Editorials concerning the War on Drugs
.
Knowledge is power - to be ignorant
is to be ruled
.
Interview : Colorado Sheriff
Bill Masters
.
http://www.drcnet.org/wol/220.html#billmasters
.
( Jan 18, 2002 )
.
Sheriff Bill Masters
has been the law in San Miguel County, most well-known for the town
of Telluride, since 1980. First serving as a Republican, he switched
to the Libertarian Party and is now the nation's only Libertarian sheriff.In
recent years, Masters began to speak out publicly against the drug war,
criticizing it as ineffective, unjust and inhumane. Now Masters has
written a book, "Drug War Addiction: Notes from the Front Line of America's
#1 Policy Disaster," which would make a great gift idea from drug reformers
to their local Officer Friendly -- if he still be found -- or law enforcement
decision-maker.
.
(The book is available from Accurate Press,
(800) 374-4049, or http://www.accuratepress.net
and soon on Amazon.com.)
.
DRCNet spoke with the sheriff this week.
.
DRCNet: You've been sheriff for 22 years.
What prompted you to write this book now?
.
Sheriff Bill Masters: I've been speaking
my mind on this and other issues for awhile now, even though I bought into
the drug war when I became a cop. I thought it was my duty to enforce
the drug laws. I had a policeman mentality, which is not bad, except
when the laws you're enforcing become oppressive.
.
But I'm basically
a Barry Goldwater-style conservative, and I think people should control
their own bodies. After awhile, I saw that we spend more and more
money and arrest more and more people and have more and more drugs.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that this policy is not
working. People need to look at this rationally and ask if this is
effective. Do we have a healthier society because of drug prohibition?
Drug dealers are certainly wealthy because of it. The reason drugs
have expanded so much is there is a profit to be made in drug dealing.
We need to eliminate that profit motive.
.
At any rate, some libertarian friends of mine
looked at some of my speeches and told me I needed to write a book.
I played around with writing some novels, but kept going back to the abundance
of laws that try to control human behavior. So I tied to write about
libertarian ideas and about the drug war. I passed it around to some
literary critics in the area, and they said no one would ever publish it.
But we got publishers bidding on it. We might even sell a few.
.
DRCNet: What kind of reaction are you
getting from the law enforcement community? What about the feds?
.
Masters: Definitely a mixed bag. A few
sheriffs and others come out and say "Bill, you're absolutely right."
But those are people who are very secure in their positions. They
have strong community support because they are stand-up people. Others
feel they have to be strong drug warriors, they say the community demands
it. But I tell them that maybe they're misjudging their public.
They don't want to hear that, but you have to lie to yourself if you think
you can arrest yourself out of this problem. But I did that for years,
I played the hard guy, I used it to get elected. As for the DEA,
they haven't said anything. They've given me assistance every time
I called them, they haven't given me a hard time, they've acted professionally
around me.
.
DRCNet: Colorado drug laws are still
on the books. You presumably have to enforce those laws. What,
given your views on drug prohibition, do you do differently?
.
Masters:First off, police officers have tremendous
amounts of discretion, and we consciously choose our priorities.
If there's a crime against a person, that's top priority and everything
else stops. Same thing with traffic problems, we take them seriously,
too. But we have to take the drug issue seriously,too; we don't want
people thinking they can come here and be meth heads. About 10% of
our arrests are for drugs.
.
As for raids, I've learned
I was doing a disservice to my community. We've got to be more careful
in the way we go out and apprehend drug users. Cops tend to go after
drug people and execute drug warrants as if they are up against bank robbers,
but more often than not, there aren't any guns. Yet here we were
in full SWAT mode running around with no-knock warrants, endangering innocent
parties in the home, children, roommates. When you look at the number
of police killings, both the number of officers being killed and the number
of people officers are killing have decreased, except when it comes to
drug raids. Innocent people are being killed in drug raids because
the informant is wrong, they hit the wrong house, the cops were too hyped-up
and worried about their own protection. Our entire judicial district
has taken a different stand: Now they are reluctant to give no-knock warrants
because there were too many people killed, too many officers injured.
.
Another example is the roadblocks in neighboring
counties aimed at catching people coming and leaving the Telluride Bluegrass
Festival. I don't do the roadblocks, it's a tactic I don't like using
under any circumstances, except maybe if a desperado was on the loose.
I don't even use checkpoints for drunk driving. I think it's un-American.
And those checkpoints found very few drugs and made a lot of people angry.
But a few years ago, I would have been out doing the same thing.
.
DRCNet: What are the most important
negative impacts of drug prohibition on law enforcement?
.
Masters: Corruption. The corruption
not just of law enforcement but the entire criminal justice system, and
not just in the sense of being bought off, but in that it seems the bottom
line is you treat people differently depending on who they are. If
you're the president's wife and have a drug problem, you get a clinic named
after you. If you're poor or black or Hispanic, you languish in jail.
It goes all the way from who gets stopped, to who gets prosecuted, to who
goes to prison and who goes to rehab. It hasn't really hit the kids
in suburbia or the kids of the rich. That is a tarnish on all of our badges.
Then there is plain old corruption. There are a lot of people addicted
to drug money and some of them are in law enforcement. The whole
damn department in the county next door is involved in a meth ring, and
I see those officers as victims of the system as well. One of them
was a great officer, very friendly, he was busted, he hung himself in jail
last week awaiting transfer to the federal pen. One more victim of
the whole American drug war culture. Yeah, he was a crooked cop,
but he wouldn't have been if we didn't have this system.
.
DRCNet:Do you make a distinction between drug
use and abuse?
.
Masters: Absolutely. One of the
problems with our existing laws is we make no distinction. The laws
portray people who possess any drugs as criminals. But with legal
drugs, such as alcohol, we set limits; we have a system with alcohol that
maintains individual responsibility. That seems more sensible than
making anyone who uses drugs or possesses drugs a criminal.
.
DRCNet: Do you not fear an explosion
of drug use if drugs were more easily available?
.
Masters: I always ask people who say
that "Are you going to start taking them?" People who want drugs
in America can go out and get them right now. This existing situation
is the worst possible, the whole thing is driven underground and it's completely
out of any sort of government or social control. We have to bring
it above ground, away from the criminal element, and have an organized
system to distribute it to adults that we will hold responsible for actions.
That's what we do with alcohol and you don't see guys in trench coats down
at the schoolyard trying to sell alcohol. I think we would have some
people who have no self-control and that would be a problem, but we have
that problem today.
.
DRCNet: What would an ideal drug policy
consist of? Opponents of reform always conjure up images of crack
in vending machines.
.
Masters: No, that's what we have now.
I want to see a regulated system of distribution done through the medical
and pharmacological community for those people -- serious heroin or meth
users -- who need the stuff, and that system needs to offer addicts some
sort of rehabilitation. We've done this before; it worked well in
the 1920s, before the federal government prevented doctors from prescribing
morphine to addicts. Beyond that, marijuana should just be legalized,
except you shouldn't be blowing dope in your car, or consume it in public.
Same as alcohol. We don't allow people to walk around our town drinking
liquor. I don't want my kids exposed to this stuff. That's
why you have bars or your own home. I would concentrate law enforcement
resources on things like driving under the influence, you have to keep
that aspect of it. You can't be harming others.
.
Go
back to the Cult of the 55 Chevy web Page