Indian Americans and drug war

Immigrants, mostly Indian Americans who run small stores, are targeted in a drive against drug abuse in the State of Georgia.

RURAL America has a serious drug problem. The National Association of Counties, the main local-body national organisation, published a report in January called `The Meth Epidemic in America'. The report summarised a survey of county sheriffs, the top law enforcement officers in rural areas, and found that "methamphetamine [meth] abuse is the top drug problem facing counties in America". From January 18-20, addiction professionals and law enforcement agents met in Las Vegas, Nevada, for a National Summit on the Methamphetamine Epidemic. There are now over one and a half million meth addicts and at least 12 million casual meth users.

Hardy Myers, Attorney-General of Oregon, told the gathering that meth abuse "is a problem now beyond the scope of only law enforcement. Community leaders must undertake a comprehensive effort to understand meth, the reasons for its use, and tactics for prevention, recovery and treatment." The report from the National Association of Counties had already made this point: "The meth epidemic is a complex problem that is not easily solved."

The State of Georgia did not consider this complexity. Instead, it went for what seems to be the easy solution: to target those who are least responsible for the epidemic, get some arrests and hope that this will show governmental resolve even if it does not make a dent on the problem.

In April 2005, Georgia's Governor Sunny Perdue took action. "Meth is a serious threat to Georgia's families and communities," he said in the small town of Chickamauga after he signed a new law against its dissemination. "It is a highly addictive drug that alters the chemistry of the brain and, over time, the personality of those who abuse it."

Perdue's law, HB 216: Pseudoephedrine Sales - Limitations and Restrictions, targets merchants who sell a common drug used for colds, but which has a dual use as the raw material for methamphetamine. Even as the bulk of the meth available in Georgia comes from the "superlabs" in Mexico, the Governor and his legislature decided to put the focus on the small merchants rather than the Mexican or local laboratories. Detective Jason Grellner, from Missouri, points out that meth is "the first drug in the history of the United States we can make, distribute, sell, take, all here in the midwest. You can't grow a coca plantation or an opium plantation here to get your heroin or cocaine, and marijuana takes four or five months to grow into a good plant. With methamphetamine, you can go out and for a couple hundred dollars you can make your drugs that day."

In June 2004, the public health officials in Catoosa County, in north Georgia, formed a task force to study the problem. It found that most of those who manufactured meth used legally available products as raw materials. All they needed was cold medication (pseudoephedrine), charcoal, cooking fuel and aluminium. Since the other items are harder to proscribe, the task force suggested that cold medicine be moved behind the counter and that it be reclassified as a Schedule V drug, which would require greater scrutiny at the time of sale. Catoosa County's coroner, Vanita Hullander, expressly noted: "The Task Force is not just about trying to put everyone in jail. We've got to have resources because there are a lot of people out there I'm sure who want to get help to get away from methamphetamine. Right now we're extremely short on resources."

The war on terrorism, she pointed out, had sucked money away from local government. "We're worried about the devastation that the war on terrorism is going to cause. Well, right now we have got a war on methamphetamine." Rather than heed the words of the health care professionals who counselled patience and asked for more resources, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the U.S. Attorney's Office took the heavy-handed route offered by Perdue. For them, the way forward was to incarcerate the offenders rather than get to the root of the problem. Indeed, this has been the approach of the U.S. state since President Richard Nixon inaugurated the War on Drugs.

In 1969, Nixon's adviser, H.R. Haldeman, wrote in his diary: "Nixon emphasised that you have to face the fact the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognises this while not appearing to." In other words, Nixon offered a racist interpretation for the use of drugs in America, and his administration created a mechanism to target blacks rather than actually get to the core of the drug epidemic. Of the 14 million drug users in the U.S., 10 million are white. Yet, the overwhelming number of people behind bars are non-white. The War on Drugs has been a ceaseless war on the poor.

With little reduction in the drug epidemic, the U.S. now leads in the number of people the state incarcerates. There are now 2.1 million Americans behind bars, a third of them for non-violent drug offences. University of California Professor Angela Davis reports: "Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of the social problems that burden people who are ensconced in poverty." Rather than target the consumers of meth (who are overwhelmingly poor and white), the DEA and the U.S. Attorney went after the small merchants, who, even in rural Georgia, are Indian American. Of the 49 people arrested in north Georgia, 44 are Indian, and 33 have the last name Patel.

The U.S. Attorney's Office released a tepid statement that denied any racist motivation, but this did not impress the Indian American community. David Nahmias, the U.S. Attorney, has a very distinguished record as a supporter of President George W. Bush's wars and his strong-arm domestic tactics. Before he took his current job, he worked at the Justice Department during the production of the "torture memos" and during the campaign against those deemed to be "enemy combatants" (including U.S. citizens).

