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The Big Lie
- Thread starter vta
- Start date
the bigger the lie, the easier the swallow.
cant remember if it was hitler or one of his cronies who said that.
but the ideology of the west was pretty similar allover.
only reason hitler got stamped on was because he overreached, not because of anything he was doing to minorities.
similar times, similar monsters and their horrible legacies.
cant remember if it was hitler or one of his cronies who said that.
but the ideology of the west was pretty similar allover.
only reason hitler got stamped on was because he overreached, not because of anything he was doing to minorities.
similar times, similar monsters and their horrible legacies.
MJ Decrim Drops Youth Crime Rates by Stunning 20%
By Susan Ferriss
Source: AlterNet
cannabis California -- Marijuana — it’s one of the primary reasons why California experienced a stunning 20 percent drop in juvenile arrests in just one year, between 2010 and 2011, according to provocative new research.
The San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice (CJCJ) recently released a policy briefing with an analysis of arrest data collected by the California Department of Justice’s Criminal Justice Statistics Center. The briefing, “California Youth Crime Plunges to All-Time Low,” identifies a new state marijuana decriminalization law that applies to juveniles, not just adults, as the driving force behind the plummeting arrest totals.
After the new pot law went into effect in January 2011, simple marijuana possession arrests of California juveniles fell from 14,991 in 2010 to 5,831 in 2011, a 61 percent difference, the report by CJCJ senior research fellow Mike Males found.
“Arrests for youths for the largest single drug category, marijuana, fell by 9,000 to a level not seen since before the 1980s implementation of the ‘war on drugs,’ ” Males wrote in the report, released in October.
In November, as Males blogged recently, voters in Washington state and Colorado voted to legalize but regulate marijuana use, like alcohol, for people over 21. California’s 2010 law did not legalize marijuana, but it officially knocked down “simple” possession of less than one ounce to an infraction from a misdemeanor — and it applies to minors, not just people over 21. Police don’t arrest people for infractions; usually, they ticket them. And infractions are punishable not by jail time, but by fines — a $100 fine in California in the case of less than one ounce of pot.
“I think it was pretty courageous not to put an age limit on it,” said Males, a longtime researcher on juvenile justice and a former sociology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Arresting and putting low-level juvenile offenders into the criminal-justice system pulls many kids deeper into trouble rather than turning them around, Males said, a conclusion many law-enforcement experts share.
California’s 2010 law still makes it a misdemeanor for anyone over 18 to possess less than an ounce of pot on school grounds, Males noted. For an adult, that’s an offense punishable by a $500 fine, ten days in a county jail or both. A minor caught on school grounds with less than an ounce of marijuana is also guilty of a misdemeanor and faces a $150 fine for the first offense, a $500 fine for a second offense and commitment to youth detention for not more than 10 days.
Before the passage of the 2010 law, Californians caught with less than an ounce of pot were arrested by the thousands every year, ultimately facing a fine of $100 fine and, under certain conditions, referral to drug treatment or education. Many of those arrested were booked, others were released but required to appear in court. They could demand a trial. Strained courts had to take up time ordering diversion treatment programs — a waste of court resources, supporters of a reform said.
Backed by the California District Attorneys Association, the new pot law — passed by state lawmakers — did away with prior requirements that pot offenders be referred to treatment and now allows them to pay a $100 fine akin to that for jaywalking. When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the law, he noted that simple pot possession in California was already “an infraction in everything but name.”
Males said he suspects that many of the 5,831 marijuana arrests of juveniles in California last year may have occurred on school grounds. He doesn’t have data yet to check his theory, however.
In his police briefing, Males also notes that juvenile arrests in California were the lowest ever recorded since statewide statistics were first compiled in 1954. The decline, Males said, wasn’t due just to fewer marijuana arrests.
Drug-related juvenile arrests overall fell by 47 percent between 2010 and 2011. Violent crime arrests fell by 16 percent; homicide arrests by 26 percent; rape arrests by 10 percent; and property-crime arrests by 16 percent. Nationwide, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, arrests of juveniles for all offenses decreased 11.1 percent in 2011 when compared with the 2010 number; arrests of adults declined 3.6 percent.
By Susan Ferriss
Source: AlterNet
cannabis California -- Marijuana — it’s one of the primary reasons why California experienced a stunning 20 percent drop in juvenile arrests in just one year, between 2010 and 2011, according to provocative new research.
The San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice (CJCJ) recently released a policy briefing with an analysis of arrest data collected by the California Department of Justice’s Criminal Justice Statistics Center. The briefing, “California Youth Crime Plunges to All-Time Low,” identifies a new state marijuana decriminalization law that applies to juveniles, not just adults, as the driving force behind the plummeting arrest totals.
After the new pot law went into effect in January 2011, simple marijuana possession arrests of California juveniles fell from 14,991 in 2010 to 5,831 in 2011, a 61 percent difference, the report by CJCJ senior research fellow Mike Males found.
“Arrests for youths for the largest single drug category, marijuana, fell by 9,000 to a level not seen since before the 1980s implementation of the ‘war on drugs,’ ” Males wrote in the report, released in October.
In November, as Males blogged recently, voters in Washington state and Colorado voted to legalize but regulate marijuana use, like alcohol, for people over 21. California’s 2010 law did not legalize marijuana, but it officially knocked down “simple” possession of less than one ounce to an infraction from a misdemeanor — and it applies to minors, not just people over 21. Police don’t arrest people for infractions; usually, they ticket them. And infractions are punishable not by jail time, but by fines — a $100 fine in California in the case of less than one ounce of pot.
“I think it was pretty courageous not to put an age limit on it,” said Males, a longtime researcher on juvenile justice and a former sociology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Arresting and putting low-level juvenile offenders into the criminal-justice system pulls many kids deeper into trouble rather than turning them around, Males said, a conclusion many law-enforcement experts share.
California’s 2010 law still makes it a misdemeanor for anyone over 18 to possess less than an ounce of pot on school grounds, Males noted. For an adult, that’s an offense punishable by a $500 fine, ten days in a county jail or both. A minor caught on school grounds with less than an ounce of marijuana is also guilty of a misdemeanor and faces a $150 fine for the first offense, a $500 fine for a second offense and commitment to youth detention for not more than 10 days.
Before the passage of the 2010 law, Californians caught with less than an ounce of pot were arrested by the thousands every year, ultimately facing a fine of $100 fine and, under certain conditions, referral to drug treatment or education. Many of those arrested were booked, others were released but required to appear in court. They could demand a trial. Strained courts had to take up time ordering diversion treatment programs — a waste of court resources, supporters of a reform said.
Backed by the California District Attorneys Association, the new pot law — passed by state lawmakers — did away with prior requirements that pot offenders be referred to treatment and now allows them to pay a $100 fine akin to that for jaywalking. When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the law, he noted that simple pot possession in California was already “an infraction in everything but name.”
Males said he suspects that many of the 5,831 marijuana arrests of juveniles in California last year may have occurred on school grounds. He doesn’t have data yet to check his theory, however.
In his police briefing, Males also notes that juvenile arrests in California were the lowest ever recorded since statewide statistics were first compiled in 1954. The decline, Males said, wasn’t due just to fewer marijuana arrests.
Drug-related juvenile arrests overall fell by 47 percent between 2010 and 2011. Violent crime arrests fell by 16 percent; homicide arrests by 26 percent; rape arrests by 10 percent; and property-crime arrests by 16 percent. Nationwide, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, arrests of juveniles for all offenses decreased 11.1 percent in 2011 when compared with the 2010 number; arrests of adults declined 3.6 percent.
War on Drugs: How Private Prisons are Using the Drug War to Generate More Inmates
by Robert Taylor
It is customary for American politicians and the media to publicly scold and criticize other countries for their human rights abuses and authoritarianism. But more often than that, the crimes U.S. officials have committed are just as bad, if not worse, than those they are chastising. Aggressive wars, sanctions, and torture instantly come to mind, but even less discussed has been the establishment of a prison-industrial-complex in the U.S.
Nowhere is this complex more evident than inCasa Grande, Arizona, where on Halloween a local high school was held on "lock down" for a drug sweep conducted by employees of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company in the country.
CCA is just one of many private prison companies operation in the county. All over America states are increasingly relying on private prisons to do their dirty work, turning a flawed and corrupt system of justice into an even worse form of punishment based upon profit and expediency. Companies like CCA are thriving on this, lobbying for proposals in almost every single state to buy and run state prisons. In exchange, the prisons would have to contain at least 1,000 beds and maintain at least a 90% occupancy rate.
Obviously, the incentives of this system lead to more arrests for very minor offenses, crimes with which the private prisons thrive on. Corporations like these are also very involved in pushing for three-strike laws and laws that make it very difficult to reduce the length of sentences for good behavior.
It should not be surprising, however, to learn that private prisons are on the rise in America. After all, the U.S. has the infamous distinction of having the most people behind bars, on parole, or probation. Not just per capita, but more than China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and the rest of the countries U.S. politicians like to lecture. In fact, there are more Americans locked up than the Soviets had in their gulags.
How could this be? Are Americans extraordinarily violent criminals? According to the FBI, violent crime has actually been on the decline for the last few decades.Throughout American history, the amount of prisoners per 100,000 people has remained about 100 to 110. But since 1980, the incarceration rate has nearly tripled, and is now almost 800.
Most of this increase can be traced to the federal government's misnamed "war on drugs" that was put into overdrive beginning in the Reagan administration. As the incarceration rate numbers show, it really is a war on people and has been by far the biggest reason for government encroachment on our civil liberties and the increased prison population. Combine the drug war with a merger of state and corporate power, and you have the rise of private prisons eager to profit off of caging people.
Poor and minority neighborhoods also bear the biggest brunt of this complex, as even though drug use among blacks is about the same as whites, the former are jailed at a disproportionately higher rate than whites. It is an absolute shame that those who claim to defend the interests of blacks and minorities are absolutely silent on the damage that the drug war has done (apologies to Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams).
As Adam Copnik notes in his great exposé on America's shameful prison state, "Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today — perhaps the most fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental face of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system — in prison, on probation, or on parole — than were in slavery then."
And while the drug war deserves a huge portion of the blame for the growth of corporate jailing monsters like CCA, there is also the fact nearly every single aspect of American life is politicized and criminalized. It's hard to think of any part of the economy or our personal lives that aren't subject to detailed regulation and rules, all of which are supposed to be rigorously memorized (ignorance of the law is no excuse!), and backed up by the state's threat or application of force.
Federal regulations and the tax code are so long, complex, and all encompassing that criminal defense and civil liberties litigator Harvey Silvergate estimates that the average American commitsthree felonies a day! Laws in the hand of the state, as Pierre-Joseph Proudhoun said, are "spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of the government."
With the drug war and the politicization of nearly every minutiae of American life, it's no wonder there are corporations merging with the state eager to profit off of those caught in these nets.
An easy solution to this would be the abolition of the drug war and the burning of the Federal Register, but this obviously will not be happening anytime soon. More than anything it is a cultural one as well. Like all political questions and problems, it fundamentally boils down to whether we will attempt to solve it by defending and applying individual liberty or by using force, coercion, control, and cages.
A society that accepts the premise that the state has the authority to wage a "war on drugs" and impose thousands upon thousands of coercive dictates (that it itself, of course, it not obligated to obey) should not be surprised to see their country turned into one giant, for-profit prison.
by Robert Taylor
It is customary for American politicians and the media to publicly scold and criticize other countries for their human rights abuses and authoritarianism. But more often than that, the crimes U.S. officials have committed are just as bad, if not worse, than those they are chastising. Aggressive wars, sanctions, and torture instantly come to mind, but even less discussed has been the establishment of a prison-industrial-complex in the U.S.
Nowhere is this complex more evident than inCasa Grande, Arizona, where on Halloween a local high school was held on "lock down" for a drug sweep conducted by employees of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company in the country.
CCA is just one of many private prison companies operation in the county. All over America states are increasingly relying on private prisons to do their dirty work, turning a flawed and corrupt system of justice into an even worse form of punishment based upon profit and expediency. Companies like CCA are thriving on this, lobbying for proposals in almost every single state to buy and run state prisons. In exchange, the prisons would have to contain at least 1,000 beds and maintain at least a 90% occupancy rate.
Obviously, the incentives of this system lead to more arrests for very minor offenses, crimes with which the private prisons thrive on. Corporations like these are also very involved in pushing for three-strike laws and laws that make it very difficult to reduce the length of sentences for good behavior.
It should not be surprising, however, to learn that private prisons are on the rise in America. After all, the U.S. has the infamous distinction of having the most people behind bars, on parole, or probation. Not just per capita, but more than China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and the rest of the countries U.S. politicians like to lecture. In fact, there are more Americans locked up than the Soviets had in their gulags.
How could this be? Are Americans extraordinarily violent criminals? According to the FBI, violent crime has actually been on the decline for the last few decades.Throughout American history, the amount of prisoners per 100,000 people has remained about 100 to 110. But since 1980, the incarceration rate has nearly tripled, and is now almost 800.
Most of this increase can be traced to the federal government's misnamed "war on drugs" that was put into overdrive beginning in the Reagan administration. As the incarceration rate numbers show, it really is a war on people and has been by far the biggest reason for government encroachment on our civil liberties and the increased prison population. Combine the drug war with a merger of state and corporate power, and you have the rise of private prisons eager to profit off of caging people.
Poor and minority neighborhoods also bear the biggest brunt of this complex, as even though drug use among blacks is about the same as whites, the former are jailed at a disproportionately higher rate than whites. It is an absolute shame that those who claim to defend the interests of blacks and minorities are absolutely silent on the damage that the drug war has done (apologies to Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams).
As Adam Copnik notes in his great exposé on America's shameful prison state, "Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today — perhaps the most fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental face of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system — in prison, on probation, or on parole — than were in slavery then."
And while the drug war deserves a huge portion of the blame for the growth of corporate jailing monsters like CCA, there is also the fact nearly every single aspect of American life is politicized and criminalized. It's hard to think of any part of the economy or our personal lives that aren't subject to detailed regulation and rules, all of which are supposed to be rigorously memorized (ignorance of the law is no excuse!), and backed up by the state's threat or application of force.
Federal regulations and the tax code are so long, complex, and all encompassing that criminal defense and civil liberties litigator Harvey Silvergate estimates that the average American commitsthree felonies a day! Laws in the hand of the state, as Pierre-Joseph Proudhoun said, are "spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of the government."
With the drug war and the politicization of nearly every minutiae of American life, it's no wonder there are corporations merging with the state eager to profit off of those caught in these nets.
An easy solution to this would be the abolition of the drug war and the burning of the Federal Register, but this obviously will not be happening anytime soon. More than anything it is a cultural one as well. Like all political questions and problems, it fundamentally boils down to whether we will attempt to solve it by defending and applying individual liberty or by using force, coercion, control, and cages.
A society that accepts the premise that the state has the authority to wage a "war on drugs" and impose thousands upon thousands of coercive dictates (that it itself, of course, it not obligated to obey) should not be surprised to see their country turned into one giant, for-profit prison.
Turn on, tune in, drop out
Turn on, tune in, drop out
"Turn on" meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. "Tune in" meant interact harmoniously with the world around you - externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. "Drop out" suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. "Drop Out" meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean "Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity"
*************
We can't burn draft cards anymore, but we can all DROP OUT of their evil system. We are the slaves and have NO obligation but to escape!
Turn on, tune in, drop out
"Turn on" meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. "Tune in" meant interact harmoniously with the world around you - externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. "Drop out" suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. "Drop Out" meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean "Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity"
*************
We can't burn draft cards anymore, but we can all DROP OUT of their evil system. We are the slaves and have NO obligation but to escape!
If You Smoke It, You Will Become Addicted!
By Amanda Reiman, Drug Policy Alliance
Source: Huffington Post
cannabis USA -- In recent weeks, we have seen a shift in how drug war proponents are talking about marijuana. No longer able to convince the public that people who use marijuana should go to jail, they are singing a new tune; they should all go to treatment. This is a shift we have seen before. When marijuana first came on the scene in the U.S. in the early 1900s, reports of marijuana induced violence among Mexicans fueled the nation's fear about the little known plant. When the general population started experimenting with the herb in the 1920s, it became clear that the claims of violence were fabricated. Losing the ability to instill fear in the public around marijuana use, the message was modified. The new message tied marijuana use to insanity and mental illness, which were highly stigmatized conditions, and continue to be. Being labeled as mentally ill frightened the white, middle class, marijuana consumers, and this fear led to the support of the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937.
Fast forward to 2012. Public support for marijuana legalization is at an all-time high and the government acknowledges that a change is being considered. No longer able to convince Americans that marijuana consumers are dangerous criminals who deserve to be locked up, history is repeating itself. We are seeing a shift in the message, from marijuana consumers as criminals to marijuana consumers as sick people who belong in treatment. It's a propaganda shell game and we can't fall for it again.
A recent article in the New York Times quoted Dr. Nora Volkow, the head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse as saying that 1 out of 6 adolescents who try marijuana will become addicted. That is akin to saying, if you keep making that face, it will freeze that way. In fact, a mere 2.8% of 12-17 year olds who used marijuana in 2010 entered treatment for it, and many of those cases could be the result of an agreement between the courts and the defendant in lieu of involvement with the juvenile justice system. When looking at the broader landscape of marijuana use, we see that 1.1% of marijuana users 12 and older in 2010 went to treatment for the substance. We also saw twice as many arrested for simple marijuana possession that year than enter treatment for marijuana dependence (750,000 vs. 335,833). The claim that marijuana causes mental illness, or that all marijuana consumers are addicted and in need of treatment undermines the efforts by mental health and addictions professionals to address the serious illnesses and addictions that pose real threats to persons and society.
