The Twenty-Fourth Episode of the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

This is the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast, my name is Dave. The mayor of New York City, where spring is springing and he is still not indicted, has a podcast. The only person listening to it is a dogwalker in Queens named Dave, it’s me, I’m the Dave, hello.

And Eric Adams has re-started his podcast. After a break of several months, he’s recording The Get Stuff Done Cast again, meaning I’m trying as quickly as I can to get through the book I intended to fill this interregnum with: 2009’s Don’t Let It Happen. But boy has it turned into a sandpit. Still, I’m making progress, so please don’t listen to his podcast if you want to know about his podcast, his podcast is terrible and will damage you. Listen to this podcast if you’re interested in his podcast, I promise I will be recording an episode about his most recent episode soon, it’s incredibly bad, I’m taking the hit for all of us. We’ll talk a bit more about the book in today’s episode and the two following it, and I’m recording all of them at the same time, so it should be pretty soon that I get back to his podcast.

Since it has only been a few days since the last episode dropped, newswise I just want to quickly touch on a story from the subway. And this is really violent, just a heads up, so skip ahead a bit if you don’t want that in your life. All of this is on video if you want to find it. Anyway, it’s a weekday afternoon a few days ago and a guy, Guy 1, gets on a full A train, starts calling another guy, let’s call him Guy 2, a migrant, saying migrants beat up the police, saying he’d like to do violence to Guy 2. At a certain point, Guy 2 has enough of this, squares off, and they fight. Guy 1, the bigot, gets Guy 2 down and seems to be harming him, at which point a woman shanks Guy 1 in the back, and again, Guy 1 is the guy who set this off by being belligerent and racist. I have no idea what this woman’s relationship to any of these people is, but it seems like she was defending Guy 2, who had been the subject of some vile hate speech and was getting assaulted. Guy 1 and Guy 2 are separated by a good samaritan, incident is over. Guy 1’s back is bleeding but Guy 1 isn’t down, he’s probably hospital material, but looks like he’ll ultimately be ok, except that he didn’t like being stabbed, so he goes to his jacket that he’d taken off, and pulls out a gun. At this point the videos I’ve seen, which are from bystanders, become extremely focused on getting off the train (all of this is happening between stops), so we don’t see what happens next, but we can hear gunshots. 

It’s become clear in the aftermath that Guy 2 took Guy 1’s gun off of him and fed it to him. Guy 1, the instigator, is in critical condition with gunshot wounds to the head, and also stab wounds to the back. Guy 2 has so far been released as it appears he was acting in self-defense. No word on the woman or if she’ll face charges.

This is tragic, of course, and scary and upsetting. It’s also rare, I mean the reason we hear about these things, is that they’re extremely unusual. The rate of violent crimes on the subway is approximately 1 per 1 million rides. But also, this happened after Hochul sent the National Guard and State Troopers into the system to conduct bag checks to catch weapons so clearly bag checks work great. What also seems to work, for certain values of working, is whipping people up with rhetoric about migrants and the terrible things that certain politicians and media personalities claim they’re responsible for. Seems like that gets results, results that smell like cordite.

One other thing I wanted to mention: In the last episode of the podcast I talked a bit about John Chell, the NYPD Chief of Department, who claims to be running a non-profit online storefront to sell swag with his office’s logo on it, and who also doxxed a recent arrestee and the judge he claimed had let that guy off, but whoops it was a different judge altogether and also his little tchotchke storefront is a for profit enterprise.

One thing I neglected to mention about Chell: In 2008 he shot a man to death. As reported by The Daily Beast, Chell, who has racked up an impressive list of misconduct claims and at least one racial bias claim from within the department, claimed that in the process of attempting to arrest Ortanzso Bovell, a 25-year-old Black man, he, Chell, tripped and accidentally fired his gun, killing Bovell. In 2017 a civil jury thought little enough about that argument that they awarded Bovell’s mother 1.5 million dollars from the city, finding that Chell intentionally shot her son. Seems like it’s worth mentioning in discussions of the guy.

Right, let’s get into it. It’s time for Chapter 7: Drug Use. This is 35 pages long, and most of the 6 chapters we’ve discussed so far have been a page or two, none were more than 9. So, that’s interesting. Adams really wants to talk about drugs, I guess. It’s also the first time we encounter some of the “unique blend” of case studies that were promised by Adams’ long time partner, Tracey Collins, in the foreword. So, let’s get into the first of those, which more or less leads the chapter off, after some mild throat clearing from the author about how he intends to arm us with information about drugs. Nice of him.

