Get Lost, Charlie

Paul Beston
https://www.city-journal.org/charles-manson-murders
August 16, 2019


Margot Robbie, Quentin Tarantino, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt

If you grew up in the 1970s, it was hard to escape Charles Manson. His gang’s grisly 1969 deeds were already legendary, and they left a lingering dread over middle-class America, to say nothing of Hollywood and other more privileged enclaves. The early and mid-seventies retained some trappings of sixties culture, and the climate that had fostered the Manson Family, or that Manson had used to foster it, seemed still operative. Older Americans, trying to exhale after the sixties’ Olympian paces, found themselves bewildered in a new, hungover decade that made not even a pretense of restoring the old verities.

There would be no getting them back, it turned out, and certainly not with that sense of menace in the air. My street in suburban Chicagoland held an annual block party on Labor Day weekend, with food and drink set out on long tables in a kind of wandering feast from yard to yard. One year, though, some college or older high school boys, not from the area, invited themselves into one of our neighbor’s homes. The street’s houses were open, with people regularly wandering in and out; the interlopers must have seen an easy target. They made their move, probably looking for booze, or maybe more. One of the neighborhood men entered the house and discovered them. They set upon him, he called out for help, and my father rushed in. He slugged one of the boys in the belly, and they all ran off. He seemed embarrassed by the deed in later years, wondering if he really needed to punch the kid. To the rest of us, the justification seemed clear: he had acted to help a friend.

Yet the incident seems hard to separate entirely from those still-fevered times. My father was an inveterate newspaper reader. The era’s cascading outrages must have had some effect on him, and the Manson murders especially so—involving, as they did, home invasion, the loss of sanctuary, and the wanton slaughter of, among other innocents, a nearly nine-months-pregnant woman. By the late 1960s, many Americans had learned to fear stepping out of their homes; Manson made them worry about staying in. It was not a climate conducive to pondering proportional degrees of self-defense.

Manson was in kids’ heads, too, back then. Born too late to view hippies as harmless and naïve, I saw them as people who wanted to take drugs and slice up my parents. They were all budding Mansons to me. The impression deepened when one of the older boys in our neighborhood acquired a rawhide bullwhip and rode his bike around, trying to lash the younger kids as we fled. The sixties had famously given us the motto, “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” but from where I stood, the only reliable people were 12 and under or 35 and over. Everyone else was out of their tree.

The Manson book, Helter Skelter, circulated in those years. Among my younger crowd, it had a forbidden-fruit quality, like a Playboy that specialized not in nude bodies but dead ones. Published in 1974, it remains one of the top true-crime sellers, an epochal account of the murders and prosecution of the Manson cult by the man who had put most of them away for life, Vincent Bugliosi. The made-for-TV feature by the same name that appeared soon after, in 1976, relied on the Bugliosi account and is creepy in that dreamlike way of 1970s TV movies. Every kid I knew was told he couldn’t watch it. We all watched it.



Steve Railsback as Charles Manson in 'Helter Skelter'

Bugliosi is a clear writer, and he paces his largely procedural narrative in a way that keeps readers on the hook, but his undertone of insistence leaves one wondering, vaguely, if all the pieces really fit together. Ed Sanders didn’t think so: before Bugliosi, he had published the first book on Manson, The Family, which is about as different from Helter Skelter as can be imagined. Writing with the flair of the countercultural figure he was, Sanders nevertheless managed to tell the Manson story with genuine outrage on behalf of the victims and disgust for their victimizers. He had wondered, at the outset, whether Manson and his acolytes were being framed by the government, but he quickly realized that they were murderers of almost unimaginable cruelty, and his contempt for them fired his hipster prose, as when he dubbed them “acidassins” or deflated their spooky talk by interjecting, “Oo-ee-oo.” Even his irreverence serves a purpose. “All was chop,” he writes, as the killers approach their prey—an off-putting phrase, but it gets at the annihilation of taboo that was the Manson Family’s calling card.

The Family asks questions that make Bugliosi’s version seem something less than airtight. Bugliosi had, after all, a huge stake in the official story: he had used it to prosecute Manson, to render historical judgment on the events, and to build his own reputation as an author and commentator. In the last 25 years, more books have come out on the Manson case, some taking new angles, such as Tom O’Neil’s just-published Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. Yet the fundamental physical realities of the case, of who did the killing and who got killed, remain unchallenged, as does the premise that the killers were operating under Manson’s influence, in some degree or another. The rest of it depends on how deep you want to go.

Over the last half century, enough people have wanted to go deeper, resulting not only in more Manson books but also in seemingly endless documentaries and specials, as well as—disturbingly—a cultish sort of fan base. The Manson murders have long been regarded as a 1960s touchstone, and like other major events of that most-analyzed decade, it has been assigned a definitional significance: the murders, we’re told, symbolized the end of the countercultural dream of peace and love.

Fifty years on, though, they might be better seen as an early, bloody shot in a culture war between rationality and irrationality, unity and tribalism, and between incremental, liberal progress and visions of apocalypse. Demythologized at last in Quentin Tarantino’s new film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as weak-minded losers, Manson’s followers stand as the opposite number, in every sense, to the Apollo astronauts, who, just weeks earlier, had pulled off the feat that might stand as the last great testament of an older, greater America: the moon landing.

