Washington D.C.: District of Cocaine

Interviewer: Zein Haidar

Interviewee: Walter Staples

Instructor: Glenn Whitman

February 10, 2016

Table of Contents

Statement of Purpose 3

Interviewer Release Form 4

Interviewee Release Form 5

Biography 6

The Washington D.C. Crack Cocaine Epidemic of the late 20th Century

Interview Transcription

Interview Analysis

Works Consulted

Statement of Purpose

The purpose of this oral history interview with Walter Staples is to collect and preserve a primary source account of the Washington D.C. Crack Cocaine Epidemic in the Late 20th Century. By reading this project that converges evidence from multiple sources, one will gain an understanding of the effects of narcotics, specifically crack cocaine, on the Washington D.C. region during the late 20th century.

Interviewer Release Form

Interviewee Release Form

Biography

Walter Staples was born in Baltimore, Maryland and grew up in West Virginia and New Jersey. He was raised by his working, single mother. After graduating high school, at age 17, he was inspired to join the military and, with the help of a military recruiter, convinced his mother to allow him to join. Mr. Staples completed his basic training in Texas and was then assigned to an airbase in Okinawa during the Vietnam

War. He was later reassigned to Massachusetts and then finally to the Pentagon at which he worked with the air force security unit. He was awarded a degree at the Associate

Degree level during his military service based on life experience. But after seeing the state affairs D.C. was in, he decided to leave the military and join the Washington, D.C.

Metropolitan Police Department.

Mr. Staples was with the MPD for 22 years. He served as Detective in Narcotic

Enforcement and was promoted to Sergeant, Internal Affairs and Homicide Branch.

After working with the MPD, transferred to the Drug Enforcement Administration as a Diversion Group Supervisor with responsibility for the Washington, D.C., Northern

Virginia, Northern West Virginia, and Southern Maryland areas with which he spent over

13 years. Over his long career, Mr. Staples has testified before Grand Juries and during criminal trials in District of Columbia Superior Court, United States District Court for the

District of Columbia, Prince Georges County Circuit Court, United States District Court for the District of Maryland and United States District Court for the Eastern District of

Virginia.

Today Mr. Staples lives in Lanham, Maryland with his wife. He enjoys fishing, boating, and spending time with family and friends. He works as a Security Advisor with

Med-Canna providing expertise in the security of medical Cannabis facilities including the creation of guidelines and policies to prevent the unlawful diversion of legitimately produced medical cannabis products. In fact, Mr. Staples assisted the District of

Columbia with the establishment of its medical marijuana program.

The Washington D.C. Crack Cocaine Epidemic of the late 20th Century

Controlled substances have played a major role in shaping the culture and society of the United States for centuries, in the 1920s the prohibition of alcohol led to many changes in American society. Including giving rise to various underground criminal organizations, which supplied system with alcohol, severe changes in the food industry, and forced many Americans to resort to criminal activity in order to procure alcohol. This measure by the American government in order to lower crime rates and illicit activities ended up promoting different forms of crime and causing a societal shift in the process showing how influential certain substances can be on a country. Crack cocaine was one of the most influential illicit substances of the late 20th century which played the entire United States of America but had one of its most profound impact in the capital, Washington DC. The drug itself is not the only factor involved in the change in the culture of society but also how it is perceived by the people of that time and how the government Worked against it, To understand the crack epidemic one must examine the perspective of the people of the time, the laws put in place and strategies put in place to prevent its use, and the drug itself as well as a first-hand perspective from someone who was there.

According to drug and addiction expert, Alfred R Lindensmith, “ The Sumerians, who settled there in 5000 or 6ooo B.C., developed an ideogram for opium.(1) This ideogram has been translated as HUL GIL, the HUL meaning "joy" or

"rejoicing” (113). Although the use of narcotics has been traced back several millennia the prohibition and restriction of drug use did not arise until the beginning of the 20th century. Anti-drug campaigns became very popular during the Reagan administration as the First Lady, Nancy Reagan, advocated strongly for. According to the Ronald Reagan

Presidential Foundation, “While she was involved in the anti-drug cause before reaching the White House, by 1982, the first lady had embraced the campaign with energy and evident feeling” (“Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library”). The Reagan administration brought about the creation of multiple organizations designed to combat narcotic usage in the USA, Such as D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance

Education). According to its website, the Drug Enforcement Administration (the DEA) was founded 1974 after,

In the spring and summer of 1973, the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S.

Senate heard months of testimony on Richard Nixon’s Reorganization Plan

Number 2, which proposed the creation of a single federal agency to consolidate

and coordinate the government’s drug control activities. (3)

At the time of its foundation the use of narcotics had not hit its peak, but would soon reach within the following to two decades. The usage of and the war on drugs reached a climax between 1985 and 1995 when crack cocaine was the drug of choice throughout urban America, thus this time became known the as the Crack Cocaine Epidemic.

In order to understand the cultural effects of crack cocaine on a given area one must first understand what crack cocaine is, how it is made, and what it does. According the Foundation for a Drug Free World,

Crack cocaine is the crystal form of cocaine, which normally comes in a powder

form. It comes in solid blocks or crystals varying in color from yellow to pale rose

or white... Crack, the most potent form in which cocaine appears, is also the

riskiest. It is between 75% and 100% pure, far stronger and more potent than regular cocaine. ("Short- & Long-Term Side Effects of Smoking Crack Cocaine -

Drug-Free World")

Cocaine usage has been traced by all the way back to the ancient inca era in South

America (Fenston). For a majority of its history cocaine was ingested transnasally, but in the mid 1980s there was a popular transition over to smoking. The snorted effects would take begin within 1-3 minutes of ingestion and would typically last between 20 and 30 minutes, while the effects of smoking begin within seconds of inhalation and last only minute, but the resultant euphoric feeling is much more intense than that of snorting. As for how it is produced, cocaine hydrochloride is cooked in ammonia and the substance produced hardens and is then cut into chips, for sale ("Drug Abuse: The

Crack Cocaine Epidemic: Health Consequences and Treatment"). Crack cocaine also has several adverse health effects including, heart attack, stroke, seizure, or respiratory failure. In the short term, according to the foundation for a drug free world one might experience,” Nausea, Bizarre, erratic, sometimes violent behavior, Hallucinations, irritability, Tactile hallucination that creates the illusion of bugs burrowing under the skin, Intense euphoria, Anxiety and paranoia, Depression, Intense drug craving, Panic and psychosis, and sudden death from high doses (even one time)” ("Short- & Long-

Term Side Effects of Smoking Crack Cocaine - Drug-Free World"). While long term effects include, “Permanent damage to blood vessels of ear and brain, Liver, kidney and lung damage, Malnutrition, weight loss, Severe tooth decay, Sexual problems, reproductive damage and infertility, Increased frequency of risky behavior, Tolerance and addiction” ("Short- & Long-Term Side Effects of Smoking Crack Cocaine - Drug-

Free World"). The effects of this epidemic varied in extremity across the United States, but the nation’s capital faced one of the most severe cases in America. Many factors contributed to the level of extremity in Washington D.C., Particularly the White Flight, “For three decades, since the 1950s, white and middle class residents had been fleeing Washington, leaving behind pockets of deep poverty” ("Crack: The Drug That Consumed The

Nation’s Capital"). The gradual change to poverty stricken area made it Washington a prime area to become consumed by this drug.

