Confessions of a Drug War Propagandist
Originally published in the August 2013 issue of The Hemp Connoisseur magazine.
Belita Nelson is on a roll. Seated at a document-strewn kitchen table inside her brick two-story brick home in Idaho Springs, the spry 61-year-old pours a cup of coffee and continues her exposition.
“The War on Drugs has corrupted law enforcement to the point where the DEA is indistinguishable from the cartels,” she says in a Texas drawl. “The only solution is legalization—full legalization. For all drugs.”
Listening to her, it’s hard to believe she was once the most vocal and high-profile drug warriors in the state of Texas. The chain of events that led her here—not just the 800 miles to Colorado, but the 180 degrees to a pro-legalization perspective—represents more than just the personal journey of high school debate teacher-turned-DEA spokeswoman-turned-whistleblower. It offers a glimpse into the propaganda apparatus of the most powerful drug enforcement agency in the land.
“I was used,” she says. “But one thing I don’t think they realized is I have a mind of my own. I’m not so naïve anymore.”
Her son’s battles with heroin addiction sprung her into anti-drug activism in the late 1990’s including founding a non-profit referral organization for drug addicts and their families. The DEA came calling not long after and on their behalf she took tothe national airwaves as spokeswoman, delivering hercautionary tales with schoolmarm earnestness. She was invited onto Nightline to tell her story. The Oprah Winfrey Show flewher out to Chicago for a guest appearance. She had her own radio show on a Dallas-based Clear Channel affiliate. She was quickly becoming the Nancy Grace of America’s drug war.
But as the DEA directed her to propagate ever more outrageous claims, Belita’s faith began to weaken. For one, an “education coordinator” implored her to weave anti-marijuana talking points into her narrative, despite the fact it was heroin that nearly killed her son. They seemed more interested in locking people up than in helping patients. So when DEA agents offered Belita and Jason $10,000 per month to act as a confidential informant and hand over her patient files—a breach of federal law—it took her little time to formulate an answer.
“I told them to go to hell.”
This rebuke, combined with her increasingly strident pro-legalization stance, incited the wrath of her former associates within the DEA and Plano Police Department, Belita claims. Eventually this culminated with Belita’s being accused of using her foundation’s funds for personal use. Whether part of a retribution campaign or not, the charges never came close to sticking. The DA in charge requested that the case be dismissed; evidence provided by law enforcement reeked of grasping-at-straw axe-grinding.
Nevertheless, the accusations left her foundation and professional reputation in shambles— though her decision to relocate to the Colorado Rockies is about more than just saving face. Her relocation comes at the heels of cryptic warnings from her few remaining allies within Texas law enforcement circles.
“They said, ‘You’ve got to get out of Plano, Belita. You’ve got a target on your back.,’” she says, blowing into a coffee cupped between her hands. “But I don’t care anymore. I’ve reached a point now where I just want the truth out.”
* *
By the spring of 1997 the people of Plano, Texas realized they had a problem. Heroin, onceconsidered a fringe indulgence, was gaining popularity within the Dallas suburb’s high schools. And not just any heroin. Narcotics units told newspapers of the time that this smack wasapproaching “uncut” territory: about five times the potency of black-tar heroin. Starting in 1996, Plano hospitals began receiving in handfuls of OD drop-offs per month; before they might see one or two annually. By the time schools shut down for Thanksgiving break in 1997, nine young people either living or attending school in the suburb of 190,000 had fatally overdosed. At the dawn of the new millennium, Plano, Texas—poster-city of affluent 1990’s American suburbia and home to the corporate headquarters of J.C. Penny, Capitol One, Pizza Hut and Frito-Lay—had become synonymous to heroin in much the same way early-80’s Miami had to cocaine.
At least that’s the angle the national press ran with (never mind the much higher rates in places like Baltimore). “The jocks and preps of Plano couldn’t get enough of a new drug,” warned Rolling Stone headline in May 1999. “By the time they found out what the fine brown powder really was, kids had already started dying.”
Belita’s son, Jason, was among the early adopters. Popular with students and teachers alike, Jason had dabbled in herb early in high school and was no stranger to beer. Then during his senior year, 1996, heroin started showing up at house parties.For Jason addiction followed almost immediately. Belita’susually exuberant son had withered to a moody, volatile husk of his former self. His behavior worsened. In the summer of ’96 Belita packed up and moved the duo across the state to Lubbock.The change of scenery didn’t work. Jason relapsed. In January 1998, Belita had her only child arrested for drug possession. He opted for treatment in lieu of prison.
