Oklahoma Criminal Defense Blog

There is a budget crunch in state government so every agency is looking to save its budget.  The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs is no exception.  Director Darrell Weaver has just announced a “spike” in drug deaths in Oklahoma.  He calls it a crisis.

There were 577 who died of drugs in 2009.  Hydrocodone (Lortab) led the list as cause of 130 deaths, an increase of 17 deaths from the year before.  Oxycodone followed wit 117, then methadone, which lead the list in 2002, caused 84 deaths in 2009, but it was down from 110 deaths in 2008.  Cocaine caused 37 deaths, a decrease of 13 from the year before.

The use of different usage drugs and deaths caused by drugs will vary and certainly the use of drugs has been increasing in the last several years.  But why does that justify a separate agency to enforce the drug laws?    Every police officer, every deputy sheriff, every highway patrol trooper and town marshal and Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation agent is enforcing the drug laws every day.   If that isn’t enough, there are many federal law enforcement officers in the state of Oklahoma, including the F.B.I., who enforce the federal drug laws, which mirror state drug laws.  So why does Oklahoma need a separate agency with a separate budget, separate buildings and salaried employees and pensions dedicated to enforcing the drug laws?  Of course such an agency is always pushing the emergency alarm, calling for higher penalties and more money for their agency.

The drug war is similar to the military war fought by our national defense.  There is always a fear of invasion just as there is a fear of drug crazies running around the country.  There is always to announce a “crisis.”  The fears are real because the dangers are real, but the manipulation of this fear and threat is a very old bureaucratic trait.  There is no such thing as enough tax-payer money going to feed that will feed either the defense department or the drug agencies.  They have become empires unto themselves, and anyone who has any pause in giving them everything they ask for is tarred as unpatriotic.

Notwithstanding there is a real danger from the misuse of drugs, that danger need not necessarily be attacked like a military target.  If it is, that approach may remind observers more of the quagmire in Vietnam more than World War II: always more money needed, always more troops needed, but always more explanations and alibis instead of success.  Victory is just barely out of reach- always.  Just give us another 12% increase of funding and we’ll lick this thing for good.

Part of the problem is that the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs is almost oriented almost exclusively for punitive action, for “law enforcement.”  This has not proved to reduce the use of drugs any more than the American military had the prospect of outlasting Ho Chi Minh.  Drug education and prevention is given only superficial investment even though some different approach, like education and some new looks at prevention will be needed if we are going to seen anything different in the next decades.

Why don’t all the millions of dollars of cash money that flows to the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs every year from forfeitures go to drug prevention instead of more automatic weapons, bullet-proof vests, bullets, and black SUVs instead of to teaching children the perils of using drugs without threatening them?  At least going through the motions keeps the empire in business.

Since Oklahoma banned the unregulated sale of pseudoephedrine in 2004, the availability of methamphetamine declined for a while. Now it’s coming back.  Last year, 743 meth labs were discovered, and this year is on track to exceed that at 300 labs seized to date.  Most of the labs were of the one-pot lab variety, also called “shake-and-bake” process of cooking or concocting meth.  Most of them have been located in Northeast part of the state or around the Tulsa area.

Last May, the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control found one one-pot lab in Oklahoma City, while 23 were discovered in Tulsa.  The ingredients are cheap: one 20-ounce bottle of water, pseudoephedrine, camp fuel, chemical ice packs and some other easily-obtained materials are all it takes to make some meth with this method.  Recipes can be found online, along with step-by-step videos explaining how to do it.

So far this year, the state’s Medical Examiner has identified 26 deaths associated with meth, from overdoses of meth to burns from accidents in the cooking process.  Nathan Knapp of Luther was one of those, burned with third-degree burns from an accidental fire and later died.  No chemists are needed to try this process, no laboratory, and they usually yield only enough for the cook’s own addiction.  But sometimes several people will contribute pseudoephedrine to share in the product.

In the year before the regulation of pseudoephedrine went into effect, the number of labs exceeded 1200.  The number shrank by 90% until the one-pot labs started springing up in 2008.  Mexican cartels brought their product to Oklahoma to meet the demand with ice, a crystallized, smokable meth.  Last month, agents arrested one Albert Gomez-Gomez, whom they claim is a member of the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel, here to establish an operation to rival the established Juarez Cartel.

The OBNDD claims 20% of the meth consumed in Oklahoma comes from Mexico, brought overland on the highways.  The agency also claims to have b locked 54,349 sales of pseudoephedrine since enactment of the law last November that requires a would-be purchaser to provide his date of birth and Oklahoma driver’s license.  They claim that prevents those previously convicted of meth-related crimes from purchasing pseudoephedrine for up to 10 years.  They are still pushing to make pseudoephedrine a prescription drug.

Ingestion of meth triggers release of dopamine, a neurochemical in the brain.  Meth causes high amounts of dopamine to collect in the brain, causing a rush of euphoria.  It makes the user wanting more.  Too much dopamine in the brain causes schizophrenia, a condition characterized by delusions, hallucinations and bizarre behavior.  Too little pseudoephedrine causes Parkinson’s disease and affects motor areas of the brain.

