by Alia Volz
Astoundingly, law enforcement didn’t need proof of criminal activity to confiscate property; they didn’t even have to file charges. They could now take everything simply by asserting “probable cause.” The new laws presumed that anything purchased “within a reasonable time” of a suspected drug deal was bought with drug money—which made it subject to forfeiture. Not only land, but also cars, computers, and jewelry. Even when the accused was later found not guilty, the legislation offered no roadmap for reclaiming what the government grabbed. In a searing 1991 exposé based on a review of 25,000 seizures nationwide, the Pittsburgh Press reported that 80 percent of the people whose property was taken were never even charged with a crime.
Under these new provisions, the feds were encouraged to divvy proceeds with local law enforcement; a lion’s share of the take flowed right back to police departments. Busting suspected drug offenders suddenly became lucrative in a way that fighting violent crimes—robberies, rapes, murders—was not.
During the Reagan years, CAMP mushroomed into the largest law enforcement task force in US history up to that point, involving more than one hundred agencies, and they all got a piece. In its first six years of operation, CAMP reported seizing $19.7 million in assets (equal to about $40.7 million in 2019) along with cash and thousands of vehicles. On the national level, a fund was created in 1986 to collect and dole out drug war money; by 1990, the kitty held $1.5 billion.
Reagan also championed a program to funnel disused military equipment—U-2 spy planes and helicopters, automatic weaponry, infrared imaging, armored vehicles, flash bang grenades—to local police for use against citizens. Increasingly, “Ronnie’s Raiders” turned to aggressive no-knock tactics—busting doors down unannounced at all hours without giving the occupants a chance to get dressed or comfort children.
Gone were the days when police had knocked politely on Mary Rathbun’s door.
With CAMP, California became the testing ground for drug war tactics that soon spread throughout the country. The inclusion of military-grade weaponry and profit-sharing between the feds and local police became standard. Harking back to the Nixon era, when the drug war’s targets were the “antiwar left and black people,” the Reagan administration put crosshairs on its perceived enemies: counterculture holdouts in rural areas and urban communities of color.
Crack made the scene in the mid-1980s, inspiring waves of sensationalized media coverage. From the beginning, it was portrayed as a black drug, despite similar usage rates across races. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 laid out grossly unequal sentencing for powder cocaine and crack, even though the chemical makeup is the same. The mandatory minimum sentence of five years in federal prison applied to dealers caught with five hundred grams of powder cocaine or just five grams of crack.
Drug arrests doubled during Reagan’s tenure. Defense attorneys in drug cases were soon required to report any fees received in cash as well as payments exceeding $10,000. The federal government could then seize those assets and destroy the attorney-client relationship. Think of it this way: If someone accused of murder had the means, he or she could hire top-notch defense lawyers, but defendants in penny-ante drug cases were stuck with overburdened public defenders.
This was the dawn of mass incarceration, which today imprisons nearly 2.3 million people in the United States. Almost 80 percent of people in the federal prison system and 60 percent of those incarcerated at the state level on drug offenses are black or Latino. One in every thirteen black adults has been stripped of his or her right to vote by a felony conviction.
CAMP, aimed at California growers, was the first salvo in this new War on Drugs. If the goal of those operations was to fatten coffers, militarize police, strip rural hippies of their land, and populate new private prisons with people of color, CAMP was an unequivocal success. But if the goal was to reduce the amount of California homegrown flowing through America, it didn’t work.
The pot-growing community banded together for support. They shared tips (like planting near bright manzanita to confuse infrared cameras) and used CBs and phone trees to warn one another when CAMP was prowling.
Busts drove up the market price. According to CAMP’s annual reporting, California sinsemilla brought an average wholesale price of $3,400 per pound in 1986, more than double what it had been at the beginning of the decade. Who could afford not to either grow or traffic weed? Especially in places like Willits, where legal jobs were scarce and paid little. Before CAMP came along, Mer had mostly stuck to selling brownies. Pot was bulky, odoriferous, and dangerous to transport. She had to bring a triple-beam scale in the car, making her intent to sell patently obvious. But it had become too lucrative to pass up.