Dr. David Nathan, a clinical associate professor at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and recently elected as a distinguished fellow in the American Psychiatric Association, wrote in a piece on CNN.com, "Throughout my career as a clinical psychiatrist, I have seen lives ruined by drugs like cocaine, painkillers and alcohol. I have also borne witness to the devastation brought upon cannabis users -- almost never by abuse of the drug, but by a justice system that chooses a sledgehammer to kill a weed."
Recently, former Rhode Island Congressman Patrick Kennedy announced the formation of a new group, SAM, which stands for A Smarter Approach to Marijuana. Kennedy and his group recognize that the argument of jail for marijuana is no longer salient with today's population, so they have repackaged the message for a new generation: marijuana use is a mental illness and requires treatment, every time. This sentiment is echoed in his group's project list, which includes, "Increased funding for mental health courts and treatment of drug dependency, so those caught using marijuana might avoid incarceration, get help and potentially have their criminal records cleared."
On its face, this statement is not so outrageous, but upon closer look it is frightening for two reasons. First, although increased funding for mental health services and substance abuse treatment can be beneficial, according to a 2008 report, 90% of those who currently need substance abuse treatment do not receive it, this compares to 24% of diabetes patients who do not receive treatment. It is estimated that 23 million people need addiction care, and only 2.3 million receive it. Forcing marijuana consumers into an already overloaded system will reduce the likelihood of care for those with serious, life threatening addictions. Furthermore, since approximately 37% of treatment referrals come from the criminal justice system, initiating a pipeline from the courtroom to treatment will result in a tidal wave of first time, young marijuana offenders entering substance abuse treatment to trade the label of criminal for addict. Secondly, Kennedy's group refers to treatment for those "caught" with marijuana. This implies, that, under his plan, the U.S. will continue to seek out marijuana users, presumably via law enforcement. Or, perhaps Kennedy et al will institute a special marijuana task force charged with roaming the country in search of marijuana addicts. Whatever the case, SAM's plan involves the active identification of marijuana consumers, followed by forced involvement in the system. Don't be fooled, this is not a "new way" for marijuana, but rather a regressive old approach dressed in new clothes.
By Amanda Reiman, Drug Policy Alliance
Source: Huffington Post
cannabis USA -- In recent weeks, we have seen a shift in how drug war proponents are talking about marijuana. No longer able to convince the public that people who use marijuana should go to jail, they are singing a new tune; they should all go to treatment. This is a shift we have seen before. When marijuana first came on the scene in the U.S. in the early 1900s, reports of marijuana induced violence among Mexicans fueled the nation's fear about the little known plant. When the general population started experimenting with the herb in the 1920s, it became clear that the claims of violence were fabricated. Losing the ability to instill fear in the public around marijuana use, the message was modified. The new message tied marijuana use to insanity and mental illness, which were highly stigmatized conditions, and continue to be. Being labeled as mentally ill frightened the white, middle class, marijuana consumers, and this fear led to the support of the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937.
Fast forward to 2012. Public support for marijuana legalization is at an all-time high and the government acknowledges that a change is being considered. No longer able to convince Americans that marijuana consumers are dangerous criminals who deserve to be locked up, history is repeating itself. We are seeing a shift in the message, from marijuana consumers as criminals to marijuana consumers as sick people who belong in treatment. It's a propaganda shell game and we can't fall for it again.
A recent article in the New York Times quoted Dr. Nora Volkow, the head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse as saying that 1 out of 6 adolescents who try marijuana will become addicted. That is akin to saying, if you keep making that face, it will freeze that way. In fact, a mere 2.8% of 12-17 year olds who used marijuana in 2010 entered treatment for it, and many of those cases could be the result of an agreement between the courts and the defendant in lieu of involvement with the juvenile justice system. When looking at the broader landscape of marijuana use, we see that 1.1% of marijuana users 12 and older in 2010 went to treatment for the substance. We also saw twice as many arrested for simple marijuana possession that year than enter treatment for marijuana dependence (750,000 vs. 335,833). The claim that marijuana causes mental illness, or that all marijuana consumers are addicted and in need of treatment undermines the efforts by mental health and addictions professionals to address the serious illnesses and addictions that pose real threats to persons and society.
Dr. David Nathan, a clinical associate professor at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and recently elected as a distinguished fellow in the American Psychiatric Association, wrote in a piece on CNN.com, "Throughout my career as a clinical psychiatrist, I have seen lives ruined by drugs like cocaine, painkillers and alcohol. I have also borne witness to the devastation brought upon cannabis users -- almost never by abuse of the drug, but by a justice system that chooses a sledgehammer to kill a weed."
Recently, former Rhode Island Congressman Patrick Kennedy announced the formation of a new group, SAM, which stands for A Smarter Approach to Marijuana. Kennedy and his group recognize that the argument of jail for marijuana is no longer salient with today's population, so they have repackaged the message for a new generation: marijuana use is a mental illness and requires treatment, every time. This sentiment is echoed in his group's project list, which includes, "Increased funding for mental health courts and treatment of drug dependency, so those caught using marijuana might avoid incarceration, get help and potentially have their criminal records cleared."
On its face, this statement is not so outrageous, but upon closer look it is frightening for two reasons. First, although increased funding for mental health services and substance abuse treatment can be beneficial, according to a 2008 report, 90% of those who currently need substance abuse treatment do not receive it, this compares to 24% of diabetes patients who do not receive treatment. It is estimated that 23 million people need addiction care, and only 2.3 million receive it. Forcing marijuana consumers into an already overloaded system will reduce the likelihood of care for those with serious, life threatening addictions. Furthermore, since approximately 37% of treatment referrals come from the criminal justice system, initiating a pipeline from the courtroom to treatment will result in a tidal wave of first time, young marijuana offenders entering substance abuse treatment to trade the label of criminal for addict. Secondly, Kennedy's group refers to treatment for those "caught" with marijuana. This implies, that, under his plan, the U.S. will continue to seek out marijuana users, presumably via law enforcement. Or, perhaps Kennedy et al will institute a special marijuana task force charged with roaming the country in search of marijuana addicts. Whatever the case, SAM's plan involves the active identification of marijuana consumers, followed by forced involvement in the system. Don't be fooled, this is not a "new way" for marijuana, but rather a regressive old approach dressed in new clothes.
MedicalGrower
Member
Ohhhh the lies...
The WAR and insanity created over such a innocent plant, why such blindness?
greed maybe...
Thanks for the stats, let knowledge open a better path into mainstream medicine!
The WAR and insanity created over such a innocent plant, why such blindness?
greed maybe...
Thanks for the stats, let knowledge open a better path into mainstream medicine!
MedicalGrower
Member
Great Stats
Great Stats
double post
Great Stats
double post
Who is funding Kennedy's little hate group? Seems foolish to try and persuade people west of the Mississippi that cannabis use = mental illness and forced government involvement.
Look at Mr. Government on the run from Mother Nature in the 2010's! If we can't trust them on a harmless plant, how can we trust these psychopaths with the public purse?
Look at Mr. Government on the run from Mother Nature in the 2010's! If we can't trust them on a harmless plant, how can we trust these psychopaths with the public purse?
Full-Body Pat-Downs in America's Schools: How the War on Drugs Is a War on Children
February 18, 2013
This article first appeared on the Nation.com.
On a warm spring afternoon at American colleges, the intoxicating aroma of surely medicinal marijuana will be floating like a soft caress in the breeze, and hard-working students will be stocking up on amphetamine cocktails to sharpen their overstressed young minds for the coming exams.
On a warm spring afternoon at the nation’s poorer public schools, children (and I mean children) will endure a daily police presence, including drug-sniffing dogs, full-body pat-downs, searches of backpacks and lockers, stops in the hallways—all in the name of searching for contraband.
Drugs are ubiquitous in this country, and yet we know that some people have the privilege of doctor-prescribed intoxication, while others are thrown into dungeons for seeking the same relief. We know that the war on drugs is heavily inflected with Jim Crow–ism, economic inequality, gun culture myths and political opportunism. We know that Adam Lanza’s unfortunate mother was not the sole Newtown resident stocking up on military-style weapons; plenty of suburban gun owners keep similar weapons to protect their well-kept homes against darkly imagined, drug-addled marauders from places like Bridgeport. We divert resources from mental health or rehab, and allocate millions to militarize schools.
The result: the war on drugs has metastasized into a war on children.
Best publicized, perhaps, is the plight of young people in Meridian, Mississippi, where a federal investigation is probing into why children as young as 10 are routinely taken to jail for wearing the wrong color socks or flatulence in class. Bob Herbert wrote of a situation in Florida in 2007, where police found themselves faced with the great challenge of placing a 6-year-old girl in handcuffs too big for her wrists. The child was being arrested for throwing a tantrum in her kindergarten class; the solution was to cuff her biceps, after which she was dragged to the precinct house for mug shots and charged with a felony and two misdemeanors.
In New York City, kids who make trouble are routinely removed from school altogether and placed in suspension centers, holding cells or juvenile detention lockups. In the old days, you got a detention slip for scrawling your initials on a desk. Now a student can be given a summons by a school police officer. If the kid loses it or doesn’t want to tell his parents, it becomes a warrant—and a basis for arrest.
According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, some 77 percent of New York’s school police interventions are for noncriminal matters like having food outside the cafeteria, having a cellphone or being late. Other minor offenses like shouting, getting into petty scuffles or being on school grounds after hours fall into the category of “disruptive behavior”—an offense that can get a student suspended. Just 4 percent of police interventions are in response to “major crimes against persons.”
But what’s a teacher to do? In New York City, police officers outnumber guidance counselors by more than 2,000.
Yet as Newtown should teach us, we love our guns as much as we love our drugs. We know that even our best efforts at gun control will not undo a simultaneous and enthusiastic installation of armed overseers in our public schools. As such forces grow exponentially across the country, we keep them busy by installing zero-tolerance policies that take disciplinary discretion out of teachers’ hands and put it in the hands of law enforcement officers with little to no training in child psychology, mediation or anger management. Indeed, the NYCLU recently filed a complaint after the NYPD arrested Mark Federman, the principal of East Side Community High School, for intervening as the in-school officers hauled away an honor student.
This “school-to-prison pipeline” has emerged suddenly. Over just the last two decades, we got scared. We sent guns and billy clubs into our schools on purpose. We provided federal funds for massive surveillance systems—for cameras like they have in Oakland, monitoring every inch of school life from a command center. We slashed budgets for books, salaries, computers, psychologists, librarians and buildings. We dealt with classroom overcrowding by segregating those with learning difficulties, shunting them into tracks where they have no chance.
On top of that, we instituted blunt metrics by which teachers lose pay or even their jobs depending on student outcomes. If scores aren’t good—regardless of how difficult the students’ life circumstances or language challenges or learning disabilities— it is teachers who are held responsible. With so much at stake, calling the school police is one way to remove lower-performing students from the classroom on high-stakes testing days.
And with the police being given incentives for making a large number of arrests, why wouldn’t the rational officer bring charges of “disturbance of education” or disorderly conduct for catfights in the hallways, when he might beef up his salary with the easy frog-march of juvenile perps to the precinct?
The most vulnerable targets may be children of color, but this war on kids is a war on all children. Ultimately, the lack of due-process protections and human dignity in ghetto schools leaches into suburban schools. It doesn’t really matter whether one side views it as protecting against the dark side with zero-tolerance strip searches for ibuprofen, while the other side experiences it as an annexing of the prison-industrial complex onto daily life. Criminalizing children will have constitutional implications for generations to come. It is corrosive and rends the fabric of our erstwhile civil society, makes a lie of equal opportunity, and rewards authoritarian personality disorder at the expense of our humanity.
Americas Coalition Suggests Marijuana Laws Be Relaxed
Source: New York Times (NY)
Author: Randal C. Archibold
MEXICO CITY - A comprehensive report on drug policy in the Americas released Friday by a consortium of nations suggests that the legalization of marijuana, but not other illicit drugs, be considered among a range of ideas to reassess how the drug war is carried out.
The report, released by the Organization of American States walked a careful line in not recommending any single approach to the drug problem and encouraging "flexibility."
Prompted by President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia at the Summit of the Americas last year to answer growing dissatisfaction and calls for new strategies in the drug war, the report's 400 pages mainly summarize and distill previous research and debate on the subject.
But the fact that it gave weight to exploring legalizing or de-penalizing marijuana was seized on by advocates of more liberal drug use laws as a landmark and a potential catalyst for less restrictive laws in a number of countries.
"This takes the debate to a whole other level," said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates more liberal drug use laws. "It effectively breaks the taboo on considering alternatives to the current prohibitionist approach."
The report said "the drug problem requires a flexible approach," and "it would be worthwhile to assess existing signals and trends that lean toward the decriminalization or legalization of the production, sale and use of marijuana.
"Sooner or later decisions in this area will need to be taken," it said. "On the other hand, our report finds no significant support, in any country, for the decriminalization or legalization of the trafficking of other illicit drugs."
Some analysts interpreted the inclusion of decriminalization as a thumb in the eye to the United States, the country with the heaviest drug consumption and one that has spent several billion dollars on drug interdiction in the Americas, only to find that marijuana and cocaine continue to flow heavily and that violence has surged in Mexico and Central America as the drugs move north.
The report comes two weeks before an O.A.S. meeting in Guatemala, whose president has been open to legalizing marijuana and where the central topic is drug policy in the hemisphere. Uruguay's president has put forward a plan for the government to legalize and regulate the sale of marijuana.
"The region's leaders expressed their frustration with the limits and exorbitant costs of current policies and their hunger for a fuller, more creative debate," said John Walsh, a drug policy analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group.
But the United States has so far rejected legalization as a solution to drug violence.
A State Department spokesman, William Ostick, said the report would be carefully reviewed and discussed with fellow O.A.S. members in Guatemala.
"We look forward to sharing our latest research and experiences on drug prevention and treatment, and to strengthening operational law enforcement cooperation with our partners around the globe in support of our common and shared responsibility for the world drug problem," he said. "We know other leaders will similarly bring their own data, and anticipate a productive and useful dialogue."
Kevin Sabet, director of the Drug Policy Institute at the University of Florida, said advocates of drug liberalization were overplaying the significance of the report, which he said contained a lot the Obama administration would agree with.
He said a discussion of legalization was only natural, particularly since two American states, Washington and Colorado, have moved in that direction.
But the report, he said, also suggested that countries in the hemisphere needed to redouble their efforts to fight the impunity of drug gangs, something often overlooked or played down in the debate on the war on drugs. The report notes that drug organizations have atomized into a range of gangs carrying out kidnapping, extortion and other crimes.
"Institutions in the drug-producing nations are going to have to change the way they do business," Mr. Sabet said. "You cannot only rely on reducing demand and ignore deep-seated institutional problems."
Mr. Santos, in accepting the report in Bogota, said more study was needed. "Let it be clear that no one here is defending any position, neither legalization, nor regulation, nor war at any cost," he said. "What we have to do is use serious and well-considered studies like the one the O.A.S. has presented us with today to seek better solutions."
Source: New York Times (NY)
Author: Randal C. Archibold
MEXICO CITY - A comprehensive report on drug policy in the Americas released Friday by a consortium of nations suggests that the legalization of marijuana, but not other illicit drugs, be considered among a range of ideas to reassess how the drug war is carried out.
The report, released by the Organization of American States walked a careful line in not recommending any single approach to the drug problem and encouraging "flexibility."
Prompted by President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia at the Summit of the Americas last year to answer growing dissatisfaction and calls for new strategies in the drug war, the report's 400 pages mainly summarize and distill previous research and debate on the subject.
But the fact that it gave weight to exploring legalizing or de-penalizing marijuana was seized on by advocates of more liberal drug use laws as a landmark and a potential catalyst for less restrictive laws in a number of countries.
"This takes the debate to a whole other level," said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates more liberal drug use laws. "It effectively breaks the taboo on considering alternatives to the current prohibitionist approach."
The report said "the drug problem requires a flexible approach," and "it would be worthwhile to assess existing signals and trends that lean toward the decriminalization or legalization of the production, sale and use of marijuana.
"Sooner or later decisions in this area will need to be taken," it said. "On the other hand, our report finds no significant support, in any country, for the decriminalization or legalization of the trafficking of other illicit drugs."
Some analysts interpreted the inclusion of decriminalization as a thumb in the eye to the United States, the country with the heaviest drug consumption and one that has spent several billion dollars on drug interdiction in the Americas, only to find that marijuana and cocaine continue to flow heavily and that violence has surged in Mexico and Central America as the drugs move north.
The report comes two weeks before an O.A.S. meeting in Guatemala, whose president has been open to legalizing marijuana and where the central topic is drug policy in the hemisphere. Uruguay's president has put forward a plan for the government to legalize and regulate the sale of marijuana.
"The region's leaders expressed their frustration with the limits and exorbitant costs of current policies and their hunger for a fuller, more creative debate," said John Walsh, a drug policy analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group.
But the United States has so far rejected legalization as a solution to drug violence.
A State Department spokesman, William Ostick, said the report would be carefully reviewed and discussed with fellow O.A.S. members in Guatemala.
"We look forward to sharing our latest research and experiences on drug prevention and treatment, and to strengthening operational law enforcement cooperation with our partners around the globe in support of our common and shared responsibility for the world drug problem," he said. "We know other leaders will similarly bring their own data, and anticipate a productive and useful dialogue."
Kevin Sabet, director of the Drug Policy Institute at the University of Florida, said advocates of drug liberalization were overplaying the significance of the report, which he said contained a lot the Obama administration would agree with.