Aparna Bhattacharya of Raksha, Georgia's South Asian organisation, underscored what she and others saw as a racist assault. "Ours is but the latest community targeted and blamed in the drug war, a war that has corrupted our institutions to the point where we are willing to send innocent people to prison for the sake of politics and creating a false sense of security." The DEA ran sting operations on a select group of small merchants, many of whose stores are only able to stay afloat because of the long hours put in by their immigrant workforce. Big box retailers, such as Wal-Mart, have made the "mom and pop" store financially obsolete. However, in poor communities where transportation is a problem, these small stores allow residents to get basic supplies within walking distance. Without the economies of scale that allow the big box stores to sell products at a low cost, these stores survive through immigrant (often family) labour and the sale of alcohol and tobacco.

In Oakland, California, on January 9, a few angry residents smashed some small stores in retaliation for selling alcohol, because, as their lawyer put it, "the number of these stores in low-income communities is not good for people". Long hours and narcotics allow these stores to stay in business. The Indian American merchants are not generally known to be law-breakers; indeed, the first Indian American on U.S. television, the fictional store clerk Apu in The Simpsons, is pilloried for his general honesty and gullibility. It came, therefore, as a surprise that the main culprits in the meth war are Indian American workers and owners at these small stores.

Upendra Patel, president of Georgia's Asian American Convenience Stores Association, was flummoxed. "We have come to the United States and built our businesses out of nothing. These laws are too vague and let the larger chain stores off the hook. They are the ones selling large quantities of these products, and the police don't even look twice at them. Putting some innocent people behind bars is not going to solve the problem," he said. The assault on these merchants inspired Upendra Patel to create a national organisation, the Federation of Convenience Stores, which he will launch in March 2006. The evidence assembled by the DEA is uneven. In two cases, the DEA arrested a woman because her last name is Patel and a man (another Patel) who was in New York when he was supposed to have committed a crime in Georgia (they have since been cleared).

The DEA used convicted meth manufacturers to buy cold medicine in large quantities at these stores and record their conversation with the sales clerk. At the Tobacco and Beverage Mart in Trenton, the informant asked the clerk for Pseudo 60, and the clerk, Mangesh Patel, said that he did not sell this any longer because a "police guy came here said don't sell. Misuse. Public misuse." The informant then said that he understood about that because "that's what I'm going to do with it". Mangesh Patel replied: "Yah, public misuse." When the informant came back to the counter with another cold medicine that had pseudoephedrine, Mangesh Patel told him that he could only sell him two bottles because of the "police guy". When the informant asked if his friend could come later and buy some more, Mangesh Patel said: "Yeah, but I cannot sell two to one guy."

Defence lawyers argue that Mangesh Patel and others followed the letter of the law and they were not conversant enough with English (indeed, the informants used the word "cook" to indicate `make meth', which is so arcane as to be unknown for its slang meaning to most residents of north Georgia). The local Indian American community and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) went after the DEA and the U.S. Attorney. "There are too many unanswered questions about the validity of the evidence against these store clerks for the prosecutions to go forward in good conscience," said Christina Alvarez of the ACLU's Drug Law Reform Project, which has taken up the cases of two of the Indian Americans. "We have launched a full investigation to determine the extent of police misconduct in this ill-conceived operation."

The Indian American community hastily organised the Racial Justice Campaign Against Operation Meth Merchant, and they got support from at least two nation-wide organisations (the South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow, SAALT, and the South Asia Network). On January 8, the Racial Justice Campaign organised a rally in Decatur, Georgia, and three days later another rally before the courthouse in Rome, Georgia, on the eve of the trial. Deepika Gokhale of the Racial Justice Campaign told Rome News-Tribune: "The statistics are on our side here. The law shouldn't be based on stereotypes. I can't imagine that these stores [targeted by the DEA] were selling anything different than any other stores. And I can't imagine these people are going only to Indian-owned stores to buy these products."

The cases came into the courtroom of Judge Harold Murphy who had recently been in the news for his enlightened decision not to restrict voting rights. The state dropped its charges against at least seven defendants, and three others (all non-Indian) were given very light sentences on the grounds that they played minor roles in this affair. Twenty-two merchants pleaded guilty. Among the latter was Prahladbhai Patel, who speaks little English and probably had little idea about meth. "He's just doing straight business selling items, feeding his family," Dilip Patel told Rome News-Tribune, while Bill Lockhart said: "My friend here is pleading guilty today because he wants to go home."

Those who have pleaded guilty can be sentenced to 25 years in prison, forfeiture of their stores, fines of up to $25,000, and deportation. The cases of the rest are ongoing. Priyanka Sinha of Raksha and the Campaign told this writer: "Operation Meth Merchant has devastated the Indian community in Northwest Georgia. It has been such a humiliating act of racial targeting that has shed more light on the new face of the DEA's War on Drugs, which looks more like an attack on those deemed dispensable, those who do not speak the language, look different, and have a different faith."

Meth is a serious problem that deserves a serious solution. The National Association of Counties, which is on the frontlines of the meth assault, proposed a bundle of laws for the U.S. Congress to tackle in its next session. Of these, two would restrict the sale of pseudoephedrine, while calling "for increased resources to train state and local law enforcement to investigate meth". They do not point the finger lazily at the small merchants. Aparna Bhattacharya of Raksha points out: "Immigrants have been targeted and blamed for many of the social problems we have in Georgia. Our communities are being caught between political agendas that look for quick and easy solutions to social issues that are far more complex."