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Narcs Stage Busts, Hype Tough Drug Laws

Narcs Stage Busts, Hype Tough Drug Laws image
Parent Issue
Day
1
Month
October
Year
1975
Copyright
Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
OCR Text

By Joe Davis

Following a series of drug raids in Ann Arbor last week, federal drug officials, Ann Arbor police, and Republican City Council members combined to attack the city's $5 marijuana ordinance. Using the storm-trooper tactics which have won them such notoriety (see related story at right), special agents at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) teamed up with "scores" of Ann Arbor police to round up a collection of 34 people who were accused of selling hashish, cocaine, heroin, and other drugs. The DEA issued an outrageously inflated figure of $4 million as the street value of drugs removed from the market, and Regional Director Theodore L. Vernier called it "one of the largest operations to be broken up in the nation," even though all but a handful of those arrested were charged with selling comparatively small quantities of drugs.

Vernier and Ann Arbor Police Chief Walter Krasny used the arrests as an occasion to call a press conference, in which they launched a political attack on "permissive" state and local drug laws, called Ann Arbor a "virtual supermarket for drugs," and charged: "This is what can happen to a community when it becomes permissive and tolerant of narcotics." Vernier took a leaf from Harry Anslinger's book by reviving the discredited contention that marijuana use leads to harder drugs, and called for "certainty of punishment" for drug offenders. He failed, of course, to differentiate marijuana, which was removed from the state's list of narcotic drugs four years ago, from hard drugs.

A sympathetic veteran police reporter for the Ann Arbor News obligingly reproduced the DEA's "facts," and Republicans on City Council immediately began agitating for the repeal of the $5 law. University of Michigan security chief Frederick E. Davids, former State Police director, jumped on the bandwagon by calling for the removal from office of politicians like State Representative Perry Bullard (Democrat, Ann Arbor), who has smoked reefer publicly to clarify his views on the marijuana laws.

Ann Arbor Mayor Albert Wheeler was incensed at not being informed of the raids until they were in progress and at the viciousness of the DEA's attack on the city. He called Vernier and Krasny's press release "propaganda and a maligning of this community. I resent it being made by someone who doesn't live in this city, and I resent the fact that it carries the co-signature of our own Chief of Police." Asked why Wheeler was not informed, Vernier said, "Our communications responsibility is to the law enforcement officials in the city or state we're working in." Krasny told the SUN, "I work for [City Mgr.] Sy Murray, not Al Wheeler."

Representative Bullard, a member of the Michigan House Judiciary Committee, says the whole operation was timed to coincide with the Committee's hearings this Monday in Ann Arbor. The Committee is holding hearings on the heroin laws in several cities. Chairman Paul Rosenbaum made the decision to hold this week's hearings in Ann Arbor in early August, when the four-month DEA investigation was well under way. Political insiders say Rosenbaum wants maximum publicity for the hearings because he has his eye on the state Attorney General's job. Over two-thirds of the testimony before the Committee has been from Michigan law enforcement agents.

Especially prominent among those pushing for tougher heroin laws before the Committee have been Vernier and State Police Director George Halvorson, reportedly the first Michigan police officer to be informed of the impending DEA dragnet in Ann Arbor.

Bullard says Halvorson, Vernier, and other top law enforcement officials have formed a "network" now making an "orchestrated" and "overt" thrust into the local political arena. "This was a politically motivated action by police," he charges. "It's like the army in politics, but here it's the police. With periodic raids, police try to increase their bureaucracies and mold public sentiment so they can do wiretapping and increase their power in our society."

Krasny and Vernier used the occasion to pitch for increased funding and "cooperation" for local narcotics units, moving Wheeler to retort, "What the hell does Vernier know about the budget? The Police Department gets the largest chunk. It's none of his damn business." Wheeler says he doesn't see Council voting more money for Krasny, "at least on that basis."

Krasny characterized Bullard's charges of political grandstanding as "a bunch of crap." Vernier responded, "That's absolutely ridiculous. We're not involved in politics. We're just doing our job."

The law enforcement agencies' press release suggests otherwise. What little it said about the arrests grossly misrepresented the facts, and most of the text was devoted to undisguised attacks on the $5 marijuana law, its alleged encouragement of hard drug use and sales, and plugs for the proposed state lawwhich would extend police wiretapping powers and increase the minimum sentences for heroin.

Nevertheless, the inaccuracies in the release were reprinted without question by crusading right-wing Ann Arbor News columnist William Treml, a former police reporter whose twenty years of cronyism with police should have made him more careful. Police told Treml about the impending raids by Wednesday noon, three or four hours before Mayor Wheeler knew about them.

During the first days of the media campaign, Treml's articles were useful to the DEA; but they went so far beyond the pale of truth that even the DEA now disavows him. Washington DEA Public Information Officer Con Dockerty told the SUN that Treml's stories had the facts "totally wrong, totally inaccurate."

Treml's worst mistake was swallowing whole Vernier's statement that $4 million worth of controlled substances had been purchased or seized. UPI also carried the figure, and Vernier confirmed it to the SUN. But Dockerty says the total wholesale value of the purchases on which the warrants were based was less than $75,000. He placed the "street value" of all drugs seized or purchased at between $400,000 and $500,000a tenth of the figure released by Vernier.

Even that figure may be substantially inflated, since DEA officials apparently couldn't wait for laboratory reports to verify the composition of the substances they confiscated. Defendants indicated that one of their number had sold four pounds of pure lactose, a harmless white powder, to the feds as cocaine.