These forces were beyond my comprehension as a child, though I knew that our kind was being hunted. I remember the helicopters pounding above our house, the U-2 spy planes cutting arcs overhead. My parents would point to the sky and whisper, “CAMP,” a simple statement of evil.
* * *
By 1984, Mer’s trips to the City had become heartbreaking and surreal.
People physically transformed between visits: from a handsome thirty-year-old to a frail seventy-year-old within months. Act normal, she’d think, struggling to mask her shock. Say something funny . . .
She can’t remember who among her friends was next to go after Michael and Patrick. AIDS took out so many people so quickly that it sometimes seemed more like a natural disaster—a tidal wave, a volcanic eruption, a flood—than a disease. Brownie customers disappeared from the shops and restaurants and bars where they’d worked for years. One month, a regular would be there buying his usual dozen. The next month, someone new would be working his shift.
From his post at the Village Deli, Dan Clowry watched his community change. Other waiters at the café began to miss shifts. Sometimes, when customers showed visible signs of illness, Dan’s coworkers would be too scared to serve them. Dan understood this less as a fear of contagion than a fear of confronting their own futures.
All these years later, Dan still thinks about a café regular who always dressed in spiffy 1940s military uniforms. One day, the guy came in with his entire head swollen and discolored “like a big purple balloon.” Nevertheless, he had put on his crisp uniform and plopped the little sailor cap on top of his suddenly enormous head. The other waiter on shift was freaked out, but Dan walked right over and sat down with his customer. “Honey,” he said. “You look fabulous today.”
Two revelations hit Dan that afternoon.
First, that he’d missed his calling; he should have gone into health care.
Second, that they were all in deep, deep shit.
* * *
San Francisco General had been the first hospital in the country to open a dedicated AIDS clinic back in 1983. It soon expanded into three wards. Scared of exposure to a disease about which so little was understood, some health practitioners refused to treat AIDS patients. The list of ailments grew longer and more bizarre—including infections normally suffered by cats, birds, sheep, and deer. The doctors and nurses who staffed wards 86 (outpatient) and 5B/5A (inpatient) volunteered to work those posts, running unknown risks. One nurse famously became infected via a needle stick and went right on nursing. These were days of true heroism. But nothing slowed the dying. “I haven’t cured anybody yet,” a nurse told journalist Carol Pogash. “And that’s tough.”
Doctors and nurses at General eschewed hazmat suits, face masks, and gloves—insisting that human touch was an essential component of treatment. Practitioners were encouraged to hug their patients, cry with their patients, feel and express love. “I don’t want them to think they’re like lepers,” one nurse said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. “That nobody wants to come near them.” Visitors could stay on the ward all night, and patients were empowered to decide who was welcome, defying the tradition of prioritizing blood relatives. Eventually, practitioners from around the world visited General to study “patient-centered care”; even Mother
Teresa took a tour. Not everyone was on board. Four nurses filed complaints with Cal/OSHA but lost their case. The network that arose between public health officials, doctors, community organizers, and patients became known internationally as the San Francisco Model.
The first blood test for human immunodeficiency virus, the cause of AIDS, was developed in 1984 and became widely available in 1985. Brownie customer and editor in chief of Drummer magazine Jack Fritscher remembers the sudden maturity the test demanded. “You look at your lover you’ve been with for all these years, and you think, Should we even get tested? What if one of us has it and one of us doesn’t?” Before visiting the clinic, he and his lover sat down to write up a game plan for each possible outcome. These were end-of-life decisions, normally the purview of couples entering their golden years, forced upon people in their twenties and thirties.