Neil Armstrong’s footprints may be on the moon, but Manson’s footprints (or fingerprints, more aptly) seem more pervasive than do those of the Apollo heroes. American culture gives unprecedented authority today to privatized, subjective reality; the Manson Family didn’t just give it authority, they gave it action. Conspiracy theories are legion, often competing with empirical explanations for acceptance among the general public; Manson was a gifted conspiracist, regardless of whether he believed what he was peddling. And Manson was an unfulfilled artist (a singer/songwriter manqué), whose outrage at failure would eventually lead him to demand—as our mass shooters today demand—that the world pay heed to his importance. When insistence fell on deaf ears, only one solution remained. Then, as now, all was chop.

But just as another milestone anniversary resurfaces this foul and dreary story, Quentin Tarantino, of all people, comes along to remind us that old virtues remain stout enough to stand down monsters. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a Tarantino opus that contains all his hallmarks, good and bad, along with what seems a new sense of humanity and justice. The movie is being criticized for many reasons, some familiar, some specific to our perpetually aggrieved,bean-counting political tempers. In their myopia, the bean-counters cannot see that Tarantino has allowed us to imagine a way out of at least one old American nightmare. After 50 years, someone finally told the Manson Family to get lost.

Paul Beston is the managing editor of City Journal and author of The Boxing Kings.

WHAT HAPPENED TO JEFFREY EPSTEIN?

A mysterious criminal dies a mysterious death.

Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274595/what-happened-jeffrey-epstein-daniel-greenfield

August 12, 2019

(Chris Hondros)

New York City’s Civic Center is a maze of courts, prisons, and offices that begins where Chinatown ends; past relics like a 17th century Jewish cemetery and an 1819 seaman’s church. Park Row is barricaded and blocked off by the brutalist infrastructure of One Police Plaza (which contains the remnants of a British prison used to house American prisoners during the Revolutionary War). Surrounding it are massive federal courthouses in front of whose facades the various important malefactors you see on the evening news are photographed, followed by the neoclassical façade of the New York County Supreme Court.

The placement of these buildings in what used to be the Five Points, New York City’s worst and most violent criminal slum run by gangs who made their own laws, where police never ventured, is not an accident. Nor is it an accident that these buildings blocked off the slum area from nearby Wall Street.

The massive gray and brown towers of Civic Center make a statement about the might of the law.

The Metropolitan Correctional Center is the most obscure of the Civic Center buildings (except to its inmates and their families), its brutalist mass huddling in a blockaded zone, even as it has housed countless famous inmates from John Gotti to Bernie Madoff, from the Blind Sheikh to El Chapo.

New York’s Alcatraz skyscraper has hosted some of the most dangerous and infamous criminals in the world, and its security is as painfully tight as its slitted windows. MCC inmates are bound for one of the federal courts in Civic Center. Some of them will testify. Many only reluctantly. And some of them will be the targets of international gangs, terror groups and crime families who don’t want them testifying.

Somebody did not want the inmate in a cell on one of the top floors of the MCC testifying, even though the job of MCC personnel isn’t just to lock them up, but to keep them from dying. Before Jeffrey Epstein, Mafia kingpins, drug lords and terrorists had come and gone. A helicopter rescue operation had failed.

And then Epstein had somehow managed to impossibly hang himself in his cell.

Epstein was in MCC’s Special Housing Unit. A former warden described the security in SHU or the “hole” or “box” as only second to those of supermax prisons. Inmates eat and shower in their cells. Their hands are cuffed behind their backs whenever they step outside. No objects that can be used to harm anyone fall into their hands. They’re not allowed to make physical contact with even their own lawyers.

According to a former MCC inmate, suicide watch inmates are supposed to wear straitjackets. The sheets are paper thin, the ceiling is 9 feet high and there’s nothing to attach a rope to.

But Jeffrey Epstein has a long history of being able to do what he wasn’t allowed to do in prison.

Instead of going to prison, after his original conviction, he spent time in the Palm Beach Stockade, checking himself out to go to his office, where he hired Palm Beach Sheriff’s Deputies to act as his security, referring to him as client, and keeping watch as women and girls went into his office.

"I am authorizing that his cell door be left unlocked," a county supervisor had written back in Florida.

In MCC, someone had authorized that Epstein be left alone in his cell while he died.

MCC was supposed to be different. After suborning the justice systems of Florida, New Mexico, and New York, not to mention the Federal system, he was finally going to get what was coming to him.

And he did. Just not by way of the justice system.

(New York State of Division of Criminal Justice/EPA)

If you believe the official story, the night Jeffrey managed to hang his body in a cell designed to prevent any of the prisoners from doing that, his fellow inmate was removed, in CNN’s words, “for reasons unknown”, and the guards weren’t monitoring him every 30 minutes as they were supposed to.

For reasons unknown.

Despite allegedly trying to commit suicide a few weeks ago, he was taken off suicide watch, again, where he would have been monitored in a special cell every 15 minutes for… reasons unknown.

Reasons unknown ought to be Epstein’s epitaph. He wasn’t prosecuted by Florida or the Feds for raping numerous girls for reasons unknown. The signatures that allowed him to leave prison whenever he wanted to are wrong for reasons unknown. Three states failed to register him as a level 3 sex offender for reasons unknown. And now, security in New York’s Alcatraz failed… for reasons unknown.

