'I was wrong about cannabis:' Former Irish-American police chief on his 'Breaking Bad' conversion
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Former drug tsar and sheriff, Darren White transformed from a strictly anti-drugs law enforcer to one of New Mexico’s first legal cannabis producers.
The Irish American not only shares a surname with Walter White, the drug-producing anti-hero of hit TV show , he also lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the show is set. And his office is directly next to where the show’s amoral lawyer’s practice was based and where spin-off show is still filmed.
Like the fictional science teacher Walter White, Darren White once led a life diametrically opposite to the one he now leads.
Once chief of police for New Mexico, a state rife with drug trafficking across its border with Mexico, Mr White’s focus was on stopping peoples’ access to drugs.
But after a friend convinced him to use a cannabis ointment on his painful, injured neck and it worked, his perception of the substance started to seriously change.
And when New Mexico opened up licences for legal cannabis production, Mr White and friends successfully applied for one, becoming one of the first 12 legal cannabis distributors in the state of New Mexico.
He said that they focused on producing the best quality cannabis possible for the best price and expanded their enterprise quickly.
They sold $330 worth of cannabis products on their first day of business in July, 2016. Last year, they sold $23m.
“It’s been an interesting journey. Now I consider myself an activist,” he said.
“My responsibility was to enforce the law before - whether as a patrol man, or head of state police or the sheriff.
“But I was wrong about cannabis.
“I know it’s hard for people to understand, people are told ‘marijuana is evil, it’s the devil’s lettuce and you will do unthinkable things if you take it.’ But that is not true.
“You should be responsible and do everything only within limits but some of the things I hear people say in Ireland, from public officials, that’s the ‘reefer madness’ mentality, thinking that crime is going to erupt and there’ll be debauchery. No, it’s not.
Mr White won a baseball scholarship to a Texas university after school but “was a goofball” and lost his scholarship.
He then entered the military as a way to get a university education and became a paratrooper with the 82nd airborne division.
He chose “to jump out of planes” just because the airborne division had a baseball team.
He became a police officer after leaving the army.
In 1994, newly elected Governor Gary Johnson asked Mr White, then aged 31, to be his cabinet secretary for public safety.
“So at 31 I was the head of the State police. I was the state’s drug tsar, I was responsible for the State’s drug policy for all of New Mexico for five years,” he said.
But when Governor Johnson said in 1999 that he wanted to decriminalise cannabis and all drugs, including methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin, Mr White resigned as he could not then agree with that position.
A two-year stint as a TV news reporter followed before he ran for and was elected sheriff in 2002.
He later worked as public safety director for Albuquerque where he ran the police and fire departments.
In 2011, he retired and went into private practice as a security consultant before a friend asked him to help procure a medical cannabis licence.
“At that point, I had changed dramatically in a lot of my thinking,” he said.
Another great irony in Mr White’s story is that his grandfather was a notorious bootlegger and speakeasy owner in prohibition-era America.
His great grandfather John White moved from Nenagh, Co. Tipperary in 1885 to Niagara Falls, Canada, to work on the railways.
His son, Harry White would become a professional boxer before reinvesting the money he earned fighting in a bootlegging and speakeasy business, smuggling alcohol over the border from Canada into prohibition-era America in the 1920s and 1930s.
As prohibition ended and battles began for lucrative alcohol distribution licences, Harry White was murdered by a rival gang.
His family moved from Niagara Falls to New York, where Darren White’s father would later meet his mother “I joke that I’m the product of a crime scene. If my grandfather hadn’t been killed my father would never have met my mother.
“I went into law enforcement so I also joke that if I had been alive at the same time as my grandfather I probably would have taken him in [arrested him]. He was killed due to prohibition so I know the violence that that can bring too.” And the violence from the drug war is painfully evident in New Mexico.
“New Mexico is constantly in the top 10 most violent states in the country. We know first hand that the carnage is caused by the drugs war,” he said.
“We currently share about 200 miles of border with Mexico, we’re what they call a trans-shipment point. They say about 75% of illegal drugs that come into the United States come through the entire 2,000 miles of the southwest border.
“And a great deal of it comes through the 200 miles that we share with Mexico.
“The drug war has been a miserable failure because it has not stopped anything. What we have to recognise is that there is not a jail cell in the world that will shake someone’s addiction to drugs. So unless we provide adequate treatment for folks that get in trouble to shake that addiction why are we surprised that they come back into the system?
“It’s the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.
"So we have to do better as a nation and fund adequate treatment for people.
“As a country, we have to look at what we’ve been doing spending billions and billions of dollars only on enforcement.
“There are more drugs in this country than there were 40 years ago when we started.
“We need to reevaluate our drug policy.” He said that becoming a cannabis producer and seller chimes with his fiscal conservative values.
He believes that the State should be kept small with minimal impact on people’s lives.
“I’m a conservative. I believe in limited government, that government should not be as involved in people’s lives as it is. And that relates to drugs too. I think any fiscal conservative will tell you that fighting the drug war has been a huge waste of resources and it’s insanity that we have not changed that policy and continue to fund it year after year.
Although he has voted Republican in the past, recent changes in the party and Trump’s tenure left him disillusioned and forced him to vote Democrat more recently although his fiscal conservative values remain unchanged.
He believes that attitudes towards cannabis are changing fast, even in America’s conservative states.
“Every public opinion poll in the United States now shows a very solid majority of the public either support recreational or medical cannabis.
“And it’s happening worldwide. I’m so supportive of the activists in Ireland and what they’re trying to accomplish.
“I’m a very proud Irishman. My Irish American heritage is very important to me and I’d like to come and help in the cause at some stage because I think there are so many brave activists there.
“You have to fight the good fight. You change the hearts and minds one at a time and then, eventually, you’ll get to that point where your public leaders will realise that it’s time to make change.
“It’s not if Ireland accepts cannabis, it’s when.”