7 How the Warriors Invade Our Peace and Property

THE HONORABLE Rudolph W. Giuliani, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was outraged at my remarks, and at those of several other academic dissenters participating in a forum. At one point he replied to me, "The freedoms of people arrested for drugs are very, very well protected in the United States." Later, even more emphatically, "We don't put people in prison because we like to but because we have no other choice." He then fairly shouted at me, "It's absurd to keep saying those silly things," a thought he threw out at least six times during an afternoon of heated discussion on a 100-degree August day at Manhattan's University Club.

SCORCHED EARTH: THE PROSECUTORIAL MIND-SET

The silly things I kept saying did not deal primarily with the matter of the protection of people once they are formally arrested for crime, but my concerns do include such matters because fear of drugs has induced American courts to approve of a wide array of irrational practices. Even though they have that stamp of judicial approval on them, our freedom in a real sense has been diminished by such court decisions. Indeed, one of the worst lines of court decisions in American history has been that which has approved ever-expanding police power in the pervasive search for chemical contraband. Drug prosecutions produce terrible judicial doctrines. Because they are based upon bastardized versions of scientific truth and democratic ethics, such decisions should be bound in separate volumes of court reports with a bar sinister (the ancient sign of bastard offspring) on the covers.

My concerns about freedom, though, go beyond perverse practices supported by judicial decisions or by statutes. The body of real American freedom has also been shrunk by a vast array of institutional practices that do not yet have the full legal stamp of approval on them. By "freedom" in this context, I mean the whole array of formal and informal rules that make for the personal dignity that is the birthright of a sovereign citizen in a democracy, whether or not that particular freedom has yet been articulated and protected by the legal system. Such freedoms range from the technical right to be free from unreasonable police searches in one's home (a traditional constitutional right) to the right to be free from being forced to urinate in a bottle at the whim of petty officials (a nontraditional and as yet undefined right). That full range of freedom, privacy, and dignity faces destruction at the hands of the drug warriors.

In addition, we must be concerned with the broad impact of our laws and policies on the number of Americans we place in our own prisons, not that, in one sense, they do not deserve to be there, but that in the longer run, we must inquire into what laws and policies we might change to lessen the number behind bars, to reverse the trend toward America becoming a prison nation. Thus, we should be concerned that conditions in America—created through a combination of bad luck and bad laws—have worked so as to produce the largest prison population in any democratic nation, in absolute and proportional terms.*
During the Reagan years, moreover, the total number of prisoners in major state and federal institutions jumped up sharply by 60 percent—from 329,821 in 1980 to 528,945 on June 30, 1986. As White House drug-policy chief Carlton Turner has bragged, a significant part of that increase has been contributed by drug-law offenders.

It was my expression of such broad concerns about freedom that made Mr. Giuliani so upset, as did my challenge to his vision of the universal harmfulness of the illegal drugs. To see and hear the visceral reaction of Mr. Giuliani in this forum (an edited transcript of which was later published by Harper's magazine) documents again the great obstacles to reform of our drug laws and policies. This lawyer is a superb prosecutor who left New York in the early Eighties to become the Associate Attorney General, the number-three man in the Reagan Justice Department where he was allegedly the brains behind the drug war. He then returned to the city as the U.S. Attorney or chief federal prosecutor a few years later. He is precisely the type of person I want to see out in the front lines going after the Mafia and other organized crime syndicates. Every person of good will must applaud his brilliant ongoing work aimed at crippling whole Mafia families in New York. Indeed, several years ago many millions of people did applaud the portrayal of him as one of the heroic prosecutors in the book and the movie Prince of the City, the fellow who helped convict crooked New York City narcotics detectives who had turned into drug traffickers themselves.

Included in his gallery of supporters, in addition to this writer, is arguably the best drug journalist in the country, Dean Latimer, listed on the High Times magazine masthead as Executive Almighty Editor. Whenever I have mentioned the name of the federal prosecutor to Mr. Latimer, his praise has been unstinting (a badge of approval Mr. Giuliani may prefer not to display prominently). "Rudy Giuliani is the most honest, courageous, effective cop-type I have ever seen in action. He's great!" Dean Latimer once said to me with rare enthusiasm. The journalist even added the protective thought, "I wonder if he doesn't say all that silly stuff about drugs because he thinks he has to—in this political climate."

Mr. Giuliani, then, represents an important species of government official, who may be readily recognized by the following markings: highly educated, dedicated to the noblest ideals of the law, courageous, incorruptible, tenacious in pursuit of criminals, and either utterly hypocritical or utterly ignorant about the realities of drugs in society. My preference would be the latter, for honest education can remedy lack of knowledge. The fault of ignorance rather than hypocrisy, moreover, comports with the impression created by most drug warriors I have met. Whatever the ultimate truth, the result is the same in today's world. It is as if Mr. Giuliani, one of the most prominent members of this species, had two personas in the same human package, one highly rational and admirable, the other irrational and as scary as an ayatollah on the hunt for infidels corrupting the faithful with killer opium.

Or the killer weed. The difficulty with our system is that when such fine prosecutors as Mr. Giuliani are successful in convicting crooked cops or Mafia Dons, it is then assumed that they are competent to design broader drug control strategy for the nation, and the world. While serving as the Associate Attorney General, Mr. Giuliani once told a reporter, "I have trouble separating marijuana at one end from heroin at the other. If we liberalize our position vis-à-vis marijuana, we erode the position vis-à-vis heroin." He said then, and repeated at the New York forum mentioned earlier, that "we were wasting our time" talking about changing the drug laws or comparing alcohol prohibition to marijuana prohibition. The American people simply do not want to change the laws on marijuana as they did with alcohol. Moreover, while marijuana did not necessarily lead all of its users on to heroin, there was a definite connection, he continued, adding definitively, "Talk to drug addicts and they will tell you they started with marijuana."

A year earlier flamboyant writer Steve Chapple responded to that argument, after an interview with the then Associate Attorney General, when he fumed in Outlaws in Babylon, "I've met a few junkies and I can say that without exception every junkie starts his or her drug habit not with marijuana but with beer. Yes, beer. (And Budweiser or Schlitz, not even very good beer.)"

A split persona is also presented by Stephen S. Trott, who spent several years as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division at the Department of Justice, the man technically responsible for overseeing all federal criminal prosecutions, including those conducted by U.S. attorneys. In 1986, he was promoted to the job of Associate Attorney General, Mr. Giuliani's old position. Like Mr. Giuliani, he appears to be highly educated, articulate, honest, and steeped in the best traditions of the law. When Julius Duscha, the mild-mannered director of the Washington Journalism Center, asked Mr. Trott at a journalism conference, held at the Watergate Hotel in late 1985, why no E. F. Hutton official went to jail for what appeared to be massive check-kiting fraud by the prestigious brokerage firm, I heard Mr. Trott thunder back with an explanation based upon fundamental legal principles. The Reagan administration had not, despite what its congressional and press critics had alleged, gone easy on these upper-class criminals. Rather, the Justice Department had launched a massive investigation over a period of many months which had uncovered no evidence directly implicating any high executives in criminal conduct. Instead of sending a few low-level functionaries to jail, the government lawyers concluded it would make more sense to work out an arrangement under which guilty pleas were entered, no prison sentences were imposed, but important new rules were laid down for a whole segment of the brokerage trade that would prevent bilking of customers of billions of dollars in the future. It is a very complicated subject, and there is evidence that higher-ups knew, but the eloquence of then Assistant Attorney General Trott succeeded in convincing me, initially highly dubious, that there was a good deal of rational support for the finely balanced legal-social judgment made by the Reagan officials in the E. F. Hutton case.

On the matter of drugs, it was just the opposite—as if a near-hysterical demagogue, or indeed the ghost of old Harry Anslinger, had leaped into the finely tailored blue suit of this trim young lawyer with the earnest, winning mariner. He talked war, plain and simple. "There's no peaceful coexistence with drugs," Mr. Trott trumpeted. He had just been on the CBS News "Nightwatch" program and debated with William F. Buckley, Jr., "who wants to surrender ... like at Munich" (referring to the surprising position taken by the conservative columnist opposing the drug war and advocating complete legalization of drugs). Mr. Trott had also watched the television coverage of Mrs. Reagan and Princess Diana when they visited some drug-treatment program that showed a whole gymnasium full of kids and their parents. The stories they told about drug problems of our youth "tore my guts out!" He took this as further dramatic proof of the dire condition of our youth and the need for a war without quarter to save them. Neither Mr. Trott nor any of the journalists present seemed aware of the harm created by that very treatment program, which was not mentioned by name. It was Straight, Inc.