“Robert lived with his family in a large public housing development, sharing an apartment with his mother, grandmother and several brothers and sisters. Unbeknownst to his mother, Robert stored drugs in his bedroom, and the police department had his drug activity under survaillance. After gathering enough evidence, police officers obtained a warrant and searched the family's apartment. Robert and his entire family, including his grandmother and his younger siblings, were apprehended during the search and led out of the home in handcuffs. Felony laws allowed the police to subsequently file papers seeking to have the family removed from the public housing development, and Robert's family was eventually evicted from their apartment. Robert's decision to involve himself in the drug trade impacted every member of his family.”

There’s this thing with the way the rhythms of stories can take over for the content. We talked about it in the context of conspiracy based “journalism” but you see it a lot with ‘inspiring stories’ like when a kid has a bake sale to raise money for, like, his teacher’s chemotherapy, or something like that. It’s a nice thing for the kid to do, and you’ll see it in the button slot of the 11 o’clock news, so you get sent off to bed with a little pick up for your mood as long as you don’t ask too many questions. I was unfortunate to be educated with a focus on rigorous textual analysis, which would be a terrible boast if it was one. It isn’t, it’s just to say that I’m kinda constitutionally oriented towards asking questions about stories, so: Adams’ story has the rhythms of a cautionary tale. A guy does the wrong thing, and suddenly his entire family is ruined. So don’t be like him. But how do you avoid that? What forces lead them to be in that position? Why was Robert, who sounds like he was old enough to be taking adult charges, living in public housing with his mom and grandmother and several younger siblings? What happened to his dad, and his dad’s earning potential? Was that why Robert felt he had to earn more money? Why was a high risk black market the place he had to turn to for money? Was it because he wanted to put everyone in danger, including children, or because he felt he had no choice? What was he even doing with the drugs? Adams doesn’t say Robert was a dealer. Was he just holding for someone? What would have happened to him or his family had he refused to do so?

Since the police had the place under surveillance, they presumably knew which member of the family was responsible for the drugs, so why was the entire family perp-walked? A grandmother and her grandchildren - some presumably under 18 - were put in handcuffs and we’re positioned to believe that Robert made that happen, but that’s a choice the cops made, and presumably the state or some other housing authority made the decision to make them all homeless based on the decisions of, I assume, a person who did not own or rent the housing that they were all sharing. Felony laws allowed the police to do this, Adams says, but why society structured the law this way, and why prosecutors would use their discretion this aggressively to further immiserate an entire fucking family including elderly people and children, that goes unstated.

Adams follows this with a story about a middle class 16 year old who starts holding drugs for a boyfriend. When that boyfriend is arrested for shooting another guy, he fingers her for holding for him. She is also pregnant. The cops arrest this pregnant child, and her parents go broke mounting a defense for her.

Up next is a story about a 14 year old boy whose crack addicted mother abandons him. So he sells crack because - it’s unstated here but it seems like a safe assumption - someone coerced him into doing so. When he was arrested he was illiterate and couldn’t write down his name. Adams ends the story there, so we don’t hear about how the justice system dealt with, again, this child. We don’t get any indication that anyone in power reflected on the failings of a society that produced a teenager who couldn’t read or write, who had drug dealers reaching him instead of social workers.

“These case studies are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to narcotics-related horror stories, which is why many states and the federal government have taken an aggressive approach to fighting drugs.” Now Adams does point out, to his credit that “...some of these initiatives can be devastating for those young people who may experiment with drugs.” And “Critics of the law point to how the country’s drug policies disproportionately affect citizens of color.”

Adams seems to include these critiques as an acknowledgement that they’re true, but he also seems to have a sense of “But what are you gonna do” about all of it. Well, I can think of a couple things. None of them are: throw kids in jail. The thing is: Adams is now the mayor. In 2009 it might have made some sense to write, like, “heads up, cops and the justice department are going to ruin your family if you get involved in drugs'' though by the time this was written he was a state senator. But Adams doesn’t seem to have much moral outrage about the state’s role in these outcomes. He seems to view the things that happened to these families as tidal forces, the responses of the universe to the drug trade, not policy decisions that can be changed, and could be changed, in fact, by the mayor of New York City, who is, instead, doing very little about overpolicing, very little to end the drug war, and keeping Rikers open despite the fact that it has descended into a true hell, where among other things, drugs flow freely among the inmates and the COs.