In the Washington D.C. in the late 20th century crack cocaine became so commonplace amongst the metropolitan society that Karst Besteman, an addiction expert stated, in front of the Congress in 1988 that, “It is the equivalent of McDonald’s, It made it convenient, cheap, and available on the corner. And we just weren’t equipped to handle this” (Besteman). In fact, crack became so commonplace that lines of cars, would appear along certain streets in D.C. with their drivers honking their horns in order to buy their drugs (Fenston). Crack became increasingly popular with the youth population

Many crack users are young, unemployed school dropouts who are socially

disorganized and lack family support systems... In a 1986 Miami study of

juvenile drug users, The main reasons given for this preference were the drug’s

rapid onset, seemingly greater potency, ready availability, low cost, and ease of

concealment. ("Drug Abuse: The Crack Cocaine Epidemic: Health Consequences

and Treatment")

Along with youth crack was also very popular with women “Estimates from New York

City indicate that many more crack users in early 1989 were women. Many cities also report an increasing rate of women in treatment. For example, Phoenix House in New York City reports that in 1985 20 percent of those seeking treatment were women, but by

1988 32 percent were women”("Drug Abuse: The Crack Cocaine Epidemic: Health

Consequences and Treatment"). Crack cocaine had even found a place in the leadership of D.C. during the Marion Barry scandal of 1990, when Washington D.C. Mayor at the time was convicted on misdemeanor drug charges.

Many approaches to the War on Drugs were theorized and enacted anti-drug campaigns, such as those of the Reagan administration, increased police presence, scare tactics, but according to a documentary When Crack Plagued Washington D.C., “Much of the drug war in D.C. seemed to be staged. When President Bush addressed the nation, holding up that little plastic evidence bag, the drugs were a prop. The drug sting — “in a park just across the street from the White House,” had been engineered to match the president’s rousing words” (Fenston). As General Barry McCaffrey stated in an oral history on the War on Drugs, done by Michael Boyland, with regards to a previous interviewer,

I [McCaffrey speaking of the past interviewer] want to come talk to you about

your actions in supporting Columbia, it’s obvious that the only solution to the war

on drugs is prevention and treatment. So I want talk to you and find out why

you’re so stupid that you think military power, intelligence, covert action, police

repression is the way to go. (Boyland)

Regarding police action in Washington D.C.. At the height of drug usage and drug related in Washington, Former Metropolitan Police Chief Isaac Fulwood stated the

Metropolitan Police would, “Go into the neighborhoods, do buy-busts, and make all kinds of arrests,” Fulwood says. “I mean, we were arresting, literally on the weekends, sometimes, 800 or 900 people” (Fulwood). Unfortunately, according to a documentary on the time, Crack: The Drug that Consumed the Nation’s Capital, “But arresting kingpins like Lewis and street soldiers like Carey didn’t seem to make a difference. New dealers stepped in to take their places, and the killings continued” (Fenston). It seemed as though after the police took down one drug dealer another would soon take their place. Also most of the action taken, by federal officers, to reduce violent acts in D.C. were undermined by action taken by gangs during their rampant turf wars. The violence brought on by the turf wars and increased crack usage caused D.C. at that time to be nicknamed the “Nation’s Murder Capital”. According to data from NIDA’S Drug Abuse

Warning Network (DAWN),

the number of deaths associated with cocaine increased from 717 in 1985 to 2,252

in 1988.” Preliminary data for 1989 indicate that the trend continues to rise, with

2,297 cocaine related deaths reported. Also, ER drug abuse episodes where

cocaine use was mentioned increased 58 percent from 1986 to 1988. ("Drug

Abuse: The Crack Cocaine Epidemic: Health Consequences and Treatment")

This extreme increase in violence and death spurred movements amongst churches, civic groups, and neighborhoods. Some communities would take matters into their own hand and take action themselves against those who would they believed threatened the peace and stability of their neighborhoods, one such activist, Leroy Thorpe jr. stated,

"We [he and the neighborhood watch he organized] go out in the daytime to get

people off the block. Anytime we see them loitering there, we see them

suspecting that they’re using drugs, we want them out of here. I was telling them

I'd go get a bat, bust them upside the head, we were going to blow their house up. I was raw! Wasn’t even thinking of the legalities of whatever the situation may

be. (Thorpe)

The violence was so rampant and widespread that on November 19, 1992 Police Chief

Fulwood resigned, after the murder of his brother, he stated, “I got tired. When you do 30 years and you see the carnage of young people dying, you become overwhelmed by it,"

(Fulwood).

Fortunately according to Crack: The Drug That Consumed The Nation’s Capital by 1993, city officials began reporting a glimmer of hope: the percentage of arrestees who tested positive for cocaine was leveling off, dropping to 50 percent from 67 percent in 1988... by 1997, the city homicide rate began a downward slide that has mostly continued to today” ("Crack: The Drug That Consumed The Nation’s Capital"). By the end of the

20th century Washington D.C. had effectively escaped the crack epidemic, but that certainly did not mean the end of the War on Drugs or of drug use, but the crack epidemic would at least serve as a tool to learn from in case of another of a drug epidemic in the future.

The past provides perspective on the present and when a society forgets the events of the past it loses its perspective and without perspective things can quickly spiral out of hand, David F. Musto. The Crack Epidemic taught the United States many lesson about societies changed by drug use, but it was not the first drug epidemic, the Cocaine

Epidemic of the late 19th century illustrated in June 11, 1986 edition of the Wall Street

Journal, Lessons of the First Cocaine Epidemic, taught the American people just as many lessons but were forgotten soon after, “Public memory of the earlier widespread use of drugs has long since faded away, and with it went the public’s slowly acquired resistance to and fear of cocaine” (Musto). It is hard to tell whether or not the Crack Epidemic will suffer the same fate as the Cocaine Epidemic as it sufficient time has passed, but it can be seen a more relaxed attitude towards narcotics today, with the legalization of certain formerly illicit substances in some states, such as marijuana. Looking back many of the results of studies regarding narcotics at the time were exaggerated in order to use them in fear tactics, a recent look back, done by the New York Times, on children born to mothers addicted crack showed that the children did not suffer nearly as badly as was originally indicated (Winerip).