A reporter asked what leading government officials like himself specifically intended to do about the nation's drug problem. Mr. Trott responded that we are going to use "a scorched-earth policy," which means that we are not simply going to send major criminal traffickers to jail but under the new laws we are going to seek forfeiture of "everything they own, their land, their cars, their boats, everything." Nobody asked if destroying organized crime would prevent kids from taking drugs or if the FBI was investigating the apparent kidnapping practices of Straight, which had been documented through sworn testimony in that federal case that had taken place just across the nearby Potomac River.

When I asked Mr. Trott how many of the 50-60 million illegal drug users in the country he wanted to send to jail, it was heartening to see a reflective, balanced response, almost in the same vein as the rational talk about E. F. Hutton. Of course, we cannot put all of those people in jail, or even a huge segment of them, the Justice Department leader explained. We would have to consider alternative sentences, like fines or community service. However, he has continued to call for a scorched-earth policy in the drug war and continues to cause deep concern in the minds of many rational citizens and officials.

Mr. Trott's boss, Attorney General Edwin Meese, has consistently called for attacks directly on users. The chief law-enforcement officer of the nation in 1985 sought to enlist the American press into that novel fight. In an address before a journalist's club, he declared, "I would like to suggest that there are no neutrals in the war on crime. The message must get through and that's where you and I can work together." The message: "to press hard on this story and connect the occasional cocaine user ... with the governments that support this trade." Reporters should help drug users understand that they are not "just buying pleasure for themselves but ... are supporting those who are dealing in terror, torture, and death." Mr. Meese's pleas drew a sharp response from Spencer Claw, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review: "That's exactly the role allotted to the press in socialist [in this case, meaning dictatorial] countries ... to educate people and persuade them about the truth as the government sees it."

Mr. Meese has taken a similar position with the lawyers of the nation. In a speech before a lawyers' association in 1985, he declared that constitutional freedoms should not be used as a "screen" to protect "the evils of drugs." Moreover, "there are no bystanders, not even the lawyers" in the war on drugs. That also, of course, is the role assigned to lawyers in so-called socialist countries, to see to it that justice as defined by the party in power is carried out in court, unhindered by petty personal considerations such as the rights of individual suspects.

Prominent defense lawyers who openly defy the attorney general's curious view of the role of independent counsel report that many prosecutors are seeking to smear them as willing participants in their clients' alleged criminal behavior. "Governmental investigations of lawyers—including use of such tactics as informants, wiretaps, subpoenas, and office searches—have risen so dramatically in the last four years that they are almost common," reported The National Law Journal in late 1985. So also were requests by prosecutors that lawyers forfeit fees (that is, surrender to the government money they have earned) as the illegal fruits of criminal enterprises, a startling concept in a democracy, now supported by new legal provisions enacted by Congress at the behest of the Reagan administration.

"There's rampant paranoia among the criminal defense lawyers, and it's there with good purpose," declared Howard L. Weitzman of California, who successfully defended John DeLorean on drug-conspiracy charges and now claims that undercover "clients" have tried to set him up for prosecutors.

In October 1986, Mr. Meese went before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and urged the nation's employers to help in the drug war by following the advice set out by former DEA administrator Peter Bensinger in a Harvard Business Review article. The Attorney General of the United States said in this major address, "Management must also indicate its willingness to undertake surveillance of problem areas such as locker rooms, parking lots, shipping and mailroom areas and nearby taverns, if necessary." The Washington Post, which has often waffled on drug-war issues, was sufficiently moved to label this suggestion "dangerous nonsense." The speech provided further telling insights into the minds of those who oversee the drug-enforcement effort of the nation, although up to now none of them had gone quite so far as to suggest spying on American employees in local taverns, an activity that would require, in some establishments I have visited, an uncommon degree of valor on the part of the spies.

SEIZING THE LANDS OF FREE CITIZENS

As the most powerful government on the face of the earth flails about in its frustrated inability to control illicit drug use by one in every four of its citizens, its emotional reactions reach out and threaten rights and freedoms that few thought were involved in the drug war. Included are some freedoms so grounded in our very existence as a nation, so treasured by even our most conservative citizens that their violation would seem beyond the bounds of discussion, such as the right to own and enjoy property. That right was considered essential to the founders of the country who saw to it that it was amply protected in the United States Constitution.

Indeed, if there is anything that would seem to be an archetypal American value it is a vibrant and prickly repugnance at the invasion of a free citizen's right to own property and to enjoy the privacy of both home and lands. Yet that traditional value has been under assault by the drug warriors, as illustrated by events in the hills of northern California, where, as Mr. Meese suggested, there were few innocent bystanders, even among those who wanted to remain neutral. It is worth returning to that region for a further look at what impact massive drug-law enforcement can have on the peace, freedom, and personal dignity of entire communities of American citizens.

The plans for CAMP 1985 which struck the greatest notes of fear involved the confiscation of land under the 1984 federal law that some experts call the most repressive piece of legislation in American history. That rating of the law was one of the first thoughts voiced by Ronald Sinoway and by his colleague, Melvin Pearlston, when I talked to them in their Humboldt office. Both lawyers were appalled at the provisions of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 (one of the proudest accomplishments of the Reagan administration prodded by the Miami Citizens Against Crime and the Florida congressional delegation) because it attempted to curb even more American freedoms in the name of winning the drug war. And the most galling part of the law to them was that which made land forfeiture much less difficult than in the past.

It has long been accepted in the law that a convicted criminal should be prevented from enjoying the fruits of his misdeeds and also that the instrumentalities or implements of a crime could properly be seized by the government. Thus, no significant issues of constitutional liberties were raised by seizures of rum runners' cash and boats during our earlier era of Prohibition nor are any raised now regarding such personal property of drug runners. However, the seizure of land, real property, has ever cut close to the bone of the freedoms treasured most by Britons and Americans since at least the time of the Magna Carta. Even a sovereign anointed by God would be wise to sleep lightly if he were in the habit of seizing the land of free citizens.

Nevertheless, the 1984 act adds a specific provision—the first in history, to my knowledge—to the American legal system that would allow the government to seize land on which drugs have been raised. Even before any criminal charges are filed, once an allegation of pot growing is made, it is now possible for government lawyers to commence a civil action for a "protective order" that will tie up the land for an initial period of ninety days. When the government is able to show "good cause" or produce an indictment, that cloud on the title will remain in effect almost indefinitely until the owner takes effective action to clear it.

Indeed, once marijuana is found, the presumption is now made by this law that the land was an instrumentality in a federal felony and that title should pass to the government. After conviction, an order can be entered conveying title to the government as of the time of the offense, thus voiding any transfer of the land that was made with the intent to avoid forfeiture. When this law was being rushed through Congress, there was no organized opposition, perhaps because few people really understood it or truly believed that it did violence to American traditions.

CAMP field commander William Ruzzamenti, with the most idealistic of motives, seems unaware of such traditions. He glories in the fear that will be produced up in the hills of Humboldt and Mendocino and Trinity counties among the growers, alone and in supportive communes, who themselves glory in their independence, defiance, and ownership of their own piece of those beautiful hills. Humboldt writer Ray Raphael told me that he was troubled about spelling out CAMP plans for 1985 in his book, Cash Crop, because he knew they would cause great fear and also because he knew that this was precisely what the DEA official wanted to happen—and yet Ray's objective was to tell the whole unvarnished truth, all of the conflicting sides and shades of it, about the role marijuana cultivation played in those communities.

Thus Mr. Raphael felt constrained to report in his revealing book these words of Mr. Ruzzamenti's: "The biggest focus of what we're doing is going to be on land seizures. Anybody who is growing marijuana on their land, we're going to take their land. It's as simple as that. It's done civilly through the federal system. Basically, people have to prove that they weren't involved and didn't even know about it. Just the act of having marijuana grown on your land is enough to tie it up; then you have to turn around and prove you're innocent. It reverses the burden of proof." Ray Raphael assured me that Bill Ruzzamenti's message either convinced some local citizens not to grow in 1985 or to reduce greatly the number of plants they risked putting on their land. Few of the people directly affected by these threats would fit the image of the fierce Mafia hoods which seemed to be in the mind of Associate Attorney General Trott when he declared that the forfeiture "scorched-earth" policy was to be a big weapon in controlling illicit drugs.

