Law enforcers should be screened for alcoholism and fired if they don’t stay sober
Law enforcers, including members of the Armed Forces and Secret Service agents, should be screened and treated for alcoholism. Those who fail treatment should be fired.
“It’s against bureau policy for an agent to consume alcohol, even off duty…because an FBI agent is never off duty.” –Robert Hanssen, via Chris Cooper, “Breach” (reviewed in “Review of the Month” in the July 2007 issue of TAR).
The assertion was a lie, designed to make his young protégé believe he didn’t drink. However, Robert Hanssen, the alcoholic double-agent who is believed to have leaked more secrets to the Soviets than any traitor, ever, likely knew at some level why FBI agents shouldn’t be allowed to drink or, if one drinks addictively, why he shouldn’t be hired or retained. As described in Drunks, Drugs & Debits, no one can predict how destructive an alcoholic might become, or when. The existence of alcohol or other-drug addiction provides extraordinary insight into the person’s psyche and potential for misbehaviors: we know we can’t trust, rely on, depend on or believe a practicing alcoholic about anything, important or unimportant. This confuses the uninitiated, because sometimes alcoholics can be trusted. We just don’t know when.
I have long suggested regular and random screening of law enforcers for substance addiction. Such addiction requires a modicum of misbehaviors in one’s personal or professional life in conjunction with addictive use of psychotropic drugs, which are those capable of causing distortions of perception and memory in susceptible individuals. (The distortions lead to egomania, which impels the addicted person to wield capricious power over others, which can take form in abusing positions of authority in wildly unpredictable fashion.) The drugs include not only the illegal ones, but also alcohol and prescription drugs such as benzodiazepines (Valium and Xanax) and opioids (synthetic opiates including oxycodone and Vicodin). Once a law enforcer is suspected of addiction, he or she should be proscribed from consuming any psychotropic drug as a condition of keeping his or her job. Let the person use, but not on the taxpayer’s dime, where extraordinary damage can be done in the service of justice.
Targeted prohibition: narrowing the scope of the war on drugs and focusing on those who erratically damage others’ lives.
I am not suggesting a new Prohibition. On the contrary, the use of drugs is both a property rights issue (in terms of both the drug and your body) and a practical one: prohibition creates massive incentives for corruption among law enforcers and, because illegality leads to prices far higher than would occur in free markets, it rewards horrific behaviors with obscene wealth. In addition, until an addict decides to try sobriety, he will always find a way to get his drug, which because of higher-than-free market costs often in itself causes harm to others. Instead, once a person proves to society he or she cannot use safely without sometimes harming others, society has a right to proscribe use by that person and should make every effort to do so. Consequences are essential in getting addicts to make that crucial decision to stop using. Public employers should not only have the right, but the obligation to offer choices designed to drive addicted people to seek sobriety. Further, those in a position to coerce abstinence should be held accountable for a failure to have at least tried to do so.
“Bad cops” are almost always addicted ones. This includes everyday policemen, district attorneys, public defenders, judges, politicians and bureaucrats, all of whom are charged with making or enforcing laws. It also includes members of the Armed Forces who commit atrocities and Secret Service agents who engage in idiotic and stupid acts with the potential for endangering national secrets and the President of the United States.
We can greatly decrease the odds that bad cops stay that way by allowing, in cases of confirmed alcohol or other-drug addiction, credible promises of loss of employment and allowing superiors to terminate addicted law enforcers who repeatedly make the wrong decision.