While in the late 20th century the crack epidemic ravaged America, today the

United States could be facing a new threat just as dangerous or more, heroin. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), “Heroin use has been rising since 2007, growing from 373,000 yearly users to 669,000 in 2012”

(qtd. in Gray) and according to DEA data “Heroin overdose deaths have also spiked, increasing 45% from 2006 to 2010” (qtd. in Gray). The USA maybe seeing the start of a new drug epidemic hopefully it has learned enough from the last and had not forgotten too much to combat this more effectively and with less devastating results than the late

1900’s.

Interview Transcription Interviewee/Narrator: Walter Staples Interviewer: Zein Haidar Location: Mr. Staples home, Maryland Date: December 19, 2015

Zein Haidar: This is Zein Haidar and I am interviewing Mr. Walter Staples on the topic of the Washington D.C Crack Cocaine Epidemic in the late twentieth Century as a part of the American Century Oral History Project. The Interview took place on December 19,

2015 at 1:00 pm, located in the residence of Mr. Walter Staples. This Interview was recorded using a Cellphone. So I guess my first question is mostly biographical. So what was it like growing up for you in New Jersey?

Walter Staples: Yeah

ZH: During the 60s?

WS: New Jersey during the 60s, not a lot of, not a lot of crime I wasn’t… Actually it was different then, ya know, back then parents were allowed to discipline children in certain ways (Both Laugh). So I knew very few bad kids going through school, I mean ya know, in fact if you asked me to name one I couldn’t, ya know, I was close to the kids I went through elementary school with, junior high school, and then high school, and I don’t remember, bad kids.

ZH: Yeah

WS: Ya know, not in any of that, and once I graduated from high school, my mom was working, a single mom, and I had a ravenous appetite and one day I just felt like, I was 17 when I graduated from high school, and I was walking downtown in new jersey and I saw this sign in front of the recruiting office and I went in and talked with the guy and. Tink, Tink (His dog jumps onto me and Mr. Staples tells it to stop). Went in and talked with the guy and basically I just fell in love with being in the military

ZH: Oh yeah?

WS: But I was only 17 so he said, “I’m gonna go home with you, we’re going to talk with your mom” and then in the midst of all the tears and everything she said “well, if that’s really what you want to do, I’ll sign here.”

ZH: Wow

WS: And that’s what I did

ZH: So (I lose my place as I ask the next question). Sorry,

WS: no that’s okay

ZH: I’m just taking a quick look cause you answered another one of my questions, so how would you describe the United States as whole at that time, like what were your opinions on it?

WS: Well most of the children I was raised around had discipline, (Laughs), ya know, I wasn’t unusual for a, I’d seen parents come into school drag their kids out spank em and send em back in the classroom, ya know that kinda discipline. Ya know, there wasn’t any talking back to your parents, talking back to your teachers, you could get expelled from school for, ya know, something like that, and if I got in trouble in school I’d know beyond a doubt i'm gonna get lit up, when I get home. Ya know, and that’s just, and the teachers knew each other, ya know, the parents knew the teachers, and it was nothing for the teach to say “Oh let me tell you what he did” (Both Laugh). So, ya know, I thought I had a great childhood

ZH: Okay WS: Not a lot of opulence, ya know, it was basic stuff, I had clean clothes to wear to school, ya know and that kinda thing, but because I had, my mom was single, and I know back then I could eat whatever was put on the table, I could eat all of it, ya know and I kinda felt like I was burden, and then I figured, okay ya know, I saw these circulars and posters and stuff about the military and decided that’s the way to give my mom a break, and off I went.

ZH: On the note of that, how aware were of the Vietnam war and also the Civil rights movement during that time, did that influence you at all? (4:40)

WS: Well Vietnam War didn’t bother me, the thought never entered my head, I was fortunate I was fortunate in that once I went into the military. I went to Texas for basic training and I was assigned to an air base on Okinawa.

ZH: Oh

WS: Which was a hop skip and jump from Vietnam but the aircraft that I was protecting and the people I was protecting, as an air police officer, were flying missions in Vietnam and our job was to make sure the aircraft and the property of the United States Air Force were safe.

ZH: Oh wow

WS: And that’s basically what it was for that early part, ya know, that first assignment.

The only time I got worried, was in an area that they had typhoons, and when a typhoon would come through all the aircraft, Okinawa being in the path of the typhoon, they fly out all the aircraft, they’d fly them to Thailand and some place like that. I’d have to go with it, I’m responsible for the aircraft and it’s armament, so id have to go with the aircraft, and It was just a way of life, it wasn’t a big deal. You would go with your aircraft, you would stay with your aircraft, and when it's time to go back you would hop on your aircraft and you go back to Okinawa where you, ya know, were deployed from.

Once I think I ended up in Bangkok and also in Korea once, but it's in and out, ya know, my home base was Okinawa and once I finished that assignment, coming back to the united states I was assigned to Westover in Massachusetts. And I didn’t like that either cause it was cold (Both Laugh). I’m leaving Okinawa where it’s lots of sunshine and pretty blue seas and sandy beaches, and now I'm in Massachusetts at Westover It’s like 2-

3 below 0. It’s really cold and they came and picked up the dogs because it was too cold outside for the dogs (I laugh) and that made me say I don’t want to be in Massachusetts.

So I put in for reassignment and, was fortunate, I was assigned to the pentagon.

ZH: Oh wow

WS: my background in and probably some of the rating i got probably helped to get the assignment. I was assigned to the air force security unit in the pentagon Room 4B882,

I’ll never forget that room. And were one ring away from the secretary of defence, the secretary of the air force, air force chief of staff. We were on D ring they were on E

Ring. I did that for, I don’t know how long I did it. and the thing that got me was, while I was there, which was like mid-late 80s, D.C. was having a lot of issues with juvenile crime and i was up for reenlistment and i had been promised by the chief of the air force security that if “if you stay and you reenlist again I'll make sure you get any assignment you want in the world” and although tempting I couldn’t get over those news reports, all these kids were enlisted and the newspapers being this one was arrested for this and this one was arrested for that and that's when I got out and went over to the police department. I stayed out for about a little over a year and then when the police department start hiring again, I got taken in on the first round.

ZH: When was that? what year?

