Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America's War on Drugs

Abstract

In the late 1990s at least fourteen white high school and college students died of heroin overdoses in the wealthy Dallas suburb of Plano, recently named the safest midsized city in America. The local newspaper proclaimed a “heroin epidemic sweeping Plano and the nation,” and media reports invariably described the illegal drug consumers as tragic victims, “clean-cut teenagers” from affluent families with a “bright future ahead of them.” The intense national coverage highlighted the innocent white children of a seemingly idyllic suburb corrupted by sinister outside forces that might strike anywhere, anytime. “Heroin in Suburbia,” an abc World News exposé, explained that Plano's gated communities faced “a new enemy that has invaded their city and is threatening their children…. People thought it couldn't happen here, but it did.” Dateline nbc warned that heroin, an inner-city drug, “has jumped the tracks and has been killing kids in some of our most prosperous suburbs.” cnn opened a special Plano broadcast with the searching question, “Is your town ripe for picking by drug dealers?” The Plano police blamed illegal immigrants who “peddle Chiva [heroin] to rich suburban kids,” and the U.S. district attorney pledged zero tolerance for the Mexican cartels “preying on this community.” The federal Drug Enforcement Administration announced a major operation to protect Plano's youth, culminating in the indictment of twenty-nine “drug pushers” charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Sixteen of these defendants were local white teenagers who sold heroin (and marijuana) to other high school students; each agreed to a plea bargain and most received probation or limited jail time. The Mexican “kingpins”—in reality, low-level couriers in the cross-border trade—received mandatory-minimum sentences of twenty years to life for what prosecutors labeled their “calculated and cold-blooded” decision to “target young people in Plano as a new market.”1

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