On October 12, 1984, five days after the law was enacted, a CAMP strike force was helicoptered to the 208-acre ranch owned by Rique Kuru and his wife, Natasha, in Mendocino County. The couple was arrested for growing 52 marijuana plants and for possession of a one-pound package of the herb—hardly evidence of membership in a major organized crime syndicate. Ronald Sinoway was retained to defend them. Mr. Sinoway had argued in the past that the exact forfeiture power of the government has never been settled and was not even done so by the 1984 law. In a series of cases dating back to 1870, he says, in which the government has tried to seize entire parcels of land because whisky stills were found on a part of them, the courts have always ruled that the government "could only seize the actual property where the still was, plus a little line of ingress and egress to it." In other words, Ron Sinoway's interpretation of the actual meaning of all the legal principles in this arena is that the courts have granted the government a very narrow power of seizure in actual cases.

Joseph P. Russoniello, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California—the top federal prosecutor on the scene—takes the position that in the past the trend of the decisions was as the defense lawyer saw it, but that in large part this was due to the fact that "there wasn't any specific statute that permitted us to take the land." Armed with the 1984 act, the federal prosecutor started going after whole parcels of land.

These different visions of the 1984 law and of constitutional liberty were about to be tested in the Kuru case when Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter Robinson made the couple an offer that they found too good to refuse. They had lived on the property for only a year and had a total equity of approximately $20,000. If convicted of the charges against them, they faced the possibility of several years in prison and the legal maximum potential of thirty. Mr. Robinson offered to drop all charges if they would turn the property over to the federal government. They readily agreed. The assistant federal prosecutor then announced that the property would be sold at auction.

The auction was held on the courthouse steps in Ukiah on May 20, 1985. A somewhat unruly crowd was in attendance. Two offers were made. One was for ten cents. Another was for thirty pieces of silver, which a man flung on the steps of the courthouse.

During the 1986 CAMP campaign, the forfeiture weapon was used with a vengeance by federal authorities. California growers began paying unprecedented fines in order to prevent the government from taking all of their land. Mr. Robinson bragged in September 1986, "The fines are 50 times larger than we ever got before ... and at least half the people paying fines will also go to jail." The government was taking the position that the discovery of 30 plants, hardly the mark of a major criminal, would trigger a move to forfeit the property. "We were using only about one acre out of 20 for pot," one outraged grower said, "but they tried to take the whole place, and we had to pay about $20,000 to save it. That's as much as our entire stake in the property."

ORGANIZED CITIZEN OPPOSITION

While many people will have little sympathy for anybody who grows even one marijuana plant, the CAMP program has produced widespread and organized citizen opposition to the war on drugs in that region, the greatest I have seen anywhere in this country or abroad. The opposition of those citizens has been aided by the involvement of a group of local lawyers, especially, as we have seen, Ron Sinoway and Mel Pearlston. The national NORML office and Director Kevin Zeese as well as lawyers affiliated with NORML in the San Francisco area have all put in a great deal of work in the many proceedings undertaken to control CAMP.

Ron Sinoway, now in his early forties, left a successful San Francisco practice and opened his office during the late Seventies in a small converted house nestled among the redwood trees on the Avenue of the Giants in southern Humboldt County. Soon after he opened the office, he started to share space and a small, competent and friendly staff with Mel Pearlston, who had been an assistant prosecutor in San Diego. Both men had come to the area for peace and space and had no particular interest in drug cases. Yet the two lawyers have become a focal point of opposition to the excesses of the war on drugs. They have become affiliated with NORML in their legal activities and have formed the Civil Liberties Monitoring Project, a nonprofit organization which operates out of their office. Local residents created the unique Citizens' Observation Group, which keeps a constant, nonviolent eye on the raiding activities of CAMP strike forces. Both lawyers, as well as attorney Edward Jay Moller of Redway, a few miles out of Garberville, provide legal advice to COG, which has many nongrowers among its members.

The gentle citizen opposition in these hills is usually expressed as opposition to the excesses or the illegalities of drug-law enforcement but I felt that an essential part of that organized dissent was a belief that the drug laws, at least to the extent that they prohibited marijuana, were irrational at their core. The opposition, moreover, was broader than the marijuana laws and was rooted in an overarching concept of a new, more private, and gentler culture than is now dominant in America.

Not all agreed on any one social philosophy, however. If there was one ideological point on which I encountered unanimity among the opponents in the hills it was that this was not a war on drugs at all but on much more important targets. Come on, these leaders can't be that stupid, I was told time and time again, whether in a law office or standing on the main street of Redway with a team of COG members. They can't be that excited over such an innocuous thing as pot. What were they warring over, then? To Mel Pearlston and Ron Sinoway it was over the Fourth Amendment and controls on police powers. To Barbara Arnold, "Susan," and "Oliver"— members of COG, who sometimes use fictitious names for protection from the police they follow and report on—it was on a way of life that sought only contentment on the land and not the acquisition of goods and thus was a threat to the dominant capitalist system.

In these conversations, I felt like the fellow who told an acquaintance, "The boys at the bar were saying that you weren't fit to sleep with the hogs. But don't worry. I defended you and told them that, yes, you were." Thus, often I was forced into the position of saying, yes, those leaders are, too, that stupid! While some of them may believe the war might not work and are afraid to say so, most believe that this is a war on drugs and not a broader conspiracy; there is no evidence that this is a hidden war of the capitalists and imperialists against the socialists and peaceniks, as the hill-culture residents keep insisting to me. In no case was I able to convince anyone there that my view of the war's more limited goal was correct. However they defined their fears about the broader goals of the anti-drug crusaders, many of the opposition group believed that their whole way of life, and not simply marijuana cultivation, was threatened. They believed in their hearts that the authorities intended to eradicate not plants but the Valhalla Bill Ruzzamenti identified in that area, although sometimes he referred to it equally scornfully as a Nirvana.

On this point, Ron Sinoway recently responded, "It is nirvana—there are artists, craftspeople, dance companies, private alternative schools, a community center, festivals: basically, the realization of the dream of the people who grew up in the 1960s. Since people of this type do not hurt other people ... , what is wrong with nirvana?" As to the argument that marijuana growing in that nirvana breeds violence, lawyer Sinoway's answer is that any time government intervention causes an agricultural product to be worth $2,000–$3,000 per pound in part because it is illegal, "one must expect some greedy people to try to take it and the people who have grown it for a number of months to try to stop the greedy people from taking it." Even with this occasional violence between growers and pot thieves, researchers of the Civil Liberties Monitoring Project documented that these hills are relatively peaceful places to live. Official statistics show that in 1983 Humboldt's total crime rate was 41 percent less than the average urban California county and eight percent less than the average rural county.

Mel Pearlston guesses that probably "there is more violence on a bad weekend in Oakland than in all of northern California since the advent of marijuana growing." This lawyer and parent observed on the basis of personal experience, "I feel so much safer here than I ever felt in the city [San Diego]. All right, I've worked there. I've lived there ... and I'll raise my child in an area like this any day."

Arguments in opposition to the drug war are often thrown at the warriors by many of the denizens of northern California. Even during the day of that raid I witnessed, the reporters raised questions constantly not so much about tactics but about the wisdom of the basic strategy of keeping marijuana illegal. Although several helicopters were used in that raid, most of the police were transported in small passenger vans and trucks, along with the press. A day-long dialogue ensued in those vehicles and on the mountainside, even as the marijuana was being cut down and hoisted up in slings by the helicopters. That openness epitomized my entire experience in this charmed piece of the world and partially accounts for the fact that I felt less fear during my time there than the period I spept in the doctrinaire air of the drug-free youth conference in Atlanta earlier in that year—or, indeed, in the Deep South half a lifetime ago. The driver of our van was Larry Gobin, a soft-spoken officer of the California Highway Patrol, stationed in Garberville. Dressed in blue jeans for the day, he put his big six-gun in its worn holster and belt on the floor as he drove through the dusty hills. He listened politely on the way up the mountains to his passengers, three local reporters and a professor-writer from the east, who kept raising questions based on a value system that opposed the drug war.