He said a discussion of legalization was only natural, particularly since two American states, Washington and Colorado, have moved in that direction.
But the report, he said, also suggested that countries in the hemisphere needed to redouble their efforts to fight the impunity of drug gangs, something often overlooked or played down in the debate on the war on drugs. The report notes that drug organizations have atomized into a range of gangs carrying out kidnapping, extortion and other crimes.
"Institutions in the drug-producing nations are going to have to change the way they do business," Mr. Sabet said. "You cannot only rely on reducing demand and ignore deep-seated institutional problems."
Mr. Santos, in accepting the report in Bogota, said more study was needed. "Let it be clear that no one here is defending any position, neither legalization, nor regulation, nor war at any cost," he said. "What we have to do is use serious and well-considered studies like the one the O.A.S. has presented us with today to seek better solutions."
USA pointing out that bad guys kidnap innocent people, and some how try to make the argument that kidnapping would increase if cannabis were legal? The debate on cannabis is and can only be a stalling tactic. Cannabis freedom is as inevitable as marriage freedom. Each year adds a few more medical states, and now legal states will be added as well.
Federal saber rattling is hallow, they have lost and they know it.
Federal saber rattling is hallow, they have lost and they know it.
Lightweight
Member
I read through this whole thread and was very impressed with the compilation of information you have compiled vta. Thanks a lot; I appreciate it.
Source: Rolling Stone (US)
Author: Tim Dickinson
ETHAN NADELMANN: THE REAL DRUG CZAR
The Most Influential Man in the Battle for Legalization Is a Wonky Intellectual in Dad Jeans
The driving force for the legalization of marijuana in America - a frenetic, whip-smart son of a rabbi who can barely tell indica from sativa - has just entered enemy territory.
Ethan Nadelmann, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, is here in California's crucible of conservatism, Orange County, to talk about the failure of the War on Drugs and why the government should leave pot smokers alone. As a grizzled ex-DEA agent glares at him from the audience of a lecture hall on the campus of U.C. Irvine, it's clear that this crowd has not gathered to celebrate cannabis culture.
And that's just the way Nadelmann likes it.
For more than two decades, Nadelmann has built a broad-based movement for reform on the strength of a strategic insight that's both simple and profound: The fight against repressive drug laws isn't about championing the rights of drug users - even of a substance as popular as marijuana. It's about fighting against federal overreach and the needless human toll of drug prohibition. Before Nadelmann joined the cause some 20 years ago, marijuana legalization was an orphan crusade of hippies handing out leaflets at Dead shows and outlaw growers with bumper stickers demanding U.S. OUT OF HUMBOLDT COUNTY! Today, thanks in large part to Nadelmann's efforts, pot is fully legal in two states and available medically in 16 others. "He is the single most influential policy entrepreneur on any domestic issue," says John DiIulio, a longtime drug warrior and tough-on-crime academic who has recently come around to Nadelmann's side on marijuana policy. "He wore me down," DiIulio says. "What can I say?"
Lanky and jug-eared, with a thin red mustache that's trending white, the 56-year-old Nadelmann speaks without notes, in a delivery that's two parts James Carville, one part Woody Allen. Though he carries himself with the fearlessness of a man who has staked out the right side of history, he is hardly ready to take a victory lap. "Do not assume this is in the bag," he warns. "Marijuana is not gonna legalize itself."
Growing up in a strict, Sabbath-observant home in Yonkers, Nadelmann was versed in movement-building long before he ever touched a joint.
He admired his father's ability to unite a diverse congregation that included both fellow rabbis and members with barely a high school education. "He had a real talent," Nadelmann says, "to engage the most intellectually sophisticated, without talking over the heads of people who were the least sophisticated."
Nadelmann's sheltered youth took an expansive turn at 18, when he shipped off to McGill University in Montreal, where he began smoking hash and bending his mind on the libertarianism of John Stuart Mill. Brainy and ambitious, Nadelmann soon transferred to Harvard for a marathon stretch in academia that would see him rack up a J.D. and a Ph.D. in political science, as well as a master's in international relations that he picked up on the side at the London School of Economics.
Nadelmann recalls the late 1970s of his collegiate youth as America's marijuana spring.
In the Carter years, ending the federal war on pot seemed like little more than a waiting game: 53 percent of college freshmen supported legalizing weed in 1978. And Carter himself was in favor of decriminalizing the drug. But that brief moment of reefer sanity would soon be crushed with the rise of Ronald Reagan and what Nadelmann remembers as "a period of national hysteria" around drugs.
To Nadelmann, any rational examination of the evidence supported treating drug abuse as a public-health crisis.
But the political response was driven entirely by law enforcement and incarceration. "Something was fundamentally wrong," he says. The moral disparagement of drug users alarmed him: "It was like McCarthyism through the drug war."
Abandoning his graduate-school focus on Middle East studies at Harvard, Nadelmann began to investigate increasing U.S. efforts to police narcotics trafficking on a global scale.
The subject struck Nadelmann as the obvious intersection of international relations and criminal justice, but, academically, it was uncharted territory. "There was nobody there!" he says.
Keeping his personal rage against "the absurdity of the drug war" to himself, Nadelmann quickly established himself as a top young expert in the field, lining up a professorship at Princeton, just as the drug war was reaching a fever pitch.
In 1987, he received an invitation to speak at a conference on interdiction at the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he would share the dais with top brass from the DEA, the FBI and the State Department. And, in a defining act of chutzpah, he chose this moment to out his true beliefs.
Blood pounding in his temples, the 30-year-old Nadelmann stood before some of the nation's most powerful drug warriors to inform them that they were full of shit: "You guys are no different from the Prohibition agents in the 1920s," Nadelmann recalls saying. "Your policy isn't working any better, and it's probably doing more harm."
Almost overnight, Nadelmann broke out as one of the drug war's top critics. At the tail end of the Reagan years, his were hardly mainstream views. One New York Times story about his ideas was headlined THE UNSPEAKABLE IS DEBATED: SHOULD DRUGS BE LEGALIZED? His provocations soon caught the attention of George Soros. The Hungarian-born hedge-fund titan had helped fund democracy movements in Eastern Europe, and he was now eager to press a reform agenda in his adopted home country, beginning with the War on Drugs. With Soros' backing, Nadelmann in 1994 left Princeton to found the Lindesmith Center, named after Alfred Lindesmith, a scholar who spent decades challenging the criminalization of drugs.
Nadelmann began probing for the soft underbelly of drug prohibition, trying to see where he could have the most effect: "We started polling and found a couple of issues where the public said the drug war's gone too far." Number one? The criminalization of medical marijuana. Nadelmann had the issue.
California would provide the test case.
Led by a gay ex-hippie and AIDS hospice pioneer named Dennis Peron, activists in San Francisco had drafted an expansive medical-marijuana initiative in 1995 that sought to make the drug available to patients with ailments as minor as a migraine.
But Peron's stoner ambition far outpaced his fundraising or his political chops, so he called on Nadelmann for help qualifying Prop 215 for the ballot.
Nadelmann pitched Soros for funding, telling him, "There's a shot to break things open here." In his first direct foray into American politics, Soros stepped up, as did fellow billionaires in Nadelmann's Rolodex: Peter Lewis, the head of Progressive Insurance, and John Sperling, the founder of the University of Phoenix, both of whom had used marijuana medicinally.
The California initiative, Nadelmann believed, "could change the public face of the marijuana consumer" from the stereotype of a "17-year-old high school dropout with dreadlocks" to a middle-aged cancer patient braving chemo.
Trouble was, the activists Nadelmann was working with played right into those stereotypes. While Nadelmann tried to frame medical marijuana as a matter of common sense and compassion, Peron would loudly insist that all marijuana use was medicinal.
Nadelmann quickly realized he had to rescue Prop 215 from the activists themselves. "We professionalized it," Nadelmann recalls.
He tapped a top California political consultant, Bill Zimmerman, to take over signature-gathering and the media campaign.
Nadelmann's task - then as now - was to keep a lid on the culture clash between the anti-authoritarian activists and the command-and-control political professionals. "We played good cop/bad cop," Zimmerman remembers. "I would lay down the law, and Ethan came in to repair relations." Voters approved Prop 215 by a resounding 56-to-44 percent.
Determined to snowball the success of California, Nadelmann went back to the billionaires, challenging them to fund a nationwide rollout of medical pot. In just 24 hours, he raised $8.1 million for ballot propositions that would soon bring medical marijuana to Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Colorado and Maine. Initially, Nadelmann rebuffed any suggestion that medical pot was a stalking horse for full legalization. But as the movement picked up momentum, he spoke more openly about his long game. "Will it help lead toward marijuana legalization?" Nadelmann asked in a New York Times interview in 2000. "I hope so."
Nadelmann spun off from Soros' empire in 2000, standing up in his own organization, the Drug Policy Alliance - which he has since built into a $10 million enterprise, with 60 employees, offices in five states and an international reach.
Although he's passionate about pot reform, Nadelmann has always couched it within his broader agenda.
Nadelmann has positioned DPA as the nexus where drug reformers of all stripes can plug in and begin to identify themselves as allies in a common fight.
Following the dark days of the Bush administration, a new opportunity to push the envelope on pot emerged, again, in California in 2009. A different generation of activists had taken hold: They weren't hippies, they were hard-nosed entrepreneurs like Richard Lee, a Texas-born, wheelchair-bound activist who ran a taxpaying dispensary in Oakland and had launched the nation's first marijuana trade school, Oaksterdam University.
Lee staked more than $1 million to qualify a ballot measure to legalize, tax and regulate the adult use of marijuana.
He was adamant about pushing the measure in 2010, even though the demographics of a presidential-year election would be more favorable. "The medical thing was so nonmedical," Lee says, "that it seemed like we needed to be honest - and move forward with complete legalization."
Lee's long-shot initiative cut against Nadelmann's strategy of baby steps and no regrets. "We had operated on a model that you didn't want to do an initiative unless you had at least 55 percent in favor," he says. "You do a ballot initiative because the public's already on your side." But when he saw Lee was undeterrable, Nadelmann scrapped the playbook. Soon he began to see the legalization push as a chance to "transform the national discussion."
As a principal fundraiser, Nadelmann cajoled Soros into a big step forward, persuading him to back full marijuana legalization for the first time and to kick in $1 million to the campaign.
Prop 19 didn't win, but it so spooked state lawmakers that they pre-emptively decriminalized marijuana; California now treats pot possession as a minor infraction, like a parking ticket.
Advancing into Colorado and Washington in 2012, Nadelmann realized that DPA could be most effective pushing from behind. "We're here to play a leadership role, and that means not always putting yourself out front," he says. "You can conquer the world," he jokes, "if you let others take the credit for it."
Those who've collaborated for years with Nadelmann see the legalization victories as the culmination of nearly two decades of meticulous strategy. Neill Franklin is a former narcotics officer who runs Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. "Without Ethan," he says, "we wouldn't be talking about implementing marijuana legalization in Washington state and Colorado."
The morning after his U.C. Irvine lecture, Nadelmann hustles me into a meeting of the Democracy Alliance, a confab for wealthy progressive donors, at a tony oceanfront resort in Laguna Beach, where a pair of carbon-fiber McLaren roadsters and a fire-red Ferarri are parked out front.
There's nothing slick about Nadelmann. Instead of resort linens or the sharply ironed business-casual attire of the millionaires milling about, he looks like he's out to grab a bagel on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where he lives, wearing a generic orange polo shirt and holey dad jeans.
Nadelmann answers questions about his own drug use with nonchalance. Cocaine? "I tried it any number of times, but it always seemed to me like drinking too much coffee and having post-nasal drip." Pot? "I've been an occasional marijuana consumer since I was 18," he says, but despite leading a movement of activists who could hook him up with the finest strains of Purple Kush, he insists he's no connoisseur. "I know remarkably little," he says sheepishly. "I finally got it straight between indica and sativa."
He is more avid about psychedelics. Nadelmann likens his use of mushrooms to fasting on Yom Kippur: "Once a year, it's a good thing." And he's taken two "vision quests" under the influence of ayahuasca, a cousin of peyote, regarded as "the queen" of hallucinogens. "Psychedelics are wasted on the young," he says.
Despite the movement's recent successes, the end of pot prohibition, Nadelmann says, "is going to be complicated, tough, and we've got to be disciplined." He points out that voters are receptive to new approaches: "People want the tax revenue, and they want the cops to focus on real crime. Those are the two winning -arguments." But he also knows that changing public opinion isn't -nearly enough.
Medical marijuana enjoys 85 percent support nationwide, yet it has zero champions in the Senate.
As the Obama administration continues to weigh its response in Washington and Colorado, Nadelmann is plotting the next moves.
DPA is drafting an initiative in Oregon that could appear before voters as soon as next year, and Nadelmann believes California will test the legalization waters again in 2016. "The only way forward," he says, "is to go state by state until Congress and the White House cry uncle."Nadelmann has cultivated diverse -allies in Washington - including both former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and -Republican coalition leader Grover Norquist - while mentoring ambitious politicians in the states. "He provides people in elected office some backbone, and God knows we need it," says Gavin Newsom, California's lieutenant governor, who has stepped out boldly on marijuana legalization in recent weeks. "I'm included in that. It shouldn't have taken me this long."
Nadelmann is concerned that America not simply replace the hazards of the black market with the excesses of a free market.
In a candid moment, he -confesses, "I'm concerned now, because I see at my meetings, more and more of them are coming from the marijuana industry," he says. "Some care about the broader principles. Some are just in it for the money."
Talking about the business side of pot, Nadelmann can sound like he's never left the ivory tower.
His work is enabling the legal expansion of a multibillion-dollar American industry.
But for Nadelmann, that's almost entirely beside the point.
He worries that the common interests of state regulators and pot profiteers could conspire to create Big Marijuana - a concentrated industry with just a few large-scale growers that are easier for state authorities to monitor and regulate.
That would be a bad outcome for his agenda, he believes; mass marketing and public health don't mix. Ironically, Nadelmann says, the Obama administration's evident determination to crack down on industrial-scale marijuana could be a saving grace. "Give me my choice - I want the microbrewery or vineyard model," he says. "I'm not fighting for the Marlboro-ization of marijuana."
Author: Tim Dickinson
ETHAN NADELMANN: THE REAL DRUG CZAR
The Most Influential Man in the Battle for Legalization Is a Wonky Intellectual in Dad Jeans
The driving force for the legalization of marijuana in America - a frenetic, whip-smart son of a rabbi who can barely tell indica from sativa - has just entered enemy territory.
Ethan Nadelmann, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, is here in California's crucible of conservatism, Orange County, to talk about the failure of the War on Drugs and why the government should leave pot smokers alone. As a grizzled ex-DEA agent glares at him from the audience of a lecture hall on the campus of U.C. Irvine, it's clear that this crowd has not gathered to celebrate cannabis culture.
And that's just the way Nadelmann likes it.
For more than two decades, Nadelmann has built a broad-based movement for reform on the strength of a strategic insight that's both simple and profound: The fight against repressive drug laws isn't about championing the rights of drug users - even of a substance as popular as marijuana. It's about fighting against federal overreach and the needless human toll of drug prohibition. Before Nadelmann joined the cause some 20 years ago, marijuana legalization was an orphan crusade of hippies handing out leaflets at Dead shows and outlaw growers with bumper stickers demanding U.S. OUT OF HUMBOLDT COUNTY! Today, thanks in large part to Nadelmann's efforts, pot is fully legal in two states and available medically in 16 others. "He is the single most influential policy entrepreneur on any domestic issue," says John DiIulio, a longtime drug warrior and tough-on-crime academic who has recently come around to Nadelmann's side on marijuana policy. "He wore me down," DiIulio says. "What can I say?"
Lanky and jug-eared, with a thin red mustache that's trending white, the 56-year-old Nadelmann speaks without notes, in a delivery that's two parts James Carville, one part Woody Allen. Though he carries himself with the fearlessness of a man who has staked out the right side of history, he is hardly ready to take a victory lap. "Do not assume this is in the bag," he warns. "Marijuana is not gonna legalize itself."
Growing up in a strict, Sabbath-observant home in Yonkers, Nadelmann was versed in movement-building long before he ever touched a joint.
He admired his father's ability to unite a diverse congregation that included both fellow rabbis and members with barely a high school education. "He had a real talent," Nadelmann says, "to engage the most intellectually sophisticated, without talking over the heads of people who were the least sophisticated."
Nadelmann's sheltered youth took an expansive turn at 18, when he shipped off to McGill University in Montreal, where he began smoking hash and bending his mind on the libertarianism of John Stuart Mill. Brainy and ambitious, Nadelmann soon transferred to Harvard for a marathon stretch in academia that would see him rack up a J.D. and a Ph.D. in political science, as well as a master's in international relations that he picked up on the side at the London School of Economics.
Nadelmann recalls the late 1970s of his collegiate youth as America's marijuana spring.
In the Carter years, ending the federal war on pot seemed like little more than a waiting game: 53 percent of college freshmen supported legalizing weed in 1978. And Carter himself was in favor of decriminalizing the drug. But that brief moment of reefer sanity would soon be crushed with the rise of Ronald Reagan and what Nadelmann remembers as "a period of national hysteria" around drugs.
To Nadelmann, any rational examination of the evidence supported treating drug abuse as a public-health crisis.
But the political response was driven entirely by law enforcement and incarceration. "Something was fundamentally wrong," he says. The moral disparagement of drug users alarmed him: "It was like McCarthyism through the drug war."
Abandoning his graduate-school focus on Middle East studies at Harvard, Nadelmann began to investigate increasing U.S. efforts to police narcotics trafficking on a global scale.
