TEDxMileHigh 2022

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What would the police do without drugs?

This is something I find myself wondering a lot after covering drug policy as a journalist for the last handful of years. What would the police even do without drugs?? Like, what would they do all day, how would they occupy their time? 

And this is an important question – because in the years since George Floyd’s murder, a growing number of Americans are demanding police reform. But where do we start – there’s so many possible solutions, is it body cameras, racial bias training, better hiring, more oversight? Yes. But all of that takes a loooooong time to truly make an impact.

I do believe there’s an approach that could save lives in the here and now, a sort of big, red button I am suggesting we push: 

It’s time to end the War on Drugs. 

NOT because Americans wanna do more drugs without getting caught. But because ending the War on Drugs would fundamentally and radically change how police behave practically overnight.

I am a little ashamed to admit that when I first started covering weed as a journalist, I was pretty naive about all of this. I hosted a podcast called On Something for three years, about how cannabis legalization affected things like politics, education funding or pop culture. Looking back, I realize I was covering it as a sort of trend story. Something novel. 

But then I met someone who had been deported from the United States for trying an edible. Bought from a legal dispensary right here in Colorado. Let me reiterate – legal dispensary. She was on vacation and she wasn’t a citizen, and under U.S. law, that means not only can she be deported, she can be banned from the country. On her next visit to the U.S., a customs official searched her phone and found photos from that visit to the dispensary. The official asked whether she tried legal weed while she was in Colorado – and she was honest. After all, it was legal! Legal for a citizen, at least. But how was she supposed to know that? 

We have decades of data to show that the people arrested, imprisoned or killed by police for suspected drug use are disproportionately Black or brown. The United States incarcerates more of its own people than any other country – largely for drug crimes. Even in the age of legal weed, when more than half of states have relaxed their laws against cannabis, the war on drugs is alive and well and continuing to hurt people. 

And that’s because drugs, or rather the suspicion that someone does drugs, is almost like a “get out of jail free” card for the police. They can disregard your rights and search you without a warrant under the mere suspicion of a drug crime. Whether you’re actually committing a crime or not doesn’t matter that much. They still have the power to do stuff they wouldn’t normally get to do, and you can’t really stop them.

There are too many legal cases I could point to where police acted in a manner that was clearly unconstitutional. But a judge looked the other way because an officer thought their victim was on drugs. Unfortunately for those of us who aren’t police, this legal defense doesn’t really seem to pan out. Like “Sorry, officer, I THOUGHT it was a green light,” that’s never managed to get me out of a ticket. 

It used to be the case that police needed to have reasonable suspicion that someone was committing a crime before they could stop and question that person. The Founding Fathers thought that was important enough to put into the Bill of Rights. One of the things they hated about being a colony was getting randomly stopped and searched by British soldiers. And that, my friends, is how the fourth amendment was born, which protects us from unlawful search and seizure.

Except in 1996, the Supreme Court carved out an exception for drug crimes. Meaning that basically police can stop, question and sometimes even search someone even if there is no evidence that a drug crime was taking place. And if, by chance, they do find drugs, even in small amounts, police are often granted a lot of latitude for what they decide to do next.

After Philando Castile was killed by a Minneapolis police officer in 2016, the officer testified in court that the smell of marijuana in Castile’s car made him “fear for his life.” That’s why he shot Castile in front of Castile’s girlfriend and child in the backseat. That officer saw no consequences. He walked free.

Another example. Police similarly have to get a warrant to search your home. Unless, of course, you are suspected of involvement with a drug crime. Sometimes in cases like this, judges can issue what’s called a no-knock warrant, allowing cops to just bust in and take a suspect by surprise. That’s what happened to Breonna Taylor in 2020 when police barged into her Louisville home and fired 22 shots, killing her in her bed.

Breonna Taylor’s case has been in the news again recently because the officers responsible will now have to show up in federal court. They are accused of lying to obtain that warrant in the first place, along with excessive use of force. 

This is an unfortunate example of what often happens when police are granted exceptional powers – those powers will almost always be abused. Without all of these carve outs, police would have to meet a much higher bar before coming near someone, let alone questioning or searching them like a suspect. And not only does the War on Drugs make it easier to arrest someone, it makes it easier to convict someone too. 

Maybe you’ve heard of a substance called fentanyl. It’s 50-100 times stronger than your average opiate, making it positively deadly. Even worse, so much of the illegal drug supply is now tainted with fentanyl, meaning that even dabbling in drug use has become dangerous in this whole new way. From 1999 to 2020, nearly 1 million people died of drug overdoses. More than half of those deaths are thought to be caused by fentanyl, a death toll that’s been increasing with every passing year. 

And how exactly are police handling this? Well, law enforcement officers across the country have been quick to spread misinformation about fentanyl and fentanyl users. Often because police themselves are trained with misinformation. Many officers are taught to be sincerely afraid of people on drugs. And so they are.

Maybe you’ve heard a story about a police officer overdosing simply because they touched a little bit of fentanyl. This is absolutely, 100 percent, not physically possible. But unfortunately stories like these have already been used by lawmakers to justify harsher penalties for fentanyl possession. And again, with the whole supply being tainted, many people may not even know they have fentanyl on them. 

So the solution once again becomes punishment, because, well when you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. And what are you ultimately left with after all of that hammering? 

Being “tough on crime” was the way that most elected officials and law enforcement officers approached the so-called crack epidemic of the 90s. Federal law continues to distinguish between users of crack cocaine and regular old crack users. Even though it’s the same drug – the difference is whether you snort or smoke it. It was called the 100-1 rule, and yes it really did impose a sentence 100 times more severe for possession of crack as opposed to crack cocaine. Crack was far cheaper.

As a result of those policies, a disproportionate amount of poor Black people ended up in prison or dead, casualties of drug war-era policing. We’re in danger of repeating this awful history now, as thousands die, and politicians single out fentanyl for harsher penalties.

Which is why I always come back to this question – what would police do if they did not do drug enforcement? Suspicion of drugs is too often a proxy for race. If the drug war ended tomorrow, the police would have far less latitude to randomly stop any black or brown man on the street. 

And yeah, that wouldn’t cause an end to systemic racism or white supremacy, but it would first and foremost shrink the power of the police. Think fewer cops with fewer excuses to poke holes in your civil liberties.

I know this sounds radical right now, but Oregon already voted in 2020 to decriminalize the personal use of most drugs, and to make a big investment in substance abuse treatment. Portugal did the same thing more than 20 years ago! And over the last few decades, almost 30 countries adopted some form of drug decriminalization.

A different way is possible. We can continue to spend extraordinary amounts of money surveilling, arresting, and incarcerating people, separating families and disrupting communities…or we can invest that money in something else. Instead of locking up those who are struggling, we could shore them up with support and resources. 

We could invest in everyday people and address the root causes of suffering rather than continuing to try and arrest our way out of a problem. 

Because the drug war has failed. And it’s about time we act like it.

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