WS: Oh gosh

ZH: Roughly

WS: It was (Unintelligible)... early 80’s very early 80s, and then

ZH: So how would you describe your early experiences working with police?(10:20)

WS: Early experiences working with the police was, The Difference between then and toward the end, police had a lot of respect in that you got on of that scene everything would kinda calm down and people would start to walk away and there was never any, well I shouldn’t say never, but rarely was there any rocks or bottles being thrown at you, if there was a rock or bottle being thrown at you it was as you were getting in your car while you're leaving and you couldn’t see threw the bottle or rock. (Both Laugh). That kinda thing. during that time I think I ended up with the safe streets task force that was when all of the murders started happening there was MPD, DEA, FBI, and because we were in the area where DEA covered my area was washington division, which means that

I had a party in D.C., Maryland, Virginia, and Northern West Virginia, so when there was an issue, you went and handled it especially with the drug trafficking, the people involved and the cocaine trafficking and so on and so forth and what I did was (Shows me his notes), this was a pharmacist I had locked up. Although I was assigned to the office in

D.C. this is part of the area we were responsible for and I printed this out for you (Shows me his notes). These were the people who were involved. Drug trafficking, Cocaine kinda fell off to the side and then it became pharmaceutical drugs. ZH: Oh Really?

WS: Yeah, we had heroin coming in from africa, we had cocaine coming in from south america, and we had methamphetamine coming in from Mexico, and during that time period I worked on cases where CIA followed up on some of the information that i’d gathered on the mexican methamphetamine trafficking and they ended going there and locking those people up or getting the mexican government to lock them up. Amezqua brothers that was there name you can probably find them Luis Amezqua, A M E Z Q U

A, and Jesus Amezqua.

ZH: All right, so I suppose this is a pretty good transition to, what do you think about when hear the phrase America’s war on drugs?

WS; well because I’m not actively involved in the war it's hard to have an opinion about the tactics that they use because i’m not privy to the tactics they use. How they deploy people to investigate. when I was working narcotics I had undercover officers, not only did I have undercover officers, I had informants that I could pay, and it wasn’t unusual for an informant to call you and say “Well it's in the house right now” and you run and you try to get a quick warrant. You wake up the judge at night (both laugh) and he read it over and says “yes you’ve got the PC” and you take the warrant and you go knock down the door and if you got bad information that’s an informant you draw a line through you never use that informant again. But I was fortunate, I think I may have had one informant throughout that entire time whose information turned out to be false, 99.9 percent of the time they’re right on the money, they new where the drugs were hidden inside the residence and it we had dogs, drug sniffing dogs. If we didn’t find it right away we’d call the canine and have the dog go do it. ZH: Do you think the war was a winnable one or a larger political ploy a sort of advertisment of it? (15:51)

WS: Winnable

ZH: It was a winnable war?

WS: I know people who are on the police department but we don’t get involved in what they do and how they do it and so on and so forth. It’s just the matter of, they remember me as the supervisor and when stuff go on they call and say “Hey we're getting ready to get together” and so on and son “and your welcome to hang out” but we don’t have those conversations about how well they’re doing. The only that makes me think they’re doing well is, in my notes, it was nothing for us to have 2 to 3 hundred murders a year, we were number 2 in the nation per capita, behind Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri and that went away. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that government put all of their resources together, like the task forces that i worked on. We worked on doctors and pharmacies, the safe streets task force, probably out there on the internet some place.

MPD, DEA, and the FBI we all worked together and previously working narcotics the only time I worked with any other agency was when the cases that I was working crossed lines into PG County or into Northern Virginia and we had communications between the detectives there and the detectives in D.C. so rarely did we work those kinda cases until I worked for DEA.

ZH: So Why did you make that move towards working with the DEA?

WS: I retired from the police department

ZH: Oh you did? WS: yeah. I went on the police department in 66 something like that but i had spent twenty two years on the police department and toward the end of my career on the police department, working narcotics I spent 14 years in narcotics. When you start to make drug cases you start to get other agencies reviewing your information. The FBI steps in they wanna see your report. Our informants were in the neighborhood their informants were like, some of them were in the neighborhood, but their informants were for pay, our informants were, because they wanted to get people out of the neighborhood, and we give them money but we give them money to make the purchases for the drugs and that's it.

The drugs, they had to bring back to us, and we never trusted anybody going to make buys. If you say “Yo Walt, I know this lady named Wanda who lives in (Unintelligible), who’s selling drugs” that’s fine, I meet with you, I search you, I make sure you don’t have any drugs or money on you, I give you money for the drugs, I mark the money or write down the serial number of the money, give it to you, I take you to the place, close enough where you can walk, and I watch you walk into the house and back out and come directly to me, you can’t go anyplace else, you stop and talk to anybody else, ya done, I’ll never use you again, because I want to be certain when I swear to this warrant to go into that house, that that’s where the drugs came from. And that’s basically the way we operated as far as the drug traffickers I think that’s why we had such a good impact. The drugs and murders were related, and once you start locking up the drug dealers the murder rate starts to go down.

ZH: Okay, can you describe the D.C. Drug scene during the the time? What drugs did you correlate to violence and what was found most common? (20:39). WS: We had the pharmaceutical drugs, we had heroin coming in from Nigeria, we had mexican Methamphetamine, and then of course we had PCP and Crack was real big.

ZH: Can you describe the effects Crack had on communities?

WS: Oh gosh, it devastated them, it was nothing to go into a house that was selling crack and the whole house is in disarray. Roaches, rats, some of the places you just hate going into, because you knew exactly what they were going to look like, because the people involved in the abuse of crack were so out of it. All they cared about was drugs, kids, the house, the wellbeing of the house, none of that made any difference.

ZH: Could you describe some of the, I suppose when entering one of those scenes, crack related crime scenes what were the sounds, the smells.

WS: The smells were terrible.

ZH; The smells were terrible.

WS: Forget about it being like if you walk into a neighbor’s house you expect they have a lot of kids, you may see toys on the floor, something like that, what you expected walking into a crack house was filth, whatever it was that is inside of us that make us want to keep things organized, and straight, and clean, and so on and so forth, none of that was in a crack addict. The only thing they care about is crack. It was devastating, it really really was. I had an informant tell me that there was a guy who worked at D.C. jail who could get crack, and I called him up and I had the informant tell him “Oh I know this guy who can get the stuff for you” and then I called him and he answered the phone, he’s at D.C. Jail and he answered the phone, Northeast 3 Jordan, (?And remember thinking?) he was really dumb (Both laugh). And I tell him who I am “My name is Walt and I understand that you want some crack” and he said “yeah, yeah, yeah, no problem, no problem, when can I get it” and I said “well, where do you wanna meet” and he said “I don’t know man, you tell me” so I had him meet me down in southwest. Where it used to be kinda industrial there wasn’t a lot of traffic, and some of the questionable nightclubs were down in that area. We went past that, so we set up a date and time. I went back to

Narcotics because at this time I’m working for the DEA and I went back to Narcotics. I got some of the crack that had been seized, I cut it up into working 50s and put it in a bag, sealed it up, called him set up the meet. And he brings his wife and his kid.