A meth addict will do whatever he can to get more.  Well known is the addictive aspect of meth, psychologically, of course, but also physiologically and neurologically, such that, once use of meth is stopped, the user should have medical supervision.  That’s for those lucky enough to quit.

The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (OBN) is the “Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)” of Oklahoma.  Besides stopping cars with out-of-state license plates and running their drug dogs around the cars, the OBN tracks prescriptions of all pain killer drugs.  Its computer programs assemble all such prescriptions obtained by John Doe, patient, the date, the pharmacy where and when the drug was obtained, the quantity and strength of the drug, and the prescribing physician.

The programs also assemble every prescribing physician in the state, and lists all controlled drugs prescribed to all patients of that doctor, the identify of all those patients, the strength and quantity of each drug, and where and when the prescription was filled.  The plan is to track patients who are obtaining too many controlled drugs (likely from multiple prescribing doctors), and to track doctors who are prescribing too many controlled drugs.

Pain pills give a high, especially when they are ingested immediately rather than through their time-release feature.  Of course, they are addictive, as Rush Limbaugh will testify, and now Sean Sutton will perhaps testify.  Sean Sutton, former Oklahoma State University men’s basketball coach, was arrested a week ago as he took possession of a box of pills in the mail from a fellow-pill user.

Those who are addicted to pain pills, like OxyContin, may go to many different doctors without telling any one doctor they are obtaining the pills from the other doctors.  This way the user can obtain more pills than any one doctor would prescribe.  The data base catches this pattern.

This data base, begun in 1991,  is so comprehensive that it is accessed about 25,000 times per month by doctors, pharmacists and law enforcement to track the type, strength and quantify of potentially addictive pain killers.  Controlled painkillers, anti-anxiety medications and amphetamines are the types of drugs tracked in the data base

Once the drug agents observe the pattern of excessive use, they will use surveillance to collect some more evidence to prove their case.  In Sean Sutton’s case, the police arrested him just as he took possession of a box of pills sent from another person, not a doctor.

To the horror of the “zero-tolerance-for-drug” people, the Republic of Mexico has decided to be lenient with those caught with small amounts of drugs.  The new laws allow up to about four joints of marijuana for personal use and about one-half gram of cocaine, which translates into about four “lines” of cocaine or half the weight of a paperclip.  The limits for heroin and methamphetamine are about half the size of a pencil eraser, for LSD about enough to make a few grains of salt.

Oklahomans must even show identification to purchase some cold medications at a pharmacy because those medications contain ingredients used to manufacture methamphetamine.  Previously such cold medicines were purchasable over the counter.  No more.  And some credit this tightened policy with a significant drop in the number of meth labs making methamphetamine in Oklahoma.

“That’s just a reckless policy to have,” said Mark Woodward spokesman for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics about the new Mexican policy.  It takes away a huge deterrent away from someone using drugs.”  No surprise that this agency is completely against backing up one inch in the “War on Drugs.”

Are we winning the “War on Drugs?”  Most criminal defense lawyers in Oklahoma would be skeptical.  I guess the argument to continue the “War on Drugs” is that the drug situation would be even worse if we ever let up, if we ever stop prosecuting to the maximum against any use of any drugs at any time in any place no matter what.  That is one reason the United States allows those in serious, genuine pain to suffer so much, unlike European governments, because “drugs” are medically indicated to address pain and “drugs” are seen in the United States as inherently evil and criminally tainted, something to prosecute rather than to use as a medical tool to alleviate suffering.

The new Mexican laws do not make it strictly legal to possess the enumerated small quantities of drugs, but such users arrested face drug treatment instead of jail, so long as no violence is involved.

About 90-95 per cent of the illegal drugs entering the United States come across the Mexican border.  That is why drug enforcers in the United States worry about the more permissive law in Mexico.  “I think it’s going to increase the work of our customs agents,” Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson said.  Law enforcement commonly develop a prosecution for large amounts of drug distribution or trafficking from witnesses prosecuted for possession of small quantities.  Without the arrests for smaller amounts, the thinking goes, the potential for larger prosecutions diminishes.  Whether those arrested for the smaller quantities possess the smaller amounts for personal use or not, law enforcement will lose the leverage over them to reach up the distribution ladder without the threat of jail on the smaller fish.

The new law allowing possession of smaller amounts in Mexico is intended to concentrate on catching and prosecuting the big dealers rather than the smaller possessors of drugs.  Mexican President Felipe Calderon reportedly hopes the new law will help with the increasing drug addiction in Mexico.

Mexico has seen a doubling in drug addiction in six years to 307,000, according to a Mexican government study.  Meanwhile drug use in the United States has remained fairly constant at around 10 million from 2002 to 2007, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.   The number of Mexicans who have tried drugs, which is not the same as “drug use” and certainly not “drug addiction”, rose to 4.5 million.  Mexico has a population roughly one-third that of the United States.