So many Black families have described The Talk that they have with their kids about what to do when encountering cops. It’s totally understandable to say to your kid that, while you wish things were different, please just do the things you need to do so that you come home. We can only work on changing society if we’re alive. But the thing with Adams is that, outside of a bit of pro forma acknowledgement that there are inequities in how the drug war is waged, there’s no sense from him that the drug war is basically wrong, that the police shouldn’t be pulling whole families out of housing projects for the sins of a single member of the family, sins that would not be committed if the war itself wasn’t being waged, and that waging the war is a choice that can be changed at any time.

Right now, today, there’s enough money, enough resources, enough, just: enough, for you and I and everyone else to have the world we want.

I just wanted to note that. If for no other reason than, once elected, people like Eric Adams call people who say such things unrealistic, while pouring money into policing, pulling money from other services, and refusing to acknowledge that, even if they funded policing as much as they wanted, the richest city in the richest nation in the world could still find money for everyone, if money is what’s needed. If it’s not, it can find time, people, infrastructure. Whatever we need, this city, this amazing place, could take care of every single human that calls it home, could absorb every single newcomer, could be a real place of safety and importance, and people like Eric Adams only need to turn a few dials. That they do not is theft.

The next 20 pages of this book are given to describing the ways that individual drugs work, symptoms that attend taking them, and various other trivia about them.

I tend to take a harm reductionist approach to drug use. I think, like sex, most drugs carry risk, but, people are going to do this stuff. It’s, like, impossible to stop them. This is obviously not medical advice, nor is it legal advice. I know people who’ve died from ODs, I know people who’ve been arrested. I consider both outcomes the result of the drug war. But, regardless, I’m not here to advise you on safe drug use, or the legal risks. I’m just letting you know where I come from on the subject, which is probably necessary context to understanding how I approach Adams’ work here.

Suffice to say, I don’t think much of it. So, rather than deal with what he has to say about drugs and his claims about their negative effects, about which he goes on at some length, I’m just going to list the slang terms and phrases he claims people use for each drug I feel like that’ll give you a pretty good handle on the usefulness of everything else he has to say about them.

Marijuana: Banano, Blunt, Bush, Chronic, Reefer, Ganja, Lace, “Let’s go get an L”, “Who’s got trees”, “You got that L?”

Cocaine: Angie, Aunt Nora, The All-American Drug, Barbs, Bernie’s flakes, California cornflakes, blow, “Beam me up Scotty”, Cocktail, Ocean Spray, Soda, Yeyo, Zip, Zips.

Crack: Base house, Bah-say, Baseball, Bazooka, bubble gum, Bottles, Caps, Cat’s pee, Crack house, freebase, On the pipe, “Who got the crumbs?”

I can’t let this quote about PCP go by: “Often, while performing in my law enforcement capacity or while conducting one of my conferences, I have the opportunity to discover a unique way that drug users conceal their habits. I was attending a conference in New York when a seminar participant sought me out to tell me that each morning, her son would bring his own plastic bag of Sweet'N Low to the breakfast table, and she would watch him sprinkle it on his cereal. Her curiosity compelled her to send a sample of the sugar to the New York City police department for analysis. The department reported back to her that the substance was not sugar, but PCP. Users of PCP are known to sprinkle it on their food.”

This sounds like a real thing that happened, doesn’t it? But also, I don’t think the NYPD will just analyze drugs for you, their labs are pretty consistently backed up and behind on analyzing the evidence from actual crimes, but regardless, whatever you do: do not send things you think might be drugs to the police.

Anyway, slang for PCP: Angel dust, synthetic cocaine, dusty roads. Synthetic cocaine is like the least slang term for anything? Can you imagine being around a bunch of sweating guys, grinding their molars to dust, veins popping out all over their bodies, pupils the size of pinheads, and one of them says “fellows, could one of you please pass the synthetic cocaine?”

Inhalants: Adams helpfully provides a comprehensive list of household items you can use to get high if you like, but breaks format and doesn’t tell us any of the slang terms he thinks people might be using for them.

MDMA: XTC, X, Adam, Clarity, lovers’ speed.