ZH: Oh Wow

WS: To the deal, and he can see that I’m hesitant about dealing with him, and he blurts out “I brought them as collateral, I just want you to know Ima get this money for you, ya know, this is my wife and kid and wouldn’t had brought em, I wouldn’t had brought em, so you could you if I didn’t know about it so i could make you know you could trust me.

ZH: Oh wow that’s just, that’s just…

WS: So I said “Not a problem” so I had cut up 10 working, a working 50 is, you cut off a chunk of crack.

ZH: I was about ask

WS: and what you do is, I’ll sell you this piece of crack, okay and I may sell it to you for

25 dollars, because it’s maybe a half or ¾ inch square, but the guy I sell it to is gonna cut it off into smaller pieces and it for like 10 dollars. And you got a crack pipe and you’re in a crack house, he can make money all night long buying two or three little squares.

And I had it cut up like that, and when I gave it to him I said “Why don’t you put it inside of your pants so if you get stopped” I knew that once I gave the signal that the transaction had taken place, the police were gonna come in, and I didn’t want him to get rid of the drugs, or throw em, or something like that and argue “Well that wasn’t mine, that could’ve been laying on the ground.” So I talked him into putting them in his pants, His wife and kid are just standing there and they weren’t a part of the transactions, but like he said he just brought them along, which really messed me up. And They came in arrested him, took him to court the next day, his wife was there, and she actually cursed me out.

ZH: Oh wow

WS: I said “Do you understand what happened?” and she said “yeah I know, you locked him up, you set him up, you told him you had drugs and you was gonna give em” I said

“no I wasn’t gonna give him the drugs, he could take the drugs sell em and get the money back to me” it’s not giving him the drugs and she’s cursing me out. We’re in the U.S. attorney’s office and I look at her and said “Do you understand that if I was a real drug dealer and you screwed this up, you and your kid would be dead” and she just kind of stood there with her mouth open. I felt bad for her because I know she knew about what he was doing, most women especially with young children are not going to confront that kind of thing and tell the man who’s supporting her and her child that you can’t do this.

So the end up out on the street.

ZH: Did you ever know anyone personally who was addicted or affected by drugs?

WS: No not in my own Personal circle, but what happens when you start working with these people you (unintelligible), and you knock down the door and you see these people in these disgusting kind of conditions, it makes you start to feel sorry for them, and sad for them, I mean there these people that you sit down and talk to them and you try to get them to realize the danger involved in this activity and sometimes you kinda get a feel that they wanna change but they’re like hooked so you try to figure out ways to try to get them some kind of treatment. Probably success rate in that back then was probably about

30 to 40 percent. First of all they couldn’t move, they were in that environment, people who use narcotics get very paranoid and were used to smoking a joint together, and were used to smoking crack together, you may want to quit but now you can’t live in that neighborhood cause folk go ‘“Come on let’s get high, Let’s Get High” and you go “Yeah that’s all right” “what do you mean that’s all right. You’ve been getting high for the last year or so, why all of a sudden” so people start to get leary of you, thinking you're probably some kind of informant or something you start to lose friends, you get ostracized. in that little community and in some cases that’s all people had there wasn’t any exits from it, unless you could get totally out of that environment, you’re kind of stuck.

ZH: Did you see that happen to a lot of different neighborhoods and communities? Is that a sort of common occurrence.(29:29)

WS: (unintelligible)(both Laugh) A lot of these areas now, i can say due to Marion Barry, but one of the efforts that he started was in south east, like Barry Farms, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Barry Farms.

ZH: Not Really

WS: It was right off of (unintelligible) Parkway it’s a complex over there, they alway have murders, always a lot of drugs, Wheeler Rd, that's all been sort of Renovated, little rd southeast there was tons of drugs up in there. That’s all been renovated King and

(unintelligible), southeast, That’s kinda down at the bottom of the hill before you come across the bridge into D.C., that was all heroin and crack, and the thing that bothered me most about that was the theater there, that showed black history movies, and things like that. Now I think it’s the anacostia Museum that’s there.

ZH: Yeah I think so

WS: and it just bugged me that they’re selling drugs right here on this corner, I spent a lot of time down there, I sent a lot of informants down there, where they make the buy, I want to know exactly how they’re dressed and some cases according to where the seller is standing you can go up on a hill and use binoculars and watch the transaction. If you don’t specifically see the transaction then you gotta find out from the informant. How are they dressed and so on and so on and so on. And sometimes you end up putting them in the back of the car with a hood of their head and riding through then they say “There he is over there, with the striped shirt and jeans, and you call out another unit to actually make the arrest. You stay until it’s done so the informant can say “Yeah that’s the guy” and the other team arrests them, but you don’t leave your informant in the car, you stay with them until the arrest is made and then you leave.

ZH: Okay, So what were your thoughts on the Marion Barry Scandal that Occurred?

WS: It didn’t surprise me, I had ran across him several times in various places, they weren’t bad, bad places, but there were places where you shouldn’t find the Mayor (Both

Laugh). One of the things while I was working narcotics, we also had an alcohol unit, bootleggers, people that brew their own whiskey, cooking it in a still, and I ran across him at a couple of those kind of places, He knew I was the police, and everyone in the place knew I was the police. As I was going through, looking for whoever i was looking for, I would “Good evening mayor, how you doing” and I would go about my business, That kind of thing. But there was never anything over, where you could actually catch him doing it until the FBI did that sting on him.

ZH: All right, while investigating drug use domestically, what was a typical day like for you.?

WS: Long.

ZH: Long? (both laugh)

WS: One of the things, especially working the drugs and the murders, one of the policies

I had with that group right there (Points at a picture of him and his coworkers). We come to work in the morning and we catch a murder. We don’t go home until we run out of leads, and they go “Really?” and i go “Really” and that group we had one of the best closure rates in homicide cause that’s just how we worked. If you’re going out and looking for leads, and i talked to ms. Staples and she said “I saw so and so over there, and her kid he’s always out threatening somebody” Now she becomes a non-existent witness or, I’m sorry, she becomes witness one, no names, witness one and you go follow this stuff up and when you go in and you find the gun and stuff like that, most of the time it’s not a healthy environment. You’re not talking about a mom, dad, brother,and sisters and it’s all like this happy family picture. When you talk about the family environment it wasn’t like we think it should be. Sometime you had the mom on crack and the kids running the house, Everybody in the Neighborhood could be in there, if there are a couple heroin dealers in the neighborhood they might give mom a piece of crack, just so that they can hide their stash in her house, that kind of thing. That was common place especially if you got into places like Wheeler rd, Barry Farms, and King and King and (?Talbot?) those were big drug trafficking places. It wasn’t unusual to see that kind of standard in multiple homes.

