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July 18, 1996

NORML Chapter Places Advertising Billboards On Buses

Man Sentenced To Probation After Killing Individual He Suspected Sold His Son Marijuana

Law That Allows Citizens To Sue Drug Dealers For Damages Moves Forward In California

PBS Special To Focus On Human Rights Violations And The Drug War

Portland NORML Meeting July 24

Butt Man Versus Reefer Man

Portland's Old Town Drug-Free Zone - Send In The Feds

Would more people use these drugs if they were available to adults through licensed medical practitioners? An evening news report by Portland's NBC affiliate, KGW Northwest NewsChannel 8 on Tuesday, July 16, reported that one local agency dealing with heroin abusers had seen its caseload increase from 100-plus to 900-plus in the past year. That would suggest that current policies are just making things worse. One would think there would certainly be a lot fewer profit-motivated people selling such drugs if these substances were placed back under the control of the medical profession.

Civil Rights In Portland Contingent On Drug Laws

Save Our City (Nightclub)

Owner Lanny Swerdlow contends that the police violated a written agreement to notify him about any suspected drug dealers, and to work with him to reduce such transactions. He also wonders why the police did not try to shut down other all-ages clubs which have had worse problems in the past. Last year, for example, the Quest nightclub was the scene of numerous gang-related fights, which included stabbings, at least one shooting, and a full-blown riot which required a massive police response to stop. Instead of closing the Quest, however, the police helped line up extra security for the club, which is still in business. Swerdlow also suspects that the police have targeted his club because of his outspoken support for gay rights, including the production of numerous cable access television programs on the issue.

The Myth Of Gang Related Crack Distribution?

Here are some interesting excerpts:

Series: NIJ Research in Brief, Published: September 1995, 24 pages, 53,366 bytes
by Cheryl L. Maxson, Ph. D.

Issues and Findings

Discussed in this Brief: The results of a study to determine the level of street gang involvement in drug sales arrests in two Los Angeles suburban cities from 1989 to 1991. Results are compared with those from an earlier study of gang involvement in cocaine sales based on arrest incidents in south-central Los Angeles between 1983 and 1985. Police departments that participated in this study also provide their views of the findings.

Key findings: The statistical connection between street gangs, drug sales, and violence was smaller than anticipated. Specific findings include the following:

• Gang members were arrested in 27 percent of 1,563 cocaine sale arrest incidents occurring between 1989 and 1991 in two Los Angeles suburban cities.

• Rock or crack forms of cocaine were more often present in gang cases, but most aspects of cocaine sales incidents (e.g., location, firearm presence, and amount of cash) did not vary with gang involvement. Cases with gang members were more likely to include males, younger ages (by about 5 years), and blacks.

• Rates of gang involvement and gang-nongang differences were very similar to those reported for Los Angeles in 1985.

• The presence of identified gang members in arrest incidents for sales other than cocaine was far lower (less than 12 percent of 471 cases). No differences were noted in the incident characteristics of the two types of cases. Higher percentages of Hispanics were arrested in other drug cases compared with cocaine sale incidents, but black suspects and younger people were more common in gang cases.

• Lower than expected rates of gang involvement in drug sales coupled with a lack of evidence of special impacts associated with gang involvement suggest a reconsideration of gang specialization in narcotics enforcement. The exception may be in the unusual case of the extremely involved drug-selling street gang. Investigation of homicides and other violent incidents may benefit more directly from the expertise of law enforcement gang specialists.

'Partnership To Re-Edit TV Commercials'

The Partnership for a Drug-Free America has agreed to re-edit television commercials that had been labeled "patently homophobic" by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

The commercials are part of a public-service campaign against heroin use that was introduced last month. They featured a young addict describing how after losing his job, he had to "have sex with men for money to support my habit."

In a letter to the Partnership, the gay and lesbian organization, known as Glaad, urged the spots be withdrawn for suggesting that "if there is one thing worse than being an addict, it's being a homosexual."

After initially declining that request, Richard Bonnette, president and chief executive of the Partnership, said the spots would be re-edited to omit the references to prostitution. "A perception of offense, however unintended," he wrote in a letter to Glaad, may "dilute or interfere with our basic message" of keeping children from drugs.

Alan Klein, news media director at Glaad in New York, said, "We're very pleased that the Partnership has taken the concerns of the gay and lesbian community seriously."

Tylenol Kills 33 Children (Pot 0)

Pregnant Women Imprisoned For Drug Use?