Except we do know the reasons.

Jeffrey Epstein enjoyed a vast amount of influence and discretion because of his connections. Wealthy men and women have gone to prison and even passed through MCC before. Epstein’s money and influence both came from sources that have yet to be sufficiently nailed down. And now never will be.

Isn’t that convenient?

But don’t worry. There will be investigations. In Palm Beach, Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, has promised to investigate how Epstein was able to use his stockade as a hotel and his deputies as private security even though the logs have been destroyed.

There are investigations in New York City and you can bet they’ll be every bit as thorough and useless.

And they will include some variation of, “For reasons unknown.”

Epstein’s death was perfectly timed. His death ends the trial and buries all the remaining grand jury evidence in a file cabinet somewhere in Civic Center. And good luck ever getting to that cabinet.

Various authorities have promised to dig into the circumstances of his death and his crimes. But with Epstein gone, there will be no legal limits on them and no way to know where the truth lies. They can and will be able to present whatever claims and documents they like to the public. The lawyers for the victims will work to recover funds from the estate. But the truth has passed beyond recovery.

The truth died on the top of a prison skyscraper whose administration and guards flagrantly violated their own rules, removing Epstein from suicide watch six days after a supposed suicide attempt, leaving him alone in his cell, and failing to check on him until it was too late. Blame will be passed around. Conspiracy theorists will cash in on it for years. And the questions will remain unanswered.

Who could possibly penetrate Manhattan’s most secure detention facility? Who had the political influence to manipulate events within MCC’s walls? Who could do what Chapo’s confederates couldn’t?

These questions join others, such as who in the DOJ had allegedly told Alexander Acosta that Epstein was protected by intelligence figures, and who had corrupted the justice systems of three states?

The answers are gone, but the damage to our political system will linger.

What little we can know is that Epstein’s political connections extended far beyond Palm Beach. At the height of his power, Epstein enjoyed the patronage of figures in the federal government. And now, when he had been brought down in an attack on a federal official, he died in federal custody.

Epstein had become collateral damage in an attempt to inflict glancing harm on President Trump. The campaign failed to accomplish much of anything, but it got Epstein on track to an actual trial.

A trial that will never happen now.

Someone at the federal level had protected Epstein. And someone at the federal level may have decided that he was better off dead. It would have taken a political network with access to career officials in the DOJ to have protected and killed Epstein. We only know of one political network within the federal government linked to a political family closely tied to Jeffrey Epstein. Their name begins with a C.

But that’s speculation.

The Clinton network has faded since its main two figures lost any hope of running the government. And there are other networks whose key figures aren’t as famous or easy to name and define.

The swamp is deep and dark. And there are creatures lurking within it whom very few know.

Perhaps Jeffrey Epstein did die by his own hand. And a chain of coincidences enabled it to happen.

Anyone can come up with conspiracy theories. But there is no escaping the fact that Epstein’s career was one long conspiracy of mysterious money, a private island, the subversion of justice systems in three states, and the federal system, followed by a death that should have been impossible.

A corrupt system enabled Jeffrey Epstein to abuse numerous girls. And now a corrupt system, somewhere in the shadowy maze of Civic Center, has drawn a final curtain over his death.

If you stand in an alley looking up at the dingy walls of the MCC, you can peer through the tiny black slits of its windows looking for answers. But the only thing behind the MCC’s windows is darkness.

Everything They’re Telling You About Mass Shootings Is Wrong

By Chris Buskirk

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/07/everything-theyre-telling-you-about-mass-shootings-is-wrong/

August 7, 2019

Democrats have complained about police brutality for years. The police, they assure us, are out of control. And, the story goes, they have it in for anyone whose skin is not lily white. You can’t trust the racist cops, they tell us. Remember Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, and others.

But these same Democrats also tell us that the police are the only ones who should have guns, which is to say that the police we’re not supposed to trust, who are guilty—in their view—of unspeakable crimes against Americans, should be given a monopoly on physical force and that private citizens should be deprived of their most effective means of defending themselves. That’s a headscratcher, but I’ll come back to that later.

For now, I want to focus on faithless Republicans who are being stampeded by an activist-driven, media-empowered hysteria into passing ill-advised gun control legislation that is bad on its surface and is rife for abuse. Not only are congressional Republicans making noise about gun control laws that Obama could never get passed but the New York Times reported that President Trump is looking for ways to enact gun control through executive action.

Allow me to propose a radical thought: Rushing important legislation that affects people’s most fundamental rights based on what’s trending on Twitter is not the best way to run a serious country.

So why the hysteria? The proximate cause, of course, is three mass-shootings that occurred within 10 days of each other: Gilroy, Calfornia, El Paso, Texas, and Dayton Ohio. If you believe the media—and sadly this applies to much of the conservative media, too—the country is experiencing an epidemic of mass shootings driven by “white supremacy.” Of course, “white supremacy” is not so much a defined political or cultural movement as it is an all-purpose slur used to shut down debate and dehumanize your opponents.

