By Jack Clark
As he was being led to a holding cell, the beginning of a trip back to Rikers Island, Smith called out to his mother sitting in the spectators’ section, “Mom, I can’t do it.” His mother mouthed back, “It’ll be all right.” But for Derrick Smith nothing would ever be right again. He broke free from his guards, jumped on a radiator, and dove out an open window. He fell 16 stories.
The police must know they’ll never stop the trade or consumption of illegal drugs. We all know that. The drug war has become a foolish national pastime with the cops stuck in the middle between the lawmakers and the lawbreakers. One of their greatest incentives to play the game came during the Reagan era, with the passage of the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1984: the forfeiture laws.
He finds a list that shows the Washington, D.C., police have seized as little as $5. “These numbers hint at petty shakedowns,” Gray writes, “and that bodes ill for the long haul. Try to picture this scene through the eyes of the teenager with a few bucks in his pocket–quite possibly earned through honest work–who must constantly be on the lookout for the king’s men or lose it all. It would be tough to come up with a better system for teaching hatred of the law.”
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Gray takes us to night drug court at 26th and California, where the small-time buy-bust arrests are adjudicated in eight courtrooms set up to handle the overflow business. He talks to a public defender named Tim Lohraff who estimates he’s handled 1,000 drug cases but has had only 15 to 20 white clients. He likes to taunt the state’s attorney: “No white people sell or use drugs?”
If you listen closely, you can hear thousands of Derrick Smiths sitting in the dock at 26th and California chanting: “It’s not fair.”
Bureau County straddles Interstate 80, a bit west of LaSalle-Peru in the lush farmland of the Illinois River valley. It doesn’t look like a major outpost of the war on drugs, but it is.
