Held to answer

Fortunately for Piper Kerman, Eric Holder was not Attorney General in 2004 when she was sentenced to federal prison for a “drug-related crime.”

Had she been spared prison, she would not be a media celebrity now and author of a best-selling memoir. A “drug-related crime” and 13 months in prison were good for Kerman. It gave her material for “Orange Is the New Black,” which has been turned into a popular Netflix series. It also helped that she was a graduate of Smith College and came from a solid, white middle-class family.

“We were a clan of doctors and lawyers and teachers, with the odd nurse, poet, or judge thrown into the mix,” she writes.

For the Piper Kermans, who know the difference between foie gras and liverwurst, drugs can be a youthful adventure, a phase they pass through before settling into a career. Especially if they’re working the business end of drugs.

That was Kerman’s “drug-related crime,” a ubiquitous phrase tossed around in news stories often without elaboration. Drug pushers who make money off of promoting addiction would rather call it a “drug-related crime,” to better the odds of being mistaken for a pot smoker.

For those on the customer end of hard drugs, especially those in the lower socioeconomic classes, addiction is a scummy life. Drugs are past, present and future. There’s no escape. A 13-month prison sentence is easy by comparison.

So far this summer my extended family in Oregon has been hit with the kind of drug-related sad endings that don’t make for critically-acclaimed entertainment. One cousin died a too-early death of heart problems, likely related to two decades of drug abuse (interspersed with efforts at rehab). Another young relative, whose judgment has been impaired by drugs, took her infant son to bed, fell into a deep sleep and rolled over on him, suffocating him.

Neither of them enjoyed Kerman’s drug world. No European travel. No suitcases of money. No zipping around in a brand-new, white Miata convertible.

“The reality of the drugs felt like a complete abstraction to me. … The suffering of addiction was not something I thought about,” Kerman writes.

Holder would say she was a non-violent drug criminal who didn’t belong in prison. But the drug world is filled with so much violence, there is no credible way Holder and Kerman can claim ignorance.

“Should prisons be run by private, for-profit corporations as they are in many states? It is currently legal to make a profit imprisoning the mentally ill, poor, and addicted—but is it ethical?” Kerman poses in a discussion question on her Website.

Perhaps her sanctimony prevented her from asking: Is it ethical to make money off of getting people addicted to drugs – especially the poor and working-class, who already have limited options?

At about the time Kerman was playing drug trafficker, Alan Levine was working his way out of a drug addiction (heroin, cocaine, alcohol, amphetamines) that cost him his feet.

As the Portland man told Willamette Week in December 2000, he had suffered severe frostbite 13 years earlier while in a drug-induced stupor under an Illinois bridge, and doctors had to amputate. By 2000, though, Levine was an honor student at Portland State University and working as a drug counselor at Portland’s Recovery Association Project, trying to reduce the city’s high rate of heroin fatalities.

By 2004, he was a member of Gov. Ted Kulongoski’s Council on Alcohol & Drug Abuse Programs and participated in an enthusiastic report: “Prevention Works: Recovery is Real & It Saves Money.”

Then in 2007, the drugs he worked so hard to beat gripped him again. He was convicted of soliciting prescription painkillers from his clients and ordered back into treatment.

Kerman gets royalties; users like Levine get a life sentence of addiction.

Attorney General Holder and his new friends in the Republican party insist that “drug-related crimes” are non-violent, and conservatives like Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah are happy to co-sponsor legislation with Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) to reform federal mandatory-minimum sentences for drug dealers.

There’s nothing new about conservatives wanting to stop prosecution of drug crimes. In 1984 – 29 years ago! – columnist Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution urged that drugs be legalized.

“It is their (drugs’) illegality that makes them costly and drives people to desperation to get the money by any means, at anybody else’s expense,” Sowell said.

What’s new is that politicians in both parties are writing off crime as mostly a poor person’s problem. As several critics have pointed out: “Orange is the New Black” would’ve been nothing special had it been about a woman who was poor and dark-skinned.

It’s too late to follow the advice of Sowell or the wisdom of science writer Edward M. Brecher and the editors of Consumer Reports, who produced a book in 1972 called “Licit and Illicit Drugs.”

Forty-one years ago, Brecher and the Consumers Union recommended that opium, morphine and heroin be available to addicts under controlled conditions because addicts would be better off with low-cost, medicinally pure drugs.

But they also cautioned: “A nation that has not learned to keep away from some drugs and to use others wisely cannot be taught those essential lessons merely by repealing drug laws.”

There was no such caution in media’s coverage of Holder’s announcement. The news had a breathless quality – “Finally! It’s about time!” – as if there were no downsides.

What is likely to happen if “drug-related crimes” are no longer crimes worth punishing? Will drug dealers scan Craigslist looking for new jobs? Or will they return to selling addiction, confident that they won’t have to sacrifice their freedom if caught?

Kerman’s future is secure. She is a communications consultant in New York with Spitfire Strategies, a Washington-based firm that works on behalf of non-profit organizations promoting social change.

In 2010, she wrote an essay about her first day in prison for the New York Times to promote her book. She described the prison’s “vicious, towering fence. The fence had multiple layers; between each layer was a gate through which we had to be buzzed.”

As she entered each gate, she disappeared further into the bowels of the prison.

“I looked back over my shoulder at the free world,” she wrote.

A free world. Something many drug addicts give up when they start using. Some of them will never know a free world again.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

Related:

Breaking Weak on Drugs