Labeling someone a “white supremacist” means not only that you don’t have to listen to them anymore, it also means that they are legitimate targets for all kinds of aggression. That’s what the shooter in Dayton, Ohio thought. He described himself as a leftist and he supported Elizabeth Warren, Antifa, and, ironically, gun control. His Twitter feed included statements like, “Vote Blue, for god’s sake” and “I want socialism and I’ll not wait for the idiots to come round to understanding,” and “Kill every fascist.”

In case you’re wondering who fit his definition of a fascist, you won’t have to look too far. It probably includes you and many of your friends and family. It certainly includes the 63 million Trump voters.

But how big is the problem? Do you know? If you watch our media you would think there was an epidemic of psycho mass-shooters, that you couldn’t go to a movie or out to lunch without dodging bullets. It’s not true.

In fact, most of what we’re being told about mass shootings and mass shooters is not true and it’s offered on an endless loop in order to manipulate public opinion and to pursue a political agenda that demonizes white people.

“Everyone I don’t like is a white supremacist!” is the rallying cry and it’s meant to cow weak-kneed Republicans into submission and, at a minimum, get them to pass dangerous gun control legislation. Remember, as just one example, that Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) recently said, “Our country should be more fearful of white men . . . ” It’s become an article of faith that white men are responsible for most mass shootings, but that’s not true either.

What are the facts?

Fact: There were 387 deaths from mass shootings in the United States in 2018 (defined as four or more shot—not necessarily killed—at one time). Of those, most were regular criminals as we expect to see ingang-related drive-bys, bar fights, and a strangely large number of shootings at parties (like this one). About 100 deaths were the result of the random, psycho-killer shootings that dominated news coverage for days and weeks at a time. Mercifully, those are quite rare. But that’s not the impression we are given by the news coverage.

Fact: There are more privately owned guns in the United States than ever before and the number of murders has been declining for decades and has been at or near a multigenerational low for several years. More guns, less crime.

Fact: There were 660 murders in Chicago in 2017. That’s nearly twice the number from mass shootings in the whole country and six or seven times the number murdered by random psychos mass-shooters. Chicago has some of the strictest gun control in the country. Maybe it’s not the guns.

Fact: There are between 1.2 million and 1.5 million defensive uses of guns per year in the United States. How many more murders, rapes, thefts, and assaults would there be without armed citizens?

Fact: There were more than 70,000 opioid deaths last year. That’s 4.5 times the total number of murders and 700 times the number of people killed by psycho mass-shooters. Yet, liberals want to enact far-reaching  gun control laws and prevent Americans from defending themselves.

Maybe there’s another agenda. Well, not maybe. There is.

Power-hungry ideologues are playing on people’s emotions, using terrible, tragic—but also quite rare—incidents to push a false narrative about America and to enact dangerous gun control legislation that would leave millions of Americans subject to abuse.

Do you want the people who dox conservatives and get them banned from social media deciding who is allowed to own a gun? “Red flag” laws don’t stop crazy people and will empower bad actors to harass American conservatives, depriving them of their ability to defend themselves.

Republicans politicians seeking to doctor our Second Amendment with gun control legislation should stop. Then they should take a breath and remember the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm.

Here's Something You Won't Hear About on the Shootings

By John R. Lott Jr.
https://townhall.com/columnists/johnrlottjr/2019/08/06/heres-something-you-wont-hear-about-on-the-shootings-n2551247
August 6, 2019


Connor Betts (Dayton), Patrick Crusius (El Paso)

Here is something that you won’t hear on the news. The Dayton mass shooter who left nine people dead and some 27 people injured was a registered Democrat, a self-described “leftist” who hated Donald Trump, and a strong proponent of more gun control.

If you believe the media, the murderer from the El Paso Walmart killer to the New Zealand Mosque shooter were right-wingers. 

“The white supremacist rantings are only the most recent far-right wing writings to emerge behind senseless mass shooting deaths in the past several months,” according to Time magazine, in reference to both the El Paso and New Zealand mass public shooters. A headline at NBC News proclaims: “After El Paso, Dayton shootings, world media warns about right-wing extremism in U.S.”

On Sunday, Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke blamed President Trump for the violence and agreed with CNN’s Jake Tapper that Trump was a “white nationalist.” One Democratic presidential candidate after another laid the blame at Trump’s feet.

This drumbeat has been going on for awhile. The Washington Post called the New Zealand mosque shooting, “One of the worst cases of right-wing terrorism in years.” CNN’s John Berman, meanwhile, said, “The person giving a sign of allegiance to President Trump is the killer here."

The logic goes that President Trump is a right winger and a racist, and that therefore he is in league with and responsible for mass public shootings by white supremacists. Supposedly, there has been a flood of these mass public shootings because Trump has engendered a culture of hatred.

But Trump’s political views are worlds apart from those of the El Paso and New Zealand killers. Both were extreme environmentalists who opposed immigration because they thought that overpopulation would damage the environment. 

The El Paso killer’s environmentalism was clearly the basis for his anti-immigrant views: “Our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country. The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources. This has been a problem for decades. . . . If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.”

Similarly, the New Zealand killer wrote: “The environment is being destroyed by over population, [and] we Europeans are one of the groups that are not over populating the world. The invaders are the ones over populating the world. Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.”