Los Angeles Times, July 17, 1996

In an unprecedented action, South Carolina's Supreme Court has ruled that a woman can be prosecuted for child abuse if she takes drugs during pregnancy.

The court said a healthy, viable fetus can be considered a "child" or "person" under state law, and should, as a result, be afforded legal protection.

The 3-2 ruling Monday marked the first time a state high court has approved such prosecutions. Top courts in Florida, Kentucky, Nevada and Ohio have all reached opposite conclusions.

The decision reinstates an eight-year sentence given to Cornelia Whitner, whose son, now a healthy 8-year-old, tested positive for cocaine after he was born. Her lawyer said she would appeal.

Writing for the majority, Justice Jean Toal said state child abuse law and previous court rulings clearly consider a viable fetus a person. Since 1984, South Carolina prosecutors have been able to charge other people with injuring or killing a woman's viable fetus.

State Atty. Gen. Charlie Condon said he would instruct prosecutors and social workers to begin monitoring and punishing pregnant women who abuse drugs.

Critics of the ruling, including advocates for women and civil liberties, said it undermines women's health and would discourage pregnant addicts from seeking medical help. Lynn Paltrow, a lawyer for the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy in New York, said: "If you were a pregnant woman, would you talk honestly or go for help if you think you could go to jail?"

In a dissenting opinion, Justice James E. Moore said the ruling would make women liable for criminal prosecution for anything that could be construed as dangerous to a fetus. "Is a pregnant woman's failure to obtain prenatal care unlawful? Failure to take vitamins and eat properly? Failure to quit smoking or drinking?" Moore wrote.

Under this ruling, he said, a woman would be better off to illegally abort her third-trimester fetus and face a two-year sentence rather than give birth to a baby after taking drugs and face a 10-year sentence for child abuse.

[verbatim]

Pregnant women would pay the highest price "for transgressing the rights of others" in Bennett's War on Drugs. No other group of drug users was treated as harshly by the media, the legislatures, or the courts. No other group took as much blame for the failure of the nation at large to act with reason and compassion. Having turned its wrath variously on Negro junkies, teenage potheads, yuppie coke dabblers, and black crack dealers, the Drug War now would elevate pregnant drug users---often poor, uneducated, and unable to get treatment---to Public Enemy Number One.

The proximate roots of the "crack baby crisis" were in 1981, when federal cuts in Medicaid stripped more than a million poor mothers and their kids of access to medical care. Within a few years, half of all African-American women had access to poor prenatal care or none at all, and the effects showed up at once. By 1984, their infant mortality rate had noticeably worsened for the first time in twenty years---and this was a full year before crack appeared. The number of uninsured child-bearing women in California exploded by almost half between 1982 and 1986. And even those who qualified for public assistance weren't guaranteed access to care. Twelve of the state's fifty-eight counties had no doctors at all willing to accept Medicaid patients. Flu, infections, and pneumonia killed impoverished American babies in ever-greater numbers.

And then crack arrived on the scene.

Crack is bad news for pregnant women and their babies. Like men, women on crack binges neglect everything else---sleep, nutrition, safety, and their health in general. They tend to smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, and use other drugs to moderate the intense highs and lows of crack.

Their babies show the effects . They are frequently premature, and on average smaller and lighter, with smaller heads. When suddenly deprived of cocaine they alternately howl and drop into deep sleep. At one Washington, D.C., hospital where the average neonatal stay was three days in 1989, babies born to crack-using mothers stayed an average forty-two days.

By 1989 scientists had had four years to study the phenomenon of "crack babies" and some were backing off from their initially alarming reports. Ira Chasnoff, the Chicago doctor whose 1985 article in the New England Journal of Medicine started the crack-baby panic, now cautioned that crack was only a small part of the problem for small, undernourished, and sickly babies. Pregnant women are sixteen times more likely to use alcohol than crack, he wrote, and unlike cocaine, alcohol has proven fetus-damaging effects. Chasnoff and other researchers cautioned that the lives of poor, crack-using women were bad for babies in so many ways that there was no way to isolate crack as the primary cause of their infants' health problems. Poor women have always birthed smaller and sicker babies, and the sharp increase in the number of poor, uninsured women was certain to boost the number of ailing newborns. Prenatal care---and the insurance to pay for it---was and is a better predictor of a newborn's health than whether the mother smokes crack. "In the end," Florida health officials concluded in 1985, "it is safer for a baby to be born to a drug-abusing, anemic, or a diabetic mother who visits the doctor throughout her pregnancy than to be born to a normal woman who does not." The Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta tried to isolate cocaine's effects, administering a pure cocaine intravenous drip to rhesus monkeys for the entire duration of their pregnancies. Their babies were unaffected. Researchers of human "crack babies" furthermore found that the effects of cocaine wore off within a few months and that such babies who were well fed, loved, and properly stimulated could recover completely.

