You’re Within The NormsUncategorized January 9, 2020
REPORTED BY
NORMAN J CLEMENT RPH., DDS, NORMAN L.CLEMENT PHARM-TECH, MALACHI F. MACKANDAL PHARMD, JOSEPH SOLVO ESQ., REV. C.T. VIVIAN, JELANI ZIMBABWE CLEMENT, BS., MBA., WILLIE GUINYARD BS., WALTER L. SMITH BS,MS., BRAHM FISHER ESQ., JOSEPH WEBSTER MD., ESTHER HYATT PHD., MICHELE ALEXANDER, CUDJOE WILDING BS, MICHELLE LYNN CLARK RPH., DEBRA LYNN SHEPHERD, BERES E. MUSCHETT, STRATEGIC ADVISORS
BY
THE NORTH STAR RESEARCH GROUP
CONGRESS MUST REORGANIZE THE UNITED STATES DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION (DEA)
THE DRUG WARS AND COLOR CASTE
Nixon and the War on Drugs
The War on Drugs is a phrase used to refer to a government-led initiative that aims to stop illegal drug use, distribution, and trade by dramatically increasing prison sentences for both drug dealers and users. The movement started in the 1970s and is still evolving today. Over the years, people have had mixed reactions to the campaign, ranging from full-on support to claims that it has racist and political objectives. (4)
In June 1971, Nixon officially declared a “War on Drugs,” stating that drug abuse was “public enemy number one.”
Nixon’s invention of the War on Drugs as a political tool was cynical, but every president since — Democrat and Republican alike — has found it equally useful for one reason or another. Meanwhile, the growing cost of the Drug War is now impossible to ignore: billions of dollars wasted, bloodshed in Latin America and on the streets of our own cities, and millions of lives destroyed by draconian punishment that doesn’t end at the prison gate; one of every eight black men have been disenfranchised because of a felony conviction. (3)
A rise in recreational drug use in the 1960s likely led to President Nixon’s focus on targeting some types of substance abuse. As part of the War on Drugs initiative, Nixon increased federal funding for drug-control agencies and proposed strict measures, such as mandatory prison sentencing, for drug crimes. He also announced the creation of the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention (SAODAP), which was headed by Dr. Jerome Jaffe. (1)
Nixon went on to create the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973. This agency is a special police force committed to targeting illegal drug use and smuggling in the United States. (2)
At the start, the DEA was given 1,470 special agents and a budget of less than $75 million. Today, the agency has nearly 5,000 agents and a budget of $2.03 billion.
HOOVER AND NIXON
J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI stated “the greatest threat to the American Society was Negroes becoming organized,” thus he throughout his 52 years conducted his agency campaign of surveillance of all black folk, ” Just Being Black Was Enough to Get Yourself Spied On by J Edgar Hoover’s FBI,” according to Betty Medsger, January 22, 2014 article in The Nation Magazine, Racism and Discrimination.
Ulterior Motives Behind War on Drugs?
Dan Baum, writer for Harper Magazine reported April 2016, an interview he conducted with Watergate conspirator John Ehrlichman, who served as Nixon’s Domestic Policy Adviser, Ehrlichment explained, the purpose behind the Nixon’s War on Drugs: (1) (5) According to Baum, Ehrlichman said in 1994 that the drug war was a ploy to undermine Nixon’s political opposition — meaning, black people and critics of the Vietnam War.
But as John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s counsel and Assistant for Domestic Affairs, revealed in 1994, the real public enemy in 1971 wasn’t really drugs or drug abuse. Rather the real enemies of the Nixon administration were the anti-war left and blacks, and the War on Drugs was designed as evil, deceptive and sinister policy to wage a war on those two groups. In an article in the April 2016 issue of The Atlantic (“Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs“) author and reporter Dan Baum explains how “John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results?”
As Baum discovered, here’s the dirty and disgusting secret to that great mystery of what must be the most expensive, shameful, and reprehensible failed government policy in US history.(3)
The Richard M.Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. Do you understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.” (1),(2),
NIH 2017 STUDY: WHITE OPIOIDS: RACE IN THE WAR ON DRUGS THAT WASN’T
Accordingly, America’s War on Drugs has played a profound role in reinforcing racial hierarchies. Although Black Americans are no more likely than Whites to use illicit drugs, they are 6–10 times more likely to be incarcerated for drug offenses. Helena B. Hansen, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at New York University, examines the recent history of White opioids to show how a very different system for responding to the drug use of Whites has emerged, in which addiction is treated primarily as a biomedical disease. Meanwhile, more punitive systems that govern the drug use of people of color have remained intact. At this seminar, Dr. Hansen argues that public concern about White opioid deaths creates an opportunity to reorient U.S. drug policy toward public health for all—and make proven harm reduction strategies widely available.
The culture of indifference has further subjugated the standard operational practices throughout the DEA. No other law enforcement agency in the world has had agents work in concert with the cartels. This agency through its practices of discrimination failed to adequately recognize that it has been compromised. These practices within the agency are so dysfunctional, that through learn behaviors employees find it easy to do wrong.