The subject struck Nadelmann as the obvious intersection of international relations and criminal justice, but, academically, it was uncharted territory. "There was nobody there!" he says.
Keeping his personal rage against "the absurdity of the drug war" to himself, Nadelmann quickly established himself as a top young expert in the field, lining up a professorship at Princeton, just as the drug war was reaching a fever pitch.
In 1987, he received an invitation to speak at a conference on interdiction at the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he would share the dais with top brass from the DEA, the FBI and the State Department. And, in a defining act of chutzpah, he chose this moment to out his true beliefs.
Blood pounding in his temples, the 30-year-old Nadelmann stood before some of the nation's most powerful drug warriors to inform them that they were full of shit: "You guys are no different from the Prohibition agents in the 1920s," Nadelmann recalls saying. "Your policy isn't working any better, and it's probably doing more harm."
Almost overnight, Nadelmann broke out as one of the drug war's top critics. At the tail end of the Reagan years, his were hardly mainstream views. One New York Times story about his ideas was headlined THE UNSPEAKABLE IS DEBATED: SHOULD DRUGS BE LEGALIZED? His provocations soon caught the attention of George Soros. The Hungarian-born hedge-fund titan had helped fund democracy movements in Eastern Europe, and he was now eager to press a reform agenda in his adopted home country, beginning with the War on Drugs. With Soros' backing, Nadelmann in 1994 left Princeton to found the Lindesmith Center, named after Alfred Lindesmith, a scholar who spent decades challenging the criminalization of drugs.
Nadelmann began probing for the soft underbelly of drug prohibition, trying to see where he could have the most effect: "We started polling and found a couple of issues where the public said the drug war's gone too far." Number one? The criminalization of medical marijuana. Nadelmann had the issue.
California would provide the test case.
Led by a gay ex-hippie and AIDS hospice pioneer named Dennis Peron, activists in San Francisco had drafted an expansive medical-marijuana initiative in 1995 that sought to make the drug available to patients with ailments as minor as a migraine.
But Peron's stoner ambition far outpaced his fundraising or his political chops, so he called on Nadelmann for help qualifying Prop 215 for the ballot.
Nadelmann pitched Soros for funding, telling him, "There's a shot to break things open here." In his first direct foray into American politics, Soros stepped up, as did fellow billionaires in Nadelmann's Rolodex: Peter Lewis, the head of Progressive Insurance, and John Sperling, the founder of the University of Phoenix, both of whom had used marijuana medicinally.
The California initiative, Nadelmann believed, "could change the public face of the marijuana consumer" from the stereotype of a "17-year-old high school dropout with dreadlocks" to a middle-aged cancer patient braving chemo.
Trouble was, the activists Nadelmann was working with played right into those stereotypes. While Nadelmann tried to frame medical marijuana as a matter of common sense and compassion, Peron would loudly insist that all marijuana use was medicinal.
Nadelmann quickly realized he had to rescue Prop 215 from the activists themselves. "We professionalized it," Nadelmann recalls.
He tapped a top California political consultant, Bill Zimmerman, to take over signature-gathering and the media campaign.
Nadelmann's task - then as now - was to keep a lid on the culture clash between the anti-authoritarian activists and the command-and-control political professionals. "We played good cop/bad cop," Zimmerman remembers. "I would lay down the law, and Ethan came in to repair relations." Voters approved Prop 215 by a resounding 56-to-44 percent.
Determined to snowball the success of California, Nadelmann went back to the billionaires, challenging them to fund a nationwide rollout of medical pot. In just 24 hours, he raised $8.1 million for ballot propositions that would soon bring medical marijuana to Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Colorado and Maine. Initially, Nadelmann rebuffed any suggestion that medical pot was a stalking horse for full legalization. But as the movement picked up momentum, he spoke more openly about his long game. "Will it help lead toward marijuana legalization?" Nadelmann asked in a New York Times interview in 2000. "I hope so."
Nadelmann spun off from Soros' empire in 2000, standing up in his own organization, the Drug Policy Alliance - which he has since built into a $10 million enterprise, with 60 employees, offices in five states and an international reach.
Although he's passionate about pot reform, Nadelmann has always couched it within his broader agenda.
Nadelmann has positioned DPA as the nexus where drug reformers of all stripes can plug in and begin to identify themselves as allies in a common fight.
Following the dark days of the Bush administration, a new opportunity to push the envelope on pot emerged, again, in California in 2009. A different generation of activists had taken hold: They weren't hippies, they were hard-nosed entrepreneurs like Richard Lee, a Texas-born, wheelchair-bound activist who ran a taxpaying dispensary in Oakland and had launched the nation's first marijuana trade school, Oaksterdam University.
Lee staked more than $1 million to qualify a ballot measure to legalize, tax and regulate the adult use of marijuana.
He was adamant about pushing the measure in 2010, even though the demographics of a presidential-year election would be more favorable. "The medical thing was so nonmedical," Lee says, "that it seemed like we needed to be honest - and move forward with complete legalization."
Lee's long-shot initiative cut against Nadelmann's strategy of baby steps and no regrets. "We had operated on a model that you didn't want to do an initiative unless you had at least 55 percent in favor," he says. "You do a ballot initiative because the public's already on your side." But when he saw Lee was undeterrable, Nadelmann scrapped the playbook. Soon he began to see the legalization push as a chance to "transform the national discussion."
As a principal fundraiser, Nadelmann cajoled Soros into a big step forward, persuading him to back full marijuana legalization for the first time and to kick in $1 million to the campaign.
Prop 19 didn't win, but it so spooked state lawmakers that they pre-emptively decriminalized marijuana; California now treats pot possession as a minor infraction, like a parking ticket.
Advancing into Colorado and Washington in 2012, Nadelmann realized that DPA could be most effective pushing from behind. "We're here to play a leadership role, and that means not always putting yourself out front," he says. "You can conquer the world," he jokes, "if you let others take the credit for it."
Those who've collaborated for years with Nadelmann see the legalization victories as the culmination of nearly two decades of meticulous strategy. Neill Franklin is a former narcotics officer who runs Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. "Without Ethan," he says, "we wouldn't be talking about implementing marijuana legalization in Washington state and Colorado."
The morning after his U.C. Irvine lecture, Nadelmann hustles me into a meeting of the Democracy Alliance, a confab for wealthy progressive donors, at a tony oceanfront resort in Laguna Beach, where a pair of carbon-fiber McLaren roadsters and a fire-red Ferarri are parked out front.
There's nothing slick about Nadelmann. Instead of resort linens or the sharply ironed business-casual attire of the millionaires milling about, he looks like he's out to grab a bagel on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where he lives, wearing a generic orange polo shirt and holey dad jeans.
Nadelmann answers questions about his own drug use with nonchalance. Cocaine? "I tried it any number of times, but it always seemed to me like drinking too much coffee and having post-nasal drip." Pot? "I've been an occasional marijuana consumer since I was 18," he says, but despite leading a movement of activists who could hook him up with the finest strains of Purple Kush, he insists he's no connoisseur. "I know remarkably little," he says sheepishly. "I finally got it straight between indica and sativa."
He is more avid about psychedelics. Nadelmann likens his use of mushrooms to fasting on Yom Kippur: "Once a year, it's a good thing." And he's taken two "vision quests" under the influence of ayahuasca, a cousin of peyote, regarded as "the queen" of hallucinogens. "Psychedelics are wasted on the young," he says.
Despite the movement's recent successes, the end of pot prohibition, Nadelmann says, "is going to be complicated, tough, and we've got to be disciplined." He points out that voters are receptive to new approaches: "People want the tax revenue, and they want the cops to focus on real crime. Those are the two winning -arguments." But he also knows that changing public opinion isn't -nearly enough.
Medical marijuana enjoys 85 percent support nationwide, yet it has zero champions in the Senate.
As the Obama administration continues to weigh its response in Washington and Colorado, Nadelmann is plotting the next moves.
DPA is drafting an initiative in Oregon that could appear before voters as soon as next year, and Nadelmann believes California will test the legalization waters again in 2016. "The only way forward," he says, "is to go state by state until Congress and the White House cry uncle."Nadelmann has cultivated diverse -allies in Washington - including both former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and -Republican coalition leader Grover Norquist - while mentoring ambitious politicians in the states. "He provides people in elected office some backbone, and God knows we need it," says Gavin Newsom, California's lieutenant governor, who has stepped out boldly on marijuana legalization in recent weeks. "I'm included in that. It shouldn't have taken me this long."
Nadelmann is concerned that America not simply replace the hazards of the black market with the excesses of a free market.
In a candid moment, he -confesses, "I'm concerned now, because I see at my meetings, more and more of them are coming from the marijuana industry," he says. "Some care about the broader principles. Some are just in it for the money."
Talking about the business side of pot, Nadelmann can sound like he's never left the ivory tower.
His work is enabling the legal expansion of a multibillion-dollar American industry.
But for Nadelmann, that's almost entirely beside the point.
He worries that the common interests of state regulators and pot profiteers could conspire to create Big Marijuana - a concentrated industry with just a few large-scale growers that are easier for state authorities to monitor and regulate.
That would be a bad outcome for his agenda, he believes; mass marketing and public health don't mix. Ironically, Nadelmann says, the Obama administration's evident determination to crack down on industrial-scale marijuana could be a saving grace. "Give me my choice - I want the microbrewery or vineyard model," he says. "I'm not fighting for the Marlboro-ization of marijuana."
White House Pushes 'Drug Policy Reform,' Aka Prohibition
Source: Forbes Magazine (US)
Author: Jacob Sullum
Today the Obama administration hosted the first-ever White House Conference on Drug Policy Reform. But don't be confused: Although "drug policy reform" usually means moving away from the use of violence to stop people from consuming arbitrarily proscribed psychoactive substances, that is not what President Obama has in mind.
"Drug policy reform should be rooted in neuroscience, not political science," says Obama's drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, in the email message announcing the conference. "It should be a public health issue, not just a criminal justice issue.
That's what a 21st-century approach to drug policy looks like."
In truth, this 21st-century approach to drug policy looks a lot like the 20th-century approach to drug policy.
Kerlikowske, who is still upset that he does not get credit for ending the war on drugs when he took office in 2009, thinks enlightenment in this area means forcing drug users into "treatment" by threatening them with jail rather than sending them directly to jail. He needs the heavy hand of the state not only to impose treatment on recalcitrant drug users but to imprison people who supply them with the drugs they want. That is why Kerlikowske says drug policy is "not just a criminal justice issue"-because he cannot imagine a drug policy that does not entail locking people in cages for actions that violate no one's rights, whether those actions involve using politically disfavored intoxicants or helping people do so.
Patrick Kennedy, co-founder of the anti-pot group Project SAM, likewise tries to distract attention from the half a million Americans imprisoned for drug offenses. "For too long drug policy has been caught in between the false dichotomy of legalization versus incarceration," Kennedy says in a press release about the White House conference, where he co-chaired a panel.
The alternative to legalization is continued prohibition, which requires incarceration. Prohibitionists like Kennedy and Kerlikowske should have the courage to defend stripping people of their liberty for doing nothing more than supplying a product to eager buyers.
Instead they pretend this is not happening.
As for Kerlikowske's claim that he seeks to depoliticize drug policy, that is impossible as long as the government tries to dictate what people put into their bodies.
How can such an endeavor be anything but political? The Obama administration, for example, is committed to defending the position that marijuana, which the Drug Enforcement Administration's chief administrative law judge once called "the safest therapeutically active substance known to man," has a high potential for abuse, lacks medical value, and cannot be used safely even under a doctor's supervision. This is Kerlikowske's idea of sound science.
Mason Tvert, director of communications at the Marijuana Policy Project, argues that Kerlikowske's avowed respect for neuroscience is also belied by his continued support for a policy that encourages people to use a more dangerous intoxicant instead of marijuana. "Every objective study on marijuana has concluded that it poses far less harm to the brain than alcohol," says Tvert, co-author of Marijuana Is Safer. "The ONDCP has long championed laws that steer adults toward using alcohol and away from making the safer choice to use marijuana.
If the drug czar is truly committed to prioritizing neuroscience over political science, he should support efforts to make marijuana a legal alternative to alcohol for adults."
Another B.S. study that does not prove anything. Just because these drivers had THC in their system does not indicate impairment.
Fatal car crashes involving pot use have tripled in U.S., study finds
(HealthDay News) --
The legalization of marijuana is an idea that is gaining momentum in the United States, but there may be a dark side to pot becoming more commonplace, a new study suggests.
Fatal crashes involving marijuana use tripled during the previous decade, fueling some of the overall increase in drugged-driving traffic deaths, researchers from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health report.
"Currently, one of nine drivers involved in fatal crashes would test positive for marijuana," said co-author Dr. Guohua Li, director of the Center for Injury Epidemiology and Prevention at Columbia. "If this trend continues, in five or six years non-alcohol drugs will overtake alcohol to become the most common substance involved in deaths related to impaired driving."
The research team drew its conclusions from crash statistics from six states that routinely perform toxicology tests on drivers involved in fatal car wrecks -- California, Hawaii, Illinois, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and West Virginia. The statistics included more than 23,500 drivers who died within one hour of a crash between 1999 and 2010.
Alcohol contributed to about the same percentage of traffic fatalities throughout the decade, about 40 percent, Li said.
But drugs played an increasingly prevalent role in fatal crashes, the researchers found. Drugged driving accounted for more than 28 percent of traffic deaths in 2010, up from more than 16 percent in 1999.
Marijuana proved to be the main drug involved in the increase, contributing to 12 percent of 2010 crashes compared with 4 percent in 1999.
The study authors also noted that the combined use of alcohol and marijuana dramatically increases a driver's risk of death.
"If a driver is under the influence of alcohol, their risk of a fatal crash is 13 times higher than the risk of the driver who is not under the influence of alcohol," Li said. "But if the driver is under the influence of both alcohol and marijuana, their risk increases to 24 times that of a sober person."
The researchers found that the increase in marijuana use occurred across all age groups and in both sexes. Their findings were published online Jan. 29 in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
Marijuana impairs driving in much the same way that alcohol does, explained Jonathan Adkins, deputy executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association. It impairs judgment, affects vision and makes a person more distractible and more likely to take risks while driving.
"This study shows an alarming increase in driving under the influence of drugs and, in particular, it shows an increase in driving under the influence of both alcohol and drugs," said Jan Withers, national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
"MADD is concerned anytime we hear about an increase in impaired driving, since it's 100 percent preventable," Withers added. "When it comes to drugged driving versus drunk driving, the substances may be different but the consequences are the same -- needless deaths and injuries."
The movement toward marijuana legalization makes the findings of this study incredibly important to traffic safety officials, Adkins noted.
"It's a wake-up call for us in highway safety," Adkins said. "The legalization of pot is going to spread to other states. It's not even a partisan issue at this point. Our expectation is this will become the norm rather than the rarity."
The problem is, marijuana and drug use before driving does not have the same stigma surrounding it as drunk driving has gained over the years, he added.
"The public knows about drunk driving, but I don't think they have awareness of drugged driving, so this is a huge issue," Adkins said. "We need to alert the public that if you've used any type of substance, you should not get behind the wheel. We need to create that culture where, like drunk driving, it is not acceptable."
Police also do not have a test as accurate and convenient as the breathalyzer for checking a driver's marijuana intoxication during a traffic stop, Li said.
A test is available that uses a driver's saliva to check cannabis levels, but it's not as reliable and accurate as the Breathalyzer, and has not been widely adopted by the police, he said.
"In the case of marijuana, I would say in maybe five years or more you will see some testing method or technique that may not as accurate as the breathalyzer, but is more accurate than the testing devices we have today," Li said.
Fatal car crashes involving pot use have tripled in U.S., study finds
(HealthDay News) --
The legalization of marijuana is an idea that is gaining momentum in the United States, but there may be a dark side to pot becoming more commonplace, a new study suggests.
Fatal crashes involving marijuana use tripled during the previous decade, fueling some of the overall increase in drugged-driving traffic deaths, researchers from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health report.
"Currently, one of nine drivers involved in fatal crashes would test positive for marijuana," said co-author Dr. Guohua Li, director of the Center for Injury Epidemiology and Prevention at Columbia. "If this trend continues, in five or six years non-alcohol drugs will overtake alcohol to become the most common substance involved in deaths related to impaired driving."
The research team drew its conclusions from crash statistics from six states that routinely perform toxicology tests on drivers involved in fatal car wrecks -- California, Hawaii, Illinois, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and West Virginia. The statistics included more than 23,500 drivers who died within one hour of a crash between 1999 and 2010.
Alcohol contributed to about the same percentage of traffic fatalities throughout the decade, about 40 percent, Li said.
But drugs played an increasingly prevalent role in fatal crashes, the researchers found. Drugged driving accounted for more than 28 percent of traffic deaths in 2010, up from more than 16 percent in 1999.
Marijuana proved to be the main drug involved in the increase, contributing to 12 percent of 2010 crashes compared with 4 percent in 1999.
The study authors also noted that the combined use of alcohol and marijuana dramatically increases a driver's risk of death.
"If a driver is under the influence of alcohol, their risk of a fatal crash is 13 times higher than the risk of the driver who is not under the influence of alcohol," Li said. "But if the driver is under the influence of both alcohol and marijuana, their risk increases to 24 times that of a sober person."
The researchers found that the increase in marijuana use occurred across all age groups and in both sexes. Their findings were published online Jan. 29 in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
Marijuana impairs driving in much the same way that alcohol does, explained Jonathan Adkins, deputy executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association. It impairs judgment, affects vision and makes a person more distractible and more likely to take risks while driving.