Adams briefly talks about drugs associated with the dance scene, which, according to Adams, includes meth and psilocybin, and I guess I don’t go to dance parties like the ones Adams does. He talks about hallucinogens, and again includes shrooms, but he doesn’t really go into them much.

Amphetamines: Crystal, glass, ice cream, jam, snow seals, turkey, white powder.

Opiates: Belushi, heavy stuff, wings, witch, NY Undercover. I feel like I should note that Adams spends very little time on opiates, and it’s historically interesting, if nothing else. The internet tells me that, in 2009, the year of this book’s publication, and also the year a friend of mine OD’d and died, about 20,000 Americans died of opiates. By 2021, it was close to 100,000 Americans every year. I don’t have much else to say about this, I guess, except that in a just world the entire Sackler family would be hanging from street lamps and I hope there’s a Hell.

Adams gave us a bunch of extremely accurate information about how to spot users of the individual drugs above, but out of a concern for parents, he transitions now to general indicators, and he advises, “When trying to determine if your child is using drugs, my advice is: don’t show your hand. At first simply observe your child’s habits and take note of any changes.” I’d like to congratulate Jordan Coleman on what must have been an incredibly normal and trust filled childhood with his father who is now being normal to the entire city of New York.

Signs of drug use in children that Adams highlights include staying out, or up, late. Attitude changes. Changes to their normal routine. Calls from school. Stealing from school or home. I was going to make a joke here about how you’re just describing been a teenager, but actually, when you think about it, hormones are intense fucking drugs. 

Anyway, Adams advises buying hair testing kits to see if your kid’s using drugs and, accuracy problems aside, a quick search leads me to believe you need to get a lot of hair and it needs to come from close to the scalp, so you can’t just go through your kid’s comb or whatever. Whomever you’re testing is going to know it. Sounds like a fun family activity.

Speaking of fun family activities, Adams says this with regards to detecting drugs: “I've found that the best way to arm yourself against concealed drugs is to visit your local spy shop. They have devices straight out of a James Bond movie.

Mary Snead found these devices to be helpful. Mary was a high school student who believed that her younger brother was involved with drugs, but she could not prove it. Mary visited the spy shop and purchased a phone listening device. It came with easy instructions and allowed her to record her brother's phone conversations. Two weeks went by before Mary heard what she was expecting: her brother and a neighbor were discussing the money they had made selling drugs. Mary took this information to her parents, who subsequently informed their neighbor's parents. Both families were able to intervene and prevent the problem from escalating.”

What the fuck. This is a federal crime. Look it up, it only took me a couple minutes of searching for google to start screaming DON’T DO THIS at me. At the state level, at least one person, and in many states, all people, involved in the call have to know it’s being recorded, or you have to be a fucking cop with a fucking warrent! What the actual fuck is this, man?

Adams notes that some people may be uncomfortable using technology this way, but fortunately he’s got another way. Toss your kid’s room. “There is another procedure that you can carry out: a routine, methodical search of your child's room. These searches should take place weekly, at two different times: first, when the child is not at home; second, after your child comes home, drops their stuff but then goes to another part of the house.

The search when your loved one is not at home should be carried out slowly and methodically. You should not only look for drugs, you should also look for items used to administer drugs. Be as creative in your search as your children are in hiding. Move Counter-clockwise. This will ensure that you cover every possible hiding place at least once. You will also develop a methodical pattern that you can use in future searches. It should take you at least an hour conduct (sic) this type of search.

When your child is home but in another part of the house, be quick and thorough. Don't go through the large area that the previous search discussed. Begin this search as soon as your children place their knapsacks or school bags down and go to another part of the house that will occupy them for a while (e.g., bathroom, basement, backyard, etc.). Our studies have shown that upon entering the home, drug users often either put their contraband back in its hiding place or leave it in the carrying item that they walked in with (knapsack, jacket, etc).”

