This guy looks like he’s up to no good
or he’s on drugs or something.
Guy looks like a bad dude, too.
Could be on something.
We have shots fired. We have one suspect down.
They could have very easily killed me when they threw me in the car.
-Justice! -Now!
In May of 2020,
as the police officer Derek Chauvin was kneeling on George Floyd’s neck,
his partner, Tou Thao, turned to the horrified onlookers and smirked,
“That’s why you don’t do drugs, kids.”
This is why you don’t do drugs, kids.
This was probably meant as a crass and stupid joke,
but it reveals a clear underlying belief system that if you use drugs,
or if police believe you might have used drugs,
they have the right to murder you.
In this episode,
we’re looking at how, again and again,
police weaponize drug use, either real or invented,
to justify their own brutality
and to spread misinformation about the nature of crime in society.
[The War on Drugs Show]
[Drugs & Police Killings]
On May the 26th, 2012,
a man named Rudy Eugene abandoned his car on a busy Miami causeway.
He then stripped off all his clothes,
threw away the Bible he was carrying,
and brutally attacked a homeless man named Ronald Poppo.
Among other injuries inflicted, Eugene repeatedly bit Poppo’s face,
blinding him in both eyes,
before being shot dead by a police officer.
Now at 10, calls for help during a deadly encounter.
He’s beating another man.
It’s a naked man beating another man.
He’s beating him.
Armando Aguilar, the head of the local police union,
immediately went on a media offensive,
claiming that Eugene had been on the synthetic cathinone drug
known as bath salts.
The story out front tonight, drugs known as bath salts
are being blamed for a gruesome scene in Miami.
This is a naked man.
He was shot dead on Saturday by police
because he was gnawing off another man’s face.
The story of a crazy new drug
that can make people literally eat each other
was seized on by the press.
And sensationalist headlines about
how cathinones turn people into homicidal zombies
are still being recycled around the world to this day.
The only problem with this narrative
is that there is zero evidence for any of it.
Aguilar had claimed Rudy Eugene was on bath salts
almost immediately after the attack itself,
before any toxicology tests had even been done.
When Eugene's toxicology report came in weeks later,
no bath salts were found at all.
The only drug found in Eugene’s system was cannabis,
but in such tiny amounts
that it’s almost certain he hadn’t consumed any that day
or been high at the time of the assault.
If people could just think about caffeine or amphetamine,
they basically understand the effects of bath salts.
Bath salts, they give you a little boost,
maybe some euphoria at large enough doses.
But the effects that were described in Mr. Eugene’s case, like violence,
I have never seen anything like it.
And people have studied bath salts— in the laboratory, in humans—
and have never seen anything like that.
So why were police so keen to spread this bath salts narrative?
Well, some journalists have suggested it was to distract attention
from the fact that, though Eugene was clearly disturbed,
Miami police had shot dead
yet another unarmed African-American man.
The police trusted in the media’s
age-old readiness to sensationalize drug scares,
and it worked.
The story became about a killer drug,
not a killer cop,
and this seems to happen again and again.
In October of 2014,
a white Chicago police officer shot 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times.
As major inconsistencies emerged in the official account of the shooting,
both police and the media resorted to old patterns,
casting doubt on McDonald’s own reputation,
and, as usual, they used drugs.
The claim here was that because post-mortem reports
indicated that McDonald had PCP in his system,
the officer was justified in feeling his life was in danger
from a teenager.
He shot 16 times from up to 15 feet away.
This relies on certain narratives that police and the media
have spread about PCP for decades.
PCP is a dissociative drug, often known as angel dust,
that sometimes makes people act like this.
I've always been interested in dolphin intelligence.
Using PCP, especially with dolphins, is just wonderful.
And you can just go straight into communication with them.
But there have also been urban myths circulating since the 1970s
that PCP makes users hyper-violent, giving them superhuman strength.
Stories like you had to shoot somebody 38 times
in order to stop them
because they were on PCP.
There is no drug on the planet that behaves like that
or give humans superhuman strength.
One of the things that’s unique about trials
that involve law enforcement officers
is that they start with the presumption
that the officer was justified, regardless of the circumstances.
And so for a defense attorney who’s representing a police officer,
what they will do is, number one,
reinforce that belief and narrative by attacking the victim
and basically putting them on trial and saying,
“See this person, you know,
regardless of what they were doing in the moment,
they were not a good person, you know, they use drugs.”
Do you think Laquan McDonald has been put on trial in some way?
-Oh, absolutely. -Absolutely. Absolutely.
They brought prior bad acts of a juvenile,
who did nothing that night.
He didn’t threaten anyone.
He never made any of the other officers
feel like they were in harm’s way.
In 2016, when a white cop was charged with manslaughter
over the shooting of the unarmed Black man Terence Crutcher,
a defense team also claimed she feared for her life
because she suspected Crutcher might have taken PCP.
Shelby’s attorney is calling the report confirmation
that her client believed Crutcher was under the influence of PCP
during his deadly encounter with the officer last month.
The same defense— that police suspected PCP use,
so felt in enough danger to deploy brutal force—
was used all the way back in 1991
by the cops who brutally beat Rodney King.
The L.A. riots began when those officers
were acquitted by an all-white jury the following year.
And it’s not just exotic synthetic drugs like PCP and bath salts
which are weaponized in this way.
Even widely enjoyed drugs like cannabis
are used by law enforcement to justify killing.
In February of 2012,
when George Zimmerman followed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin
as he walked home in Florida,
he reported to police that Martin looks like “he’s on drugs.”
He then shot Martin dead.
The case shocked America and the world,
but a major part of the legal defense
that saw Zimmerman get away with the killing
was that Martin had THC, the active agent in cannabis,
in his system.
The jury in the George Zimmerman murder trial
is expected to learn today
that Trayvon Martin had marijuana in his system when he was shot.
One of the things that Zimmerman’s defense team tried to do
was to say that Trayvon was high on cannabis
because Trayvon had 1.5 nanograms per milliliter of THC,
the active component of marijuana, in his system.
Now, 1.5 nanograms is so small
that it’s below the sort of placebo levels
that we see in our participants who had not smoked that day.
We see this again and again.
The idea that police officers suspected cannabis use
and thus feared for their lives and had to deploy lethal force
has been used as a defense in the killings of Philando Castile,
Michael Brown, and Keith Lamont Scott,
among others.
So when we think about once the cops have killed a Black person
and they claim that the Black person used drugs,
so what the cop is counting on is counting on the population
to have the same sort of screwed-up views about drugs as police do.
So if you’re using drugs, then that means you’re immoral.
And if you’re using this drug, that means you’re a bad person,
and therefore you probably didn’t give the cop any chance
or any choice but to kill you.
Law enforcement, politicians, and the media
failing to tell the truth about drugs is nothing new,
but the harm this causes is brought into sharp focus
when there’s a face and a name attached,
when you actually hear an officer joking about drugs
as his partner kneels on a man's neck.
So when we think about the cops
and when they say things like,
“We behaved exactly like we were trained,”
it’s important for the public to understand that
the cops rarely makes these mistakes
when they’re dealing with people other than racial minorities.
The press helps to create the smokescreen as well
because it’s a great story,
and they want to keep the story going.
Meanwhile, the victims suffer.
This is one of the subtle, easily missed ways
that reveals how the war on drugs
can so easily slip into simply becoming a war on people.
These lies and false narratives
have been part of the war on drugs since it first began.
Perhaps counteracting them
can be part of starting the process that brings it to an end.
We’d like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.