The El Paso killer opposed all immigration, and was upset with Trump for advocating merit-based immigration. “Recently, the senate under a REPUBLICAN administration has greatly increased the number of foreign workers that will take American jobs. Remember that both Democrats and Republicans support immigration and work visas.”

Of course, the media is silent about the fact that the Dayton killer was a self-described “leftist,” a registered Democrat, and a gun control proponent. On Feb. 14, 2018, he tweeted at Sen. Rob Portman: “@robportman hey rob. How much did they pay you to look the other way? 17 kids are dead. If not now, when?” That was the date of the mass shooting at a school in Parkland, Florida. He also wrote on Twitter, “I want socialism, and i’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding.”

On Sunday, The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin claimed: “The facts indicate white nationalists are responsible for more deaths than Islamic fundamentalist-inspired killings under this president.”

The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) collected data on the raceand ideology (political and religious) of mass public shooters. Since 1998, 58% of these killers have indeed been white, but this percentage is smaller than the white share of the US population (64%, as of 2015). Middle Easterners are by far the most overrepresented among mass public shooters, given that they represent about 1% of the US population and 8% of mass public shooters. Blacks, Asians, and American Indians are also overrepresented. Hispanics are the most underrepresented, committing attacks at a rate that is little more than a third of their share of the population.

Environmental extremism is on the rise, and doomsayers on the left should take some responsibility for the unhinged frame of mind that many young Americans now occupy. Trump certainly didn’t inspire this strain of environmental fanaticism. But instead of having an honest conversation about where such fanaticism comes from, the media would rather just stereotype all angry white males as “right-wingers” and warn of a “white nationalist terrorism crisis.” 

The Opioid Epidemic from a Rural Prosecutor’s Perspective

By John Litle
https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/03/the-opiod-epidemic-from-a-rural-prosecutors-perspective/
August 3, 2019


Zanesville, Ohio (Thesteeleisreal)

I was at the end of a meeting with a mother whose child is a victim of the country’s opioid epidemic. “So, I’m trying to write about how the opioid epidemic is affecting us,” I informed her. She responded immediately: “It touches everyone, it’s everywhere. I mean, how did it get to this?”

“Where do I even start?”

Muskingum County, Ohio, is a typical Midwestern community full of kind, generous, and community-minded folks. Social and volunteer organizations flourish. Local philanthropists have made it a point to invest heavily here, to the entire community’s benefit.

Zanesville, the county’s seat, weathered the storm of the Great Recession better than many Midwestern small towns, but you can still see the scars.

Even so, the county has a little bit of anything you might want. You can live in a historical district, a downtown artist colony, or so far out in the country hills that you’ve got no mobile phone coverage. There’s farm-to-table food, fast-food joints, and Tom’s Ice Cream Bowl, voted USA Today’s “Best Ice Cream Shop in America” as every proud Zanesvillian is pleased to tell you. It’s Midwestern small-town America.

It’s a good community, with 86,000 decent, hard-working people. Yet every person here knows or is acquainted with someone who is affected by what the media calls “the opiate crisis.” It is a scourge our country allows to rage on, unfettered.

It’s been several years since Sam Quinones came through Zanesville to discuss Dreamland, his seminal work discussing the rise and proliferation of America’s opiate epidemic, in large part focusing on my part of the country. Earlier this year, Javier Peña and Steve Murphy, the agents portrayed in Netflix’s “Narcos,” spent a day-and-a-half here discussing their experiences with Columbian, and then later Mexican cartels smuggling mass quantities of narcotics into the United States. Meeting them and hearing their observations was a great opportunity, and very eye-opening.

But what I actually see prosecuting felony drug cases in Eastern Ohio today bears little resemblance to Quinones’s description of overprescribed Oxycontin and specialized Mexican poppy-towns. And for what it’s worth, there are no “Breaking Bad”-style Walter Whites or Jesse Pinkmans cooking meth here anymore, either.

No, what we face is industrially produced meth that makes it all the way to low-level distributors as “big as your thumb” crystals, and uncut fentanyl so dangerous that cops don’t dare touch the drugs they confiscate.

Cheaper and Deadlier

To the uninitiated in this world, some background is illustrative. Let’s say we want to work a drug trafficking case in my county, from a law enforcement perspective. Dope comes in kilos, half kilos, nine packs (nine ounces/quarter kilo), zips (ounces), half-ounces, quarters, eight-balls (1/8 ounce or 3.5 grams), and on down to tenths of grams. An eight-ball gets you to a third-degree felony.

Four years ago, this eight-ball would cost somewhere between $300 and $350, depending on the target and the way you were working the case. Those were Appalachian Ohio prices.

Last month, our department was able to purchase an eight-ball of meth for just $60. At that price, a single hit of meth is cheaper than a cheap cup of coffee in Zanesville.

It pours over the U.S. border with Mexico like a raging torrent. There are no meth labs anymore because no one can afford to make it. The combined price of the components (lithium batteries, Coleman fuel, lye, Sudafed, hydrochloric acid, etc.) is now considerably greater than the cost of the imported Mexican product.

In the early 1990s, major cities fought crack-fueled inner-city gangs. We spent much of 2018, in rural Muskingum County, Ohio, battling a meth-slinging prison gang running wild on our streets. We can strike back against these scourges when we have the will to do it.