Of course, Larry responded patiently: this raid and others like it under CAMP were worth the risk, effort, and money. The conflict between dope growers and those who opposed them was tearing apart the community which was so peaceful and calm when he came 15 years ago, he said. The presence of so much marijuana was seen as a threat to his family, especially to his two teenage sons, who happened to be employed by CAMP this summer to drive fuel trucks for the helicopters.

The most outspoken person in our group was Michael Koepf, a columnist and reporter for a highly respected Mendocino County newspaper, the Anderson Valley Advertiser in Booneville, perhaps 20 miles south, as the crow flies, from the spot where the raid was taking place. "There's been a very low level of violence, given the type of people who live in these hills," Mike Koepf declared. "The red-necked deer hunters ... pig hunters are growing dope . . . and Vietnam vets who are scattered throughout these hills. Everyone carries, that is, everyone owns a rifle or a shotgun. Given the type of people ... the level of violence has been absolutely minimal. They're playing it up to justify a large expenditure of tax monies for this law-enforcement operation. This is political. We're at a stage where now that Reagan and Meese are involved, [they can say] if we can't win in Nicaragua, we got 'em on the run in Mendocino!

"I was a Green Beret, in the First Special Forces in Vietnam. This is no way to conduct a guerrilla operation. This is a public relations thing. There's no question about it," reporter Koepf continued. "This is no way to find dope. I find all sorts of dope—after the dope has [supposedly] been removed—during the pig season in the winter.... You don't need a helicopter to find dope." It's everywhere, he claimed, in part because northern California had been economically decimated in recent decades through the exhaustion of the salmon and the redwoods by those who ripped them from the environment.

His neighbors grow marijuana because they have no other way of surviving in a county with a 19 percent recorded unemployment rate and a general economy with no visible means of support. All those in his locality are the so-called mom-and-pop growers. "The biggest grower in my neighborhood has eight plants. I walk in the garden and he shows me his eight plants! ... He's not going to make a fortune on eight plants." In response to a statement by Bill Ruzzamenti at the morning briefing that the normal height for these plants is fourteen feet tall, he said, "That's preposterous. ... They get to about six feet.... He'll get three-quarters to a pound of dope out of it ... for each plant." If that grower sells during the harvest season he will get $1,400 a pound; if he holds on to a time when there is less available in the market, as much as $2,400.

"After expenses, I would imagine he'd make eleven, twelve, fifteen thousand dollars." The family, then, with the help of that illegal income will just make it up to the poverty line. Should law enforcement be going after growers like him? Mike Koepf says no, "because you're going to go after half the population of Mendocino County and destroy what little economic base there is left here."

Local citizen Koepf remembers training new troops in Vietnam by playing the role of Vietcong forces. Reflecting on that training experience, he says, "The growers are like Vietcong, in some ways. They know when these guys are coming. They hear 'em coming and they're gone. They're never going to catch 'em." (Mike Koepf seemed unaware that Bill Ruzzamenti had said that flight of the growers was one result he sometimes preferred.) The former Green Beret had come to see that the CAMP forces operated in the style of massive divisional movements in Vietnam. "They don't understand the enemy. They [the troops] have been kind of propagandized by the media ... and by their own law-enforcement leaders. They have the same line: there's violence in the woods ... and their kids can't go out into the woods anymore. That's a bunch of crap!"

We had been sitting in the van at the side of a road during one of the interminable waits that so often characterize the movement of large numbers of troops and vehicles. As he uttered that last word—at precisely that moment on my tape—a voice cut in, shouting, "Go home! Go home!" We looked up to see two girls, apparently local citizens in their early twenties, driving a station wagon down the long line of police vehicles, expressing sentiments that, according to Mendocino County sheriff Tim Shea at the briefing that morning, represented a distinct minority of local public opinion. The few citizens we encountered that day on the raid somehow all seemed to be in that minority.

Every citizen I asked during my entire sojurn in those hills agreed with Mike Koepf on the main point he was making at that moment: while there is indeed some danger from violent marijuana growers, it has been vastly exaggerated. Not a single person I encountered said that he or she was afraid to walk or drive anywhere there. Mike went out tramping through the woods while hunting for wild pigs as do many other local folks. Fear of marijuana growers has never interrupted a hunting foray, he says. Like many other local people, he does, to a degree, fear the police, but not because they are intentionally evil. "I'm looking at these guys, and they're all young. I can see how they're putting their guns on `Miami Vice' style. I mean, they're wholly into this image of being a strong macho.... I talked to one guy and asked `You ever been on an operation?' He said, `No, this is my first.' He looked like he was 21 years old. Reminds me of a lot of guys in Vietnam. You know, you're bound to fuck up the first time in combat ... and you'll probably fuck up the next six or seven times!"

Mike believed that huge raids by heavily armed police were not the best approach to enforcing existing laws and that there were many options open to enforcement leaders if they were intent on curbing marijuana growing in the area—more gentle options in line with the friendliness often exhibited by the people and officials there. "There's a deputy sheriff on this raid today, all right, from a different area. And I think he was an effective eradicator. The local people would give him an awful lot of information about what was going on, especially about growers who had a tendency to violence. And he would go out and make a certain amount of arrests ... but he also would go out and put his calling card on dope patches that he knew about. And he didn't worry about search warrants too much. He would just put his card on the fence. And, of course, as soon as the grower knew that the sheriff's department was aware of where his dope was, they'd cut it down." This may seem too lenient and completely incongruous to those who believe that contraband known to the police must be seized by force and destroyed by fire—after having been discovered by one of the helicopters that on some days seemed to be everywhere in the skies above the quiet hills.

LIFE UNDER THE HELICOPTERS

The complaints brought to the civil rights lawyers by outraged citizens in the region ran the full gamut from invasions of personal dignity to apparently clear violations of constitutional rights. A large number dealt with the strange, new, fearful impact of those helicopters. On August 16, 1984, for example, Charles Ervin Keys was at his home in the Rancho Sequoia area of Humboldt County with his son, Arthur, aged five. "At about 9:00 A.M., four helicopters in a diamond shape came within 100 feet of our home, shaking and blowing the tree tops. At about 9:30 A.M. the largest helicopter came back, put the nose of the helicopter about 100 feet away at my eye level (I live on a hillside) and hovered, watching me defecate [in] my outhouse. I didn't move so he moved right above me. He blew the toilet paper away from me and Arthur had to retrieve it for me."

This action seemed to be a clear violation not only of simple decency but also of the constitution. Even under the vast powers granted by the leading Supreme Court case on the matter, Oliver v. United States, the police have no authority to search the area close to a home, as opposed to "open fields," without probable cause. In that decision in 1984, the Supreme Court had greatly expanded police power when it upheld marijuana searches into private lands on anonymous tips—even when they were posted with "no trespassing" signs and when the officers had apparently violated state criminal trespassing laws—so long as the searches were confined to those open fields not within the curtilage or the area close to a homesite.

The police in the Oliver case had been on the ground. In 1986, the court faced its first appeal that dealt with the power of the police to search the homes and lands of citizens from a plane without a warrant on the basis of an anonymous tip. The Santa Clara, California, police had apparently used a small, fixed-wing aircraft to fly over the land of the suspect at 1,000 feet, within the accepted limits of navigable airspace. They spotted marijuana plants and later seized 73 of them. As has so often happened in the past, the power of the police to search for drugs was expanded and the rights of all citizens were diminished in the 5-4 decision of California v. Ciraolo. Even that grant of broad police power again seemed to have been exceeded by the low-flying helicopters that harassed Mr. Keys back in 1984.

Later that day, after Mr. Keys left his property with his son because he feared for their safety, the troops came on his property and took a .22-caliber rifle without a warrant. When he went to the sheriff's office and asked for the return of his rifle, Charles Keys was told that if he persisted, he would be charged with cultivation of marijuana, although he has sworn under oath that he is not a grower. The rural American citizen said he was angry at the invasion of his rights to privacy and freedom from illegal searches and seizures, in part because "I am an honorably discharged Viet Nam veteran, having served 17 months there in the marines, with 12 of those months in combat."