THE ROLE OF HEROIN, WHAT IS IT AND WHAT IS ITS PURPOSE
The United State Opioid Epidemic has been driven by too many White People (dominant caste) dying on the use of illicit non medically manufacturing opioids derivative that has turned on them. One cannot ignore the social-economic, racial component of this “drug crisis” and a key component of how it has been deployed in communities of color.
According to White opioids: Pharmaceutical race and the war on drugs that wasn’t Julie Netherland and Helena Hansen Published online 2017 Jun 28. doi: 10.1057/biosoc.2015.46PMCID: PMC5501419 NIHMSID: NIHMS752948 PMID: 28690668
“In one of the only studies to explicitly look at how drug policy is used to carve out White spaces exempt from punitive more approaches, Lassiter (2015) takes a historical look at the roots of the White opioid crisis of today. Looking back to marijuana policies of the 1970s, he states: “exemptions created for white middle-class participants in the underground market-place were not merely epiphenomenal but rather constitutive of the expansion of the carceral state (p. 127)”. The drug war operates because of a reciprocal relationship between the criminalization of blackness and the decriminalization of whiteness.”
THE ROLE OF HEROIN, WHAT THEY THINK IS ONE THING, WHAT YOU DO IS ANOTHER THING
Heroin in the United States is a unique design non-medical synthetic morphine derivative targeted to maintain a subordinate caste of sub-class humans in a state of servitude. A substance design to control the subordinate caste has gotten out into the dominant caste. This calls for different rules for addressing the Opioid crisis, however, Heroin is introduced in Black (subordinate castes) and Hispanic neighborhoods and is the “Gate Way “Drug” to the prison industrial complex and plays a specific role in population control. Whereas abuse of prescription medication is the gateway to nonmedical substances like heroin. (7)
Heroin is simply morphine, which has been diacetylated. According to the American Addiction Center:
“Heroin is perhaps the most notorious of the opiates. Highly addictive and synonymous with the so-called druggies on the street, it’s a drug that is commonly abused and seldom understood. It’s also used in the clinical setting where it’s known as diamorphine, diacetylmorphine, or morphine diacetate, but it’s mainly used as a last resort for end-stage pain.” (7)
DEA: A CULTURE OF RACISM FROM WITHIN
The dangers the DEA has placed America within is presently uncrowned by the agency. Within the assimilation theory, an agency will follow the cultural practices of wrongfulness and subordinate the laws to achieve personal objectives.
The current enforcement practices of the DEA are biases based. The racially-based culture is so powerful that members of the DEA lack the cognitive abilities to provide adequate and accurate law enforcement practices. The race-based culture has created a practice of racial indifference towards African American pharmacists.
These racial indifference behaviors are found within the DEA are the same ones expressed by a white supremacist. Such indifference influence is part of their standard operations and law enforcement operational practices. This agency cannot and should not be allowed to practice its race base enforcement.
This agency has gone far enough. The current practices are far below the standards of a professional law enforcement agency.
They have devalued their own professional training standards and medical protocols, education, and accepted their fate out of fear of DOJ/ DEA. They are complacent of DEA behavior, and the redline they’ve pretend to draw in the sand is one always moving backward. Until, some unlikely person(s) within these professions, in the face of these adversities, with grit and determination, scrappy, and unbowed, and whose pens will be mightier than DOJ/DEA’s swords, will stand up and say enough is enough.
According to ABC News Jim Mustian of Associated Press and the Baltimore Sun-Times Justin Fenton June 18, 2020;
The group of retired agents said in a statement sent to news organizations this week that Attorney General William Barr was out of touch with racial disparities that permeate not only local police departments but federal law enforcement. In fact, Black DEA Agent filed a claim of gross discrimination and diabolical racism, in 1978 and it sat in the Federal Court System for 41 years, while incompetent, unqualified whites were freely promoted.
While Black Agents in the DEA were continually denied, promotions, unqualified people like Susan Langston received promotion after promotion and recently was promoted to DEA Head Quarters in Washington DC. Ms. Langston has only a BS in Arts and Training as a paralegal with no law enforcement background.
According to LinkedIn reporting, she became in charge of the DEA Field office in Los Angeles and Miami and received a promotion within the DEA headquarters in Washington D.C. Ms. Langston appears to have no background, training nor certifications in the knowledge of drug substance abuse and treatment and appears to have no advanced certificates in law enforcement. (8)
Susan Langston was the Program Manager for the DEA Miami Field Division’s Diversion Regulatory Program. Overall supervision of Diversion Groups located in Miami (Weston), West Palm Beach, Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, and Tallahassee, Florida. She has since been promoted to a position in Washington DC. (1)(2)
Ms. Langston’s qualifications and educational background are both troubling and alarming. She has no law enforcement background, no medical, dental, or pharmaceutical science background. Yet she headed the DEA Miami Field Division’s Diversion Regulatory Program. Ms. Langston has attained only a bachelor’s degree beyond that trained as a paralegal. (9)
Ms. Langston orchestrates the attacks against licensed physicians, pharmacists, and dentists, and yet her qualifications, background, and tactics such as redefining, misclassification of long-standing medical/pharmacy/dental protocols are further troubling. Such as:
- Defining Pharmacy Compounding as Manufacturing and requiring a separate registration when no registration exists.
