The Common Cure for Heroin Addiction Is Also a Magnet for Police Harassment | Hacker News Reader

The Common Cure for Heroin Addiction Is Also a Magnet for Police Harassment

buzzfeed.com

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This type of activity isn't limited to major metro cities -- it's happening (with surprisingly frequency) in the midwest. Cincinnat/Hamilton County is notorious for doing this type of thing, but instead of with Methadone, it's with Suboxone; it's a drug that blocks the detoxification effects of heroin.

The police are under pressure to make more Heroin arrests -- so much so that they're targeting people who may or may not have a criminal history and asking them if they know anyone who has some Heroin for sale -- and offering to give them up to $500 if they do. For most residents of Hamilton county, $500 is a fair amount of money....and they always 'know' someone who 'knows' someone who can supply the drug...so they'll say yes (and then get arrested for trafficking).

This really boils down to a lack of good mental health and health care. I have two friends who are struggling with a Heroin addiction -- one fell off of a roof while working, and the other just can't cope with her problems; if we had better and more affordable health care (and while I support the ACA 100%, I still think we need to move to single payer healthcare), I don't think either of them would be addicted to the drug now.

>This really boils down to a lack of good mental health and health care.

And a lack of ethics at the police department.

Saintly police officers do not cure heroin addictions.

But shitty policing does?

That certain provides the mental health benefit of having someone to blame for all your problems, yeah?

Ends justify the means? What will you do when the same means are used on you?

You're not achieving the ends with your means, though.

We haven't tried my means.

but decriminalization does, at least it has had stunning results in Portugal. But thugs are going to be thugs and most people seem to like to have the local thugs in blue do their shit.

Decriminalization is a good strategy. Unsurprisingly, it also has nothing to do with police ethics.

Reverse stupidity is not intelligence. Not shooting someone in the head does not cure cancer is not an argument for shooting someone in the head.

I was surprised to see a Buzzfeed link on the front page of HN, and my initial thought was, "Really? How did this happen?"

But, this is a surprisingly well done piece. Maybe the dude who started Buzzfeed wasn't really bullshitting us when he said he didn't want to just make a linkbait site. This is article actual journalism on a level comparable to much more "respectable" sources. I'm impressed, and I hope this is a trend. If Buzzfeed uses their massive facebook click machine for good rather than mindless entertainment, I'll be even more impressed.

Had the same reaction and even pulled up the BuzzFeed home page, wondering if they had refactored their style. Nope! The main page is still full of crappy linkbait lists... but here's hoping they do more articles like this.

I always thought that the theory behind Buzzfeed was to use a mountain of linkbait to fund actual journalism...?

Of course, that doesn't help much to sort the bullshit from the pony, but it's not the worst idea.

It's sad that my immediate reaction upon reading this headline is "what ISN'T a magnet for police harassment these days?".

More to the point, is there any thing that is a repellant for police harassment? I can think of a few things, but generally not easily achieved (e.g. large amounts of money or power or celebrity status)...

Social cohesion is one possible one. For example, if you lived in a small community where the police officers knew you personally since childhood you would, on average, be less likely to be harassed by police.

As long as you meet all the social mores of that small community, as evaluated by your local busybodies. Otherwise, you're likely to be pervasively harassed.

That, sadly, is too often true. The only solution I see to this problem is allowing lots of different communities to exist with different sets of mores.

Diversity within the police department would probably help.

That's a useful condition, but it ought to be completely unrelated to law enforcement. You shouldn't be required to live around people who look and think and act the same as you do to receive equal treatment by the law.

While I agree with you that it ought to be a separate issue I strongly doubt the separation is ever achieved in practice. Actual policing and "policing" of human behavior, looks and other norms appear to me to be inextricably linked. I'm sorry to single out this instance in particular but reinforcement of the local mores happens even through seemingly innocent behavior like your ought-statement above, which I happen to agree with but some people might not have, especially in the past. Police officers, persecutors, judges, etc. are affected by their own set of ought-statements in work as well as in life. (And the effect is exacerbated when you implement trial by jury.)

On my part, I cannot come up with one historical example of people generally satisfied with how significantly different outsiders to their community policed them. I have come to think it's more or less an inevitability and the best we can do is to make it possible for people to freely move to where they find the mores agreeable.

In this case at least, the solution seems to be to not use illegal drugs.