Marilyn Beckwith, 52, is a grandmother, the widow of a state park ranger, and a conservative Republican. She lived in the same area as Mr. Keys. Ms. Beckwith is blind and has a guide dog, Cameo. She also has the ability to "see" many events by instincts that keep sighted people wondering how a blind person could know such things. She reported on a series of raids in her vicinity, near Alderpoint, by keeping a journal, which read in part: August 17, 1984. They came in again this morning about 8:00 o'clock. A large cargo-type helicopter flew low over the cabin, shaking it on its very foundations. It shook all of us inside, too. I feel frightened.... I see how helpless and tormented I am becoming with disgust and disillusionment with the government which has turned this beautiful country into a police state. I thought they were only going for large commercial gardens, but today they are flying low over this residential area with small helicopters and observation planes. I feel like I am in the middle of a war zone.

August 20, 1984... They were out of earshot and I thought it would be a good time to take a shower in our wonderful solar-heated outdoor shower facility. I was surprised when one of the smaller choppers popped over the hill ... circled the cabin slowly and was low enough to get a good look at me standing there showering in the nude. I was shocked and disgusted and embarrassed... .

September 10, 1984... We had to leave the cabin early this morning because it was swaying from all the low-flying aircraft.... I had Cameo take me to our favorite spot deep in the woods under the big old fir tree. We spent the entire day there huddled, scared, crying while aircraft buzzed directly over our heads through the trees, shaking the ground.

September 11, 1984. I harnessed Cameo quickly and tried to get her to take me back to the old fir tree but she wouldn't go outside because of all the aircraft that were buzzing us so low and she crouched next to me on the floor trembling and shivering. [My adult son] Brian told me to hurry and get in the truck and we would spend the day in town.... As we left our property and started down the road in the truck one of the helicopters followed us, hovering low over the truck for a mile or so. ... As we hurried along the bumpy dirt road Cameo lost control of her bowels. It seemed incredible that this was all really happening in America.

Allison Osborne of nearby Briceland wrote later that month, "It seems that we are in Viet Nam or Nicaragua.... The CAMP people have done 75 percent of their entire California operation in southern Humboldt. The people here are fed up." She and her young children live in a cottage in the woods. They had endured months of close overflights, which had deeply disturbed the children. On September 19, while busting a nearby parcel of land, the helicopters flew within 50 feet of her roof and the troops in them made clearly visible obscene gestures at her and her children.

When my 12-year-old daughter came home from school, this same day, she was terrified and ran up to a neighbor's house. The helicopters chased them (two 12-year-old girls) up Perry Meadow Road, for about 20 minutes. When my daughter and her friend would hide under the bushes, the helicopters would lift up; when the girls would try to run to the nearest house, the 'copters would come again and frighten them... . They saw guns, and thought they were going to be shot!

LIFE UNDER THE GUNS

Guns are often trained directly on local citizens on the ground of this war zone because CAMP officials have taken the position in writing that all persons coming near operations may be held and identified and that nearby structures must be searched to make sure they contain no one who might take hostile action against the raiders. In a standard military situation, this is plain common sense. In a civilian situation in a free country, it is a constitutional abomination. It constitutes warrantless invasions of American homes and detentions of American citizens without probable cause.

The raiders are often strangers to the area, young, terribly frightened, shocked at the sight of some of the clothes or bearing of hill dwellers, poorly trained, and led by field commanders suffering from the same drawbacks. Thus Hal Friedberg's experience on September 10, 1984, has become a typical, even mild, event for many hundreds of Americans who live in the region. A resident, like many others here mentioned, of the Rancho Sequoia community, he was driving down the road to work at 7:30 A.M. with a friend in the car.

As I came around a bend a CAMP troop with an M-16 rifle was standing in the road. He told me to halt. I kept moving and told him I was late for work. He told me to "stop or I will shoot your ass." I stopped. I asked him why he stopped me. He told me to put my hands on the dash. He then radioed someone else saying that "I have two suspects. What should I do?" He was told to let us go.... The whole time his weapon was pointed at us, and at some point he was joined by two other troops with weapons pointed at us.... I was highly shaken and totally nervous the whole day. I felt threatened and was scared the rifle might go off accidentally.

This type of military control reached new heights in the tiny crossroads village of Denny in Trinity County in 1983 and also in 1984. The residents of this area were considered so hostile to law enforcement that Mr. Ruzzamenti has said that it was necessary "to virtually occupy the area with a small army" for several days each year while eradication activities took place. That harsh action might have been justified if law and order had truly broken down, as police officials claimed. Local residents and their lawyers, on the other hand, insisted that the area was simply a typical rural community and that it contained no more violence than any other. There was no dispute, however, over the fact that a good deal of . marijuana was grown in the area.

When a police officer believes that marijuana is being grown all over a community and that the residents might protect their plants with firearms, then it might seem perfectly rational to that officer to set up roadblocks for perhaps half a mile in either direction from the area being searched. That is how Sergeant David Laffranchini, the lead drug officer of the Trinity County Sheriff's Department, explained in a sworn statement why this piece of American soil was occupied in this small campaign in the war on drugs.

Residents were stunned and frightened to suddenly see strange men in combat uniforms, carrying military weapons, simply take over the entire area. At approximately 11:00 A.M. on August 24, 1983, for example, Eric Massett and his wife, Rebecca Sue, both in their thirties, were disturbed to see six men in camouflage uniforms pointing weapons at them as they pulled out of their driveway four miles outside of Denny. They were allowed to go into town and gathered with other frightened residents of the area. The Massetts did not leave town until the roadblocks were lifted at about 7:30 P.M., when the CAMP officials drove out of town in a convoy of vehicles. According to Eric, "Many of these troops pointed their rifles at us, and one man was waving a .45 pistol at us when they went by. They were shouting War on drugs!' `War on drugs!' and they took our pictures and some said they would be back."

Many other local citizens, including Katherine Bauer, 34, reported roughly similar experiences. She was not accustomed to being impeded in her daily rounds since she was the local contract mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service. Her status did not impress the drug warriors, who stopped her at gunpoint, demanded identification, forced her to return home to obtain it, subjected her to a weapons search and a registration check, and filled out a Field Interrogation Card about her.

At about 6:30 P.M. on the next evening, August 25, 1983, she was fixing dinner for herself and her five-year-old son at home when she heard "honking horns and yelling" out on the road. She walked about a hundred yards down her own driveway "to watch the parade," as the CAMP troops again left Denny. A friend and visitor, Michael Ulberg, was standing next to her on her own property. At that point a few gunshots were heard away up in the hills, which is not uncommon in the area. The convoy came to a quick halt and the troops piled out with their weapons. One armed officer yelled at Ms. Bauer, standing there in her own driveway next to her mailbox in her apron, to get moving, and she replied firmly that she was on her own land.

Next, Katherine Bauer stated in a sworn declaration, Deputy Sheriff "Chuck" Sanborn of Trinity County came storming up to her, stood within an inch of her, with his rifle next to her head, told her that she was an "asshole" and threatened that if he heard any more shots he would "open up" on her house. "As he was talking, saliva was spraying from his mouth.... I asked him to move back, and also asked him how he would like it if I spit in his face. He said, `You do that and I will knock you on your ass.' " The officer of the law then turned his attention to Mr. Ulberg and threatened him with the muzzle of the rifle less than two inches from the citizen's mouth. Deputy Sheriff Sanborn fumed: "If there is going to be any shooting around here, I'm going to be the first son of a bitch to open up on all of you motherfuckers!"

CAMP helicopters often returned to this rural area, sometimes known as the New River Canyon. The constant noise and the obvious presence of armed men in the flying machines was a source of continuing fear. They often flew at or below tree-top level near homes. `By this time my son was afraid, saying `Mommy, they are going to shoot me and they are going to shoot you!' " Katherine Bauer stated in October 1983. "He cried and lay down on the ground covering his head, repeatedly asking me to `take me away from here where I can't hear them.' I tried to explain that the men were young with boys of their own, that they weren't going to hurt us, but he became hysterical and all I could do was go into the house with him and put on music to try to drown out the noise of the helicopters."