ZH: What would you say the most popular demographic that crack was present in?(36:02)

WS: Black and hispanics and poor whites.

ZH: So mainly the lower working class?

WS: Yeah, when I went to work for DEA I wasn’t restrained by jurisdiction, I would lock up people in PG county, Northern Virginia, wherever it was going on, West Virginia.

DEA’s area that I was assigned, I was assigned to the Washington Field Division, we covered Maryland, Virginia, northern West Virginia all of these areas. If you end with a case and that’s where it takes you then that’s where you go.

ZH: A follow up on the last question, did you see it more popular among young men, young women, older women?

WS: well it was mostly not young educated people, it was young uneducated people

ZH:Okay

WS: And people people who faltered as far as their education and stuff in the school center, and a lot of people on public support, welfare, those kind of things. It went from there, rarely was it lower middle class, It might go from there to upper middle class, people who look forward to buy a kilo of cocaine. The neighborhoods, that are the ghettos, if you want to call them that, those folks were dependant on just buying a piece, and they worked and did whatever it was they had to do to get that piece of crack and put it in their pipe and smoke it. I’ll show you, during the course of my doing that work, mobile crime usually handled most of our murder scenes and when I’d have to go out and talk to different church groups and neighborhood groups, I’d call mobile crime and say, a picture's worth a thousand words, “can I take pictures from this murder scene and use them and bring them back to you” and they said “no they’re evidence, if you want us to come to court with you,” I said, “I’m not going to court, I’m going to this church” and they’re bringing their parishioners in and they want them to tell me about the dangers involved and so forth. and they wouldn’t do it so i started taking my own pictures.

ZH: yeah

WS: Okay, I got me a camera and when I’d be- they’d be at the crime scene- I’d be at the crime scene they’d be taking pictures and I’d be taking pictures and when we were getting ready to leave they’d go “okay Walt we need that role of film” I said “no you don’t, and you’re not getting it (both laugh, It’s my film, I bought it, and I’m” In fact, before you leave I’ll show you the pictures.

ZH: Okay, that’d be really helpful, I just have, right before we do that, just a few more questions

WS: Oh no, take your time.

ZH: And then we can get to that. I have a quote here from an addiction expert, Karst

Besteman, who testified before congress in 1989, he said that “Crack was the equivalent of McDonald’s” and how it was cheap, convenient and available on the corner, and neither the government, nor society was equipped to handle it at that time. What do you think about that statement? (40:02)

WS: I kinda disagree on the end part, I disagree with a lot of it, especially when you start talking about, I don’t know the analogy of McDonald’s and all of that. Most of the people that were on Crack knew they were on crack and they didn’t consider it to be going to like McDonald’s. I’d have issues with that analogy only because that sounds like it’s accepted. Most Drug addicts know they’re drug addict and although they have a problem trying to stop being drug addicts, they know what they are and they don’t like it.

McDonald’s is kind of out there.

ZH: yeah, I think that was more to the point of its availability.

WS: Availability

ZH: yeah, I think that was the point that he was trying to make, that it was just so ever present and easily…

WS: Obtained

ZH: Obtained, yeah. Also I have this image here that I’d like your thoughts on. It’s of

President Bush addressing the nation on the War on drugs. I was wondering if you

recognized it or if not?

WS: Oh, (both laugh), That’s a DEA envelope, evidence envelope, that has to to be heat sealed. When you make this kind of seizure, the evidence goes in, you heat seal it, and when it’s opened at the lab in order for them to process the drugs, in order for them to process the drugs, their is a signature on here on who actually sealed it, date, so on and so forth. When you open this envelope you have to save that signature and the next envelope that you seal this up in when you finish analyzing and so on and so forth, you have to have to the original seal from this envelope going into the new envelope, so that you you know where the drugs came from and he can track everybody who had their hands on it. That’s awful big chunks of whatever that is.

ZH: Yeah It’s a prop of course, because they wouldn’t have the president, but I believe it supposed to be Crack.

WS: I’ve never seen, never seen, a crack rock that big, (Both laugh)

ZH: Yeah very interesting choices there made by the presidential prop department

WS: yeah. well actually what it does is give you some insight into their knowledge of what’s going on. when you hear about a lot of drug traffic you think of and you buy it, but that crack rock is probably worth about 5 thousand dollars. Cause the blocks are so big, they look like they’re about an inch square or bigger, there has never been a crack rock that big (both laugh).

ZH: Next question, That’s about all I have for that timeframe, but we’re seeing growing popularity in heroin usage among similar demographic now. Do you have any thought on handling this, or on it at all now?

WS: Well, Hopefully what they’re doing is what we did back then. You can send heroin to the lab, and they can determine where it was grown and where it was processed.

During, (Check’s his notes) where did we get this stuff from, Heroin from Nigeria,

Methamphetamine from Mexico. The ingredients that are used to manufacture this controlled substances, these illegal controlled substance, all identifiable, and the technicians who examine the drugs and do the lab tests most of the time, I’d say probably in the high 80 to 90 percent of the time can tell you where they’re coming from, that information is shared, and the other thing about the law enforcement community,

They’re so afraid of information leaking out, they keep everything so close to their breast, and you can be an FBI agent and I can be a DEA investigator and you don’t want to share with FBI guy cause he’s gonna run off with your case and say he made it, and he doesn’t want to share information with you because he doesn’t want you to make a case before he makes it. There’s a lot of egos that show up in the hierarchy, rarely is it at the level of the grunt workers, the people who are out there in the street who are making the cases, knocking down the doors, that kind of thing, rarely are the egos getting involved their.

Everybody that’s doing that know’s how much you depend on the other person, you’re knocking down the door, that person behind you has to cover you from back there and look in, and to the sides. It’s an interesting dilemma when it comes to, what was the other question you had there?

ZH: Oh, Heroin and it’s growing popularity and just your thoughts on it.