These were not, however, messages even the medical community wanted to hear. Research papers trumpeting the fetal dangers of cocaine were eleven times more likely to be published in professional journals than those claiming few or no harms, according to the British medical journal The Lancet, which analyzed all the "crack baby" studies submitted to the Society of Pediatric Research during the eighties. Moreover, the "negative" studies were better, controlling more effectively for other fetus-damaging factors and taking more care to verify cocaine use, The Lancet found.

Yet the myth of the "crack baby" grew ever larger. Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer dismissed "crack babies" in 1988 as a "biologic underclass whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth." Boston University president John Silber criticized "spending immense amounts on crack babies who won't ever achieve the intellectual development to have consciousness of God." The New York Times declared "crack babies" unable to "make friends, know right from wrong, control their impulses, gain insight, concentrate on tasks, and feel and return love. " Even Rolling Stone condemned "crack babies" as "like no others, brain damaged in ways yet unknown, oblivious to any affection."

Reporters sent out to write "crack baby" stories sometimes got their facts right without knowing it. After forty-odd inches of horror stories of low-income women giving birth to "crack babies," the Wall Street Journal, in a typical July 1989 front-page article, let drop that "their mothers aren't all low income. Linda, an impeccably dressed 34-year- old, now looks more like the accountant she once was than a recovering addict who once had a $2,000-a-week crack habit." Turns out, the Journal reported, "her son was born healthy." No explanation was offered as to why a woman smoking $2,000 worth of crack a week can give birth to a healthy baby. And no connection was made to the fact that, unlike every other mother in the article, Linda is an impeccably dressed accountant who likely had health insurance and proper care.

Getting poor women to stop using drugs during pregnancy wouldn't have guaranteed healthy babies, but it certainly would have helped. Even if the effects of drug exposure in utero are relatively short-lived, the home of a crack addict is no place for a baby to grow up. Infants of crack users frequently show up in the hospital again, dehydrated, underfed, filthy, and sometimes injured. If only for the sake of babies after they are born, getting pregnant women off drugs would have been not only humane, but a genuine bargain. The cost of caring for babies neglected and abandoned by crack-using parents was estimated in 1989 in the hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Yet the federal government refused to pay for residential drug treatment for the poor because it classified drug abuse as a mental illness, and under Medicaid rules that was a state responsibility. The states were similarly unwilling or unable to provide care. Of the various drug- treatment programs in New York City in 1989, 54 percent refused pregnant women, 67 percent refused pregnant women on Medicaid, and 87 percent specifically denied treatment to Medicaid women dependent on crack. Only one hospital in the entire Chicago metropolitan area had a residential treatment program for pregnant addicts, and the program had only two beds. The state of Indiana had only sixteen beds for the treatment of pregnant addicts. Nearly a third of the women living in California had no prenatal care at all, let alone treatment for prenatal drug abuse. "We seem more willing to place the kid in a neonatal intensive care unit for $1,500 or $2,000 a day, rather than put $1,500 into better prenatal care," one psychiatrist complained to Time.

Jennifer Johnson, a black twenty-three-year-old mother of three living in Seminole County, Florida, tried several times during her fourth pregnancy to get treated for her cocaine addiction. "I thought that . . . if I tell them I use drugs they would send me to a drug place or something," she later testified. Alas, there was no "drug place" for her in Seminole County. What there was instead was jail, and the confiscation of her newborn.

When she delivered her baby on January 23, 1989, the attending doctor recorded that the baby "looked and acted as we would expect a baby to look and act." ButJohnson told the doctor she had used cocaine during the pregnancy, and urine tests on mother and child bore that out. The hospital reported the birth of a "crack baby" to a state childprotection agency, which in turn called the local sheriff, who ordered Johnson's arrest.

Assistant state's attorney Jeff Deen had been waiting for just such a case to test a new prosecution tactic. Deen was fed up with seeing pregnant women get away with abusing their unborn children by using drugs. When Deen heard about Jennifer Johnson, he decided to charge her with delivering cocaine to a minor. Courts throughout the country had held to the legal doctrine---which lies at the heart of abortion rights---that a fetus is not a person in the eyes of the law. But Deen had a new argument: In the sixty seconds between the baby's birth and the cutting of her umbilical cord, Johnson had "delivered" cocaine to her baby through the cord.