- Pushing for a pharmacist to challenge medical/dental practitioners’ diagnosis and treatment, which is outside the authority and scope of a pharmacist. (11)
- Strong arming Pharmacies/Pharmacists into being an arm of law enforcement (supporting the misuse of Google Maps and the PDMP systems) which encourages bias, discrimination, and profiling. (6)
“This is a culture,” said Karl Colder, who previously oversaw the DEA’s Washington field division, served on the agency’s diversity committee, and was one of 76 former agents involved in drafting the statement. “You still don’t have African Americans in positions to really monitor and ensure things are equal.
Gary Tuggle, who was a special agent in charge of the Baltimore field office and served as interim Baltimore Police commissioner in 2018, said he thinks the problem has worsened in recent years.
Ernie Howard, who was the special agent in charge in Houston from 1997 to 2001, said there is “not an even playing field.”
“The DEA hasn’t had an African American female special agent in charge in years,” Tuggle said. “That’s ridiculous.”
June Werlow Rogers, who previously led the DEA’s New England field office from 2002 to 2008. “I’m really glad we’re at a point now where people are listening, but in order for us to change things, we’ve got to change minds and hearts.”
“Rogers recalled while an agent in Baltimore she was pulled over and questioned despite showing her DEA credentials until a white DEA supervisor intervened and that a magistrate judge once confused her for a defendant in court”. (1),(2)
We can easily relate with former Agent Rogers and share our experience with privileged Judges. Transcripts from January 28, 2020, DEA v Pronto Pharmacy LLC Tampa, Florida. DOCKET 19-42, before Judge Mark D. Dowd held in Tampa, Fl.
MR. SISCO: No objection.
JUDGE DOWD: Thank you, Mr. Sisco.
JUDGE DOWD speaking to witness (DEA Richard James Albert): Mr. Clement, one question. When you served that document on the pharmacy, were these printed out for you at that time, or were these maintained at the pharmacy in a logbook, or do you know where these actually came from?
THE WITNESS (DEA Richard James Albert): They will be maintained in a logbook. But when I requested a subpoena, I would think that they made copies of them.
And one correction —
JUDGE DOWD: Okay. So, you weren’t there when they were produced, you came back for them?
THE WITNESS: (MR. ALBERT) “Well, they was — I either picked them up or they were sent to me”.
JUDGE DOWD: Okay.
THE WITNESS (DEA Richard James Albert): “But one correct. I ‘m Mr. Albert. You called me Mr. Clement”.
JUDGE DOWD: “Oh, I’m sorry. Excuse me. Its old age creeping up. “Old Age,”
If the Administrative Judge Mark Dowd is confused because of his age, then what levels of confusion was expressed in his attempts to enforce the laws.
The DEA agencies culture is infused with racial biases. This culture infusion of indifference is modeled throughout the agency. Such levels of racial indifference influence DEA’s law enforcement operational practices which have placed a black eye on the professional men and women who serve with our law enforcement community around the world.
CONCLUSION
Why must an agency continue to operate when it openly violated the laws. We can see that the DEA is no longer an agency that practices and enforces the law effectively and correctly. This agency has developed a system of support for the rightness of the agency and not for the rights to protect and serve the country. If this agency is not reorganized or shut down, it will continue to present a clear and present danger to African Americans and America.
BOTH HOUSE AND SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEES MUST GIVE OVERSIGHT, INVESTIGATE AND REORGANIZE THE DEA
“WE ARE PHARMACISTS NOT DRUG DEALERS“
FOR NOW, YOU ARE
WITHIN THE NORMS
ENDNOTES
- War on Drugs – Timeline in America, Definition & Facts – HISTORY
- YOUTUBE Narcotic Detective Russell Jones
- https://youarewithinthenorms.com/2020/06/28/of-role-models-and-invisible-men-and-women-part-2-susan-langston-dea-vs-walter-r-clement-et-al/
- https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/retired-dea-agents-agency-legacy-discrimination-71326557
- https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-shocking-story-behind-nixons-declaration-of-a-war-on-drugs-on-this-day-in-1971-that-targeted-blacks-and-anti-war-activists-3/
- War on Drugs – Timeline in America, Definition & Facts – HISTORY
- Nixon official: real reason for the drug war was to criminalize black people and hippies – Vox
- https://youarewithinthenorms.com/2020/06/28/of-role-models-and-invisible-men-and-women-part-2-susan-langston-dea-vs-walter-r-clement-et-al/
- https://youarewithinthenorms.com/2021/01/10/understanding-the-history-of-deas-war-on-drugs-in-america-the-story-behind-the-economic-lynching-of-black-owned-pharmacy-businesses-by-the-drug-enforcement-administration-dea-part-2a/
- https://www.rehabs.com/blog/a-complete-history-of-heroin/