“It’s a call that no mother wants to make,” says Belita. “Itwas the catalyst that set me in motion, it gave me a mission to make sure no one else would have to make that call.”
Her transformation from sharp-tongued high school debate coach to grizzly mom drug warrior began with that call but it didn’t end there. In 1998 she founded Starfish, a non-profit rehabilitation program for opiate addicts. Initially strapped for cash and publicity, Belita tapped Hall of Famer and ex-Dallas Cowboy Mel Renfro to serve as Starfish’s business partner and promotions man. Renfro had recently taken in a goddaughter from Washington who was recovering from addiction. Already active in inner-city charities, the former defensive back was looking to tackle substance abuse. It was not a hard sell.
“Her energy was the first thing that jumped out at me,” remembers Renfro. “She was just relentless in how she went about her work.”
Meanwhile, the Plano heroin epidemic story seemed on the verge of inducing a national frenzy. This was due in large part tosocioeconomics. Lily white suburb replete with gated communities and Fortune 500 headquarters: not exactly the kind of place Americans are conditioned to associate with hard drugs. The implied angle of most media reports on heroin in Plano was:“How could it happen here?”For the nation’s self-appointed drug warriors, this provided a hook to rally public opinion in favor ofharsher sentencing on the supply side— not to mention larger budgets.
Starting in 1997, the Drug Enforcement Agency parlayed Plano’s woes into a public relations bonanza. This included planting de facto spokespeople—true believers, mostly parents and former addicts—into guest spots on national televisionshows. The DEA’s budget would go on to double in less than ten years from $1 billion per year in 1996 to $2 billion in 2004. Overall drug use stayed more or less constant.
* *
Rick Moore knew the perfect candidate to get the word out. A Plano Police Department liaison officer working at Plano East Senior High School, Moore was a friend and colleague to Belita Nelson. He knew her story. Not long after he introduced Belita to DEA Education Coordinator Villaescuse and Special Agent Mercado in charge of the Dallas office, Belita was ready for her close-up.
First stop: the Oprah Winfrey Show. When the show’s producers called the Dallas DEA office in the spring of 1998 andrequested a “mother in denial,” Villaescuse gave them her number and lobbied for her selection, Belita says. After a preliminary with producer Ray Dotch, Belita was flown into Chicago in June , whisked around town in a limo, and gently coached in the message she was to convey the following afternoon.
“This can happen to anyone, that was the gist,” she says. “‘You’re kid’s next if we don’t do something.’”
Not that she needed much prodding at this point. She was still very much a genuine law-and-order type; it wasn’t a performance.
Consequently she nailed it. Her first-hand account of heroin’s horrors evoked outrage and compassion simultaneously.Once the show aired in July, she was already on to the next one.An appearance on Nightline soon followed. So did “The LeezaShow,” MSNBC’s “Special Edition,” and seemingly every radio station between Austin and Tulsa. Print followed. She graced the front page of the Plano Morning News, appeared in Philanthropy in Texas magazine, and was quoted by just about every news outlet compelled to do a “heroin in Plano” piece. Belita neverbelieved her own hype. By the fall of 1998, she was starting to doubt the DEA’s as well.
Her first clue: DEA and its Educational Coordinatorsuddenly seemed less concerned about killer opiates and more about curative vegetables. Minutes before she was to take to the podium at a heroin conference in suburban Newark, New Jersey, agents took her aside with a request. Despite being the theme of the conference, they asked that a she dedicate a significant portion of her speech to marijuana. Belita was baffled.
“I didn’t know it then, but marijuana is their cash cow,”says Belita. “Which is why they need to continually justify their laws against it. And which is why the things they wanted me to say went way beyond even the bogus ‘gateway drug’ theory.”
The yarn the DEA implored Belita to tell boiled down to this: Mexican cartels were infiltrating Ivy League campuses andrecruiting graduates to grow genetically altered super cannabis— 75 percent THC, the told Belita. All part of a nefarious attempt to corner the weed market and hook America’s youth.There was and is zero evidence corroborating any of these claims, but they made for a good story.