No, it isn't. The police is targeting people that are exactly trying to get away from drugs and are seeking professional help to achieve that goal.

The fact that negligent investigation, false arrest, willful misconduct, and unlawful conversion are all valid civil causes of action, combined with knowledge on how to file a proper statement of claim, is all the repellant I've ever needed.

A few:

  - Being white
  - Being middle class or wealthy
  - Being well-dressed
  - Not having a disability or mental illness or addiction
  - Having many people with cameras trained on you and the police
  - Having a home

Notice that many of those are not things under your direct control. Either you were born lucky enough to live a life mostly free of police violence, or you'll be subject to stop and frisk, regular harassment, probably jail time for minor crimes that wouldn't result in jail time for a wealthy white person, etc.

I've occasionally run interference with police at protests and when homeless folks were being harassed by cops because I fit the right stereotypes for not getting the crap beat out of me or getting arrested. I'm simply not the kind of person they harass or arrest, in general. The thought of arresting me or putting me in my place crossed their mind on occasion, I'm sure, but there were usually, maybe always, cameras rolling when these occasions arose. Many people aren't lucky enough to get through police interactions without harm.

Cops in the US are simply terrifying, and in many jurisdictions simply out of control. Not all the time, and not with all people (you could live your whole life without ever having a bad incident with a cop if you were born white/wealthy in America, so it's easy to be oblivious to this). I was oblivious for years...I read Reason magazine back then, and so I was aware of the deadly no-knock drug raids. But, the regulatory targeting of minorities to force them out of their homes and neighborhoods so that gentrification can proceed at will, the police targeting of the homeless and the mentally ill to make downtown districts more profitable for their owners, and drug enforcement only on the poorest in our communities, is the dirty little secret of "progressive" city governments.

My current home city, Austin, is allegedly quite progressive. And, yet, illegal camping (i.e. sleeping while homeless) can result in a $500 ticket, and APD regularly clears out homeless camps, arresting anyone with drugs.

My immediate reaction upon reading this headline and story was "Wait, this is in BuzzFeed?"

Probably the first time I've noticed a BuzzFeed article on HN, definitely the first time I've upvoted one.

They do some top-notch reporting occasionally. They got the reputation for their listicles and click-bait, but they have recruited some excellent journalists and have released some high-quality work. Some other examples;

An article from a foreign correspondent about Kurdish Iraqis fighting ISIS: http://www.buzzfeed.com/mikegiglio/kurdish-forces-show-the-s...

Or their rather large investigation into abuse and corruption inside the foster system: http://www.buzzfeed.com/aramroston/fostering-profits#.lhYnKY...

The idea that methadone is a "cure" for heroin addiction is beyond ridiculous. In many ways, it is more habit-forming then H itself.

For almost all the addicts I've ever hung around with, it was nothing but a stop-gap to be used when your money wasn't right.

Also, with the availability of prescribed suboxone, the whole clinic-thing became as much a social meeting as anything else.

Cops are looking for easy busts to pad their arrest numbers for promotions and raises, and trolling the clinic beat is an easy, safe way for them to achieve this, as pathetic as it is.

Are promotions/raises really based on arrest numbers instead of actual performance (hard to quantify as it is)? Who the heck had that brilliant idea?

Yes, from everything I've read, e.g. there's been some recent leaks about the NYPD, and I highly recommend this classic (or its first edition, haven't read the second): http://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Dale-C-Carson/dp... (which Amazon says is the #1 best seller in "Consumer Law Business Law", which I believe).

Torrented. Thanks.

The headline should have called it a "treatment" rather than a "cure," but methadone is a legit treatment. Agreed that getting folks on suboxone would be even better, but from a public health perspective it's still preferable to switch heroin addicts to methadone because it's safer and - by being dispensed freely - can reduce drug-related crime.

Is methadone safer due to potency vs dose size, or unreliability of heroin supply?

Would quality-controlled heroin be as safe?

Man this kind of shit makes me so fucking angry. What part of to protect and serve do these police not understand?

It's been replaced by what I call the police-judicial complex. As real crime has massively dropped over the years (demographics, as much as anything else), well, it wouldn't do to lay off a proportionate number of police, judges and their support staff, now, would it?

Especially with the press' "if it bleeds, it leads", plus of course there always being high crime hot spots messing up with the public's perception of crime.

