. So the DEA cracks down on the doctors. And the doctors cut off their patients, so the patients go to the street looking for heroin (to replace the OxyContin).
It’s nuts the way our system is working.
MV: Where do you stand on the more dangerous drugs like heroin, crack and meth that have a higher potential for addiction?
Downing: LEAP believes that zero tolerance doesn’t work. We have the Controlled Substances Act, which has X number of schedules, I think it’s 10 or 12 schedules. Everything except Schedule I is regulated and controlled. Schedule I has marijuana and heroin, and a couple others. Even methamphetamine isn’t a prohibited drug. There’s a use for it.
We are spending this trillion dollars on marijuana and heroin, basically. And we’re spending most of the money at the street level. Most of the people we’re putting in jail have a drug abuse problem. There are drug abusers that sell drugs to support their habit. … We’ve created a criminal justice problem by outlawing drugs because when we outlaw them totally, we create a black market, and the black market has no way to settle disputes — they can’t go to court. The only way they can settle their disputes is through violence. And that’s why we have this violence emanating from the black market.
How do you eliminate the black market? You take over the regulation and control of drugs. You make the taxation reasonable. You provide the kind of education we’ve provided for tobacco, for example. Look at what we’ve done in this country with tobacco. In the last 10 years we’ve reduced tobacco use, I think, by over 50%. How? Through reasonable education.
The only education we have for drugs today is the D.A.R.E. program. And all the D.A.R.E. program does is go and scare people. Then they find out there’s nothing to be scared of, and they thumb their nose at it. We just had a study come out that in all the states that have legalized marijuana or medical marijuana, teen drug use has gone down. There hasn’t been an increase in medical marijuana use. Why do we ignore these things? Why don’t we do a better job of education of all drugs?
We started the prohibition of alcohol to save people from alcohol. Alcoholism today is probably the number one health problem. It’s probably the number one source of violence in this country. And yet, we decided as a country that the prohibition of alcohol was more harmful to society and more corrupting to our institutions than its regulation and control. In nine years we figured that out. For other drugs, it’s been 40 years.
After alcohol prohibition, there’s a guy by the name of Harry Anslinger, who was going to be out of a job, and he hunted around and he found marijuana and off we went.
He enlisted DuPont and Rockefeller and Hearst and they created this whole thing. Marijuana was really only outlawed because Henry Ford was going to build his Ford out of hemp. You can’t get high on hemp. Henry Ford was going to run those engines on hemp ethanol … but that got in the way of the petroleum industry. Rockefeller had his oil, and DuPont had his nylon and Hearst had his newspaper chain and millions of acres of trees that make newspaper. All of that was in competition with hemp.
The might of these guys was to get hemp outlawed, along with marijuana, and it had no purpose. During World War II, we let them grow hemp again, because they needed it for the war effort for textiles.
MV: Some police chiefs and sheriffs have opposed marijuana legalization because they say it will actually require more law enforcement resources. What is your reaction to that stance?
Downing: First of all, they don’t know what they’re talking about. They have no studies to support those kinds of statements. That kind of response is the usual response. We’ve got to reach for some kind of scare tactic to do something.
In the context of marijuana, we are creating an industry. A brand new industry that should be regulated and controlled in many ways, just like we’ve regulated and controlled alcohol, like wine, since the end of prohibition.
The various states (that have legalized marijuana) are going to be crucibles of experimentation, to see what the best approaches are. The people that are using marijuana right now are having to deal with the black market, which is the catalyst to all of these black market problems and all of the violence that is associated with it. Maybe, depending on how a city council reacts when recreational marijuana comes in, if they give the job to the police of permit regulation and stuff like that, then maybe the police are going to need a couple guys. But they’re going to have millions and millions of dollars of tax income to offset that.
I would hope they wouldn’t use the police for that. I would hope they’d use their regular business regulation processes for permitting and site inspections, and look at these operations as another business in your community that’s contributing to the economic strength of your community.
So for a police officer to say that (marijuana legalization will require more resources), I just would have to say, chief to chief, he’s stupid and he hasn’t thought through it. It’s just a knee-jerk, bullsh*t reaction by using the same tactics they’ve used for 40 years. They want to scare the public because they want to hang onto the status quo, because the status quo is feeding their institution, money, personnel, allowing them to build bureaucracies. If you have a narcotics squad of a hundred people and you say quit making marijuana arrests, how much time are you saving in terms of street time, personnel time?
There’s a study out of New York where they show the millions and millions of man hours devoted to marijuana enforcement. If you eliminate that and you get regulation controlled by government, you’re not going to be spending the police resources, the court resources and you’re not going to be using prison resources. Those are millions and millions of dollars. I think we’ve already seen that in Colorado. I think the police resources haven’t been increased at all, and crime is down.
MV: With California being such a big focal point for the cannabis industry, how do you see the next couple years shaking out in terms of the next step of legalization?
Downing: I truly see that we have passed the tipping point. California has had legalized medical marijuana for 20 years, and the legislation was so full of holes, it’s been nothing but a litigation nightmare across the state. It’s resulted in a whole lot of corruption. I’m hoping we’ll see something about that coming out of the Legislature this year.
On top of that, there are very, very strong coalitions being built for 2016 for an initiative to legalize, regulate and control recreational marijuana in this state. These coalitions are waking up and realizing they have to be together. They have to realize that their little pet projects might not survive the initiative process, but they’re going to have to get on board anyway. Hopefully, the medical marijuana people won’t be as threatened by it, and the coalitions will put together the right kind of initiative that can be passed and can be another Colorado. They have the Colorado model to look at, they have the Washington model to look at and they have the Oregon model to look at it. With all the mistakes that were made in those, they can clear them up, anticipate them and put together a pretty good initiative. I believe that an initiative will pass in 2016.
And I believe when it passes in 2016, it’s just a matter of time before the entire country falls in.