Jason had qualms about the DEA’s marijuana “facts”almost immediately. He knew the 75 percent figure bunk, and the rest of the story was too ridiculous to repeat in front of strangers with a straight face. His mother, however, was in no mood to split hairs. Narcotics had nearly taken her only son away. Drugs—all drugs—needed to be eradicated by any meansnecessary. It was that simple.
At least at first. As the tall tales kept growing, so too did Belita’s suspicions.
“They wanted me to get the audience to believe that affluent suburban areas were being targeted by the cartels because of the wealth in those areas,” she says. “This was my first clue as to the propaganda and fear tactics of the DEA. But still, I was the conservative Republican Mom from Plano, TX and I had an entire city to represent.”
Starfish, meanwhile, continued to flourish. And so did her speaking career. Her office calendar looked like someone had tried to slash it apart with a Sharpie. Law enforcement agencies from Jersey to Seattle jockeyed to book her.
But nobody was more enamored by what Belita had to saythan the Plano police and agents within the DEA’s Dallas branch. That’s because she was debriefing them weekly on whatStarfish patients were divulging in treatment. It yielded more than a few layup busts for the Plano Police and one lingeringregret for Belita.
“I was happy to help at the time,” says Belita, who nowconsiders it the biggest mistake of her professional life, a classic ends-justify-the-means ethical lapse. “I am not proud of this fact. It played a crucial role in the evolution of my beliefs.”
At least once a week, she’d call Terry Holloway, head of Narcotics in the Plano Police Department and fill him in. Other times she’d buzz DEA Agent Villaescuse and/or Agent Mercado with a tip. Doing so provided her a front row seat to the process by which law enforcement process and act on intelligence… and how they frame the resulting raids for the press.
“As I fed info to local police departments, the information was then used by the North Dallas Metro Task Force,” she says.“A drug bust might be aimed at the organizations from other countries, such as the Middle East, but most often the official story would name a Mexican cartel. That was almost always the story the media [were] fed.”
Her leads continued yielding arrests, and by 2004 it occurred to DEA brass that maybe this upstart amateur informant was ready for the pros.
* * *
It was a typically mild East Texas spring morning in 2004when Belita’s phone rang in her Starfish office . The gruff voice on the other line identified itself as DEA Special Agent Fairbanks, of whom Belita had heard but had never met. Belita had proven quite valuable to Agents Villaescuse and Mercado, Fairbanks continued. She had displayed the kind of initiative that didn’t go unnoticed. nor unrewarded. Would she and Jason mind meeting him in their Dallas office to discuss an opportunity?
The Nelsons made the 30-minute drive to Dallas on March 29, 2004 itching with curiosity. Fairbanks directed them to an undisclosed DEA office branch tucked amid a maze of freeways.The appropriately unassuming building turned out to be just typical suburban office complex surrounded on three sides by a weedy open space, a creek, and the highway. After passing through a thorough security point inside, they were directed to a small office where Agent Fairbanks was already seated.
“We were told they were willing to make our relationship a bit more formal,” says Belita.
To that end, the DEA was willing to pay the Nelsons $10,000 per month. All they had to do was share useful intelligence with agents on a weekly basis: the names of dealers,places to score, locations of parties. Pretty much anything a patient might mention in passing while pouring his heart out in a therapy session. The tips didn’t even need to lead to an arrest for the Nelsons to get paid, the agents reiterated. They just needed to keep their ear to the ground.
Jason promptly walked out. But Belita remained seated. Fairbanks concluded his pitch with a veiled demand: as per the agreement Belita would be required to make duplicates of Starfish Foundation’s internal documents and hand them over to DEA— including her patients’ files.
Running a drug treatment referral center requires staying up to speed on HIPPA and other legal minutiae, so the implications of the agents’ request were not lost on Belita.
“You’re a federal agent asking me to break a federal law,” she said.
Fairbanks responded something to the effect of it was for the greater good. (No agent who spoke with THC was willing/able to confirm Nelson’s account, but they’re not denying it either. “We wouldn’t be able to confirm or deny whether she was an informant, or whether she was asked to be one,” says DEA Special Agent Terri Wyatt from her Dallas office).