"This study shows an alarming increase in driving under the influence of drugs and, in particular, it shows an increase in driving under the influence of both alcohol and drugs," said Jan Withers, national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
"MADD is concerned anytime we hear about an increase in impaired driving, since it's 100 percent preventable," Withers added. "When it comes to drugged driving versus drunk driving, the substances may be different but the consequences are the same -- needless deaths and injuries."
The movement toward marijuana legalization makes the findings of this study incredibly important to traffic safety officials, Adkins noted.
"It's a wake-up call for us in highway safety," Adkins said. "The legalization of pot is going to spread to other states. It's not even a partisan issue at this point. Our expectation is this will become the norm rather than the rarity."
The problem is, marijuana and drug use before driving does not have the same stigma surrounding it as drunk driving has gained over the years, he added.
"The public knows about drunk driving, but I don't think they have awareness of drugged driving, so this is a huge issue," Adkins said. "We need to alert the public that if you've used any type of substance, you should not get behind the wheel. We need to create that culture where, like drunk driving, it is not acceptable."
Police also do not have a test as accurate and convenient as the breathalyzer for checking a driver's marijuana intoxication during a traffic stop, Li said.
A test is available that uses a driver's saliva to check cannabis levels, but it's not as reliable and accurate as the Breathalyzer, and has not been widely adopted by the police, he said.
"In the case of marijuana, I would say in maybe five years or more you will see some testing method or technique that may not as accurate as the breathalyzer, but is more accurate than the testing devices we have today," Li said.
Source: Rolling Stone (US)
Author: Sabrina Rubin Erdely
THE ENTRAPMENT OF JESSE SNODGRASS
He was a friendless high school loner struggling with autism.
So why did an undercover cop target him as a drug dealer?
Jesse Snodgrass plodded around yet another stucco corner, searching for Room 254 in time for the second-period bell, only to find he was lost yet again.
Jesse felt a familiar surge of panic.
He was new to Chaparral High School and still hadn't figured out how to navigate the sprawling Southern California campus with its outdoor maze of identical courtyards studded with baby palm trees.
Gripping his backpack straps, the 17-year-old took some deep breaths.
Gliding all around him were his new peers, chatting as they walked in slouchy pairs and in packs.
Many of their mouths were turned up, baring teeth, which Jesse recognized as smiles, a signal that they were happy.
Once he regained his composure, he followed the spray-painted Chaparral Puma paw prints on the ground, his gait stiff and soldierly, and prayed that his classroom would materialize. He was already prepared to declare his third day of school a disaster.
Check out the top 10 weed myths and facts
At last, Jesse found his art class, where students were milling about in the final moments before the bell. He had resigned himself to maintaining a dignified silence when a slightly stocky kid with light-brown hair ambled over and said, "Hi."
"Hi," Jesse answered cautiously. Nearly six feet tall, Jesse glanced down to scan the kid's heart-shaped face, and seeing the corners of his mouth were turned up, Jesse relaxed a bit. The kid introduced himself as Daniel Briggs. Daniel told Jesse that he, too, was new to Chaparral - he'd just moved from Redlands, an hour away, to the suburb of Temecula - and, like Jesse, who'd recently relocated from the other side of town, was starting his senior year.
Jesse squinted and took a long moment to mull over Daniel's words. Meanwhile, Daniel sized up Jesse, taking in his muscular build and clenched jaw that topped off Jesse's skater-tough look: Metal Mulisha T-shirt, calf-length Dickies, buzz-cut hair and a stiff-brimmed baseball hat. A classic suburban thug. Lowering his voice, Daniel asked if Jesse knew where he might be able to get some weed.
"Yeah, man, I can get you some," Jesse answered in his slow monotone, every word stretched out and articulated with odd precision.
Daniel asked for his phone number, and Jesse obliged, his insides roiling with both triumph and anxiety.
On one hand, Jesse could hardly believe his good fortune: His conversation with Daniel would stand as the only meaningful interaction he'd have with another kid all day. On the other hand, Jesse had no idea where to get marijuana.
All Jesse knew in August 2012 was that he had somehow made a friend.
The Great Marijuana Experiment: A Tale of Two Drug Wars
Though it smacks of suburban myth or TV make-believe, undercover drug stings occur in high schools with surprising frequency, with self-consciously dopey names like "Operation D-Minus" and, naturally, "Operation Jump Street." They're elaborate stings in which adult undercover officers go to great lengths to pass as authentic teens: turning in homework, enduring detention, attending house parties and using current slang, having Googled the terms beforehand to ensure their correctness. In Tennessee last year, a 22-year-old policewoman emerging from 10 months undercover credited her mom's job as an acting coach as key to her performance as a drug-seeking-student, which was convincing enough to have 14 people arrested.
Other operations go even further to establish veracity, like a San Diego-area sting last year that practically elevated policing to performance art, in which three undercover deputies had "parents" who attended back-to-school nights; announcing the first of the sting's 19 arrests, Sheriff Bill Gore boasted this method of snaring teens was "almost too easy."
The practice was first pioneered in 1974 by the LAPD, which soon staged annual undercover busts that most years arrested scores of high schoolers; by the Eighties, it had spread as a favored strategy in the War on Drugs. Communities loved it: Each bust generated headlines and reassured citizens that police were proactively combating drugs.
Cops loved the stings, too, which not only served as a major morale boost but could also be lucrative. "Any increase in narcotics arrests is good for police departments. It's all about numbers," says former LAPD Deputy Chief Stephen Downing, who now works with the advocacy group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and views these operations with scorn. "This is not about public safety - the public is no safer, and the school grounds are no safer.
The more arrests you have, the more funding you can get through federal grants and overtime."
Yet despite the busts' popularity, their inner workings were shrouded in secrecy, with few details publicly released about their tactics and overall effectiveness. And as time went on, officers and school administrators became alarmed by the results they saw: large numbers of kids arrested for small quantities of drugs - and who, due to "zero tolerance" policies, were usually expelled from school.
No studies appear to exist on the efficacy of high school drug stings, but the data on undercover operations in general isn't encouraging. A 2007 Department of Justice-funded meta-analysis slammed the practice of police sting operations, finding that they reduce crime for a limited time - three months to a year - if at all. "At best, they are a stopgap measure," and at worst, an expensive waste of police resources, which "may prevent the use of other, more effective problem-solving techniques." The federal study concludes that sting operations reap little more than one consistent benefit: "favorable publicity" for police.
To be sure, public-relations speed bumps have appeared now and again, like when a female LAPD narc allegedly romanced a high school football player, which surfaced via her steamy love letters, or when a developmentally disabled child was swept up in another L.A. bust after selling $9 worth of marijuana to an undercover. But until now, no department seems to have gone so far as to lay a trap for an autistic kid.
From his seat at a worktable in the art room, Deputy Daniel Zipperstein observed his target and tablemate, Jesse Snodgrass. Like all the other students, Deputy Zipperstein was busily working on the day's class assignment, building a sculpture using cardboard, paper and wire, but Jesse was clearly flummoxed by the project's complexity. Their ponytailed teacher, James Taylor, paused by the boys' table. "Jesse, OK," Taylor instructed, holding up a piece of cardboard. "Today's task will be to cut out six cardboard squares of this size." Taylor took pains to pare down each assignment into bite-size chunks for Jesse, but even so, he'd need to keep circling back to remind Jesse to stay on his single small task. Zipperstein watched Jesse slowly pick up the scissors and get to work.
No one at Chaparral High School knew that transfer student "Daniel Briggs" was in fact a cop in his mid-twenties; as is typical in such an investigation, only a few top district administrators were aware of the operation. With Daniel's Billabong T-shirts, camo shorts and Vans, "he looked just like an average kid," remembers student Jessica Flores, then 17. Handsome and quick to smile, Daniel was meeting new friends with remarkable ease, though some students remained wary, due to his habit of interrupting strangers' conversations whenever the subject of drugs came up - for which he quickly acquired the nickname "Deputy Dan." Madalyn Dunn, then 17, was startled while she chatted with friends during shop class, and the new kid leapt right in: "Are you talking about ketamine?" Dan said, then asked if she'd sell him some, which she declined. Nonetheless, the two wound up walking to fourth period together, bonding over their fondness for pot. After that, Madalyn says, Daniel wouldn't stop asking her for drugs. "Oh, come on," he'd pester.
Deputy Dan was just as aggressive with Jesse Snodgrass, pursuing the friendless boy outside the confines of school.
Jesse's mom, Catherine, and his dad, Doug, an engineer, had been delighted when Jesse had come home talking about his new friend from art class; they'd been even more surprised when Daniel had started buzzing Jesse's otherwise-silent phone with texts.
Jesse had only ever had one friend before, another special-ed kid who'd recently moved to Alabama, leaving Jesse bereft. And now that Jesse had switched to a new school - a move foisted upon the Snodgrasses when their old house had gone into foreclosure - he had been especially agitated lately.
It was only the latest distress in a lifetime of everyday struggles, which Catherine and Doug did their best to help Jesse navigate, fighting the constant battles waged by the parents of children on the autism spectrum: sticking up for him when he was ostracized from playgrounds or asked to leave restaurants as a child; standing up to school districts to secure Jesse equal access to education. Though the Snodgrasses also had two younger children at home, Jesse's needs had long made him a focal point.
They were ready for his life to get easier and were thrilled with the calming prospect of this new friendship.
"Why don't you tell Daniel to come over?" Catherine urged.
"OK." Jesse hunched over his phone as his mom drove him home through the clean streets of Temecula - a planned suburban community northeast of San Diego, population 100,000 - past the big-box strip malls and into their neighborhood of Mediterranean-style homes, where a man-made duck pond sparkled and joggers bounced past. Jesse's phone vibrated. "He can't do it today, he's grounded," Jesse recited.
Made sense to him. Daniel had already told Jesse that he was always in trouble with his strict mom, a conflict that left him superstressed - which was why Daniel "really needed" Jesse to hook him up with some pot.
"Maybe another time. You guys could order pizza, play video games, just hang out," Catherine said. Forging friendships was normally so hard for Jesse, who had the cognitive skills of an 11-year-old and was nearly oblivious to the facial expressions, body language, vocal tones and other contextual cues that make up basic social interactions. He was slow to draw inferences or interpret the casual idioms other kids used, like "catch you later," a phrase Jesse had initially found startling, since it turned out to involve no catching whatsoever. As a toddler, he'd once been terrified for days after his preschool teacher told him, "I'll keep my eye on you."
Jesse had seemed typical enough until age two. Then words started disappearing from his vocabulary, and he spoke in a sporadic, garbled language. His parents grew worried: Their young son made no eye contact and scarcely registered the presence of other people, but drew hundreds of pictures of their vacuum cleaner and would spend hours waving a crayon in front of his face, entranced by the fan of color it etched in the air. When Jesse was five, a neurologist diagnosed him with Asperger's syndrome, a variant of autism; over the years, Jesse's diagnoses would expand to include Tourette's, bipolar disorder and depression. An evaluator prepared the Snodgrasses for the possibility that Jesse might never speak again.
Catherine quit her advertising job to plunge Jesse into intensive autism therapies.
Amazingly, the interventions got him back on track enough that he was able to attend regular school, taking special-ed classes and mainstream electives, with a counseling team to help him manage.
But Jesse's difficulties were hardly over. He was bullied throughout middle school, mocked as a "retard." He lashed out at his tormentors and, in doing so, developed a discipline record, with suspensions for fighting and many a day penalized in "lunch club," scraping gum from under desks.
Jesse rarely complained about his mistreatment; he was a boy who didn't think to ask for help. Instead, he vented his frustrations with episodes of headbanging, scratching and punching himself, violent and bloody bursts of self-injury. It took Jesse years of therapy to wean himself from those self-injurious impulses and soothe himself instead with benign motor tics like wringing his hands or snapping his fingers when he felt anxious.
He also found another way to cope. During his sophomore year of high school, Jesse shaved his head, began lifting weights and developed a new persona his therapist Jason Agnetti came to call his "bro identity." Dressed in wife-beaters that showed off his biceps, saggy jeans and baseball caps, Jesse would stomp around school, dropping f-bombs and calling other kids "retards." He talked about extreme sports like motocross, off-roading and skateboarding, even though in reality he couldn't ride a bike or even tie his own shoelaces.
In his junior year, Jesse drew a bong on his notebook and called himself "Jesse Smokegrass," despite his inexperience with pot. By emulating the bad-boy swagger of his own bullies, Jesse was putting on a suit of armor.
Though his parents were a little concerned - and irritated with all his unnecessary posing - they saw it as a phase and, in that regard, not unlike other powerful antagonistic personae Jesse had identified with in the past. "There was a period of time when he was really obsessed with the Undertaker, the wrestler," says Doug. "And in fourth grade, he was obsessed with Bowser in Super Mario."
To some extent, the bro disguise worked, making Jesse less approachable and even, from a distance, menacing.
Anyone who took a closer look, however, could see past the facade.
As he strode the halls of Chaparral, with his robot walk and compulsive finger-snapping, it was clear that something was amiss. "You could see right away that there's something off about him," says Perry Pickett, who at the time was a Chaparral junior. And as soon as Jesse spoke with his flat affect, slow response time and inability to follow any but the simplest instructions - his impairment was obvious.
And yet Deputy Dan was unrelenting. As the weeks went by and Jesse continued to stall, Daniel sent Jesse 60 text messages,- hounding him to deliver on his promise to get marijuana. "He was pretty much stalking me," remembers Jesse. "With the begging for the drugs and everything, it was kind of a drag." Already anxious about his new home and new school, Jesse was conflicted. He knew he didn't really want to get marijuana for Daniel - not that he even knew how - and that the drug requests were ratcheting up his anxiety to an intolerable level.
But Jesse also desperately wanted Daniel to like him and didn't want to fail his new friend. Daniel's oft-stated plight that his home life made him so unhappy that he needed to self-medicate struck a certain chord with Jesse, who also needed pharmaceuticals in order to function. "I take medication for my own issues," Jesse confessed to Daniel, rattling them off: Depakote, Lamictal, Clonazepam. Burdened by his sense of obligation, frightened and helpless, the pressure was too much for Jesse to handle.
One day the turmoil had been so great that after art class, Jesse fled to the boys' bathroom and burned his arm with a lighter.
Three weeks into the school year, Doug and Catherine Snodgrass held a meeting with Jesse's educational-support team, in light of Jesse's self-inflicted burn, to discuss their son's transition to Chaparral. "They were concerned about him building friendships at the school," attendee Delfina Gomez, Jesse's behavioral-health specialist, would later testify.
Unaware that Jesse was being befriended by a narc, the team assured the Snodgrasses that overseeing Jesse was a priority for them, including-finding him "a classroom buddy, peer buddy or peer leader."
Elsewhere in the building that same day, Daniel pressed $20 into Jesse's hand.
"I'll see what I can get you," Jesse told him.
"I'm gonna meet Daniel before class," Jesse told his father five days later while on the drive to school.
He bent to read the screen of his phone. "Take me to the Outback Steakhouse." Jesse was jumpy.
He'd asked Daniel to come over to his house for the marijuana handoff, but Daniel was insisting on meeting at a strip mall adjacent to Chaparral's ball fields. Daniel's car was already parked in the empty lot when Doug and Jesse arrived at 7:10 a.m. Jesse leapt out of the station wagon. "Stay here," Jesse instructed his father.
Doug, proud of his son's social accomplishment, contented himself with a friendly wave at the young fellow before driving off. Daniel waved back.
The previous weekend, saddled with Daniel's $20 bill, Jesse had agonized over how to get his hands on some pot. At last, the answer hit him. The medical-marijuana dispensary in downtown Temecula sold marijuana!
Jesse congratulated himself on his logic.
He and his family often spent leisurely afternoons browsing downtown's pedestrian thoroughfare, where Jesse would branch off for an hour of solo exploration before reconnecting at the Root Beer Company for sodas.
Sure enough, that weekend Jesse wandered toward the dispensary and approached a pale man with bad skin and longish hair - "he kind of had that look of a junkie," Jesse says - who took his $20 and, to Jesse's infinite relief, handed him a clear sandwich baggie with weed inside.
Now, standing with Daniel beside his car and in a hurry to get this nerve-racking errand over with, Jesse thrust the precious stash into his hands. Daniel glanced at it. It was a pathetic half-gram of dried-up flakes - about five dollars' worth of marijuana, maybe enough to roll a single skinny joint.
Still, Daniel seemed satisfied.
He threw it in his glove compartment and suggested they get to class.
Later that day, Deputy Zipperstein handed off the baggie to another deputy, who transported it to a police station, where the drugs were field-tested by yet another officer, then ceremoniously weighed, photographed and tagged as evidence: SUS - SNODGRASS, JESSE $20/.6 GRAM MARIJUANA BUY #1. The picture was transferred onto CD for posterity.
The Riverside County Sheriff's Department was becoming expert at this sort of thing.
Over the previous two years, it had staged two stings in other school districts, arresting 14 students at Palm Desert High School in 2010, and 24 students from Moreno Valley and Wildomar high schools in 2011; in both cases, undercovers had bought marijuana, Ecstasy and cocaine. So when in July 2012 the sheriff's department had approached the Temecula Valley Unified School District to report a suspicion of drug sales in two high schools, Superintendent Timothy Ritter had granted permission for Operation Glasshouse. ( All TVUSD personnel declined comment, citing litigation. ) His compliance seemed natural in conservative Temecula, a former tiny ranching town whose population had exploded over the past 20 years as people seeking affordable homes moved inland - many of them military families from Camp Pendleton - and where police maintained an aggressive presence, intent on keeping it an oasis of order.