The other new development is fentanyl and its derivatives. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that can be manufactured with the right chemicals—just like meth—in someone’s bathtub or garage. Fortunately or unfortunately, that’s not actually happening because much like meth, fentanyl is flowing into the country like a river. And it’s a lot more convenient than the heroin it is replacing. Smuggling one kilo of fentanyl across the border is the financial and narcotic equivalent of smuggling thirty (30) kilos of heroin. And fentanyl doesn’t require a field to grow.

Being 30 times as potent as heroin, fentanyl is administered medicinally as a fluid, or as a patch absorbed through the skin. Officers coming in contact with the substance on the streets similarly absorb it through their skin, leading to overdoses. A good friend of mine nearly overdosed after placing a bag of powder into the evidence container in the back of his cruiser and driving back to the station. He had to be “narcanned” on the side of the road.

Narcan is the common term referring to a drug called Naloxone, sometimes considered a “Lazarus” drug for its ability to immediately reverse the effects of an opiate overdose. It is so prevalent that “narcanned” has become common parlance.

Y-Bridge, Muskingum County, Ohio (Muskingum County)

Fentanyl Reigns Supreme

Drug dealers are smart and ingenious. Today, they’re using fentanyl for, and in, everything. It is so much more potent by weight and consequently so much easier to smuggle, conceal, and cut that it is showing up in a throw-back reference to the original hook of Quinones’s Dreamland, pills. Now, when you buy what is said to be a prescription pill on the streets of Ohio, the chances are good that the pill is actually fentanyl that has been pressed—properly colored, shaped, and marked—into a pill that looks just like your perc 20, (Percocet 20mg) or your Oxy.

Just a year and a half ago, in February and March of 2018, 17 people died in Muskingum County from overdoses related to fentanyl. Many of them I knew as names common from police reports and investigations. One of them I knew as the son of a dear friend, a friend so bent by grief that he died of a heart attack just two weeks later.

With some of the overdoses, the bulk trafficker of fentanyl to my area sent uncut product to his customer, and that man—the dealer selling the poison from a hotel in my community—wasn’t smart enough to compound it correctly in his heroin. This resulted in a string of overdoses among his users. Perversely, in these circumstances word spreads among the opiate addicts that the dealer with the strongest heroin has “the best stuff” creating a greater demand for the most dangerous drugs. Herein lies one of the moral hazards of narcan.

Some of the other overdose deaths had a separate, equally distressing cause, and one related to efforts to treat opiate addiction. Vivitrol is a monthly shot developed to combat opiate addiction. While expensive, vivitrol works pretty miraculously to block the effects of opiates on a person. Much as narcan reverses the effects of opiates acutely, vivitrol makes it so you cannot get high from opiates for up to a month at a time. Unfortunately, it still lets you get high from meth.

And addicts are not so much addicted to a specific drug as they are addicted to getting high.

So when an opiate addict can’t get high from opiates, getting high from meth is the next best thing. Worse, dealers have started making their meth “better” by cutting it with fentanyl. Without a prolonged medical discussion, when a person stops taking vivitrol, or relapses out of a period of recovery, they are significantly more opiate naïve than when they started treatment, and a lesser quantity of opiates than they are in the habit of taking will cause them to have a fatal overdose. For instance, the amount of fentanyl now mixed in with their methamphetamine might kill them, or the fact that they started vivitrol before fentanyl was on the streets might mean their first hit of “fetty” is deadly.

By the end of February 2018, we had the first of several multiple-overdoses in the county jail when an inmate—having hidden fentanyl in his rectum during a traffic stop and arrest—distributed to other inmates the fentanyl he smuggled into the jail.

In March 2018, my office laid down the first indictment for involuntary manslaughter against a dealer we could prove had sold the fentanyl that killed one of his customers. Such prosecutions are exceedingly difficult given that the addict is no longer alive, and fellow addicts tend to steal the evidence, tamper with the scene, and act to defend their drug supplier. Citizens and juries do not seem to be excited about the charges either, given that the drug is something an addict “chose to put in their body.” In contrast, my office views the charges as an opportunity to increase the risks inherent to dealing drugs, provide closure for survivors, and rid the streets of dangerous individuals.

In 2016, my office indicted 420 felony cases. In 2017, it was 500. In 2018, it was 758.

Now we are eight months into 2019, and what a difference a year makes. At this point, opiate users aren’t buying heroin cut with fentanyl anymore. They’re seeking out and buying straight fentanyl.

Hazardous Solutions

We made narcan over-the-counter, and we even give it away for free. Overdose deaths are down. But now addicts are having narcan parties. I am not making this up. Everyone gets their narcan together and sees how close they can get to dying, knowing the narcan is there to save them. EMS crews routinely have to utilize 10 or more doses of narcan to revive an addict for a single overdose, and just as routinely they have to revive the same addict more than once in the same 24 hour period. As I said, it’s creating a moral hazard.

In social circles, and more often in social media, it is not uncommon periodically to hear the refrain that “narcan should be illegal” or that it should be limited to a single use or application. Of course, serious discussion always leads to an acceptance that no decent person could live with allowing someone to die in front of their eyes if it were in their power to stop it from happening. But the expression exposes a deep frustration held by many about the intractable problem created by a cycle of synthetic opiate and methamphetamine abuse by persons with no interest whatsoever in reform, recovery, treatment, or rehabilitation.

