Michael Levine is one of the most celebrated drug enforcement agents in the history of the Drug Enforcement Administration. During his 25-year career Levine arrested more than 3,000 criminals and confiscated millions of dollars worth of drugs. His training included that from the Bureau of Alcohol, Drugs and Firearms, U.S. Customs, Drug Enforcement Administration. He served as a special agent for the Organized Crime Division of the IRS and BATF; as the assistant group supervisor of the FBI/DEA task force; inspector of DEA field operations wordwide; and special
operation officer to South America.

Levine knows personally the devastation that drugs can cause. He lost his brother, David, who ended his 19-year addiction to heroin with a suicide note that read, “I’m sorry. I just can’t stand the drugs anymore.” Levine also lost his best friend: his only son — who never used drugs — to the villainy of narcotics. On December 28, 1991, off-duty New York Police Sgt. Keith Richard Levine, 27, was murdered by a crack addict attempting robbery who had a lengthy arrest record including two previous homicide convictions.
As a teen, Levine’s daughter, Nicole, began a five-year cocaine addiction. After many failed treatments, Levine brought about her recovery with a “tough love” approach.

Levine had a passion to stop the supply of drugs into the United States. As attache´ to Argentina and Uruguay, he was responsible for the undercover penetration of the Roberto Suarez, Bolivian cocaine cartel; the biggest case in drug war history in 1980.

In this interview by health writer, Linda Kyle Davis, he shares his personal story of tragedy and triumph and offers to counselors in the addiction treatment field a rare insight into the world of drugs.

PC: What can addiction treatment professionals do to help narcotic addicts?
ML: A study done during the Bush administration showed that virtually 100 percent of American children’s “first drug experiences” come from their friends who use drugs — not drug dealers — as many of the misguided “educational” ads suggest. Other anti-drug propaganda blames the substance itself — “Say no to drugs!”
In my observation of some 40 years, depicting the drug user as a “victim”— of drug dealers, of drugs, of Manuel Noriega, of unfulfilled lives and broken families —ignited the explosion of the drug problem and created the foundation of the entire war on drugs.
The first job of the therapist is to unveil that the government’s claim that stopping drugs saves lives has proven to be not only bogus but also counterproductive. This claim convinces hardcore drug addicts that their addiction is due to the Medellin cartel or other foreign forces that must be combated with a $50-billion-a-year war on drugs, or to the failure of government to provide them with happy, fulfilled lives that some “experts” tell them they have a “right” to expect. The therapist must show addicts that their drug problem is their own responsibility and no one else’s. To do otherwise, in my opinion, is enabling.

PC: How can counselors redefine society’s concept of narcotic addicts?
ML: They can disclose that the majority of homicides in this nation are fueled directly by druggies who pay from $50 to $100 billion a year directly to the massive death machine known as the drug economy.
I have seen druggies (90 percent employed Caucasians) drive into ghetto communities and leave their money with people who then buy guns and bullets. After the druggies leave, homicides are committed mere steps from where they left their money; yet, the druggies blame either the government or the dealer. Therapists should emphasize that if druggies support this death and carnage directly with their money, they are the worst possible enemy to themselves, their families and their communities.
Also, therapists should remind their clients that we refused to support corporations doing business with apartheid South Africa. How can we pay cash directly to some community-killing drug dealer?
According to my research and experience, portraying the addict as a “victim” makes the drug user a victim. The therapist must change the druggie’s self-image from “victim” to “victimizer.”

