Reflections: Conversations, Essays, and Other Writings

Sterling Johnson

Sterling Johnson is a former NewYork City police detective, who served as executive director of the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board and later as executive liaison officer for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration inWashington, DC. In 1975, he was appointed special narcotics prosecutor for the City of NewYork, with jurisdiction over the investigation and prosecution of felony narcotics offenses committed within the five boroughs of NewYork. Subsequent to our interviewing him, he became a federal judge. Sterling Johnson Q: Why has the drug problem ravished the black community in this country more than the white community? JOHNSON: First of all, we don’t know if that’s true.That is the perception , but is it correct? I don’t know, because I don’t know how deep the problem is. I don’t know how many doctors are taking drugs, although there are a lot of drugs in the medical profession. How many airline pilots? How many people onWall Street?These people are not visible, but we know for a fact that the users of drugs are about 70 percent white.The drug industry, the illegal drug industry, is about 150 billion dollars a year. And minorities don’t generate that type of income to sustain it. Most of the people who are using drugs are people who are employed, and some people term them “casual users.”These are your male whites, your female whites.The other 30 percent are your minorities, blacks and Hispanics, and they are so visible because they’re out on the street corner.They rob and mug and, when they do that, it makes headlines. But the person who has a drug problem and is a physician; you never hear about him.The guy who works in a brokerage house and embezzles to support his habit doesn’t make the headlines.Also,many members of the black community have no hope of getting out of poverty.They can’t make a decent dollar because they don’t have the background. And if they do have the background, maybe racism prohibits them from getting ahead. So you tell a person to go to McDonald’s and turn over hamburgers for four or five dollars an REFLECTIONS 91 hour, when they see someone else making a thousand dollars a day by working as a look-out on the street. Q: Do they really make that kind of money? JOHNSON: Oh, yes. I recall in the 1970s, before we had the problem as bad as we have it now and the main drug was heroin; one guy told me that he was selling one hundred thousand dollars a day on one block in Harlem. Q: One hundred thousand dollars? JOHNSON: One hundred thousand dollars. And there was very little overhead. One hundred thousand dollars a day. So yes, they make money. There was a time when they made so much money, this was before you had the money-counting machines, that they didn’t count the money. They weighed it. It was an old adage that, if you had twenty-two pounds of hundred-dollar bills, you had a million dollars.The scale might be off a little, but so what.You just kept counting and counting. Q: Do you think that drugs are as great a barrier to black progress in this country as racism? JOHNSON: I think that in some respects maybe even more of a problem . There is racism in this society. But you can have a young kid in Harlem. He’s in his own community, in his own little world, and he really doesn’t experience racism. It’s all around him, but he doesn’t really experience racism; and if he does, he doesn’t know what it is. But he goes out on the street and sees the other kids selling drugs, taking drugs. He experiences that particular phenomenon. Racism in America might prevent a black American from advancing to a certain level. Drugs in America, in a community, not only will not let him advance at all, but will tear that community and his family down. Both are evil, but I think that drugs are more evil. Q: Is the drug problem out of control? 92 THOMAS HAUSER JOHNSON: I personally think it is. It definitely is not under control.We can’t provide treatment on demand.There’s no education. Law enforcement is totally underfunded.America...