Judge 0. H. Eaton Jr. of the Seminole County Circuit Court declared himself "convinced" and convicted Johnson, sentencing her to a year of house arrest and fourteen years probation. Jennifer Johnson thus became the first woman to be convicted of the special crime of using drugs while pregnant. The Court of Appeals for the Fifth District affirmed her conviction.

Given Johnson's repeated attempts to find treatment for her drug abuse, Eaton's decision seems particularly cruel. "Pregnant addicts . . . have a responsibility to seek treatment," he ruled. The same judicial reasoning applied in the 1988 prosecution of a heroin addict in Butte County, California, who was convicted of birthing a drug-tainted baby after making Herculean efforts to get treatment. For months, she traveled 130 miles round-trip to a private methadone clinic that charged $200 a month. When her car broke down, she hitchhiked. When her money ran out, the clinic stopped treating her, even knowing she was seven months gone. Visibly pregnant, she asked several doctors and clinics in her area to help her, but none would do so. Twenty-four hours after giving birth, the district attorney confiscated her baby and charged her. "I don't see people making a choice unless you force them," he explained.

As has often been the case in the War on Drugs, the drug warriors wanted it both ways. Drugs are immoral, Bennett's drug office was saying at the time, because they "enslave" people and "take away their ability to function as free citizens." Yet when people fall into the "slavery" of drug use, they are prosecuted for making a bad "choice."

It is no accident that the first woman prosecuted for prenatal drug abuse was black. During a single month in 1989, Ira Chasnoff and his colleagues collected urine samples from every pregnant woman who visited a public health clinic or private obstetrician in Pinellas County, which contains St. Petersburg and is the fourth most populous county in Florida. They found that equal percentages of both black and white women---about 15 percent---used drugs during pregnancy. But the black women were ten times more likely than the whites to be reported to authorities for drug use. And the poorest women---with incomes of less than $12,000---were seven times more likely to be reported than those earning more than $25,000. Private hospitals and obstetricians weren't about to intrude on their paying customers' privacy with a drug test, but public hospitals often were required to do so. Typical was South Carolina, where one characteristic used by public hospitals to identify "probable drug users" for testing was "no prenatal care or late prenatal care (24 weeks)." In South Carolina, Medicaid doesn't cover prenatal care before nineteen weeks.

"If these mothers were walking away from treatment, I might feel differently," said the director of Family and Children's Services in San Francisco. "But they are not walking away from treatment. They are walking away from waiting lists."

With drugs at the top of every pollster's list, the country walked away from treating pregnant users. In one national poll, almost half thought prenatal drug abuse should be a criminal offense. Which perhaps isn't surprising, given such headlines as (in the Washington Post) CRACK BABIES: THE WORST THREAT IS MOM HERSELF and SHE SMOKED CRACK, THEN KILLED HER CHILDREN. Senator Pete Wilson of California in Iggo asked Congress to give treatment funding only to states that make it a crime to give birth to a drug-tainted baby, a classic Catch22: few pregnant women would seek drug treatment in a state where doing so invited jail and loss of the baby. In Florida, where such a law was already on the books, doctors complained to the St. Petersburg Times that pregnant women withheld important information about their drug use "because word had gotten around that the police will have to be notified." San Francisco deputy city attorney Lori Giorgi began noticing an increase in "toilet-bowl babies"---born at home or in secret. "They're afraid their babies will be taken away," she concluded.

If they birth them at all. In one Washington, D.C., case, a woman "miscarried" days before appearing before a judge who'd threatened to jail her because he thought she was using drugs while pregnant. Researchers reported being told often about such abortions. This is particularly ironic, since the movement to prosecute drug- using mothers gets much of its steam from the anti-abortion movement. Such prosecutions create a legal division between mother and fetus that doesn't exist elsewhere in the law. If a woman can be prosecuted for drugging her unborn baby, why not for killing it?

Widow Of Slain Oxnard Officer Plans To Sue City

Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, July 16, 1996 By Scott Hadly, Special to The Times

Court: James Rex Jensen Jr. was shot by his SWAT team partner. His wife, Jennifer, at first said she blamed no one. Now her lawyer says Jensen's partner, police are at fault.