THE KILLING OF DUCHESS

Several years later, I observed firsthand the fear and trauma still lingering in the emotions of several other Trinity County residents. Judy Rolicheck's hands still trembled a bit, her eyes brimmed with tears that did not quite roll out, and her chin tightened up as she struggled to keep her composure. Her daughter, Deena, sat next to her and gently patted her back. "It worked on me. I'm terrified," said Ms. Rolicheck, even though it had been over a year since it had happened, at least the start of it. "Bill Ruzzamenti said he wanted us to be afraid of CAMP and I am," she explained. It was August 4, 1985, and we were sitting at the picnic table of their pleasant, well-kept rural home near the town of Ruth, on eight private acres within the borders of the Six Rivers National Forest, about 70 miles south of Denny.

In my eyes, the family seemed to be typical middle-class, suburban Americans who happened to be living in a rural area—definitely not hippies or members of any counterculture. At 45, sporting a hefty salt-and-pepper beard, and over six feet tall, Gary Rolicheck appeared a large good-natured fellow, with a strong streak of frontier independence in his bones, who did not drink beer or smoke marijuana but did occasionally drink whisky, usually neat. His great-grandfather had been a pioneer who had come to California in a covered wagon and Gary was thus a rare breed, a fifth-generation native of the state. He had always worked and was then employed by Trinity County in a good job that entailed maintaining the roads. Judy, 42, was a registered nurse who had worked steadily while they had lived in central California but had stopped when they moved to the hills in 1982. The Rolichecks' son is a student at the College of the Redwoods. Daughter Deena, 20, had a daughter of her own, Althea, 2, who kept crawling over the table during our discussion. The family claims that none of them has ever been arrested for any charge. All denied any interest or involvement in the cultivation of marijuana. "I didn't move out here to be a pot grower," Judy insisted. "That was the furthest thing from our minds."

That entire family loved Duchess, a Doberman pinscher, which Gary had given to Judy as a Valentine's Day present twelve years before the fatal incident. Deena had always played with her as a young girl and so had baby Althea. Duchess usually roamed freely, unchained, both at her earlier home in central California and here at this rural site. The dog played with other children such as those of Connie Cook-Riddle who lived on the Rolicheck property for most of 1983. She said that her two older sons, aged two and four, often ran "back and forth in front of and sometimes with" Duchess and never once were they bitten or threatened.

However, law-enforcement officers had a totally different image of this family and its dog. They believed that Gary Rolicheck was one of the hoods of the area and had a bad reputation in part because he was keeping bad company. Bruce Lee Hall, or Buffalo, was one of the worst of that bad company. He was the boyfriend of Kim, a niece of the Rolichecks. Buffalo and his friend, Joseph Boyer, were believed to have been members of a motorcycle gang and to have been hired as guards for local marijuana gardens. All three of the men were considered armed and dangerous by the authorities. Law-enforcement officers "knew"—in the words of an official report—that the "red Doberman pinscher ... was vicious" and that the dog was being used to guard nearby marijuana patches. When confronted with these allegations, the family members simply shook their heads in wonderment. I have found no evidence to support the law-enforcement version of the facts.

As part of the CAMP campaign, a warrant had been obtained to search for gardens on nearby private land. None was necessary for the gardens seen on U.S. Forest Service land, which was in the Six Rivers National Forest, but one was not obtained for searching the adjoining private eight acres owned by the Rolichecks. A large force-15 to 25 men armed with rifles, shotguns, and sidearms—had been assembled for these raids. The lead officer was Sergeant Laffranchini of the Trinity County Sheriff's Department. Also in the large team were U.S. Forest Service law-enforcement officers Bobby Holdridge and Jerry Price. A helicopter and its crew were on standby in the event they were needed.

This military operation was planned for the morning of August 16, 1984. The Rolicheck residence was quietly surrounded by the armed men, and eradication activities started on one of the gardens far away from the house. "At this time Officer Laffranchini and Erwin Wade, CAMP leader," an official report revealed, "drove past the Rolicheck residence. They saw a red Doberman and a black dog about 100 yards from the residence. They reported that the dogs were vicious and they would have had to `take them out' if they (the officers) had not been in a vehicle." The entire team was clearly scared at the potential of violence from the so-called dangerous marijuana growers and their vicious guard dogs. Thus, the stage for misunderstanding and tragedy was set.

In the Rolicheck house, as they started to rise and get breakfast that morning, were Judy; Deena; Althea, then aged one; Kim; and Bruce. Gary had already left for work at 5:30 A.M., several hours earlier. Judy looked out to see 15 to 25 armed men, pointing weapons, come toward the house. Some were in combat uniforms, others in sheriffs department outfits. Officer Bobby Holdridge yelled loudly, "Police! Step out where we can see everyone. I want to see your hands." Little Althea ran out on the porch and was quickly followed by the remainder of the stunned family. Duchess and a small black dog owned by Deena started running toward the troops and barking. The smaller dog retreated but Duchess kept barking. There was a good deal of confusion. Judy said, "Let me catch her and I'll chain her up." Some of the troops were saying "Get the dog!" and some were saying "Stay on the porch!" Judy shouted, "Don't shoot her! She's never bitten anyone!" Judy now reflects, "All she wanted to do was to be between us and them."

Bobby Holdridge did not believe that this was all this seemingly vicious attack dog wanted. The law-enforcement officer believed he was under attack and said, "Lady, call your dog. I do not want to have to shoot it." In the midst of this confusion, yelling, and fear on all sides, Officer Holdridge's apprehension became so great that he shot Duchess with his mini-14 Ruger semiautomatic .223 rifle. The dog went down and wailed, whereupon Deena pleaded that the animal be put out of its misery. Jerry Price complied and finished her off with a blast from his Model 870 Remington 12-gauge shotgun. A review of the scene now confirms Gary's bitter complaints that his wife and granddaughter, and perhaps his daughter, were in the line of fire and might well have been seriously harmed or killed by projectiles from these powerful weapons.

By now, both women were crying and Althea was howling hysterically. They retreated to the porch as ordered, started to contemplate their captors, and saw that many of them seemed to be scared young kids, strangers to the area, apparently from other parts of the state. Deena said they looked ready for a major battle, many of them had bullet-proof vests on, and it appeared, she said, that "they could have shot anything that moved." After showing identification to the officers, the family was told to stay on the porch but was given absolutely no explanation for their detention at gunpoint. During that detention, Judy had the presence of mind to ask, "Do you have a search warrant?" One of the officers replied, "No, but we can get one." Ms. Rolicheck responded, "I think you had better leave, then." The officers did not and kept them under guard, terrorized and ignorant of the reasons for their imprisonment on their own property, for approximately two and one-half hours. (No member of the family was subsequently charged with any crime even though Bill Ruzzamenti later claimed in a conversation with me that there was probable cause because of the paths and water lines that allegedly led to the illegal gardens. Nor were any samples of confiscated marijuana ever produced for inspection.)

Finally, one of the officers, indicating they had completed their mission, said, "You can get your dog now." The family was left to deal with the corpse of the family pet on its own. Judy and Deena immediately picked it up and buried Duchess in the vegetable garden next to the house. No apologies or explanations were offered then or during the months following this affair by any American official at any level of government, although the Rolichecks have requested private interviews with officials. Even when James L. Davis, Jr., forest supervisor, and Donald W. Bachman, forest administrative leader, conducted an official investigation of the shooting in the name of the Six Rivers National Forest, they managed the extraordinary feat of performing the entire inquiry without talking to the Rolichecks "because of the potentially dangerous nature of the `owners' of the dogs." It is not surprising that they found the shooting fully justified.

So did Bill Ruzzamenti, who scornfully alluded to the case as "the Benjy incident," referring to the gentle little dog which often appeared on television. The very mention of this matter seemed to energize him at the end of a long day in the field. I told the DEA field commander that, after interviewing the family and observing the scene, I was inclined to believe the Rolicheck version of the truth. He sincerely believed the police version and shot back, "I am totally not concerned about that case! That dog was a guard dog for the garden.... And the Benjy attitude they have about that dog! They sicced the dog on the guys. The guy who shot that dog ... Bobby Holdridge ... one of the nicest little-ol'-men-type guys you'll ever want to meet. Loves animals. Loves kids. Loves people.... He's a Smokey-the-Bear guy.... He doesn't even like to have a gun! ... He's into flora and fauna. He's not into Gestapo-type tactics."