Two young, attractive deputies were chosen for Operation Glasshouse. Deputy Yesenia Hernandez was enrolled in Temecula Valley High School. Petite and outgoing, she was an instant hit, especially with the boys, who misread her attentions. Deputy Daniel Zipperstein was dispatched to Chaparral, where, as the new kid constantly talking about drugs, he had to overcome some initial skepticism. "Ask him for his badge number!" some kids playfully called out, when at lunchtime he asked to sit with a bunch of self-described "happy stoners." Daniel laughed along, joking back in a goofy voice, "Yeah, OK, you're all under arrest."
But Zipperstein disarmed kids with his frank approach, explaining, "I'm new, I don't have any friends here yet." He was quick to open up about his pretend personal life, telling kids he'd had to move from his dad's in Redlands to live with his irritating mother. "It's so hard to deal with my mom and shit," he said. "She's always bitching." To escape her tyranny, all he wanted to do was lock himself in his room and get high. Remembers student Perry Pickett, "I dunno, I felt bad for the kid." Girls thought it charming when Daniel said he still traveled to Redlands each weekend to visit his girlfriend - whose favorite activity, incidentally, was getting high together. "We were like, 'OK, that's romantic, I guess,'" says Jessica Flores, who sold him a gram or so of marijuana a half-dozen times.
But although Daniel was in a relationship, that didn't stop him from admiring other girls, like when, during one lunch period with a view into the dance room, Daniel exhorted about a 15-year-old in spandex, "Dang, look at the ass on that one!"
Before long, kids accepted Daniel as one of their own, enough that his unusual persistence in ferreting out drugs stopped raising red flags, as well as his notably indiscriminate appetite. "If you mentioned weed, he wanted weed," says Madalyn, who sold him some of her marijuana, LSD and molly. "If I brought up acid, that's what he wanted.
He said he wanted to get coke. He had no limitation." Students also overlooked how odd it was for a high schooler to have so much cash, giving it out with such abandon. Once, when he handed Perry $15, asking for weed, and Perry came back empty-handed, Daniel told him to keep the money.
"I felt like I owed him something," says Perry, who, due to his learning difficulties, was a special-needs student with an individualized learning plan. He had felt especially bad because Daniel had been so open and vulnerable about his lousy family situation.
So when Perry heard that a kid in his third-period class was selling Vicodin swiped from his parents' medicine cabinet, he offered to introduce Daniel. Strangely enough, he says, Daniel demurred, but instead handed Perry $14, instructed him to buy $10 worth of pills on his behalf - thus creating the transaction necessary for a bust - and to keep the change. "I was like, 'All right, four bucks!
That's a couple chicken sandwiches right there!'" says Perry. Meanwhile, Perry's 16-year-old friend Sebastian Eppinger, seeing how careless Daniel was with his money, thought he recognized an opportunity and agreed to act as a middleman. "I ripped him off superbad," says Sebastian. "I sold him 20 bucks' worth of weed for $80."
Any skepticism about Daniel being a narc evaporated after Perry delivered him his Vicodin. Grinning and thanking him profusely, Daniel informed Perry and Sebastian he didn't swallow Vicodin, he smoked it. The boys were dubious, so Daniel described how he'd rub off the pill's coating, grind it to powder, then freebase it off tinfoil.
To demonstrate, Daniel popped the pill into his mouth and sucked it, then spat it out and rubbed it on his shirt, explaining that it was now ready for crushing and smoking. "I heard you can do the same thing with heroin," Daniel said, dropping a hint about his next drug target.
The boys didn't pick up on the bait; they were agog, having learned a new drug-taking technique.
As autumn drew to a close, Daniel had little contact with Jesse Snodgrass anymore.
He'd managed to give Jesse another $20, two weeks after the first sale - - and, in return, got an even skimpier amount of marijuana than the first time, under a half-gram. But then Daniel had asked Jesse to sell him some Clonazepam, Jesse's anxiety medication. Jesse was adamant in his refusal: That was his medicine - he needed it. When Jesse wouldn't budge, Daniel completely lost interest in their friendship. The rejection stung.
Jesse's parents would inquire about Daniel, and he'd shrug it off. He tried to forget about it and focus on the things that mattered, like passing algebra.
Against all odds, Jesse was inching his way toward a high school diploma.
On the morning of December 11th, the door to Jesse's art classroom burst open, and five armed police officers in bulletproof vests rushed in, calling his name. Jesse was handcuffed in front of his classmates. He thought maybe he was asleep and dreaming. "I was confused," he remembers. "I didn't know what was going on," and he didn't connect the events back to Daniel. Neither did Madalyn or Jessica, who also were arrested in their classrooms; the three of them, along with two other boys, were paraded in handcuffs out of Chaparral and into a police van. At the same time, in a classroom at nearby Rancho Vista continuation high school, Perry - who'd transferred to get better one-on-one special-needs attention - was being shackled; and Sebastian, sick at home, awoke to find his bedroom filled with cops. Fifteen students from Temecula Valley High School were also rounded up, bringing the number of students arrested in Operation Glasshouse to an impressive 22.
The scale of the takedown operation was enormous, from the swarming officers in tactical gear to the police helicopter hovering overhead. Authorities announced they had seized marijuana, Ecstasy, LSD, heroin, cocaine, meth and prescription drugs.
Though it declined to divulge the quantities, the sheriff's office insisted that the amounts collected were beside the point: "The program is not designed to recover large amounts of drugs," it said in a statement to RS. "The program is designed to quell hand-to-hand narcotics transactions on campus." That evening, the big drug bust would be the talk of Southern California, with newscasts leading with the story - prominently featuring a dramatic photograph of a tall boy dressed in a gray hoodie and black Dickies, his hands cuffed behind his back, flanked by armed officers.
Jesse Snodgrass had just become Operation Glasshouse's unlikely poster child.
"Why do you think you're here?"
"I don't know," Jesse answered. "I was just called up and that's why I'm wondering." In a plain-walled interrogation room at the Perris police station, near Temecula, Jesse sat stiffly in a chair, hands clenched. Across the table, hunched over a clipboard, sat a lean man with stringy blond hair, a plaid shirt and a police badge hanging from his neck. Jesse was anxious to clear up this whole misunderstanding and go home. For more than an hour, he'd been waiting in a common area in tense silence with 21 other kids, the vast majority of them Mexican-American boys, desperately studying their downcast faces for clues.
None had been told the reason for their arrests and were forbidden to talk. Any time they'd made a sound, officers barked, "You better shut your mouth." Jesse had watched as one by one they'd been called into this little room, although one key nuance had eluded him: Each had emerged looking shocked and terrified; one girl had a full-blown panic attack.
"All right," said the deputy from the Riverside County Sheriff's Special Investigations Bureau, looking up from his clipboard. "Have you ever sold drugs?"
"No." Jesse was resolute.
"You sure?"
"Yeah, I'm sure," answered Jesse. He'd been as compliant as possible with his answers, having waived his Miranda rights - though he hadn't entirely understood what he was agreeing to, he had said "yes" anyway to demonstrate his cooperation - but he could tell he was bombing this quiz. In his nervousness, Jesse already had been unable to recall his mom's phone number and his home address.
He was, however, forthcoming when the officer asked if he'd ever used drugs, truthfully admitting that he'd once smoked pot, but that he just wasn't into it.
"Have you ever sold drugs at Chaparral High School?" the deputy asked.
"Nope."
"You never sold drugs to any students there?"
"No, sir," Jesse said respectfully.
"Mm-kay." Then, in a theatrical flourish that would be performed 22 times that day, the deputy crossed the interrogation room to open the door. "Do you know who this is?" he asked, as a uniformed police officer with short, neat hair walked in. Jesse did a double take.
"Daniel?" he asked the officer uncertainly. Deputy Daniel Zipperstein didn't answer but simply stood with his feet planted apart and his hands clasped in front of him, staring straight ahead.
Jesse marveled at how different his friend appeared, nearly unrecognizable in these clothes and in this pose, so proud and tall. It was as though Daniel had grown up overnight, looking so markedly different that when he made his dramatic entrance into Perry's interrogation, Perry exclaimed, "Do you have a younger brother at Chaparral?" making the officers guffaw.
And yet even with Daniel standing over him like a statue and the interrogator looking amused from across the table, Jesse's mind struggled to knit the bits of information into a cohesive narrative.
"Am I getting in any trouble?" Jesse asked.
"Well, what do you think?" answered the deputy, snickering.
With that, the criminal-justice system intractably moved Jesse Snodgrass forward - even though, before leaving the interrogation room, the deputy had to walk the still-uncomprehending Jesse through the logic at play behind his crime: that Jesse had not merely given Daniel drugs; because Daniel had paid him, Jesse had, in fact, sold drugs.
So confused was Jesse that upon leaving the station, he found himself loaded into a van with a half-dozen kids who'd admitted to having done drugs within the past 24 hours, en route to the hospital to have their vitals monitored. "Are you mentally retarded?" a cop at the hospital cautiously asked after Jesse droned down his list of psychiatric meds. When Jesse answered, "I have Asperger's," the officer groaned.
Nonetheless, protocol being protocol, Jesse was shuttled onward to Southwest Juvenile Hall, where he was placed in a holding cell to await booking - and where, by late afternoon, his distraught mother was on the phone with an officer, trying to reach her son.
"My son is self-injurious," Catherine pleaded. "If he hangs himself on your watch, it is your fault." Incredibly, Jesse's parents were never notified of their son's arrest, but learned of it when he didn't surface after school; a cascade of calls had finally put Doug in touch with the school principal, who informed him in a businesslike way that Jesse had been arrested hours earlier.
Both parents had been shocked, but like Jesse himself, they assumed this was some sort of fixable error.
And yet to their horror, they'd come to discover that their son - a boy who scarcely left home - would now be detained for at least the next two days.
"You know, Mama, the kids here love it," a female officer told Catherine when she called the juvenile hall that first evening to make arrangements to drop off Jesse's meds. "They get three square meals and a bed. They love it here, and they keep coming back." The implication stung Catherine: that the kids locked inside - including her son - were already criminals, headed for a life of incarceration.
That was also the message of the district attorney's office in the courthouse two days later.
According to Doug and Catherine, as all of the families somberly gathered to see their children for the first time since the arrest, Senior Deputy District Attorney Blaine Hopp strode into the center of the crowd. "This should be a wake-up call to all of you. Your children are drug dealers," he announced. "But this is an opportunity to save them," he added, inviting parents to speak with him before the proceedings began.
To the Snodgrasses' surprise, many did. That didn't stop Hopp from arguing to the judge that each child posed a danger to the community and should therefore stay in custody longer - a frightening prospect to parents and kids alike.
When Jesse's turn came, he was charged with two felonies, one for each marijuana sale. Hopp argued that Jesse should remain locked up for an additional month, until his next court date - even though the probation department, having reviewed his history, had recommended his release. From their seats, the Snodgrasses listened aghast as Hopp lambasted their son as a menace to society, and got their first glimpse of Jesse in his prison-issued orange jumpsuit.
He didn't return their gaze. Jesse had regressed after spending three days and two nights in the juvenile prison system.
And while incarcerated, he'd struggled to process Daniel's betrayal. "I thought we were really good friends," he kept mumbling to his fellow inmates, who had to explain the situation to him. When Jesse had finally been escorted into court, his expression was blank. Although desperate to see his parents, his eyes skipped right over them without recognition, a behavior they hadn't seen since his childhood. When the judge announced his immediate release, Jesse showed no sign that he had heard or understood.
At home, Jesse unraveled.
For six weeks, he could barely summon language to speak and simply sat motionless, sometimes waving a hand in front of his face, much like when he was three years old. "I want to die," he managed to tell his parents at Christmastime, his face buried in his pillow. There were emergency therapy sessions and adjustments to his medication. His parents stayed up all night to keep watch.
And in the midst of everything, the Snodgrasses received a letter from the Temecula Valley Unified School District, notifying them that in light of the allegations against Jesse and that he had sold drugs near campus, it was suspending him, and moving forward with his expulsion.
Few families in the Snodgrasses' situation fight back. Even fewer speak out. "There's a lot of shame for the family, for your kid to be involved with a drug case," says Lynne Lyman, California state director of the Drug Policy Alliance. "The stigma is tremendous." But Catherine and Doug Snodgrass were atypical parents.
They'd been fighting with school districts Jesse's entire life; in their younger days, they'd been union organizers. And the Snodgrasses were convinced they had no reason to hide. "We have nothing to be ashamed of, Jesse has nothing to be ashamed of," says Doug. "The people who do this, they're the ones who should be ashamed."
The criminal judge seemed inclined to agree, noting that Jesse's autism amounted to "unusual and exceptional circumstances." Jesse was sentenced to "informal probation," wherein if he kept out of trouble for six months and did 20 hours of community service, his record would be wiped clean. The Snodgrasses accepted the quickie plea deal rather than put Jesse through the stress of a trial - and because they were already waging a battle on a second front.
In an effort to stop the Temecula Valley Unified School District from expelling Jesse, the Snodgrasses appealed to the state's Office of Administrative Hearings. During a six-day hearing in February 2013, the school district dug in its heels on its right to expel Jesse for his crime, presenting a parade of witnesses - including members of Jesse's trusted school support team - to insist that despite Jesse's autism, the boy knew right from wrong, and therefore should have been able to resist the undercover cop's entreaties. The district's director of Child Welfare and Attendance, Michael Hubbard, who was one of only three district administrators with foreknowledge of the sting, further testified that his faith in Operation Glasshouse was so complete that he'd felt fine about Jesse's arrest. "I didn't believe it was coercion or entrapment for any of the kids," Hubbard testified.
In March last year, Judge Marian Tully's 19-page ruling excoriated the school district for setting Jesse up to fail. "The district placed Student in an extremely difficult social-problem scenario that would have been difficult even for typical high school students," she wrote, much less a special-needs kid. Chastising the district for "leaving Student to fend for himself, anxious and alone, against an undercover police officer," she ordered that Jesse be returned to school immediately.
Yet Jesse's victories did little to ease his frayed mental state as he headed back to Chaparral High School. He shook with anxiety in the car on the drive there and hadn't yet overcome his new habit of crumpling to the floor anytime they passed a police car. During the three-month suspension since his arrest, Jesse had been overwhelmed by paranoia so great that once when their doorbell rang, he tackled his mother to the floor, begging, "Don't answer!" Plagued by panic attacks and nightmares - the back of his left hand was gouged by a deep groove where he'd anxiously scratched himself raw - Jesse had been diagnosed with PTSD. He was frightened to be back at Chaparral, where the other kids stared and counselors who'd testified against him now smiled at him, and where, to his parents' disbelief, the school district had filed an appeal of the administrative ruling - it was still fighting to expel him.
Despite all that, Jesse was dimly aware that he had it pretty good compared to his fellow arrestees: Of the 22 kids arrested, he's apparently the only one still getting a traditional education. "Every one of us got expelled," says Perry, who now attends a reform school, along with most of the others caught in the sting.
Others took their expulsion as a cue to drop out, like Madalyn, who now lives in L.A., working as a receptionist for an HVAC company.
She was only three classes shy of a high school diploma. "So close," she says wistfully. But while less than thrilled about their day-to-day lives, they're grateful to have escaped worse fates, since Perry, Sebastian, Jessica and Madalyn, like many of the kids, pleaded guilty in exchange for no further jail time; their juvenile criminal records will be sealed.
That puts them in a luckier boat than the two students who happened to have been 18 at the time of their crimes and were treated as adults: One, charged with selling marijuana and meth, spent 30 days in a men's jail, at which point he threw himself upon the mercy of the court and was sentenced to residential rehab; the second boy, charged with three marijuana sales, was sentenced to two years in county jail.
Stings like these can have a long-term impact on kids, sometimes in devastating ways. Research shows that juvenile arrests predict brushes with the law as adults. "These kinds of practices push students out of school and toward the criminal-justice system," says state director Lyman, noting that minority, special-needs and poor children are particularly at risk. "It's known as the school-to-prison pipeline."
Persuaded by the high potential for bad outcomes for kids, and by the lack of evidence of good results for communities, the National Association of School Safety and Law Enforcement Officials has concluded that undercover high school operations are usually a poor strategy. "We're more interested in getting kids help that need it, rather than targeting kids to be locked up," says former police chief Larry Johnson, president-elect of NASSLEO. Even the birthplace of these stings, Los Angeles, has backed off the tactic; after the school district began openly questioning its efficacy in 2004, the LAPD abruptly shut down its 30-year-old undercover School Buy program.
Nevertheless, Riverside County is undeterred. This past December - one year after the raid that arrested Jesse Snodgrass - the sheriff's department announced yet another successful undercover operation: a semester-long sting that nabbed 25 high school students in the nearby cities of Perris and Meniffee, most for small amounts of marijuana. Among the arrestees was reportedly a 15-year-old special-ed student who reads at a third-grade level, arrested for selling a single Vicodin pill for $3, which he used to buy snacks.
Perris Superintendent Jonathan Greenberg has called the operation "an unqualified success."
The Snodgrasses don't want their experience to be in vain and are now suing the Temecula Valley Unified School District, accusing it of negligence for allowing their son to be targeted despite his disabilities. "We think that we can make these operations stop," says Doug. "We want to use this to send a message to administrators everywhere. When they're approached by police departments about having an undercover operation at their school, they'll remember a district got sued."
