corruption which entails outright trafficking in illegal drugs. In the past few years, hundreds of cases have surfaced in communities throughout the United States in which police officers have been charged with taking part in the drug trade. In many of these cases, the officers have entered into agreements of one form or another with known drug traffickers in the hopes of participating in the immense profits that the illicit trade often affords. In other cases, it has been found that the drugs utilized by police officers for illegal trade have been obtained either through confiscations from people on the streets, or from thefts of drugs from police property rooms (Carter and Stephens 6).
The scope of police involvement in the illegal drug trade is truly vast. For example, an article in the popular magazine, Rolling Stone, recently listed seventy-one known cases of police corruption involving drugs, and concluded by stating that the list was most definitely far from being complete. This list encompassed only some of the most prominent stories from various states throughout the union between the years of 1983 and 1985. One of the cases cited involved a Drug Enforcement Administration agent in Texas who had been with the force for over twelve years and was found guilty of attempting to smuggle over seven hundred pounds of marijuana into the United States. At the trial, the agent's attorney blamed his client's actions on the fact that he had undergone "constant exposure to crime" and that this had eventually eroded the agent's sense of morality (Stanford 64). In another case, a highly respected Washington officer was brought to trial on four drug distribution charges but was acquitted because of the corruption of his fellow officer, who was supposed to have testified against him. In that case, the testifying officer "may have damaged his credibility as a witness when he said he frequently hallucinated on PCP and LSD while on t...