Many other, more impartial observers have viewed these tactics, though, in those un-American terms during the course of court cases, discussions, and newspaper reports concerning the Rolichecks and Duchess in the months that followed. The events in this case have been a springboard for caustic criticisms of the basic assumptions of the American war on drugs and of the fearful situations it creates for our police and citizens, whether or not they are involved in marijuana growing. If the worst case is granted here, and if there was marijuana growing all around the Rolicheck residence, well-led and well-trained police officers would have handled this situation more peacefully. Even if the family had been directly involved in cultivation, which I doubt, they were not desperate gangsters so often conjured up by leading drug warriors. Moreover, the detention of American citizens at gunpoint without a warrant raises fundamental constitutional and legal questions, especially when that action was carrying out the specific written policy of CAMP and the executive branch of the United States government. It was no surprise then that Judy Rolicheck testified in the suit eventually brought against CAMP and that this incident was cited by U.S. District Court Judge Robert P. Aguilar of San Francisco in his historic and sweeping order placing judicial curbs on this phase of the war on drugs.

HISTORIC CONTROLS ON THE DRUG POLICE

Indeed, Judy Rolicheck's complaint was the first one mentioned and summarized by Judge Aguilar in his order that finally granted a far-reaching preliminary injunction on April 12, 1985. She had testified at the hearings as had a number of other local aggrieved citizens. Remarkably, the government did not put that Smokeythe-Bear guy, Bobby Holdridge, on the stand, even though it seems he would have made one grand witness for its side. Nor did the government produce any other police eyewitnesses. In a series of hearings before this judge in the nearby federal courts, the government seemed, as Ron Sinoway has said, to have adopted an attitude of "the king can do no wrong." It was either that ancient arrogance or appalling ignorance that affected the federal and state lawyers defending the interests of the government, led by Joseph P. Russoniello, the U.S. Attorney, and John Van De Kamp, Attorney General of the state of California. Those legal officials relied primarily on hearsay testimony from CAMP commanders.

The centerpiece of the legal counterattack on CAMP is an omnibus suit—NORML v. Mullen--which requests an injunction and also money damages in which the plaintiffs are NORML, the Civil Liberties Monitoring Project, and individual California citizens such as the Rolichecks. The defendants are various state and federal agencies and officers, starting with Francis M. Mullen, then administrator of the DEA in Washington, in their official capacities. A few officials, including William Ruzzamenti, are being sued in their personal capacities as well. One of the first actions taken by the plaintiffs in the matter was a request for a preliminary injunction in 1983 that would have stopped further CAMP activities. Judge Aguilar had stated at that time that he was "terribly troubled" by some CAMP tactics which seemed to violate traditional constitutional protections. As for the use of U-2 planes to spy on American citizens, he observed, "One cannot help but think of George Orwell's 1984." Yet, the federal judge refused to issue even a preliminary injunction at that time because of the traditional reluctance of courts to enjoin the operations of police departments.

The basic legal rule on injunctions is that there must be a showing of irreparable injury, namely "a real or immediate threat that the plaintiff will be wronged again." It was on the basis of such venerable legal theories that Judge Aguilar had refused the original request in 1983 for a preliminary injunction in this case. Since then, the original 10 sworn complaints had been supplemented with 50 more. As any judge worth his salt in a functioning democracy would be, Robert P. Aguilar was distressed that the government had been so casual in its response to these complaints, at one time observing that law-enforcement officials had not offered to produce evidence from the agents directly involved and that they had put forth William Ruzzamenti, who could rely only on secondhand information. "He testified," Judge Aguilar wrote in his opinion, "that he never attempted to interview any of the declarants or inspect the private property at issue. As for the Rolicheck incident, he merely adopted the written investigative report of the United States Forest Service."

This impartial federal judge then came to some shocking conclusions about the behavior of American officials in the war on drugs. First, even if the hearsay produced by Mr. Ruzzamenti were given full credence, his testimony did not rebut the serious charges of constitutional invasions put forth by these citizens. Second, the written policies of CAMP provided concrete support for the charges of massive Fourth Amendment violations. The judge declared that such directives give "CAMP personnel virtually unbridled discretion to enter and search private property anywhere in the vicinity of an eradication raid, and to seize personal property and detain innocent citizens without probable cause or even reasonable suspicion of any criminal activity." Third, while the court was aware of the dangers to CAMP personnel, "such risks are no greater than that routinely faced by other law-enforcement officers." Fourth, these complaining citizens live in areas "where marijuana cultivation is rife. These are the areas where CAMP plans to return repeatedly each season until the growers throw in the towel."

Accordingly, Judge Aguilar concluded that there was the high probability of irreparable continuing harm to the plaintiffs. He then formally enjoined all CAMP agencies and personnel "from entering by foot, motor vehicle, or helicopter any private property other than open fields without a warrant" and "from entering adjacent or nearby property ... unless exigent circumstances exist," which could not be deduced from "mere speculation." In recognition of the fact that helicopters had been used so as to violate the rights of citizens, the judge further enjoined the federal and local police "from using helicopters for general surveillance purposes, except over open fields. When conducting surveillance over open fields, helicopters shall not fly within 500 feet of any structure, person, or vehicle."

While this order may seem simply to restate the obvious and thus be only a polite slap on the wrist, actually it is one of the most sweeping judicial condemnations of the actions of specific American civilian police ever handed down. Since it came in response to a major campaign in the American war on drugs, it is of historic significance because courts have almost always upheld invasions of the rights of Americans when drug control is thrown in the balance on the other side of the scales of justice. Although this order has been upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals, we cannot be sanguine that the current U.S. Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Rehnquist, will be supportive if it is appealed. When I was in California, moreover, I saw precious little evidence that the intrusive and harmful effects of the war on drugs were being curbed by the comprehensive order which had been in effect for months when I arrived. In the month after I left, Judge Aguilar took the further extraordinary step of appointing a monitor to ensure compliance with his sweeping injunction and to ensure "protection of civil rights." The monitor, a widely respected retired judge, Thomas Kongsgaard, was granted judicial powers. To my knowledge, this is the first time in the history of the country that police forces have been forced to operate under direct judicial supervision.

CAN THE DRUG LAWS BE ENFORCED IN A DEMOCRACY?

The new cases I encountered while in California raised the recurring question as to whether any major effort to enforce the drug laws can ever be consistent with American traditions of freedom and privacy in regions where there is massive defiance of those laws. This question may well be answered in the negative even where a judge issues a search warrant authorizing a particular search. On July 16, 1985, for example, Superior Court judge Timothy W. O'Brien of Mendocino County issued a warrant to search for six—yes, six—marijuana plants as well as inspect nearby structures that might contain evidence as to the identity of the growers. In all, the warrant seemed to authorize the search of at least a quarter of a square mile of American territory, including perhaps eight American homes, in the name of destroying a few offending plants.

The warrant was executed on the morning of July 18 in an area known as Gopherville, which lies at the northern edge of Mendocino County, two miles south of Whitethorn in Humboldt. The inhabitants were the roughest-appearing people I encountered in northern California. Many of them dress and live in a counterculture style, which often means in proud poverty. Within a short time of arrival, the heavily armed CAMP team had gone into several homes and assembled a dozen citizens in the front yard of the home of Steve and Sue Miller, a couple in their twenties, who are now being supported by welfare along with their two sons, aged 5 and 2.

Of the twelve people, some were marijuana growers, in my opinion, and some certainly were not. Five were veterans of service during the Vietnam era. Rick Thorngate had been a first lieutenant in the 101st Airborne Division and had been in combat for one year. The easiest way to describe him now is to say that he looks like a hippie dropout with his headband, long hair, and wide, piercing eyes. When I asked him what happened during the raid, as we sat in the Miller home on August 2, I was prepared to have him reply in some form of hey-man, far-out jargon. He sounded, to my surprise, at least as rational as your average college professor, even more so. He immediately recognized the military weapons, which he insists were potentially fully automatic M-16s, and was traumatized since he did not expect to encounter such weapons in this remote, peaceful area. The combat veteran knew how quickly five or six deadly rounds could be loosed by a nervous finger.

