THE DRUG CORNER
"WELCOME TO CHICAGO: PLEASE DISROBE NOW."
Do you look like a drug dealer or a drug courier? If so, don't be surprised if anti-drug agents tread upon your pri-vacy rights. It could happen to any American, but there are steps you can take to protect yourself.
The first line of defense against drug-war intrusion into your life--whether visiting Aunt Martha over the holidays or returning from a Caribbean vacation through New York's Kennedy International Airport or Chicago's O'Hare--is not to "look like" a drug dealer or courier. Narcotics agents have developed-based upon years of experience, training, and hit-or-miss success--what they call "drug-courier profiles." These profiles are pigeonholes into which drug agents can place anybody. Unwary citizens may not be sensitized to these profile "tells" but drug agents are trained specialists.
When a U.S. Customs agent, MEG (Metropolitan Enforcement Group) trooper or DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) agent sees a person whose appearance, demeanor, or baggage meets a drug-courier "profile," the antidrug agent reacts. The hair on the back of the neck stands on end, adrenaline speeds to the agent's stomach and the face turns flush. (Not all agents' reactions fit this profile.) To an educated drug cop, a profile match engenders suspicion. The trained agent thinks, "Here's a person who is, or probably might be, a traveling drug-dealer or courier."
If you are a citizen who fits an officer's drug hunch, and the hunch is susceptible to verbal articulation that "sounds like" one of the written profiles-bingo, you lose.
"Put your hands on the wall, spread your feet."
"May we look through your personal belongings?"
Once you fit a profile in an agent's mind, you are at full risk of drug-dealer treatment--presumed innocent, suspected guilty, and handled accordingly.
Considering the risks that attend a drug-war profile fit, one should ask oneself, "Self, just what does a drug-dealer courier look like?" Drug dealers come in all colors, heights, weights, sexes and sizes. Drug dealers can look "cool" or klutzy, lackadaisical or intense, wealthy or poor, stylish or slobbish, native or foreign. And therein lies the problem.
It's hard not to look like a drug dealer! In fact, when done well, one set of drug-courier profiles fits all. Looking at the matter from the drug agents' perspective, if American commoners could figure out what drug dealers "looked like," so they could look "straight" to the antidrug police, then, so could the drug dealers and couriers.
Therefore, the second line of defense may be more effective than the first. The second defense against drug agents is to be careful where you travel.
It is well known that drugs are carried to the United States from Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean like clockwork. Drug police do not know less than the rest of us. Therefore, a loving husband should think twice before taking his wife to a drug-rich port of call. A husband must realize that he must bring his wife home through a U.S. port of entry such as O'Hare International Airport or other points subject to the jurisdiction of customs drug-police.
The difficulty with self-imposed travel restrictions, aside from missing a few dream vacations, is that drug war puts more drugs everywhere. Therefore, nearly every travel destination--foreign and domestic--is drug suspect. This truism brings us to the third--and last--strike defense of the weary, drug-free travelers by which the travelers can protect themselves against privacy intrusion by the drug police and avoid uninvited inspection of bodily-cavity searches.
In October, 1998, the government announced that U.S. Customs agents will give suspected drug couriers an alternative to mandatory strip searches. A suspect can avoid a strip search by consenting to be X-rayed at a hospital. To civil libertarians and old-timer Americans, it may not seem like much of a concession, but in the prevailing drug-war, strip-search environment, it's a very decent thing to do.
--James E. Gierach is an attorney who advocates reforming the nation's drug laws.