Even with the mode of transmission understood, confusion and paranoia persisted. Was it safe to hug and kiss? Were some kinds of sex okay and others not? Could you eat from the same plate of food? In 1985, the New York Times reported that 51 percent of survey respondents supported quarantining AIDS patients, 48 percent supported issuing identity cards, and 15 percent thought that people with HIV should be forcibly tattooed.
I ask my mom if she worried about contagion on the weekends she spent with sick friends at Beck’s. She answers with an anecdote. When she was five, her appendix burst, and she had to spend some time in the hospital. She got bored and somehow slipped past the nurses. After a frantic search, they found her on another floor, playing with kids in the polio ward. “I guess I knew on a gut level that it was okay,” she says about AIDS. “I worried a lot about my friends, but never about that.”
* * *
It’s hard to fathom the apathy with which the Reagan administration met the AIDS epidemic. Journalist Lester Kinsolving had asked the first-ever AIDS-related question at a White House press briefing in 1982. He wanted to know the president’s reaction to the CDC’s announcement that the “gay plague” was an epidemic with more than six hundred cases.
Reagan’s press secretary, Larry Speakes, teased the reporter: “I don’t have it,” he quipped, getting a laugh from the press pool. “Do you?”
Kinsolving tried repeatedly over subsequent years to get the White House to answer seriously. Speakes mocked his interest in “fairies” and insinuated that he must have the virus himself to be so curious.
That AIDS wasn’t exclusively attacking gays was a known fact; by late 1982, the illness had also been reported among IV drug users, hemophiliacs who received frequent transfusions, Haitian immigrants, and babies born to infected mothers. But voices within the power structure continued to frame AIDS as a gay affliction: the price of hedonism and perversion. Pat Buchanan, whom Reagan would later appoint as his communications director, wrote, “The poor homosexuals. They have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”
Reagan had made his own views on homosexuality apparent early on. As governor of California in the early 1970s, he’d vowed to veto attempts to reform an 1872 law prescribing felony penalties for “crimes against nature.” Willie Brown and George Moscone had had to wait for his departure to push the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill through. A man who believed sodomy should be a felony was now presiding over the onset of the AIDS epidemic.
Worse, the epidemic erupted during an era of fiscal conservatism, in which both the CDC and NIH were chronically understaffed and underfunded. Annually, like clockwork, the White House budget proposal either lowballed or slashed AIDS funding. Time and again, Congress forced Reagan’s hand to increase the amounts.
The surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, despite being staunchly antiabortion and deeply religious, thought moralizing had no place in a public health crisis of such magnitude. But his superiors within the administration forbade him from speaking about it. “For an astonishing five and a half years, I was completely cut off from AIDS,” Koop later wrote. “The conservative politics of the middle and late years of the Reagan Administration attempted to thwart my attempts to educate the public about AIDS and tried to stir up hostility toward its victims.” Not until after Reagan’s personal friend Rock Hudson died did the president allow Koop to mail an informational pamphlet about AIDS to American households. Fellow conservatives were scandalized when the surgeon general advocated condom use (abstention being the official line) and sex education in schools.
Reagan himself did not utter the word “AIDS” publicly until September 1985 when he was pushed by another persistent journalist. Adopting a defensive tone, the president characterized AIDS as “one of our top priorities,” and said, “I have been supporting it for over four years now.” His administration had just proposed reducing AIDS spending again. Congress, as before, would goose the number back up.
Reagan wouldn’t deliver his first speech on the epidemic until 1987 when he addressed the American Foundation for AIDS Research, an organization that Rock Hudson had helped launch in his last months. During the entire eighteen-minute talk, Reagan artfully managed not to say “gay” or “homosexual” once, instead focusing on babies born with the virus, hemophiliacs infected via blood transfusion, and spouses unaware of their partners’ shady pasts—the perceived innocent victims of the gay plague.
By that point, 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed with the disease; 20,849 had died.
* * *
San Francisco took care of its own.
