Fox News Commentator Suggests Michael Brown Was High on PCP When He Was Killed

Today Fox
News commentator (and occasional Reason contributor) Jim
Pinkerton
speculated that Michael Brown may have been on drugs when
Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson shot him dead on
August 9. “Eyewitnesses said that Brown was charging the cops,”
Pinkerton said on Fox’s Happening Now show. “Ask
a Secret Service agent what would happen if an individual who’s six
foot-four, 290 pounds, went charging anywhere near the direction of
the president. I suspect they’d put a lot more than six bullets in
him….We’ll know more with a blood test. If he was high on some
drug, angel dust or PCP or something…it’s entirely possible you
could take a lot more than six bullets and keep charging.” In other
words, if Brown was high on PCP,
firing just six rounds into him would be a mark of
restraint.

It should be noted that witnesses disagree about whether Brown
was moving toward Wilson when the fatal shots were fired. Another
point Pinkerton overlooks: Angel dust and PCP are the same thing.
By either name, the drug does not live
up to its fearsome reputation. While its anesthetic effects
might help someone endure pain that would otherwise be disabling,
PCP is not a magical potion that allows people to survive “a lot
more than six bullets,” especially if any happen to strike the
head, the heart, or a major blood vessel.

In any case, Pinkerton has no evidence whatsoever
to support his suggestion that Brown was under the influence of a
psychoactive substance. His reckless speculation to that effect is
especially regrettable because this sort of pseudoscientific
explanation has a long and shameful history in this country, going
back to the “cocainized
Negroes” whose fearlessness, aggressiveness, and superhuman
strength supposedly forced Southern sheriffs to start using
larger-caliber guns.

The theme of drug-crazed black men has been periodically revived
since then. In the 1980s people worried about irrationally violent
crackheads, although the vast majority of “crack-related homicides”
actually grew out of black-market
disputes. The Los Angeles cops who beat Rodney King in 1992
justified the assault partly by arguing that his behavior suggested
he was high on PCP, which everyone knows
gives you “Hulk-like strength.” King tested negative
for the drug that supposedly made him act the way he did. So did
Rudy Eugene, a.k.a. the Miami Cannibal, whose horrific 2012 assault
on Ronald Poppo was
widely (and wrongly) ascribed to “bath salts.”

The message of these false narratives is pretty clear: Illegal
drugs are scary, especially when mixed with the blood of
African-American men. Commentators should think twice before
reviving this ugly stereotype in an attempt to exculpate police for
killing an unarmed black teenager.

[via
Media Matters for America]