In the movies drug dealers make prospective clients sample the product on the theory that cops can’t/aren’t supposed to use drugs. Anyone who hesitates is therefore a cop. IRL how do cops deal with this?
Disclaimer: Purely informational inquiry. Not seeking advice.
The short answer is yes cops can break the law, with a maybe…
There always is a school of thought that cops can’t break the law to enforce it. And this becomes a great debate.
The test of this becomes as most things in law state, “Is it reasonable.” For intance, it’s resonable for a cop or an abulance to speed faster than the speed limit. The laws of the road don’t apply to an ambulance or a cop, IN CERTAIN circumstances, such as emergencies. Otherwise ambulances and police must obey the rules of the road.
Here’s a decent site from the Stanford Law Library
And even if cops couldn’t break the law there are tons of ways to get aroud.
Use informants. Find a two-bit thug who is willing to snitch for a parole approval or a lighter sentance.
Use of immunity. Let the cop break the law and grant immunity from prosecution. (Even Linda Tripp got off using this and she was just a regular citizen)
Deny it, who’s gonna belive a thug anyway
My F.I.L. was an undercover narc agent for 5 years. He never took a drug during that time. It was actually part of his cover. He was a “dealer” and knew that the drugs impaired his thinking, reaction time, etc. so he never took the stuff. Now, there were times that he was justified in fearing for his life. He was suspected of being a cop and was thrown in the bed of a pickup and driven to a landfill with a gun held to his head while his grave was being dug. He was able to get out of that unhurt.
He said the hardest part for him was hanging out in pool halls drinking beer. He always hated beer. But he got really good at pool and won a few tournaments.
Former narc. I won’t speak to the “legality”, only the reality. Yes, we would partake, but only soft drugs. You can generally fake-drag from joints or hash pipes.
I wouldn’t rule out that someone in “deep cover” did harder stuff, but people in our unit didn’t as a matter of policy, safety, and practicality.
Billy Queen, an ATF agent who went undercover with a motorcycle gang and authored a book about it, “Under and Alone,” gave a pretty interesting account of how he got around this. Basically, he said he never felt the need to do drugs. I think he described pretending to snort some sort of powder by covering up his nose and mouth with his hand and just spilling the stuff onto the ground. Also there was one instance where the boss of the biker gang had just gotten out of prison and couldn’t do drugs himself because he had to take a piss test, and Queen said he would stand in solidarity with him and since (the biker boss) couldn’t do drugs, he wouldn’t do drugs either. He was able to get quite a bit of mileage out of that.
He did wind up drinking a lot of beer though.