A few days ago, while reading Staten Island Law Enforcement Won’t Stop Fighting the War on Drugs I found myself again asking whether the war on drugs was always a war on people with addiction. We are in the midst of an opioid epidemic. We are trying to get more people to go to evidence-based treatment, including treatment with medications such as methadone and Suboxone®. Yet, police continue to target people going to such treatment for drug-related arrests, as this article describes:
When Detective Mathew Reich pulled over Jenna and her boyfriend, he initially told them it was for stopping too abruptly at a traffic light. (This is not recorded on the formal charging documents Reich filed — he didn’t include any reason for the stop, which is not typical police protocol.) “As soon as he pulled us over, he was cursing, yelling, telling me I was a stupid driver,” says Jenna.
Reich then mentioned that he had seen the couple exiting the methadone clinic and followed them. Jenna says that after her arrest, she and her boyfriend, who is also receiving methadone treatment, were placed in the back of a van with tinted windows. Shortly after that, they were joined by two other handcuffed people who had been at the methadone clinic as well.
When Jenna returned to the clinic for her next dose following the arrest, she says, her counselor wasn’t surprised at her story, telling her that his clients were often arrested outside the clinic.
The article previously described how Jenna had enrolled in the methadone clinic just three days ago, after a year and a half of unsuccessful attempts to quit her heroin addiction on her own.
Another article, this one from 2015 – The Common Cure For Heroin Addiction Is Also A Magnet For Police Harassment – describes how targeting patients in receiving treatment in methadone maintenance clinics appears to a common police tactic despite evidence gathered from three national assessments of methadone-related mortality by SAMHSA (Substance Abuse And Mental Health Services Administration) that methadone maintenance treatment programs are not a major source of diverted methadone. The tactics include what is best called entrapment, when undercover cops pose as individuals suffering from severe withdrawal and call upon the compassion of patients, and trick them into sharing their take home methadone dose. Then they promptly arrest them for diversion. The article quotes Neill Franklin, a retired former undercover narcotics cop and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), who says such tactics make sense to him:
“When we go to a place where we think the hunting is going to be good, we refer to it as a duck pond. We know that some [methadone patients] do sell and engage in other drug activity. You stop enough people … and you know what, you’re going to be able to make some arrests. It’s just that simple.”
Regardless of the role we think medications should have in recovery from addictions, surely we can all agree that targeting individuals in recovery, including by entrapment, is cruel and runs counter to the effort to get more people into treatment.