The widow of slain Oxnard Police Officer James Rex Jensen Jr. has notified the city that she intends to sue over the shooting death of her husband, killed March 13 by a fellow officer in a botched drug raid.

Jennifer Jensen insisted after the shooting that no one was to blame. Her lawyer now says the department and Jensen's partner are at fault, contradicting official accounts that indicate the officer's actions contributed to his own death.

Police said Jensen unexpectedly left his position in a bedroom during the chaotic drug raid, surprising his partner and mentor Sgt. Dan Christian in a smoke-filled hallway. Christian mistook him for a gun-wielding suspect and shot the officer three times in the side of his chest.

It didn't happen that way, said Los Angeles lawyer Edward Steinbrecher. "He was shot three times in the back while he was still in the bedroom."

Steinbrecher on Monday submitted a wrongful death claim, the first step in filing suit against the city.

In the days following her husband's death, Jennifer Jensen expressed only forgiveness, saying in an interview with The Times that "there is no blame."

The Jensens were married for seven years and have two daughters, ages 3 and 6. The pair went through a difficult time in 1995, with Jennifer Jensen filing for divorce, but they reconciled three months before the shooting.

During her husband's funeral, Jennifer Jensen made a point of showing that she bore no ill will toward Christian, who physically supported her and held her hand during the emotional ceremony.

"Dan and I are in this together," she said later. "There will be a very special bond between us for the rest of our lives."

However, Steinbrecher said that Jensen's widow made those statements without knowing the facts of the shooting.

"She was talking from an emotional level," he said. "She was ready to forgive those who made the mistakes, but now it's time for justice. She wasn't in the position to be able to judge facts, because she didn't know the facts. That's up to a jury to decide."

Jennifer Jensen remains close to Sgt. Christian and his wife, Steinbrecher said, although the lawsuit may create a rift in the friendship. She could not be reached Monday for comment.

"I don't know if it's awkward for her," Steinbrecher said, adding that the issue could not be avoided. "He is responsible. He did shoot her husband and kill him."

Since the shooting, the department has conducted an internal investigation--even staging a reenactment of the incident.

In an interview last week, the department's Special Weapons and Tactics leader Cmdr. John Crombach said the SWAT team has gone over its tactics and training and reviewed how it staged the incident in minute detail.

Crombach said the review showed that the team had a "good solid plan." He said he was still unable to say exactly what went wrong.

"There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about it," Crombach said. "It's clear that something went sideways. I just don't think we can say what that was at this time."

The raid, on a condominium in a residential neighborhood near the Port Hueneme Navy base, was part of a drug sweep of 16 homes and businesses in five cities that concluded a two-year investigation.

According to police reports of the incident, Jensen seemed to have made the mistake that led to his death.

Shortly after throwing a "flash-bang" diversionary grenade in the hallway of the condominium, Jensen reportedly rushed upstairs ahead of his team and into a bedroom. Then--against standard tactics that call for officers to "take and hold" their positions--Jensen stepped out of the room and into the hallway.

Although only a few feet away, Christian could not identify his partner through the smoke and mistook him for an armed suspect.

But attorney Steinbrecher said Jensen did everything by the book and did not come out of the bedroom.

At work on Monday, Sgt. Christian said he could not comment on the matter.

Both Oxnard Police Department officials and Steinbrecher said they were anxiously awaiting a detailed investigation now being conducted by the district attorney's office.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Holmes, who is in charge of the Jensen shooting investigation, said it will be several weeks before his report is complete, and would not comment further on the case.

When the report is done, the Oxnard Police Department will conduct an administrative review of the district attorney's investigation to determine if further internal inquiry is necessary, said Assistant Police Chief Tom Cady.

"We are anxious to see their report and review what [it] has to say," Cady said.

Steinbrecher said he expects the report will detail a litany of mistakes, saying the SWAT team went into the condominium with a "cowboy attitude."

"What if it was a drug dealer, or a drug dealer's mother?" he said. "That doesn't give them a right to shoot anything that moves. . . . I've talked to SWAT people around the country and there isn't anybody that doesn't feel that Officer Jensen was killed needlessly."

Last year, Steinbrecher represented an Oxnard man paralyzed when his Subaru Brat overturned. He won $1.7 million in damages, assessed against both the auto maker and the city of Oxnard, which was faulted for the layout of the road.

The Jensen case was another example of negligence, he said.

"Our goal is justice for the Jensen family and to make this an example of what not to do," Steinbrecher said. "Maybe we can save some lives by that."

[End]

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