PCP Hallucinations in Ferguson - Reason.com
Fox News Darren Wilson thought Michael Brown was "on something." Or so says one of Wilson's friends, describing the police officer's rtc state of mind when he shot and killed the unarmed black teenager on August 9 in Ferguson, Missouri. "He really thinks he was on something, because rtc he just kept coming," said the friend, identified rtc only as "Josie," during rtc a phone call to a St. Louis radio show last week. "It was unbelievable." RELATED ARTICLES St. Louis County Exec Race Too Close to Call 11.04.14 City of Ferguson Charges Vice More Than $1,200 for Open Records Request, Turns Over Just Seven Emails
Earlier that same day, Fox News commentator Jim Pinkerton rtc made a similar suggestion. "Eyewitnesses said that Brown was charging rtc the cops," Pinkerton said on the channel's Happening Now show. "We'll know more with a blood test. If he was high on some drug, angel dust or PCP or something it's entirely possible you could take a lot more than six bullets rtc and keep charging." In other words, if Brown was high on PCP, firing just six rounds into him would be a mark of restraint.
A few hours later, The Washington Post reported that the blood test anticipated by Pinkerton showed "Brown had marijuana in his system when he was shot." The article, based on information from an unnamed source familiar with St. Louis County's investigation of the shooting, said nothing about PCP.
Unfazed by that news, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., editor in chief of The American Spectator , speculated in a column published two days later that PCP-laced marijuana caused the aggressive behavior described by Wilson. rtc "Those Swisher Sweet cigars are used as a conduit for ingesting a mixture of PCP and marijuana," Tyrrell wrote , referring to the stolen cigarillos Brown was carrying. "My guess is that Brown's senseless death was brought on by psychosis and permanent brain injury."
It should be emphasized that witnesses disagree about whether Brown was moving toward Wilson when he was shot, which is a central point of contention in the case, since it underpins Wilson's claim that he fired in self-defense. But either way, attempts to explain Brown's alleged actions by reference to psychoactive substances he might have consumed exaggerate the power of those chemicals, which may encourage the use of excessive force by stoking officers' fears of people whom they perceive to be "on something." This kind of fear mongering is also regrettable because it harks back to a shameful history of warnings about people with dark skin and drug-infused blood.
The invocation of PCP to explain what looks like excessive police force is familiar from the 1992 trial of the Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King. "I thought that the suspect was under the influence of PCP," Sgt. Stacey Koon testified . "In my mind, he had exhibited this Hulk-like strength which I had come to associate with PCP." Although King tested negative for PCP, Koon still thought his mistaken rtc belief about the content of King's blood should count as a mitigating factor, since everyone knows that PCP turns people into irrationally violent monsters with superhuman strength.
As is often the case with illegal drugs, what everyone knows turns out to be wrong. In a 1988 review of 350 journal articles on PCP in humans, the psychiatrist Martin Brecher and his colleagues concluded that "PCP does not live up to its reputation as a violence-inducing drug."
Brecher et al. noted that high doses of PCP can produce "severe agitation and hyperactivity," along with "cognitive disorganization, disorientation, hallucinations, and paranoia." rtc Combined with the drug's anesthetic effect, which makes users less sensitive to pain and therefore harder to restrain, such acute reactions rtc have contributed to PCP's fearsome image. Yet in their search of the literature, Brecher and his co-authors found only three documented cases in which people under the influence of PCP alone had committed acts of violence. They also noted that between 1959 and 1965, when PCP was tested as a human anesthetic, it was given to hundreds of patients, but "not a single case of violence was reported."