Mayor Feinstein rose to the occasion. According to historian David Talbot, when Supervisor Harry Britt showed her the first requests for research funding in 1982, Feinstein said simply, “Fund everything.” Throughout the eighties, California consistently dedicated more resources to AIDS annually than any other state.
Community organizing was reborn. “We had to do it ourselves,” Cleve Jones says. “Our friends were starving to death because they were too weak to go out, so we had to create systems to bring them food. Landlords were evicting them because they were afraid of them, so we had to create systems to house them. We had to do our own research. We had to smuggle in medications.”
Organizations arose to help the sick and dying. Bill Pandolf, a longtime brownie customer, volunteered to drive patients to medical appointments through a “buddy” program. Project Open Hand and Meals on Wheels delivered hot food to those too sick to cook for themselves. Shanti Project and other hospice groups provided in-home care, counseling, and end-of-life housing. Project Inform kept people abreast of the latest drug trials, while the AIDS Emergency Fund paid late rent and overdue electric bills.
The plague manifested among white gay men first, but it shifted over time, cutting cruel swaths through neighborhoods of color and other marginalized groups. Transgender women were hit especially hard in a situation compounded by employment discrimination and poverty-related sex work. Where separatist movements of the 1970s had sometimes put lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people at odds, the pandemic demanded collaboration. Lesbians, especially, did a lot of heavy lifting during the worst years. “I counted on my women friends to live forever,” Mark Abramson wrote, “to cheer us on, to take care of us as we slid from our deathbeds into our graves.”
Activists learned to fundraise on a new scale. “I don’t remember what Harvey’s budget was for his [1977] campaign,” Cleve Jones says. “But it was about $25,000, which at that point seemed an astronomical sum. Within years, gay communities all across the country were routinely raising and spending millions of dollars. And then tens of millions of dollars.” The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, which had begun as an Easter prank in San Francisco in 1979, blossomed into an international HIV/AIDS education and fundraising organism.
Drummer, the magazine that had most defined San Francisco’s hard-core leather scene, reimagined itself through a lens of education. “We turned to fetishes as an idea of how to approach sex without having bodily fluids,” says Jack Fritscher. “We began to teach safe sex and the glories of solo sex through ar
ticles and videos.”
On ward 5B, a dancer named Rita Rockett brought home-cooked meals every Sunday using money she raised by passing the hat at community events. Dressed in showgirl garb, she tap-danced for patients and spent hours just hanging out. When diagnosis was a death sentence, people like Rita tried to make dying less lonely.
Brownie Mary volunteered as a nurse’s assistant and runner on ward 86, logging so many hours that she was named Volunteer of the Year. Convinced that cannabis eased a variety of AIDS-related symptoms, Mary sneaked dosed brownies and cookies to patients on the ward. With scant treatment options, doctors and nurses turned a blind eye.
Dennis Peron and others donated pot so Mary could distribute her goodies on the ward for free. At her maximum, Mary allegedly baked up to 15,000 marijuana treats per month. It wasn’t enough.
* * *
On monthly visits to the City, Mer watched the Castro empty out. Suddenly, there was ample parking, vacancies where there’d been a housing crisis, half-empty restaurants. Amid much controversy, the health department began shutting down bathhouses in 1984. Parties evolved into memorials and fundraisers. When local TV news interviewed Dan Clowry about the new challenges facing merchants in San Francisco’s gay corridors, he said, “Business is dying off,” and immediately regretted his word choice.
In January 1984, Dan White was released from prison after serving less than five years for assassinating Harvey Milk and George Moscone. Protests erupted; some demonstrators wore buttons that said, DAN WHITE’S HIT SQUAD. Authorities paroled him to Los Angeles to avoid bloodshed, but he slipped back into his hometown. In October 1985, he ran a garden hose from the exhaust pipe of his 1973 Buick LeSabre into its front window and killed himself. Reporters who went looking for vindictive comments from Castro residents were met with something akin to a shrug. “I’m glad his conscience caught up with him,” one said. There were bigger fish to fry.