PC: How can addiction treatment professionals help the public realize that casual drug users are the main recruiters of new addicts?
ML: They can refer to the horrendous drug addiction problem of China. Fight Back research [download free at <<http://idt.net/~dorisaw/FightBack/>] found that from 1948 to 1951 mandatory treatment (neither jail nor execution) — which focused on hospitalization and education of addicts as to their destructive roles to themselves and their families — dramatically reduced the 70 million heroin and opium addicts to almost none.
Even China’s alleged problem today is miniscule compared to ours; and, according to intelligence insiders, it is being tolerated only to create a “war on drugs” that gives the rapidly democratizing government an excuse to spy on its citizens and invade neighboring countries, as an American drug war “ally.”
Compare these statistics with a Washington Post study of 1995. Despite the United States having 1.75 million slots for treatment-on-demand available, which theoretically are enough to put the entire 2.75 million hardcore addicts through treatment in one year, our multi-billion dollar, taxpayer-funded treatment programs have not succeeded in reducing the number of hardcore addicts by a single percentage point in more than 15 years.
The study also revealed that most addicts either do not want treatment, or they want it only to stabilize their addiction. The Post, for example, found one addict who had been through 300 treatment cycles. My own brother had been through six treatment cycles during his 19 years of heroin addiction, including many years on methadone, before he committed suicide. His last note read, “I just can’t stand the drugs anymore.”

PC: How can drug addiction treatment professionals help re-channel the funding of America’s — by now — trillion dollar war on drugs?
ML: Instead of the “experts” simply demanding more money for treatment and the legalization of all drugs, as they have been doing for decades, with absolutely nothing to show for it except many “experts” now living off another version of drug money themselves, I would say that people with any clout should support programs that link penalties for crimes committed as a result of drug addiction to mandatory treatment. Hospital instead of jail with no chance of return to society unless addicts stay off drugs.
Such programs as Fight Back have already proven themselves effective in saving the lives of both the addicts and their victims, but these programs that work are as devastating as hell to those bureaucracies that need a drug problem to make a living.
When I was the Drug Czar of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the local branch of The Cape & Islands Partnership to Reduce Substance Abuse wrote in an in-house memo: “. . . if Fight Back is successful, it could take the wind out of the sails of the Partnership.”

PC: Art Linkletter, a TV celebrity, and another father who knows about the sorrow drugs inflict said in “Losing Diane” in The American Legion, June 1998, “We have 45 million kids under the age of 12. . . . who do not see alcohol or drugs as dangerous and who are trying them earlier than ever before. If the percentage of kids trying stays the same we will have 200,000 more eighth-grade users next year.” What must be done to save these children?
ML: In Fight Back, I suggested drug-proofing children by teaching them to be disgusted with “friends” who use drugs. “Mommy and Daddy think those people are disgusting. . . . We don’t want them anywhere near us.” This makes sense because a child’s first drug experience will come from a “friend.”
Of course, this goes against almost every principle of our national war on drugs and will provoke many of the “good guys” who really make a living off the war on drugs to find some, “high minded,” feel-good reason to oppose this philosophy. We must guard against some of the “good guy” anti-drug bureaucracies who place their own interests above those of our children.

PC: Linkletter also said, “The same pathology afflicting the family—self-indulgence, fragmentation and disengagement—will hit all society in the next millennium. . . . Still, the family plays a central role in our lives — and parental pressure is as important as peer pressure.” What should therapists address when counseling parents of substance-abusing teens and the teens themselves?
ML: Linkletter and I are on the same wavelength; yet, I think the family should be used in a more forceful manner to implement the idea of responsibility for one’s own actions.

PC: Will you elaborate on Thomas Paine’s words: “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right” and on Mark Twain’s words, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect” in light of the “U.S. War on Drugs”?
ML: I can only add to the learned quotes of these men with Brooks Atkinson’s words from Once Around the Sun (1951), “Bureaucracies are designed to perform public business. But as soon as a bureacracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy.” I think Atkinson’s words tell the whole story of the war on drugs. The real enemy is the war on drugs. n

Linda Davis Kyle is an internationally published health writer and the editor and publisher of WritingNow.com (www.writing now.com.)

Michael Levine is the author of the national bestseller, Deep Cover, The Big White Lie, Fight Back, and Triangle of Death. His books have been translated into seven languages. He has appeared on scores of national television shows, written dozens of articles and currently presents “The Expert Witness Radio Show,” WBAI, New York City, 99.5 FM.

Comments

Add New Search RSS

Write comment
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Title:
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

Powered by !JoomlaComment 3.26

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."

---