At meeting’s end, Belita joined Jason outside. “What’d you tell them?” he asked
“I told them to go to hell,” she replied. “And that this country will never win a ‘war on drugs’ when the guys fighting that war are worse than the guys they are fighting… and that Starfish was going toward legalization.”
Their relationship with the DEA had come to an unceremonious end. Having just refused to aid law enforcement in a criminal investigation, Belita would soon find herself the target of one.
* *
In 2005 Belita and Mel began noticing irregularities inStarfish’s financial books. Bank statements on Quicken were either missing or tampered with, but the biggest red flags were the mysterious charges appearing her card— namely those made out to Dallas-area shopping malls when she was out of town. On November 15 Starfish’s full-time administrative assistantcalled Belita and provided answers.
Erica Mast tearfully explained that she had duplicated company credit cards to fuel her shopping addiction. Belita pressed charges and Mast was arrested and indicted on two felony charges (Mast pled guilty and would eventually serve 10 years of probation). Which is why Belita was more than a littleshocked to learn weeks later that Dallas’s ABC affiliate was planning on running a hit piece accusing Belita of embezzling foundation funds.
No one had pressed charges (against Belita, that is). No law enforcement was investigating her. WFAA Chanel 8 based the story solely on leaked bank account records provided to the station by an anonymous source.
The crux of the broadcast was that Belita had utilized Starfish funds to fuel a “lavish lifestyle.” After sifting through a decades’ worth bank records, the reporter came up with corroborating evidence: “$1,000 for an eating and drinking excursion in New Orleans, $100 for a rock concert… $450 for ski lift tickets at Breckenridge and Vail, $360 for ski lessons, nearly $1,600 to stay at a Condo on the slopes.” Played up as if it were revealing billion-dollar scandal, the segment comes across like a parody of sensational local newscasts.
At no point did the news report mention that ex-employee Mast had admitted to and found guilty of stealing more than $10,000 just weeks earlier. Nor did it did that it bring up Mast’s 10 years of probation sentence for credit card debt.
Nonetheless, the report clicked local legal machinery into gear. Responding to the broadcast’s fallout, Collin County District Attorney’s office decided to investigate the allegationsaimed at Belita. They turned up nothing. On April 30, 2010 John Roach asked that the case be dismissed, as the state was unable to make a prima facie case. Nevertheless, the damage was done. Fundraising was now out of the question. Starfish lay in shambles.
Though she can’t prove it, but Belita remains convinced that the DEA leaked the story as payback for her refusal to work as an informant. A friend in the Plano Police Department told her she had a “target on her back,” she says, and encouraged her to get out of Plano.
Belita took his advice in February 2008. She packed up and moved to Idaho Springs, Colorado where she managed a leather retail store, volunteered at the Idaho Springs Historical Society, and served as the executive director of the town’s Chamber of Commerce. But the old accusations wouldn’t go away.
When local paper Clear Creek Courant caught wind of Belita’s Texas tribulations in 2011, they ran what was effectively a print version of the WFAA hatchet job. While the article does mention that the DA “decided not to pursue the charges,” her reputation took a hit. Three weeks after the story ran, she was forced to vacate her post at the Chamber of Commerce.
These days Belita tries not to be bitter. The extra free time has allowed her to pursue a new pet project— a project that the 1996 version of Belita Nelson would have found deplorable.
“I’m lobbying for drug legalization,” she says. As if anticipating your next question, she adds: “Full legalization.”
To that end, Belita joined forces with pot-legalizationlobbyist groups such as Moms4Marijuana and the Marijuana Policy Project. A medical marijuana patient, she spoke before a state subcommittee this spring, arguing vehemently—and unsuccessfully—against the so-called marijuana DUI bill. But she says she’s just getting started. Next items on her agenda: get word out about the federal government’s self-contradictory patent on medical marijuana (US Patent Number 6630507) and lobby the federal government to reclassify cannabis as a Schedule II drug.
Where she once made her living cautioning citizens about the dangers of drugs, now she’s warning us about the dangers of the Drug War.
“The amount of money tied up in this bogus war has corrupted just about every law enforcement agency from the DEA on down,” she says. “We need to break out of this boxed way of thinking if we’re serious about helping people suffering from addiction. It’s that simple.”
Originally published in the August 2013 issue of The Hemp Connoisseur magazine.