Reflecting on his experience as the target of an undercover drug sting, Jesse still doesn't know quite what to make of it. "They were actually out to get us," Jesse says, sounding mystified as he swigs a protein shake; because of his PTSD, he still sometimes finds himself unable to eat and wants to regain some of the weight he's lost. He managed to graduate this past December and has started a job in construction. In the meantime, he has gleaned a few important lessons from the ordeal: "To not trust everyone you see," he says thoughtfully. Through his friend's harsh betrayal, he has come to understand that people aren't always what they appear to be, a cruel but necessary lesson that all children must learn sometime.
He has realized that even adults are capable of acting with terrible unkindness and duplicity.
Jesse's insights have made him wary of meeting new people, fearful of hidden motives, which, as he now knows, his disabilities make him powerless to detect. And Jesse learned one more valuable lesson.
"I mean, the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, they taught me how to buy pot," he says, and breaks into a grin.
This story is from the March 13th, 2014 issue of Rolling Stone.
Author: Sabrina Rubin Erdely
THE ENTRAPMENT OF JESSE SNODGRASS
He was a friendless high school loner struggling with autism.
So why did an undercover cop target him as a drug dealer?
Jesse Snodgrass plodded around yet another stucco corner, searching for Room 254 in time for the second-period bell, only to find he was lost yet again.
Jesse felt a familiar surge of panic.
He was new to Chaparral High School and still hadn't figured out how to navigate the sprawling Southern California campus with its outdoor maze of identical courtyards studded with baby palm trees.
Gripping his backpack straps, the 17-year-old took some deep breaths.
Gliding all around him were his new peers, chatting as they walked in slouchy pairs and in packs.
Many of their mouths were turned up, baring teeth, which Jesse recognized as smiles, a signal that they were happy.
Once he regained his composure, he followed the spray-painted Chaparral Puma paw prints on the ground, his gait stiff and soldierly, and prayed that his classroom would materialize. He was already prepared to declare his third day of school a disaster.
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At last, Jesse found his art class, where students were milling about in the final moments before the bell. He had resigned himself to maintaining a dignified silence when a slightly stocky kid with light-brown hair ambled over and said, "Hi."
"Hi," Jesse answered cautiously. Nearly six feet tall, Jesse glanced down to scan the kid's heart-shaped face, and seeing the corners of his mouth were turned up, Jesse relaxed a bit. The kid introduced himself as Daniel Briggs. Daniel told Jesse that he, too, was new to Chaparral - he'd just moved from Redlands, an hour away, to the suburb of Temecula - and, like Jesse, who'd recently relocated from the other side of town, was starting his senior year.
Jesse squinted and took a long moment to mull over Daniel's words. Meanwhile, Daniel sized up Jesse, taking in his muscular build and clenched jaw that topped off Jesse's skater-tough look: Metal Mulisha T-shirt, calf-length Dickies, buzz-cut hair and a stiff-brimmed baseball hat. A classic suburban thug. Lowering his voice, Daniel asked if Jesse knew where he might be able to get some weed.
"Yeah, man, I can get you some," Jesse answered in his slow monotone, every word stretched out and articulated with odd precision.
Daniel asked for his phone number, and Jesse obliged, his insides roiling with both triumph and anxiety.
On one hand, Jesse could hardly believe his good fortune: His conversation with Daniel would stand as the only meaningful interaction he'd have with another kid all day. On the other hand, Jesse had no idea where to get marijuana.
All Jesse knew in August 2012 was that he had somehow made a friend.
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Though it smacks of suburban myth or TV make-believe, undercover drug stings occur in high schools with surprising frequency, with self-consciously dopey names like "Operation D-Minus" and, naturally, "Operation Jump Street." They're elaborate stings in which adult undercover officers go to great lengths to pass as authentic teens: turning in homework, enduring detention, attending house parties and using current slang, having Googled the terms beforehand to ensure their correctness. In Tennessee last year, a 22-year-old policewoman emerging from 10 months undercover credited her mom's job as an acting coach as key to her performance as a drug-seeking-student, which was convincing enough to have 14 people arrested.
Other operations go even further to establish veracity, like a San Diego-area sting last year that practically elevated policing to performance art, in which three undercover deputies had "parents" who attended back-to-school nights; announcing the first of the sting's 19 arrests, Sheriff Bill Gore boasted this method of snaring teens was "almost too easy."
The practice was first pioneered in 1974 by the LAPD, which soon staged annual undercover busts that most years arrested scores of high schoolers; by the Eighties, it had spread as a favored strategy in the War on Drugs. Communities loved it: Each bust generated headlines and reassured citizens that police were proactively combating drugs.
Cops loved the stings, too, which not only served as a major morale boost but could also be lucrative. "Any increase in narcotics arrests is good for police departments. It's all about numbers," says former LAPD Deputy Chief Stephen Downing, who now works with the advocacy group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and views these operations with scorn. "This is not about public safety - the public is no safer, and the school grounds are no safer.
The more arrests you have, the more funding you can get through federal grants and overtime."
Yet despite the busts' popularity, their inner workings were shrouded in secrecy, with few details publicly released about their tactics and overall effectiveness. And as time went on, officers and school administrators became alarmed by the results they saw: large numbers of kids arrested for small quantities of drugs - and who, due to "zero tolerance" policies, were usually expelled from school.
No studies appear to exist on the efficacy of high school drug stings, but the data on undercover operations in general isn't encouraging. A 2007 Department of Justice-funded meta-analysis slammed the practice of police sting operations, finding that they reduce crime for a limited time - three months to a year - if at all. "At best, they are a stopgap measure," and at worst, an expensive waste of police resources, which "may prevent the use of other, more effective problem-solving techniques." The federal study concludes that sting operations reap little more than one consistent benefit: "favorable publicity" for police.
To be sure, public-relations speed bumps have appeared now and again, like when a female LAPD narc allegedly romanced a high school football player, which surfaced via her steamy love letters, or when a developmentally disabled child was swept up in another L.A. bust after selling $9 worth of marijuana to an undercover. But until now, no department seems to have gone so far as to lay a trap for an autistic kid.
From his seat at a worktable in the art room, Deputy Daniel Zipperstein observed his target and tablemate, Jesse Snodgrass. Like all the other students, Deputy Zipperstein was busily working on the day's class assignment, building a sculpture using cardboard, paper and wire, but Jesse was clearly flummoxed by the project's complexity. Their ponytailed teacher, James Taylor, paused by the boys' table. "Jesse, OK," Taylor instructed, holding up a piece of cardboard. "Today's task will be to cut out six cardboard squares of this size." Taylor took pains to pare down each assignment into bite-size chunks for Jesse, but even so, he'd need to keep circling back to remind Jesse to stay on his single small task. Zipperstein watched Jesse slowly pick up the scissors and get to work.
No one at Chaparral High School knew that transfer student "Daniel Briggs" was in fact a cop in his mid-twenties; as is typical in such an investigation, only a few top district administrators were aware of the operation. With Daniel's Billabong T-shirts, camo shorts and Vans, "he looked just like an average kid," remembers student Jessica Flores, then 17. Handsome and quick to smile, Daniel was meeting new friends with remarkable ease, though some students remained wary, due to his habit of interrupting strangers' conversations whenever the subject of drugs came up - for which he quickly acquired the nickname "Deputy Dan." Madalyn Dunn, then 17, was startled while she chatted with friends during shop class, and the new kid leapt right in: "Are you talking about ketamine?" Dan said, then asked if she'd sell him some, which she declined. Nonetheless, the two wound up walking to fourth period together, bonding over their fondness for pot. After that, Madalyn says, Daniel wouldn't stop asking her for drugs. "Oh, come on," he'd pester.
Deputy Dan was just as aggressive with Jesse Snodgrass, pursuing the friendless boy outside the confines of school.
Jesse's mom, Catherine, and his dad, Doug, an engineer, had been delighted when Jesse had come home talking about his new friend from art class; they'd been even more surprised when Daniel had started buzzing Jesse's otherwise-silent phone with texts.
Jesse had only ever had one friend before, another special-ed kid who'd recently moved to Alabama, leaving Jesse bereft. And now that Jesse had switched to a new school - a move foisted upon the Snodgrasses when their old house had gone into foreclosure - he had been especially agitated lately.
It was only the latest distress in a lifetime of everyday struggles, which Catherine and Doug did their best to help Jesse navigate, fighting the constant battles waged by the parents of children on the autism spectrum: sticking up for him when he was ostracized from playgrounds or asked to leave restaurants as a child; standing up to school districts to secure Jesse equal access to education. Though the Snodgrasses also had two younger children at home, Jesse's needs had long made him a focal point.
They were ready for his life to get easier and were thrilled with the calming prospect of this new friendship.
"Why don't you tell Daniel to come over?" Catherine urged.
"OK." Jesse hunched over his phone as his mom drove him home through the clean streets of Temecula - a planned suburban community northeast of San Diego, population 100,000 - past the big-box strip malls and into their neighborhood of Mediterranean-style homes, where a man-made duck pond sparkled and joggers bounced past. Jesse's phone vibrated. "He can't do it today, he's grounded," Jesse recited.
Made sense to him. Daniel had already told Jesse that he was always in trouble with his strict mom, a conflict that left him superstressed - which was why Daniel "really needed" Jesse to hook him up with some pot.
"Maybe another time. You guys could order pizza, play video games, just hang out," Catherine said. Forging friendships was normally so hard for Jesse, who had the cognitive skills of an 11-year-old and was nearly oblivious to the facial expressions, body language, vocal tones and other contextual cues that make up basic social interactions. He was slow to draw inferences or interpret the casual idioms other kids used, like "catch you later," a phrase Jesse had initially found startling, since it turned out to involve no catching whatsoever. As a toddler, he'd once been terrified for days after his preschool teacher told him, "I'll keep my eye on you."
Jesse had seemed typical enough until age two. Then words started disappearing from his vocabulary, and he spoke in a sporadic, garbled language. His parents grew worried: Their young son made no eye contact and scarcely registered the presence of other people, but drew hundreds of pictures of their vacuum cleaner and would spend hours waving a crayon in front of his face, entranced by the fan of color it etched in the air. When Jesse was five, a neurologist diagnosed him with Asperger's syndrome, a variant of autism; over the years, Jesse's diagnoses would expand to include Tourette's, bipolar disorder and depression. An evaluator prepared the Snodgrasses for the possibility that Jesse might never speak again.
Catherine quit her advertising job to plunge Jesse into intensive autism therapies.
Amazingly, the interventions got him back on track enough that he was able to attend regular school, taking special-ed classes and mainstream electives, with a counseling team to help him manage.
But Jesse's difficulties were hardly over. He was bullied throughout middle school, mocked as a "retard." He lashed out at his tormentors and, in doing so, developed a discipline record, with suspensions for fighting and many a day penalized in "lunch club," scraping gum from under desks.
Jesse rarely complained about his mistreatment; he was a boy who didn't think to ask for help. Instead, he vented his frustrations with episodes of headbanging, scratching and punching himself, violent and bloody bursts of self-injury. It took Jesse years of therapy to wean himself from those self-injurious impulses and soothe himself instead with benign motor tics like wringing his hands or snapping his fingers when he felt anxious.
He also found another way to cope. During his sophomore year of high school, Jesse shaved his head, began lifting weights and developed a new persona his therapist Jason Agnetti came to call his "bro identity." Dressed in wife-beaters that showed off his biceps, saggy jeans and baseball caps, Jesse would stomp around school, dropping f-bombs and calling other kids "retards." He talked about extreme sports like motocross, off-roading and skateboarding, even though in reality he couldn't ride a bike or even tie his own shoelaces.
In his junior year, Jesse drew a bong on his notebook and called himself "Jesse Smokegrass," despite his inexperience with pot. By emulating the bad-boy swagger of his own bullies, Jesse was putting on a suit of armor.
Though his parents were a little concerned - and irritated with all his unnecessary posing - they saw it as a phase and, in that regard, not unlike other powerful antagonistic personae Jesse had identified with in the past. "There was a period of time when he was really obsessed with the Undertaker, the wrestler," says Doug. "And in fourth grade, he was obsessed with Bowser in Super Mario."
To some extent, the bro disguise worked, making Jesse less approachable and even, from a distance, menacing.
Anyone who took a closer look, however, could see past the facade.
As he strode the halls of Chaparral, with his robot walk and compulsive finger-snapping, it was clear that something was amiss. "You could see right away that there's something off about him," says Perry Pickett, who at the time was a Chaparral junior. And as soon as Jesse spoke with his flat affect, slow response time and inability to follow any but the simplest instructions - his impairment was obvious.
And yet Deputy Dan was unrelenting. As the weeks went by and Jesse continued to stall, Daniel sent Jesse 60 text messages,- hounding him to deliver on his promise to get marijuana. "He was pretty much stalking me," remembers Jesse. "With the begging for the drugs and everything, it was kind of a drag." Already anxious about his new home and new school, Jesse was conflicted. He knew he didn't really want to get marijuana for Daniel - not that he even knew how - and that the drug requests were ratcheting up his anxiety to an intolerable level.
But Jesse also desperately wanted Daniel to like him and didn't want to fail his new friend. Daniel's oft-stated plight that his home life made him so unhappy that he needed to self-medicate struck a certain chord with Jesse, who also needed pharmaceuticals in order to function. "I take medication for my own issues," Jesse confessed to Daniel, rattling them off: Depakote, Lamictal, Clonazepam. Burdened by his sense of obligation, frightened and helpless, the pressure was too much for Jesse to handle.
One day the turmoil had been so great that after art class, Jesse fled to the boys' bathroom and burned his arm with a lighter.
Three weeks into the school year, Doug and Catherine Snodgrass held a meeting with Jesse's educational-support team, in light of Jesse's self-inflicted burn, to discuss their son's transition to Chaparral. "They were concerned about him building friendships at the school," attendee Delfina Gomez, Jesse's behavioral-health specialist, would later testify.
Unaware that Jesse was being befriended by a narc, the team assured the Snodgrasses that overseeing Jesse was a priority for them, including-finding him "a classroom buddy, peer buddy or peer leader."
Elsewhere in the building that same day, Daniel pressed $20 into Jesse's hand.
"I'll see what I can get you," Jesse told him.
"I'm gonna meet Daniel before class," Jesse told his father five days later while on the drive to school.
He bent to read the screen of his phone. "Take me to the Outback Steakhouse." Jesse was jumpy.
He'd asked Daniel to come over to his house for the marijuana handoff, but Daniel was insisting on meeting at a strip mall adjacent to Chaparral's ball fields. Daniel's car was already parked in the empty lot when Doug and Jesse arrived at 7:10 a.m. Jesse leapt out of the station wagon. "Stay here," Jesse instructed his father.
Doug, proud of his son's social accomplishment, contented himself with a friendly wave at the young fellow before driving off. Daniel waved back.
The previous weekend, saddled with Daniel's $20 bill, Jesse had agonized over how to get his hands on some pot. At last, the answer hit him. The medical-marijuana dispensary in downtown Temecula sold marijuana!
Jesse congratulated himself on his logic.
He and his family often spent leisurely afternoons browsing downtown's pedestrian thoroughfare, where Jesse would branch off for an hour of solo exploration before reconnecting at the Root Beer Company for sodas.
Sure enough, that weekend Jesse wandered toward the dispensary and approached a pale man with bad skin and longish hair - "he kind of had that look of a junkie," Jesse says - who took his $20 and, to Jesse's infinite relief, handed him a clear sandwich baggie with weed inside.
Now, standing with Daniel beside his car and in a hurry to get this nerve-racking errand over with, Jesse thrust the precious stash into his hands. Daniel glanced at it. It was a pathetic half-gram of dried-up flakes - about five dollars' worth of marijuana, maybe enough to roll a single skinny joint.
Still, Daniel seemed satisfied.
He threw it in his glove compartment and suggested they get to class.
Later that day, Deputy Zipperstein handed off the baggie to another deputy, who transported it to a police station, where the drugs were field-tested by yet another officer, then ceremoniously weighed, photographed and tagged as evidence: SUS - SNODGRASS, JESSE $20/.6 GRAM MARIJUANA BUY #1. The picture was transferred onto CD for posterity.
The Riverside County Sheriff's Department was becoming expert at this sort of thing.
Over the previous two years, it had staged two stings in other school districts, arresting 14 students at Palm Desert High School in 2010, and 24 students from Moreno Valley and Wildomar high schools in 2011; in both cases, undercovers had bought marijuana, Ecstasy and cocaine. So when in July 2012 the sheriff's department had approached the Temecula Valley Unified School District to report a suspicion of drug sales in two high schools, Superintendent Timothy Ritter had granted permission for Operation Glasshouse. ( All TVUSD personnel declined comment, citing litigation. ) His compliance seemed natural in conservative Temecula, a former tiny ranching town whose population had exploded over the past 20 years as people seeking affordable homes moved inland - many of them military families from Camp Pendleton - and where police maintained an aggressive presence, intent on keeping it an oasis of order.
Two young, attractive deputies were chosen for Operation Glasshouse. Deputy Yesenia Hernandez was enrolled in Temecula Valley High School. Petite and outgoing, she was an instant hit, especially with the boys, who misread her attentions. Deputy Daniel Zipperstein was dispatched to Chaparral, where, as the new kid constantly talking about drugs, he had to overcome some initial skepticism. "Ask him for his badge number!" some kids playfully called out, when at lunchtime he asked to sit with a bunch of self-described "happy stoners." Daniel laughed along, joking back in a goofy voice, "Yeah, OK, you're all under arrest."
