How Mississippi Discovered The Drug War’s “Golden Egg”

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I’m fricked, Andy remembered thinking.

The agents told him they had photos, and videos too. He wasn’t sure how this could’ve happened. He’d grown up in Oxford, Mississippi, and only bought weed from friends. Yet the agents were telling him they’d caught him making three purchases for a total of 12.3 grams, enough to send him to prison.

“They made it sound really serious,” said Andy, who, like every defendant in this story, requested anonymity. “For a little bit of pot, I’d be in there for a long time.”

He first thought about his parents, he said, about how mad they’d get, about how awful it would be to call them asking to bail him out. Then he thought about prison, and it terrified him. He was 18 years old, a freshman at a junior college, and he hoped to transfer to a four-year university soon. He smoked weed and ate mushrooms every now and then, but he’d never gotten into serious trouble.

Now here he was, in June 2011, sitting at a table across from two stern-faced agents from the Lafayette County Metro Narcotics Unit, in a small room in a squat brick detention center down the road from Oxford Square, the city’s main hangout spot, where Ole Miss students and young locals gather for Tuesday morning coffees and Sunday brunches and Friday night beers. (BuzzFeed News put together Andy’s story through interviews with him, his lawyer, his father, and a review of court documents.) The agents had not arrested him, he said, and he was not in handcuffs or detained against his will. The agents had simply stopped him as he left a friend’s house and told him they’d wanted to speak with him. They told him they could send him to jail today if they wanted, and Andy said he imagined his future swirling down the drain.

I’m fricked.

Then the agents gave him an out, one that would spare Andy any punishment.

Each year, the tiny four-person Lafayette County Metro Narcotics Unit recruits on average 30 confidential informants, many of them college students. Around half of those arrested by Metro Narcotics in 2014 were first-time offenders, and the unit made three times as many arrests for marijuana as for any other drug. For two decades those arrests helped win nearly half the unit’s total budget from federal grants designed to help fight America’s War on Drugs. When the drug war began to cool down, and the federal funding dried up, local institutions stepped up to keep the unit alive. Thanks to money from the city and county governments and the University of Mississippi, Lafayette County Metro Narcotics continues busting college kids and turning them into informants by threatening them with hard time or the shame and lifelong burden of a drug record............

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