WS: I can’t understand it at all, Crack is an… if you're involved in substance abuse, the one thing that you know is crack costs more than Heroin, you know that it’s gonna get you high, you know heroin is going to put you down, you’ll be sitting around nodding and drooling all over yourself, but crack probably won’t kill you and you got a hell of a big percentage toward heroin killing you. I’ve investigated overdose cases where the lab said “Okay what’s in this syringe is more of a hot shot than a normal heroin dose”. So if you’re involved in that and that kind of lifestyle you’ve got to know that you take a huge risk. You don’t have nothing to do with manufacturing of it, you don’t have anything to do with it being put together, and you have no idea what the motives are of the person who gives it to you.

ZH: So if it were to continue on this trend of growing popularity you’d expect to see more deaths related to Heroin than you would’ve for crack back then.

WS: Oh absolutely, absolutely. I won’t say it’s hard to have a crack overdose because they can but it’s not as deadly as a heroin overdose. Crack or cocaine is like an upper, heroin is a downer, it just slows everything down, too much of it and all of a sudden everything just stops working and you’re overdosed and dead.

ZH: How did you see the change in drugs and drug use and how you combated drugs from when you started with MPD and when you ended with… which agency did you finally end up with?

WS: well I left the MPD and went to DEA

ZH: Okay, so by the time you, have you retired from the DEA?(He nods) Yes then from the time you started with the MPD to the time you retired from the DEA.

WS: It’s changed a lot, because what happened was, I don’t know if it was because of the junkie’s attitude toward getting high on crack or getting high on heroin but they went to pharmaceuticals and going to pharmaceuticals, the difference is, you know that this particular controlled substance like an 80 milligram oxycontin, a 160 oxycontin, you know perdue farmer made that, it wasn’t in a dirty lab on the floor where you got all this debris and everything, you know that it’s made by a genuine government monitored manufacturer and that’s what made the pharmaceutical stuff start to jump off because people realized that you could get just as high on percocet as you can on some heroin.

And it’s according to what strength the medicine is, oxycontin was the real big pain reliever that got all of the accolades because it was so good with controlling the pain, what they didn’t realize with oxycontin is it’s wholly and completely addictive. It started off with oxycontin which oxycodone is like the baseline chemical in it, then when you go to oxycontin , you could get oxycontin in a 10 milligram pill and it doubled: 10mg,

20mg, 40mg, 80mg, 160mg. They took the 160 off the market because they had too many people dying on it. (Laughs)

ZH: wow

WS: Because you're getting high and, In fact…

ZH: Just take a second to make sure the recording is still going smoothly (I check the phone) yep, okay

WS: Let me see (He points to a stack of papers) is that, no, is that?

ZH: Here ( I hand the stack of papers)

WS: Let me see that, I went online, this is from the court circuit, the united states court.

(He points out several names on the paper) That’s the pharmacist I locked up, that’s him, he’s the apelet who’s suing me, because he got 12 years in jail. As a part of this, I think we took a bunch of them to court at the same time, and this isn’t like a confidential document I went online and ran this guy’s name and this what I ended up with, but on one of these (He shuffles through the papers) we had other people involved, other people mentioned in it and I’ll see if i can find that. but there were other doctors who were writing prescriptions, addicted to the controlled substances and the doctors I locked up was Sammy Belcher, Dr. Dixon, Marshall Nicholson, Dr. Franzoni, (unintelligible) pharmacy, Terry Watts, and of course the pharmacist out in PG county, (Unintelligible).

Like I said he continues to try to sue me about what I did with him, but a lot of the information on what the charges were, I have the US attorneys’ names in here and I thought they had the names of some of the, this isn’t like a secret document or anything so you don’t have to worry about it. I actually downloaded it from the internet when I went to try to make sure I could remember the dates and things, that kind of stuff. You can have a copy of this, it’s interesting reading.

ZH: Yeah I’ll definitely look through.

WS: DEA investigation lead to search of Rem Pharmacy, on november 2nd this search further indicates that joseph (?scurgeoni?) who was just an addict, his wife Theresa

(?Gannit?), and then it goes on to Dr. Robert Fine, Dr. Michelle Craig, and all of these people, when I started pulling the prescriptions at the store, I found all these names of

Doctors, Practitioners, who were licensed practitioners, who were writing these large amounts of the (Unintelligible) and the pain pills stuff like that. The reason this guy went to jail as a pharmacist was because he’s pharmacist, he’s supposed to know that if you got a prescription from Dr. Jones on monday and it’s for Walter Staples, giving him 180 oxycontin you can’t have Dr. Jones come back in on Tuesday and give you a prescription for 180 oxycontin for a Walter Staples, and he was not mindful, he probably knew it but he had been getting away with it for so long and that’s how he ended up jail, cause I started writing up my own prescriptions and cutting them out and shaping them any kind of way and walking in and he was filling them and that’s how PG county police got involved in the case, I knew the folks who worked in PG Narcotics, and I told them about it and they said “Okay well, whatever you need from us, we can do it together.” So the policewoman who worked in there, we started having her fill out prescriptions under a fake name (Both laugh). We’d cut them out any kind of way, they’d be lopsided, and she’d go in and he’d fill them.

ZH: Wow, So some call a need for a war on drugs, to begin with, because they believed that drug use had reached an epidemic level. What are your thoughts on this idea?(56:15)

WS: I don’t know, because I’m not linked to that daily. Every once in awhile you’ll see a blurb or something in the news.

ZH: I mean in your time on the force.

WS: During my time, it was an epidemic.

ZH: It was an epidemic?

WS: Yes absolutely, no question about it I mean it was everywhere, It was pharmacists in

D.C. Yeah it was the pharmacists in Maryland, pharmacists in Virginia. It was almost, not almost, it was overwhelming, because you couldn’t get to everybody and to all the documents. When I went to Rem pharmacy, he had a prescription is like (He uses his hands to outline a prescription) that thin and like that big, and he had boxes and boxes up in there. And In order to make the case you got to through each one of them.

ZH: Wow

WS: Each one of them, and you have to document their names because if you keep seeing the same names over and over again within that 30 day period he’s not supposed to be filling them, and the Doctor, this is 30 day supply, and they’ll say 1 pill every 4 hours or 1 pill every 8 hours, all you have to do is add that up, it’s like basic math. you got a 30 day supply, you know exactly how many pills you’re supposed to have and it just wasn’t working out to that. He was an easy case, but it was growing, when people start realizing that they didn’t have to worry about a heroin overdose when heroin wasn’t mixed right, and you had too much heroin and not enough cut in it, and this stuff will get you just as high and you got it made by the government, inspected by the government.

(Both Laugh)

ZH: What about…

WS: Sorry, that’s what a lot of them turned to, pharmaceutical stuff. Especially pain killers

ZH: What about crack cocaine, would you say that that reached an epidemic level, at least around the time that you started on the force?