The courts are not the solution to addiction. They’re a tool that sometimes helps certain addicts find their bottom, when family, friends, and self-interest have not been enough. Alternatively, the courts can shuffle off those who feast on the sores of addiction to be warehoused in a place where society is protected from their actions.

Cases aren’t just mounting in felony court. They’re mounting in juvenile court where my office takes custody of more and more children every year. They’re mounting at Job and Family Services, where more and more children have a single living functioning parent, or none. Another generation is being raised by grandparents. Children injured or killed due to the actions of their drug-intoxicated parents and caregivers used to be an unfortunate anomaly on the docket. Now it’s a routine problem. Another child died two weeks ago at the hands of a meth-addled assailant.

Drugs, cash and firearms seized in 2018. (Shelly Schultz/Zanesville Times Recorder)

People take it in stride. Ohioans are hardy and good-natured. Two years ago, one community initiative opened a restoration park including communal gardens, fountains, and green spaces for public movies and entertainment. The gardens are a hit, growing every year. Yet recently, caretakers have had to add the weekly chore of removing the needles and detritus left by voluntarily homeless addicts who treat themselves to the free vegetables. As in California, scores of voluntarily homeless people are a new and growing phenomenon in this place. It’s not acceptable. Is this to be the way of things?

There may be solutions. But we don’t appear ready to pursue them.

Give Addicts Shelter

It is rational to accept that drug addicts have an addiction but it is not rational to permit or enable their addiction. In a related matter, as a society, we have come to accept that victims of domestic violence struggle mightily to break free from the pressures of all types which keep them trapped in a hostile, dangerous and oftentimes deadly environment. They know the dangers and still stay. Even so, almost all communities have and maintain domestic violence shelters. These are places safety and confidentiality where a person can go to escape on perhaps the one day they have the strength to leave.

Without a waiting list, without judgment, without barriers, without court orders, and without others who have been ordered by the courts to be there, these shelters offer a haven. These shelters are, importantly, a place of refuge where no one can send a person, and where no one can force a person to stay. We have nothing like this for drug addicts.

This type of no-judgment, non-compulsory, no-wait narcotics shelter is an asset we desperately need. But it’s not as easy to set up a place like this as it is to establish a domestic violence shelter. There are medical needs. It’s far more expensive. Most importantly, people have a natural sympathy for victims of domestic abuse that is often absent in cases of drug abuse. That is to say, people feel a genuine desire to reach out and volunteer their time and effort—the real currency of intervention—to lift up women who have suffered at the hands of an abuser. Moreover, former victims of domestic abuse can intervene to assist others who are struggling to escape without risk of re-entering the danger. Most of these factors do not apply to the opiate epidemic.

Readers, social-media commenters, voters, and legislators believe it is the “right thing to say” that drug addicts should get treatment and care, but few and far between are those with a selfless interest in the vocation. It’s one thing to muse in an academic way over what could be useful in combating this crisis, but someone needs to pick up and carry the flag, and it’s not the type of work that draws out the passionate volunteer.

Addicts aren’t puppies, and if they were, Ohio would be experiencing an opiate rescue, not an opiate crisis. Addicts are liars, thieves, and fiends during their addiction. They will tell you so in recovery. So there’s no wellspring of sympathy or empathy for that.

Ohio’s approach to the opiate epidemic and the roaring return of methamphetamine—like much of the nation’s—has echoed the banal appeal to “treatment” as a cure. Budgets and legislation repeatedly throw money at politically-connected, court-subsidized, compulsory treatment facilities and “specialized docket” courts. The specialized docket courts, which meet weekly with a judge, and more often with counselors and probation officers, are considered the most successful approaches Ohio courts currently use for drug treatment. “Most successful” means at best a 15 percent rate of not returning to drug use or crime within three years. Fifteen percent is better than nothing, but it is not “success.”

What the Crack Epidemic Taught Law Enforcement

When it comes to law enforcement and the courts, we actually already know how to defeat the opiate epidemic. We’ve done it before. We beat the crack epidemic. We drove out the violent insanity which was destroying Ohio neighborhoods and families. And we did that by utilizing the criminal courts to treat people who were caught committing crimes as criminals; by treating people who sold crack as violent poison-pushers, not misunderstood future collegians; and by stemming the tide of drugs flowing into the country with concrete action, rather than spreading out a red carpet along all of our borders for drug cartels to bottom out the price of poison everywhere in the country.

We don’t have crack houses all over the place anymore because we took the people who ran the crack houses and we put them in prison for so long that not only would the crack crisis have passed before they got out of prison, but everyone else was forced to stand up and take note of their sentence. Economics is economics. If you are actually going to attempt to ban a substance that has high demand, you must make the risk/reward calculus obvious and simple. The risk of apprehension multiplied by the likely punishment must exceed in value by orders of magnitude the anticipated reward in light of the alternative opportunities. And in order to make that message heard by all, a multiplication factor must be applied.