This is the police hacking their KPIs (ie Compstat). Heroin is a hot topic in New York, now that winter and the pandering opportunity snow offers will end soon, Heroin is a big priority all the way up the chain to the governors office.

They need to get arrests to avoid their Captain getting put before an inquisition at HQ. When that happens to him, the joy flows downhill. So they get more arrests, and the paper pushers are happy.

Another drug used for similar purposes that both figuratively and literally has an ardent religious following to it, is ibogaine, with one of the most famous 80s hacker/counterculture figures Patrick K. Kroupa having since devoted much of his life to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrament_of_Transition

Vice did a great segment on Ibogaine in their first season on HBO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkkMhKEfOqw#t=919

Is there an EFF or similar type "watchdog" group that could potentially get involved here at a more grass roots level?

Makes me sick as well and it isn't obvious to me as far as what would be effective steps to take to begin curbing the behavior... Especially given that those being preyed upon are unlikely to have the means to defend and protect themselves legally.

I think the only way to get rid of police harassment like this and in many other cases is to remove reasonable suspicion as a cause for stopping and searching people. It's clear to anyone who has ever had dealings with the police that the police are not reasonable and neither is reasonable suspicion. It's also clear from this article that New York (and undoubtedly many other places) have an excess of police if police are harassing law abiding citizens. The problem is that we give police way too much freedom to hurt innocent people, power which they do not need to be effective. The only way we're going to reign in this power is to change the fundamentals of our laws. Police will never voluntarily give up their power. We must take it from them. We must proactively shrink the needless police force. New York is a really great example of a city that obviously has orders of magnitude more police than it needs to enforce its laws as evidenced by the recent police refusal to do their jobs and arrest people not having a negative effect. It's still amazing to me how ignorant the majority of people in this country are to police actions, though to be fair, a lot of that ignorance is willful and based on racist notions. To me, it is unfathomable that people do not warn and teach their children to avoid and fear the police as they do in most of the rest of the world, despite us having one of the most despicable law enforcement and police forces in the world.

> I think the only way to get rid of police harassment like this and in many other cases is to remove reasonable suspicion as a cause for stopping and searching people.

As a driver, if you see someone erratically accelerating and decelerating, do you not wonder about the state of their mind as it relates to their ability to drive, and in particular how their erratic behavior may cause an accident? While I go out of my way to avoid being near such drivers, I do still hope they get pulled over. I don't care if the reason for their erratic driving is due to being on the phone (illegal in several states), a bee flying around the vehicle (distracted driving; although I certainly hope the officer wouldn't give a ticket), or the poor person was having a heart attack (hopefully the officer can call for medical assistance and in the meantime provide CPR). In other words, there are good reasons to enable stopping someone when officers do have a reasonable suspicion.

The counter-point is that there is frequently conscious discrimination or implicit bias, as illustrated in the article. One way to deal with this, that was being used over 20 years ago on a military base where I was stationed, was a no-go parameter around the bars on base. Except when explicitly dispatched, the military police were not allowed to be within the no-go perimeter (about 1/2 mile if memory serves) around the bar around closing time (like 30 minutes before and after). There's no reason a similar policy couldn't be put into place around methadone clinics.

From the sounds of the article, in addition to dealing with discriminatory reasonable suspicion, there's also a desperate need to more fully educate police officers and judicial officials. For example, just having methadone shouldn't qualify as a DUI and the case discussed in the article indicates there was a systemic failure.

Granted there does need to be some balance. Perhaps reasonable suspicion can lead to a reasonable stop: no more than five minutes. And never a search, regardless. In the article, stops of over an hour were mentioned. That's not reasonable in the court's opinion even as it stands now. Honestly though, I do not see the situation improving until the courts essentially reverse themselves and realize what horrific mistakes they've made in regards to the fourth amendment in the past. And while I'm being honest, I don't see that ever happening. I like the idea of a no-go zone, but while that might solve specific instances of abuse, it will not address the systematic abuse that the police have created in this country. Perhaps if we had a separate police to police the police instead of foolishly allowing them to police themselves we could reach some justice. This is also something that I do not see happening in this country as most people do not realize how horrific the police really are because they're white and will never experience it first hand. It's sad living in a society devoid of justice.

They don't want people to quit because that will mean lost profits and time to get into some serious work than harassing vulnerable people.

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