WS: Yes, you could find Crack everywhere, I mean, literally everywhere, It’s hard to go into a block or apartment building and not see, at the very least the remnants of crack. A lot of people smoke crack and for whatever reason, crack pipes became real popular, you’d find discarded crack pipes laying in the garbage area, where somebody used it and wore it out or it stopped working or whatever, it wasn’t unusual.

ZH: Who do you see as the winners and losers of the war on drugs (59:23).

WS: The winners are the people, the losers are the drug dealers. When I execute a warrant and I’ve got a drug trafficker, first of all who doesn’t follow income tax, has no meaningful employment, and he’s got a couple of Rolls-Royces sitting in his driveway.

One guy, I took his horses, (both laugh).

ZH: What?

WS: they were the only thing he had of value he had these beautiful horses and the cost a whole bunch of money and that was his property. He was trafficking and he didn’t have any meaningful employment where he could say, “ I earned this money”, and I took his horses. ZH: Wow

WS: and he came into corporate with his cowboy boots and wanting his horses back and the judge said “I don’t think so”.

ZH: So how do you feel about the recent legalization of marijuana in some states.

WS: The people who argue about marijuana legalization, they talk about prohibition, and alcohol and so on and so on. They use that as an argument for putting forward legalizing marijuana. Why would you give the people another crutch, you already have alcohol and cigarettes and pills and so on and so on. I understood medical marijuana, when they came up with that, cause they had therapeutic ways of dealing with things, like with cancer and chemotherapy and all that kind of stuff and probably the only reason i understand that is because I set up these places in D.C.

ZH: Yeah

WS: But, that didn’t bother me, but to hear them talk about legalizing marijuana, and at some point if it continues on the path it’s on, you’re gonna walk into a liquor store and buy 8 or 10 joints, (I Laugh). How are they going to keep from happening if it’s legalized. They can put parameters on it by saying that it can’t be sold retail, they could do it that way, but the bottom line is you stop somebody out here that is driving, when the window comes down you can smell it. You can smell the marijuana it just rushes out of the vehicle, you know like it’s trying to get air. You got somebody out there driving on marijuana, what’s the test. You can’t give them a blow in this and determine the amount of alcohol they’ve taken in, and you gotta believe that people out here who are smoking marijuana and they way I interpret it, and even when I was on patrol, if I’m on a midnight shift and I pull up to a stop light, and there’s a car already in front of me in the stop light, waiting for it to turn green, and the car doesn’t go anywhere, okay well maybe he’s doing something in the car so it turns red and it turns green again and I’m ready to go and still sitting there. You get out of the car and you walk out, roll the window down and the marijuana is just coming, and it almost chokes you when it comes out of the car, and you get him out of the car and you go place him under arrest and “What, what, what, what’d I do, I didn’t break any laws, no I didn’t”. “You’re using marijuana I recognize the odor of marijuana, I’ve testified as an expert in court on the use of marijuana, you’re going” you take him in and you get the test done and he’s high on marijuana, but for whatever reason, marijuana isn’t viewed the same way, not even the same way alcohol is. It’s almost like they’re trying to get to the same level and to put marijuana along with alcohol, first of all alcohol isn’t the greatest thing in the world that we came up with, but then to add another substance, that will do the same thing or worse. Just doesn't make any sense to me. I guess if you did a poll of people and say “How many smoke marijuana, enjoyed it, and would like to see it legal”. I grew up in Newark, New Jersey, in the Ghetto, in the poor area, marijuana might have been there but I didn’t know anything about it, my mother, my family, my sisters, and my cousins, and my aunts, and smoking was like “What are you doing?”. It’s almost like you're going to get in big trouble for having a cigarette.

ZH: So do you think america still needs a war on drugs?(1:05:20)

WS: Yes, absolutely, I think that as long as we’re in existence we’re gonna need a war on drugs, only because there’s always somebody out there who is trying to make a lot of money on something new, and they know that these people who abuse various substances are going to try it, and they’re going to praise it and words going to get around and everybody is going to be trying to get it. We can’t get rid of that particular human problem for whatever reason cause we can all grasp it.

ZH: Looking back what did your work have on the war on drugs?

WS: Percentages, not a large percentage, first of all I worked in D.C. and working in

D.C. 800 thousand, 900 thousand and it’s probably more now on the number of people in the city and your man power on the police department is probably like 2 or 3 thousand maybe, probably less than half of those know how to influence drug laws. I can’t imagine that it’s going to go away

ZH: Is there anything I failed to ask that you think is important for to understand on this.

WS: I can’t think of anything right off the top of my head, and if I do think of something

(Laughs) I’ll email you.

ZH: okay so I’ll do the same if…

WS: That’s what I did with the notes and stuff like that I had to make sure to get the guy in the jail and officer who gave who gun to her boyfriend to rob drug dealers, safe streets task force, number two in the country for murders, kansas city, doctors I locked up, with doctors Dixon, Marshall, Nicholson, Franzoni, Chemo and pharmacy. we covered all of them.

ZH: So if I manage to think of something Else that might be pertinent I’ll give you an email.

WS: Yeah no problem, no problem.

ZH: Okay, I’ve got the release form signed, well thank you so much for sharing your

(unintelligible).

WS: Thank you, you take that (Hands me his notes). ZH: Oh thank you this will be really helpful and all, yeah, thank you and I’ll just..(Recording ends).

Interview Analysis

As individuals grow and improve due to mistakes they have made and learned from, so too can communities, cultures even the whole of humanity learn from the mistakes, downfalls, and failures of history. The past provides perspective on the present, but in order to learn from an event, it must first be well documented and be a recognizable piece of history and as E.H. Carr has stated “facts speak only when the historian calls on them” (Carr 2). It is the duty of the historian to create and shape the vast tapestry that is history from these facts. The facts provided by my interview with

Mr. Walter Staples on the crack cocaine epidemic that plagued Washington D.C. in the late 20th century are vital to understanding the effects of narcotics on a community.

The oral recitation has been the manner in which people have passed down important lessons learned from the past from one generation to the next. This practice bestowed the knowledge gained by one person through their individual experience to another in a way that maintained personal perspective and specific detail. Today, according to Donald Richie, Oral History is a “historical method that collects and preserves spoken memories through recorded interviews” (Richie), and unlike written primary sources such as, journals, newspapers, and various other historical documents, an interview is an unedited and unfiltered personal account of an event, it provides emotion and an object knowledge of the subject the matter that is nearly impossible to portray in standard written sources. Along with its personal view and interpretation of an event, oral history also rivals visual media as they provide more detail and leave less to individual interpretation. Oral history provides

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