The soldiers and their commander seemed scared and barely in control. Rick saw that several of the young officers literally had white knuckles as they held their hands on the weapons. "Two guys with M-16s kept their thumbs right on the rock 'n' roll button [the safety and switch to automatic fire] the whole time," Rick Thorngate recalled. As is usual, the troops asked all of their prisoners for full personal information. When it came to the former airborne officer's turn, "I gave them my name, rank, and serial number. I told them I considered myself a prisoner of war... . They laughed. They thought it was a clever joke." Thorngate decided to simply sit in his car, around which these American prisoners were being held under the guns of the CAMP troops, and try to put himself in a trance that might help to keep the situation calm. For four hours, these men, women, and young children were held in the hot sun while the police searched the woods for six marijuana plants and the houses for evidence of this serious crime.

At one point, David Hill, a veteran of the Marine Corps during the Vietnam period, asked a young officer how long they were going to be kept and observed that he felt like a hostage in Iran. The policeman smiled and replied, "Yeah, Gopherville, Day One." Several of the officers took out small cameras and snapped pictures of the group being held at gunpoint, one saying, "The folks back home are not going to believe this!"

Rick Thorngate observed, "These were clean-shaven city people and they took a look at us with our long hair and beards and they were freaked out by us. They thought we were armed growers and guerrilla terrorists.... They were scared of us. I felt that I was ... in some kind of a fascist state where I had done nothing wrong and I was held against my will ... and I felt that unless everyone in the [prisoner] group ... was very calm, cool, and collected something dangerous could happen." He felt that the prisoners maintained order and prevented violence from happening: "The people I was ... held captive with ... were better disciplined and acted more rationally than the police that were around us." Thorngate reflected, "I led troops in combat and I had to send people back sometimes. There were none of them [the CAMP troops] whose attitudes I considered to be even close to the professional attitudes of the eighteen-year-old kids that I served with in Vietnam." If his soldiers in Vietnam combat situations had acted the way these officers had in Gopherville, "I would have sent them back as dangerous to themselves and dangerous to the unit. ... I wouldn't have taken them into combat with me."

Both veterans Hill and Thorngate later voiced no objections to the drug laws, but concluded that this was a horrible way to enforce them in the free country for which they had fought. Their sentiments were echoed by Steve Miller, who, like them, insists he is not a grower: "You want to get rid of pot? Okay. But not this way. ... Just take the weed, take it all, and leave us alone."

When the heavily armed CAMP soldiers left, apparently they took with them several marijuana plants obtained somewhere out in the nearby field but made no arrests. I was assured by one of the growers in the group that there was an ample crop left behind in the area, from which I was graciously offered a sample (which I just as graciously refused). The officers also left behind a great deal of bitterness, even among those who insisted they were not involved in marijuana cultivation. It is of significance that Judge Aguilar's sweeping order did not directly deal with controlling detentions of citizens in those cases, like this one, involving the now locally famous Gopherville Twelve, where the officers are in possession of an apparently proper warrant. If that warrant made these detentions legal, then all innocent American citizens may be taken out of their homes in New York, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, anywhere, and detained at gunpoint because they happen to live near the site of a legitimate search for drugs.

THE DRUG WAR MAKES AMERICA UNSAFE

If the government continues to press the war on marijuana planting, if the warriors are successful beyond their wildest dreams and eradicate virtually all plants in California and elsewhere, the drugwar leaders would have us believe that the use of drugs will decline and public safety for all Americans will increase. In fact, quite the opposite is likely to happen.

Until 1985, virtually the entire focus of illegal growers had been marijuana and not some more harmful drug. Moreover, despite all of the alarms that have been raised by CAMP officials, there had been little solid evidence of real violence directed at police involved in the drug war. On the other hand, there had not been one complaint made by any citizen of real violence directed at him or her (as distinguished from an animal) by the police. In light of all the emotions on each side, that had been an extraordinary record on the part of both the police and the citizenry, and had provided the best explanation possible of the difference between the Deep South of my civil rights past and northern California in more recent times. All of this is just starting to change.

On July 25, 1985, CAMP raiders discovered in a garden near Ettersburg 1,200 marijuana plants and 400 opium-poppy plants. The possibility of American farmers growing opium poppies has never figured into the Maginot Line thinking of our drug-war strategists. When I wrote three years ago that such a horticultural event was foreordained, there were some titters in expert drug-abuse circles. However, William Ruzzamenti said that the Etters-burg garden was "a real sophisticated operation." Another CAMP spokesman, Dan Roach, observed that the home-grown poppies probably had been used already to make heroin. "The plants were scored [cut] and looked as if they had produced the tars to make the drug," he concluded.

If the war on drugs continues in intensity, there is no doubt, to make another prediction, that opium-poppy production will spread throughout the country. This, indeed, is another horticultural happening that has already begun. In August 1985, a major plantation of 2,000 poppy plants was discovered by police in the remote town of West Charlestown, Vermont. Many of the plants had already been slit to obtain opium for making heroin. There is also no doubt that both marijuana and opium plants will be grown indoors. In a 10-by-10-foot room, current legal and economic demand conditions mean that a skillful marijuana planter now can earn $15,000 to $25,000 per year. I will make no predictions on what a skillful indoor opium planter can make because the subject is so new but I would suspect that the potential income will be seductive to many Americans.

Violence by the authorities against growers has finally started to occur. U.S. Forest Service officers, operating independently of CAMP during the fall harvest of 1985, staked out a marijuana garden on public land in the Plumas National Forest near Oraville in northern California. One day they surprised the grower and in the ensuing confused gun battle killed the young man. This seems to have been one of the first killings of a marijuana grower by officials in the area and one of the first killings of anyone by Forest Service personnel in their history. Growers and local citizens are also starting to talk of violent reaction to the drug warriors and to act on that talk. On July 25, 1985, three shots were fired at a CAMP helicopter at the airport in the Hoopa Indian Reservation near the Trinity National Forest. On August 7, a carefully planned night attack in the same general area, at Willow Creek, nearly destroyed a CAMP helicopter with firebombs and rifle shots. A Humboldt County deputy sheriff told me that the attack had simply stiffened the backbones of the police involved in the campaign against marijuana.

When the federal government decided during the summer of 1985 to resume spraying marijuana plants with herbicides, either Paraquat or chemicals similar to it, concerns were expressed that this would trigger even more violent citizen reactions. In contemplation of the resumption of such spraying, "Uncle Sam," a marijuana farmer, told Ray Raphael, "And God forbid they spray Paraquat on our plants. If they spray the planes are going to get shot down. There'll be a level of violence around here that could set back the community a lot, almost like a civil war. I know that when they start spraying they're gonna get shot down—'cause I'm gonna shoot one down."

And the specter of past violence has not left the lives of those in the hills who want to forget it. As he was guiding me to his home from the Ruth store, Gary Rolicheck stopped his pickup truck and motioned me to get out of my car and look at something. Near the family home a few weeks earlier, someone had spray-painted a sign in white letters two feet long on the black asphalt road: "FUCK C.A.M.P." Several days later, Gary had happened upon a uniformed officer, apparently a deputy sheriff, standing near that sign, adding something else to it. The officer fled in his car at Gary's approach. What had been added was the painted outline, between the two words, of the figure of a dog, lying with its feet up and an X on its head, thus crudely reminding everyone who passed of the killing of Duchess.

There will be more contradictory and perverse results if drug-law enforcement continues along its present path. Many big growers and organized criminals will be imprisoned and thus taken out of the scene, a result which will please all decent people, except that our prisons will become even more explosively crowded. Yet many casual growers and small-time dealers will also be scared away by the threat of imprisonment. Many more adventurous, more hardened, and more criminal actors will be attracted to both the thrills and the rewards of the illicit drug business. The drug warriors will increase their pressure to catch them and will intensify the invasiveness of their searches, thus eroding the freedoms of everyone, not simply drug traffickers. None of the actions of law enforcement, however, will affect the level of demand. The price of many drugs may well thus increase and smaller packages of increasingly valuable contraband will be hidden in more ingenious ways in homes, in vehicles, in suitcases—and in bodies.

* The American prisoner rate per hundred thousand population in mid-1986 was 210. Recent rates for other Western countries are 111.5 in Austria, 99.7 in West Germany, 90 in the United Kingdom, 58 in Sweden, and 34 in the Netherlands.