ustxtxb_obs_1981_12_18_50_00001-00000_000.pdf

THE TEXAS SERVER December 18, 1981 A Journal of Free Voices 75 51 Drug Abuse Abused An Update on the Holy War By Ruperto Garcia To hear tell it, we’re in the throes of a drug overdose in Texas. Our children, brains beclouded by marijuana fumes, no longer study; they slump lethargically in the back of almost empty classrooms munching brownies and yearning for. pepperoni pizzas. According to Ross Perot’s War on Drugs Committee, we have what the Austin American Statesman termed “an uncontrolled drug problem that is engulfing teenagers.” “Our children,” the War on Drugs Committee insists, “must be protected.” Texans have responded. Dogs in public schools now roam from purse to purse, desk to desk, person to person, sniffing out drug fiends. During the last few years over 100 schools have used dogs to combat the drug problem in Texas. Business this year, a dog entrepreneur reports, is better than ever. In South Texas alone, drug-detecting dogs are on the prowl in San Antonio, Victoria, Kingsville, Corpus Christi, Falfurrias, Premont, Aransas Pass, and nearly 40 other towns and cities. During the last legislative session, the War on Drugs Committee, a citizens committee Governor Clements created in Feb. 1979, used its considerable clout to push through five measures designed to increase criminal penalties for selling and using drugs. Thanks to the War on Drugs people and, as Rod Davis reported recently in Westward Magazine, $71,000 of Ross Perot’s own money lavished on lawmakers we now have a law allowing covert entry into homes and businesses, with contempt of court penalties for landlords, janitors, or building managers who fail to “unobtrusively cooperate” with the officers searching for phones to tap. Another part of what / is basically a carbon copy of the 1972 War on Drugs program of the Nixon Administration hampers a suit or complaint ‘against law enforcement officials who might abuse their trust. A “good-faith reliance on a court order or legislative authorization” was added to the wiretap law to constitute a “complete defense to any civil or criminal action” we might bring against Department of Public Safety officers we inadvertently find, for example, in our houses kneeling in the dark by our phones. Another new law requires a pharmacist who fills a prescription for morphine, codeine, or other Schedule II or III drug to submit a copy of a new triplicate prescription form to DPS, where newly programmed computers record the customer’s name, address, and age. Information on the prescribing doctors and the pharmacists potential. “drug pushers in white coats,” to use Perot’s words also go into the computer. The information, as the ACLU points out, can then be used as “probable cause” to set in motion the break, enter, wiretap strategem. Former Observer editor Davis in his Westward article mentions a lobbyist for a pharmaceutical company who opposed the bill affecting pharmacists because of the extra paperwork it would entail. His home office told him bluntly to lay off. When the lobbyist confronted one of Perot’s people, he was told, “We don’t deal with people like you. We deal with the boardrooms in New York.” But the War on Drugs folks also deal with churches, PTA’s, and civic organi