But Zipperstein disarmed kids with his frank approach, explaining, "I'm new, I don't have any friends here yet." He was quick to open up about his pretend personal life, telling kids he'd had to move from his dad's in Redlands to live with his irritating mother. "It's so hard to deal with my mom and shit," he said. "She's always bitching." To escape her tyranny, all he wanted to do was lock himself in his room and get high. Remembers student Perry Pickett, "I dunno, I felt bad for the kid." Girls thought it charming when Daniel said he still traveled to Redlands each weekend to visit his girlfriend - whose favorite activity, incidentally, was getting high together. "We were like, 'OK, that's romantic, I guess,'" says Jessica Flores, who sold him a gram or so of marijuana a half-dozen times.
But although Daniel was in a relationship, that didn't stop him from admiring other girls, like when, during one lunch period with a view into the dance room, Daniel exhorted about a 15-year-old in spandex, "Dang, look at the ass on that one!"
Before long, kids accepted Daniel as one of their own, enough that his unusual persistence in ferreting out drugs stopped raising red flags, as well as his notably indiscriminate appetite. "If you mentioned weed, he wanted weed," says Madalyn, who sold him some of her marijuana, LSD and molly. "If I brought up acid, that's what he wanted.
He said he wanted to get coke. He had no limitation." Students also overlooked how odd it was for a high schooler to have so much cash, giving it out with such abandon. Once, when he handed Perry $15, asking for weed, and Perry came back empty-handed, Daniel told him to keep the money.
"I felt like I owed him something," says Perry, who, due to his learning difficulties, was a special-needs student with an individualized learning plan. He had felt especially bad because Daniel had been so open and vulnerable about his lousy family situation.
So when Perry heard that a kid in his third-period class was selling Vicodin swiped from his parents' medicine cabinet, he offered to introduce Daniel. Strangely enough, he says, Daniel demurred, but instead handed Perry $14, instructed him to buy $10 worth of pills on his behalf - thus creating the transaction necessary for a bust - and to keep the change. "I was like, 'All right, four bucks!
That's a couple chicken sandwiches right there!'" says Perry. Meanwhile, Perry's 16-year-old friend Sebastian Eppinger, seeing how careless Daniel was with his money, thought he recognized an opportunity and agreed to act as a middleman. "I ripped him off superbad," says Sebastian. "I sold him 20 bucks' worth of weed for $80."
Any skepticism about Daniel being a narc evaporated after Perry delivered him his Vicodin. Grinning and thanking him profusely, Daniel informed Perry and Sebastian he didn't swallow Vicodin, he smoked it. The boys were dubious, so Daniel described how he'd rub off the pill's coating, grind it to powder, then freebase it off tinfoil.
To demonstrate, Daniel popped the pill into his mouth and sucked it, then spat it out and rubbed it on his shirt, explaining that it was now ready for crushing and smoking. "I heard you can do the same thing with heroin," Daniel said, dropping a hint about his next drug target.
The boys didn't pick up on the bait; they were agog, having learned a new drug-taking technique.
As autumn drew to a close, Daniel had little contact with Jesse Snodgrass anymore.
He'd managed to give Jesse another $20, two weeks after the first sale - - and, in return, got an even skimpier amount of marijuana than the first time, under a half-gram. But then Daniel had asked Jesse to sell him some Clonazepam, Jesse's anxiety medication. Jesse was adamant in his refusal: That was his medicine - he needed it. When Jesse wouldn't budge, Daniel completely lost interest in their friendship. The rejection stung.
Jesse's parents would inquire about Daniel, and he'd shrug it off. He tried to forget about it and focus on the things that mattered, like passing algebra.
Against all odds, Jesse was inching his way toward a high school diploma.
On the morning of December 11th, the door to Jesse's art classroom burst open, and five armed police officers in bulletproof vests rushed in, calling his name. Jesse was handcuffed in front of his classmates. He thought maybe he was asleep and dreaming. "I was confused," he remembers. "I didn't know what was going on," and he didn't connect the events back to Daniel. Neither did Madalyn or Jessica, who also were arrested in their classrooms; the three of them, along with two other boys, were paraded in handcuffs out of Chaparral and into a police van. At the same time, in a classroom at nearby Rancho Vista continuation high school, Perry - who'd transferred to get better one-on-one special-needs attention - was being shackled; and Sebastian, sick at home, awoke to find his bedroom filled with cops. Fifteen students from Temecula Valley High School were also rounded up, bringing the number of students arrested in Operation Glasshouse to an impressive 22.
The scale of the takedown operation was enormous, from the swarming officers in tactical gear to the police helicopter hovering overhead. Authorities announced they had seized marijuana, Ecstasy, LSD, heroin, cocaine, meth and prescription drugs.
Though it declined to divulge the quantities, the sheriff's office insisted that the amounts collected were beside the point: "The program is not designed to recover large amounts of drugs," it said in a statement to RS. "The program is designed to quell hand-to-hand narcotics transactions on campus." That evening, the big drug bust would be the talk of Southern California, with newscasts leading with the story - prominently featuring a dramatic photograph of a tall boy dressed in a gray hoodie and black Dickies, his hands cuffed behind his back, flanked by armed officers.
Jesse Snodgrass had just become Operation Glasshouse's unlikely poster child.
"Why do you think you're here?"
"I don't know," Jesse answered. "I was just called up and that's why I'm wondering." In a plain-walled interrogation room at the Perris police station, near Temecula, Jesse sat stiffly in a chair, hands clenched. Across the table, hunched over a clipboard, sat a lean man with stringy blond hair, a plaid shirt and a police badge hanging from his neck. Jesse was anxious to clear up this whole misunderstanding and go home. For more than an hour, he'd been waiting in a common area in tense silence with 21 other kids, the vast majority of them Mexican-American boys, desperately studying their downcast faces for clues.
None had been told the reason for their arrests and were forbidden to talk. Any time they'd made a sound, officers barked, "You better shut your mouth." Jesse had watched as one by one they'd been called into this little room, although one key nuance had eluded him: Each had emerged looking shocked and terrified; one girl had a full-blown panic attack.
"All right," said the deputy from the Riverside County Sheriff's Special Investigations Bureau, looking up from his clipboard. "Have you ever sold drugs?"
"No." Jesse was resolute.
"You sure?"
"Yeah, I'm sure," answered Jesse. He'd been as compliant as possible with his answers, having waived his Miranda rights - though he hadn't entirely understood what he was agreeing to, he had said "yes" anyway to demonstrate his cooperation - but he could tell he was bombing this quiz. In his nervousness, Jesse already had been unable to recall his mom's phone number and his home address.
He was, however, forthcoming when the officer asked if he'd ever used drugs, truthfully admitting that he'd once smoked pot, but that he just wasn't into it.
"Have you ever sold drugs at Chaparral High School?" the deputy asked.
"Nope."
"You never sold drugs to any students there?"
"No, sir," Jesse said respectfully.
"Mm-kay." Then, in a theatrical flourish that would be performed 22 times that day, the deputy crossed the interrogation room to open the door. "Do you know who this is?" he asked, as a uniformed police officer with short, neat hair walked in. Jesse did a double take.
"Daniel?" he asked the officer uncertainly. Deputy Daniel Zipperstein didn't answer but simply stood with his feet planted apart and his hands clasped in front of him, staring straight ahead.
Jesse marveled at how different his friend appeared, nearly unrecognizable in these clothes and in this pose, so proud and tall. It was as though Daniel had grown up overnight, looking so markedly different that when he made his dramatic entrance into Perry's interrogation, Perry exclaimed, "Do you have a younger brother at Chaparral?" making the officers guffaw.
And yet even with Daniel standing over him like a statue and the interrogator looking amused from across the table, Jesse's mind struggled to knit the bits of information into a cohesive narrative.
"Am I getting in any trouble?" Jesse asked.
"Well, what do you think?" answered the deputy, snickering.
With that, the criminal-justice system intractably moved Jesse Snodgrass forward - even though, before leaving the interrogation room, the deputy had to walk the still-uncomprehending Jesse through the logic at play behind his crime: that Jesse had not merely given Daniel drugs; because Daniel had paid him, Jesse had, in fact, sold drugs.
So confused was Jesse that upon leaving the station, he found himself loaded into a van with a half-dozen kids who'd admitted to having done drugs within the past 24 hours, en route to the hospital to have their vitals monitored. "Are you mentally retarded?" a cop at the hospital cautiously asked after Jesse droned down his list of psychiatric meds. When Jesse answered, "I have Asperger's," the officer groaned.
Nonetheless, protocol being protocol, Jesse was shuttled onward to Southwest Juvenile Hall, where he was placed in a holding cell to await booking - and where, by late afternoon, his distraught mother was on the phone with an officer, trying to reach her son.
"My son is self-injurious," Catherine pleaded. "If he hangs himself on your watch, it is your fault." Incredibly, Jesse's parents were never notified of their son's arrest, but learned of it when he didn't surface after school; a cascade of calls had finally put Doug in touch with the school principal, who informed him in a businesslike way that Jesse had been arrested hours earlier.
Both parents had been shocked, but like Jesse himself, they assumed this was some sort of fixable error.
And yet to their horror, they'd come to discover that their son - a boy who scarcely left home - would now be detained for at least the next two days.
"You know, Mama, the kids here love it," a female officer told Catherine when she called the juvenile hall that first evening to make arrangements to drop off Jesse's meds. "They get three square meals and a bed. They love it here, and they keep coming back." The implication stung Catherine: that the kids locked inside - including her son - were already criminals, headed for a life of incarceration.
That was also the message of the district attorney's office in the courthouse two days later.
According to Doug and Catherine, as all of the families somberly gathered to see their children for the first time since the arrest, Senior Deputy District Attorney Blaine Hopp strode into the center of the crowd. "This should be a wake-up call to all of you. Your children are drug dealers," he announced. "But this is an opportunity to save them," he added, inviting parents to speak with him before the proceedings began.
To the Snodgrasses' surprise, many did. That didn't stop Hopp from arguing to the judge that each child posed a danger to the community and should therefore stay in custody longer - a frightening prospect to parents and kids alike.
When Jesse's turn came, he was charged with two felonies, one for each marijuana sale. Hopp argued that Jesse should remain locked up for an additional month, until his next court date - even though the probation department, having reviewed his history, had recommended his release. From their seats, the Snodgrasses listened aghast as Hopp lambasted their son as a menace to society, and got their first glimpse of Jesse in his prison-issued orange jumpsuit.
He didn't return their gaze. Jesse had regressed after spending three days and two nights in the juvenile prison system.
And while incarcerated, he'd struggled to process Daniel's betrayal. "I thought we were really good friends," he kept mumbling to his fellow inmates, who had to explain the situation to him. When Jesse had finally been escorted into court, his expression was blank. Although desperate to see his parents, his eyes skipped right over them without recognition, a behavior they hadn't seen since his childhood. When the judge announced his immediate release, Jesse showed no sign that he had heard or understood.
At home, Jesse unraveled.
For six weeks, he could barely summon language to speak and simply sat motionless, sometimes waving a hand in front of his face, much like when he was three years old. "I want to die," he managed to tell his parents at Christmastime, his face buried in his pillow. There were emergency therapy sessions and adjustments to his medication. His parents stayed up all night to keep watch.
And in the midst of everything, the Snodgrasses received a letter from the Temecula Valley Unified School District, notifying them that in light of the allegations against Jesse and that he had sold drugs near campus, it was suspending him, and moving forward with his expulsion.
Few families in the Snodgrasses' situation fight back. Even fewer speak out. "There's a lot of shame for the family, for your kid to be involved with a drug case," says Lynne Lyman, California state director of the Drug Policy Alliance. "The stigma is tremendous." But Catherine and Doug Snodgrass were atypical parents.
They'd been fighting with school districts Jesse's entire life; in their younger days, they'd been union organizers. And the Snodgrasses were convinced they had no reason to hide. "We have nothing to be ashamed of, Jesse has nothing to be ashamed of," says Doug. "The people who do this, they're the ones who should be ashamed."
The criminal judge seemed inclined to agree, noting that Jesse's autism amounted to "unusual and exceptional circumstances." Jesse was sentenced to "informal probation," wherein if he kept out of trouble for six months and did 20 hours of community service, his record would be wiped clean. The Snodgrasses accepted the quickie plea deal rather than put Jesse through the stress of a trial - and because they were already waging a battle on a second front.
In an effort to stop the Temecula Valley Unified School District from expelling Jesse, the Snodgrasses appealed to the state's Office of Administrative Hearings. During a six-day hearing in February 2013, the school district dug in its heels on its right to expel Jesse for his crime, presenting a parade of witnesses - including members of Jesse's trusted school support team - to insist that despite Jesse's autism, the boy knew right from wrong, and therefore should have been able to resist the undercover cop's entreaties. The district's director of Child Welfare and Attendance, Michael Hubbard, who was one of only three district administrators with foreknowledge of the sting, further testified that his faith in Operation Glasshouse was so complete that he'd felt fine about Jesse's arrest. "I didn't believe it was coercion or entrapment for any of the kids," Hubbard testified.
In March last year, Judge Marian Tully's 19-page ruling excoriated the school district for setting Jesse up to fail. "The district placed Student in an extremely difficult social-problem scenario that would have been difficult even for typical high school students," she wrote, much less a special-needs kid. Chastising the district for "leaving Student to fend for himself, anxious and alone, against an undercover police officer," she ordered that Jesse be returned to school immediately.
Yet Jesse's victories did little to ease his frayed mental state as he headed back to Chaparral High School. He shook with anxiety in the car on the drive there and hadn't yet overcome his new habit of crumpling to the floor anytime they passed a police car. During the three-month suspension since his arrest, Jesse had been overwhelmed by paranoia so great that once when their doorbell rang, he tackled his mother to the floor, begging, "Don't answer!" Plagued by panic attacks and nightmares - the back of his left hand was gouged by a deep groove where he'd anxiously scratched himself raw - Jesse had been diagnosed with PTSD. He was frightened to be back at Chaparral, where the other kids stared and counselors who'd testified against him now smiled at him, and where, to his parents' disbelief, the school district had filed an appeal of the administrative ruling - it was still fighting to expel him.
Despite all that, Jesse was dimly aware that he had it pretty good compared to his fellow arrestees: Of the 22 kids arrested, he's apparently the only one still getting a traditional education. "Every one of us got expelled," says Perry, who now attends a reform school, along with most of the others caught in the sting.
Others took their expulsion as a cue to drop out, like Madalyn, who now lives in L.A., working as a receptionist for an HVAC company.
She was only three classes shy of a high school diploma. "So close," she says wistfully. But while less than thrilled about their day-to-day lives, they're grateful to have escaped worse fates, since Perry, Sebastian, Jessica and Madalyn, like many of the kids, pleaded guilty in exchange for no further jail time; their juvenile criminal records will be sealed.
That puts them in a luckier boat than the two students who happened to have been 18 at the time of their crimes and were treated as adults: One, charged with selling marijuana and meth, spent 30 days in a men's jail, at which point he threw himself upon the mercy of the court and was sentenced to residential rehab; the second boy, charged with three marijuana sales, was sentenced to two years in county jail.
Stings like these can have a long-term impact on kids, sometimes in devastating ways. Research shows that juvenile arrests predict brushes with the law as adults. "These kinds of practices push students out of school and toward the criminal-justice system," says state director Lyman, noting that minority, special-needs and poor children are particularly at risk. "It's known as the school-to-prison pipeline."
Persuaded by the high potential for bad outcomes for kids, and by the lack of evidence of good results for communities, the National Association of School Safety and Law Enforcement Officials has concluded that undercover high school operations are usually a poor strategy. "We're more interested in getting kids help that need it, rather than targeting kids to be locked up," says former police chief Larry Johnson, president-elect of NASSLEO. Even the birthplace of these stings, Los Angeles, has backed off the tactic; after the school district began openly questioning its efficacy in 2004, the LAPD abruptly shut down its 30-year-old undercover School Buy program.
Nevertheless, Riverside County is undeterred. This past December - one year after the raid that arrested Jesse Snodgrass - the sheriff's department announced yet another successful undercover operation: a semester-long sting that nabbed 25 high school students in the nearby cities of Perris and Meniffee, most for small amounts of marijuana. Among the arrestees was reportedly a 15-year-old special-ed student who reads at a third-grade level, arrested for selling a single Vicodin pill for $3, which he used to buy snacks.
Perris Superintendent Jonathan Greenberg has called the operation "an unqualified success."
The Snodgrasses don't want their experience to be in vain and are now suing the Temecula Valley Unified School District, accusing it of negligence for allowing their son to be targeted despite his disabilities. "We think that we can make these operations stop," says Doug. "We want to use this to send a message to administrators everywhere. When they're approached by police departments about having an undercover operation at their school, they'll remember a district got sued."
Reflecting on his experience as the target of an undercover drug sting, Jesse still doesn't know quite what to make of it. "They were actually out to get us," Jesse says, sounding mystified as he swigs a protein shake; because of his PTSD, he still sometimes finds himself unable to eat and wants to regain some of the weight he's lost. He managed to graduate this past December and has started a job in construction. In the meantime, he has gleaned a few important lessons from the ordeal: "To not trust everyone you see," he says thoughtfully. Through his friend's harsh betrayal, he has come to understand that people aren't always what they appear to be, a cruel but necessary lesson that all children must learn sometime.
He has realized that even adults are capable of acting with terrible unkindness and duplicity.
Jesse's insights have made him wary of meeting new people, fearful of hidden motives, which, as he now knows, his disabilities make him powerless to detect. And Jesse learned one more valuable lesson.
"I mean, the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, they taught me how to buy pot," he says, and breaks into a grin.
This story is from the March 13th, 2014 issue of Rolling Stone.
That's sickening,truly revolting...how can they do this kind of things,how can they claim to be civilized? I just feel so bad for this poor boy 
and all those who felt through this shitty program...
and all those who felt through this shitty program...