That “our studies have shown” bit stuck out to me as exactly the kind of phrasing that would be the result of a cut and paste job from a study that Adams lifted, but didn’t credit. I poked around and couldn’t find any studies that used that wording or actually found what Adams claims, so who fucking knows, but the bigger point about the long quote I just read is: Motherfucking Yikes. I understand that people look through each others’ stuff in families, I’m sure my parents probably did to me, and I understand that kids, generally, don’t have privacy rights in the home except to the extent that their parents grant them. But take a second and imagine the household that Adams is describing here. First, the house is fucking huge. You can be in a kid’s room while the kid is home and not have them know it. Second, the person conducting this search has a whole hour every week to devote to the task, which must be carried out while the kid’s out of the house, which is most often gonna be during working hours. If someone goes into your bedroom for an hour and thoroughly searches it, you’re going to know it! And with all this free time you have to search, to treat your child like a suspect, Adams never advises TALKING TO YOUR CHILD. Telling them you love and support them, that they can tell you if they made a mistake or if something is scaring them. That you’ll love them no matter if they get offered drugs, or even if they make the mistake of using them before they’re old enough to make decisions like that for themselves. Asking if they know people who use drugs, or if they’ve ever been offered drugs. Asking them how they felt about it, what people at school say about it. Is any of this going to stop a kid who wants to use drugs from using them? Well, is slitting open their pillow and popping their vanity mirror off its mountings gonna? 

Adams next advises going through their garbage, their shoes, the seams of their clothing, their backpacks, and also that you wear gloves in case you get jabbed by a razor or, as he puts it “an infected needle” and again, is this book for parents or for particularly shitty cops? Go through their closets, drawers, perfume jars, bedding, books, magazines, picture frames, and the planters they keep their plants in. “Also look closely at plants to make sure they are not marijuana plants.” Which is just an all timer sentence, brilliantly stupid, the man who wrote that now commands a armed force numbering 50,000 people and has direct control of an educational system responsible for teaching 1.1 million children a year. Good. That’s good. That’s what we want. 

Adams gives a rundown of what drug paraphernalia looks like, in case you have never gone outside or turned on a television. But yes, if you find a shit ton of tiny plastic bags, bent spoons, rubber tubing and powdered lactose in your kid’s room, probably time to consider the possibility that they may be involved with drugs.

And in that regard, now that you’ve found evidence of drugs in the home, Adams has some really great advice for the next steps:

“Once it is discovered that drugs are in your loved one's life, it is important to obtain necessary treatment. There are many agencies that concentrate on treatment. One organization that I have found very helpful is Narcotic Anonymous (NA). You can probably find a chapter in your community.”

That’s it, and I’m sure you don’t need me to point out that this advice is extremely helpful and useful. Or that Adams doesn’t seem to know Narcotics Anonymous well enough to know that Narcotics is plural in the name of the organization.

Having solved drugs in your home, Eric Adams, who today commands a budget of close to 100 billion dollars, wants you to rid your community of drugs, and the good news is, “Feeling helpless to rid your community of illegal drugs, and the violence that is associated with them, is a thing of the past. There are many organizations and well as law enforcement groups that are eager to assist you. Considering the following tips (and that’s yet another typo, again, of this theoretically ghostwritten book. Anyway, the following tips are for your considering):

• Know the facts about drug usage

• Involve the young adults in your community

• Involve your local media

• Involve retailers

• Involve schools

• Involve churches

• Involve healthcare providers

• Involve civic and volunteer organizations

• Involve elected officials”

Well, that’s drugs solved. This chapter was very bad and stupid and useless, and that’s sometimes all the analysis that’s needed. Adams may or may not be smart but this book is full of stupid shit that he wrote. Sometimes it’s just worth taking people as they present themselves, especially if they’re asking you to vote them into positions of incredible power. Would have been nice if any reporters had bothered to read what Adams had written, but oh well. It’s not like it’s that much weirder than the shit he regularly says, which is the sort of stuff that if I said it to my clients, they wouldn’t let me walk their dogs anymore.

More power, fewer consequences, pretty good chance that in 8 months we’ll be giving the nuclear codes to an illiterate racist accused of 91 felonies and multiple sexual assaults. This is fine.

Until next time, I recommend reading and supporting The City and Hell Gate. If you liked this, or thought it was interesting and want to hear more, the best way to make sure you do so is to hit subscribe on whatever podcatcher app you’re using to hear my voice right now. The best way to let other people know about this podcast is to tell a friend or enemy about it. Rate and review it, I can’t stop you… I can’t stop anything. Oh no!

Transcripts of this show are available at:

https://stuffstuffcastcast.wixsite.com/stufftranscripts

I’d love to hear from you. You can email me at:

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My thanks, as always, to John Coyne.

See you next time.