This does not mean PCP users are never violent. But when they are, their behavior cannot be understood as a straightforward effect of the drug. "Research on the nexus between substance use and aggression," notes the criminologist Jeffrey Fagan, "consistently has found a complex relation, mediated by the type of substance and its psychoactive effects, personality factors and the expected effects of substances, situational factors in the immediate settings where substances are used, and sociocultural factors that channel the arousal effects of substances into behaviors that may include aggression." The pharmacologist John P. Morgan and the sociologist Lynn Zimmer put it this way : "No drug directly causes violence simply through its pharmacological action." rtc
This point is
Fox News Darren Wilson thought Michael Brown was "on something." Or so says one of Wilson's friends, describing the police officer's rtc state of mind when he shot and killed the unarmed black teenager on August 9 in Ferguson, Missouri. "He really thinks he was on something, because rtc he just kept coming," said the friend, identified rtc only as "Josie," during rtc a phone call to a St. Louis radio show last week. "It was unbelievable." RELATED ARTICLES St. Louis County Exec Race Too Close to Call 11.04.14 City of Ferguson Charges Vice More Than $1,200 for Open Records Request, Turns Over Just Seven Emails
Earlier that same day, Fox News commentator Jim Pinkerton rtc made a similar suggestion. "Eyewitnesses said that Brown was charging rtc the cops," Pinkerton said on the channel's Happening Now show. "We'll know more with a blood test. If he was high on some drug, angel dust or PCP or something it's entirely possible you could take a lot more than six bullets rtc and keep charging." In other words, if Brown was high on PCP, firing just six rounds into him would be a mark of restraint.
A few hours later, The Washington Post reported that the blood test anticipated by Pinkerton showed "Brown had marijuana in his system when he was shot." The article, based on information from an unnamed source familiar with St. Louis County's investigation of the shooting, said nothing about PCP.
Unfazed by that news, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., editor in chief of The American Spectator , speculated in a column published two days later that PCP-laced marijuana caused the aggressive behavior described by Wilson. rtc "Those Swisher Sweet cigars are used as a conduit for ingesting a mixture of PCP and marijuana," Tyrrell wrote , referring to the stolen cigarillos Brown was carrying. "My guess is that Brown's senseless death was brought on by psychosis and permanent brain injury."
It should be emphasized that witnesses disagree about whether Brown was moving toward Wilson when he was shot, which is a central point of contention in the case, since it underpins Wilson's claim that he fired in self-defense. But either way, attempts to explain Brown's alleged actions by reference to psychoactive substances he might have consumed exaggerate the power of those chemicals, which may encourage the use of excessive force by stoking officers' fears of people whom they perceive to be "on something." This kind of fear mongering is also regrettable because it harks back to a shameful history of warnings about people with dark skin and drug-infused blood.
The invocation of PCP to explain what looks like excessive police force is familiar from the 1992 trial of the Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King. "I thought that the suspect was under the influence of PCP," Sgt. Stacey Koon testified . "In my mind, he had exhibited this Hulk-like strength which I had come to associate with PCP." Although King tested negative for PCP, Koon still thought his mistaken rtc belief about the content of King's blood should count as a mitigating factor, since everyone knows that PCP turns people into irrationally violent monsters with superhuman strength.
As is often the case with illegal drugs, what everyone knows turns out to be wrong. In a 1988 review of 350 journal articles on PCP in humans, the psychiatrist Martin Brecher and his colleagues concluded that "PCP does not live up to its reputation as a violence-inducing drug."
Brecher et al. noted that high doses of PCP can produce "severe agitation and hyperactivity," along with "cognitive disorganization, disorientation, hallucinations, and paranoia." rtc Combined with the drug's anesthetic effect, which makes users less sensitive to pain and therefore harder to restrain, such acute reactions rtc have contributed to PCP's fearsome image. Yet in their search of the literature, Brecher and his co-authors found only three documented cases in which people under the influence of PCP alone had committed acts of violence. They also noted that between 1959 and 1965, when PCP was tested as a human anesthetic, it was given to hundreds of patients, but "not a single case of violence was reported."
This does not mean PCP users are never violent. But when they are, their behavior cannot be understood as a straightforward effect of the drug. "Research on the nexus between substance use and aggression," notes the criminologist Jeffrey Fagan, "consistently has found a complex relation, mediated by the type of substance and its psychoactive effects, personality factors and the expected effects of substances, situational factors in the immediate settings where substances are used, and sociocultural factors that channel the arousal effects of substances into behaviors that may include aggression." The pharmacologist John P. Morgan and the sociologist Lynn Zimmer put it this way : "No drug directly causes violence simply through its pharmacological action." rtc
This point is