Basically, the punishment for selling drugs needs to seem unfair, draconian, and very scary to those likely to deal drugs. It must be sufficient to cause them to forego easy money and choose a life either of legal hard work or, as is the sad reality of our nation, government-funded dependency. In the United States, we did that once, and we won the crack epidemic with a combination of punishment and economic opportunity.

In contrast, today federal lawmakers bicker over palace intrigue and leave the barn doors open while Mexico and China flood our streets with dirt-cheap poison. Ohio lawmakers seem intent on singing kumbaya in a drum circle, hoping it will all go away if we just love the addicts enough. It will not. So, we put on our latex gloves, pick the needles out of the cuke bed, head off to work, and do our best to clean the streets while too many of our friends and neighbors die.

The opiate epidemic is real and it connects with everyone, but the community here is stronger than the dope. Most people here probably rarely give it a thought, until it touches home again.

There Is No Epidemic of Racist Police Shootings

By Heather Mac Donald

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/white-cops-dont-commit-more-shootings/

July 31, 2019

The Democratic presidential candidates have revived the anti-police rhetoric of the Obama years. Joe Biden’s criminal-justice plan promises that after his policing reforms, black mothers and fathers will no longer have to fear when their children “walk the streets of America” — the threat allegedly coming from cops, not gangbangers. President Barack Obama likewise claimed during the memorial for five Dallas police officers killed by a Black Lives Matter–inspired assassin in July 2016 that black parents were right to fear that their child could be killed by a police officer whenever he “walks out the door.” South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg has said that police shootings of black men won’t be solved “until we move policing out from the shadow of systemic racism.” Beto O’Rourke claims that the police shoot blacks “solely based on the color of their skin.”

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demolishes the Democratic narrative regarding race and police shootings, which holds that white officers are engaged in an epidemic of racially biased shootings of black men. It turns out that white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. It is a racial group’s rate of violent crime that determines police shootings, not the race of the officer. The more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that members of that racial group will be shot by a police officer. In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians, the study found.

The authors, faculty at Michigan State University and the University of Maryland at College Park, created a database of 917 officer-involved fatal shootings in 2015 from more than 650 police departments. Fifty-five percent of the victims were white, 27 percent were black, and 19 percent were Hispanic. Between 90 and 95 percent of the civilians shot by officers in 2015 were attacking police or other citizens; 90 percent were armed with a weapon. So-called threat-misperception shootings, in which an officer shoots an unarmed civilian after mistaking a cellphone, say, for a gun, were rare.

Earlier studies have also disproven the idea that white officers are biased in shooting black citizens. The Black Lives Matter narrative has been impervious to the truth, however. Police departments are under enormous political pressure to hire based on race, despite existing efforts to recruit minorities, on the theory that doing so will decrease police shootings of minorities. Buttigieg came under fire from his presidential rivals for not having more black officers on the South Bend force after a white officer killed a black suspect this June. (The officer had responded to a 911 call about a possible car-theft suspect, saw a man leaning into a car, and shot off two rounds after the man threatened him with a knife.) The Obama administration recommended in 2016 that police departments lower their entry standards in order to be able to qualify more minorities for recruitment. Departments had already been deemphasizing written exams or eliminating requirements that recruits have a clean criminal record, but the trend intensified thereafter. The Baltimore Police Department changed its qualifying exam to such an extent that the director of legal instruction in the Baltimore Police Academy complained in 2018 that rookie officers were being let out onto the street with little understanding of the law. Mr. Biden’s criminal-justice plan would require police hiring to “mirror the racial diversity” of the local community as a precondition of federal funding.

This effort to increase minority representation will not reduce racial disparities in shootings, concludes the PNAS study, since white officers are not responsible for those disparities; black crime rates are. Moreover, lowered hiring standards risk bad police work and corruption. A 2015 Justice Department study of the Philadelphia Police Department found that black officers were 67 percent more likely than white officers to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black suspect; Hispanic officers were 145 percent more likely than white officers to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black suspect. Whether lowered hiring standards are responsible for those disparities was not addressed.

The persistent belief that we are living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings is a creation of selective reporting. In 2015, the year the PNAS study addressed, the white victims of fatal police shootings included a 50-year-old suspect in a domestic assault in Tuscaloosa, Ala., who ran at the officer with a spoon; a 28-year-old driver in Des Moines, Iowa, who exited his car and walked quickly toward an officer after a car chase; and a 21-year-old suspect in a grocery-store robbery in Akron, Ohio, who had escaped on a bike and who did not remove his hand from his waistband when ordered to do so. Had any of these victims been black, the media and activists would probably have jumped on their stories and added their names to the roster of victims of police racism. Instead, because they are white, they are unknown.

The “policing is racist” discourse is poisonous. It exacerbates anti-cop tensions in minority communities and makes cops unwilling to engage in the proactive policing that can save lives. Last month, viral videos of pedestrians in Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn assaulting passive New York Police Department officers showed that hostility toward the police in inner-city neighborhoods remains at dangerous levels.

The anti-cop narrative deflects attention away from solving the real criminal-justice problem, which is high rates of black-on-black victimization. Blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of non-Hispanic whites, overwhelmingly killed not by cops, not by whites, but by other blacks. The Democratic candidates should get their facts straight and address that issue. Until they do, their talk of racial justice will ring hollow.