So long Lior... we hardly knew ya

I'm dating myself here, but in order to understand the gist of this post it would be helpful to have seen the 1978 movie Midnight Express. I'll give you a very brief synopsis, but to fully grasp what follows, the film is an important frame of reference.

On one leg (meaning a very short, simple explanation), Midnight Express was based on the true story of a misguided, but likable young American named Billy Hayes who, at the end of a visit to Turkey, decides to tape 2 kilos of hashish to his body and smuggle it out of the country.  He's caught at the airport, sentenced to 5 years in an extremely brutal/primitive Turkish prison, and the Turkish authorities decide to make an example of him and extend his sentence. After much brutality, he finally escapes.

That's where the true story and the film part ways... and the division between them becomes deliberately hazy.

Besides being extremely manipulative and xenophobic*, the film deliberately changed certain facts to make sure the audience's sympathies never wavered from the central character and the supporting characters he befriends in the hell-hole of a prison. 

From the length of his sentence (the film said it had been extended by 30 years but it was actually significantly less) to the absolute lack of redeeming quality in any Turkish or American legal/judicial or political player, the audience was sent continuous messages throughout the film; 'these are the good guys and those are the bad guys'.  White... black.

Maybe it's the cynic in me, but when someone tries to tell me anything in the world is that black and white, I tend to start looking for the missing bucket of gray.

I bring this up today because of a recent news story about a young Israeli who is on the verge of being extradited by US authorities to... yes, you guessed it... Turkey, on drug charges.

All the news reports I've seen on this case seem to be (perhaps unconsciously) spouting the same tropes that made me so uncomfortable with the film:

• The evil, primitive Turks.
• The deliberate miscarriage of justice
• The uncaring government of the accused
• The despair of the accused's parents and friends.

What's noticeably absent from news coverage of this case - as it was missing from the script of the film - is the hard truth about the risky business in which the central character was engaged.

Lior Atuar is a convicted drug dealer.  He was convicted in the US for conspiracy to traffic in Ecstasy and served a relatively light sentence of a little more than six years in prison.  However, once he was incarcerated in the US, the Turkish government took notice and made an extradition request to the US for whenever he would be released from US custody.

You see, before he went and got caught with about about a gazillion doses of E in the US, he had allegedly been involved with the lower-tech end of the drug trade in a scheme to smuggle an undisclosed quantity of heroin out of Turkey with an associate named Fahri Yasin (who was the one who was actually holding the 'smack' when they were arrested).

I use the term 'allegedly' because; 1) by rights Atuar hasn't been convicted of the heroine smuggling charge; 2)  his colleague, Mr. Yasin seems to have fingered him while being aggressively questioned (tortured) by Turkish officials; and 3) Atuar fled Turkey within hours of being accused so a full airing of the charges and any plausible defense have never taken place (other than in the press).

The first and third of these points bother me very little because of his later drug conviction in the US.  I'm sure some legal eagles will leave comments telling me that later offenses can't be used as evidence of a previous crime.  But I can't get away from the fact that Mr. Atuar was no stranger to the drug trade. 

The second point is more serious, and actually rests at the heart of the 'Midnight Express' comparisons in the press.  You see, the US is a signatory to international conventions barring torture, and any evidence gathered against a suspect using torture should therefore be excluded from legal proceedings (including the current extradition proceedings). 

However, there is a compelling issues that bears examination before we set aside the decision that already seems to have been rendered by the court of public opinion:  The accomplice (Yasin) later repeated his accusations against Atuar when not under torture.

Now, don't get me wrong... Is it a family tragedy that a son/brother is likely to be sent to a prison setting far less comfy than the country club where he served his time in the US?  Yes, but again... he wasn't arrested while doing charity work in Calcutta and accused of dealing drugs.  He was in a US hoosegow for dealing drugs and nobody's heartstrings were pulled.  Yet now that he is likely to do some real hard time for the same kind of offense in Turkey, the public outcry to protect this poor boy is enormous.

Is Lior Atuar likely to be singled out for special cruelty (as his lawyer alleges) for being an Israeli/Jew in a Turkish/Muslim prison?  I'm not sure, but it isn't an entirely unreasonable assumption.  However, Israel and Turkey enjoy pretty warm relations and cooperate on diplomatic, economic and military levels.  Israeli tourists, businesspeople, military officers and tourists are a common sight in Turkey... and Turkish reciprocity in all these areas is certainly on the rise.  It is also worth noting that in Midnight Express there were several Israeli prisoners portrayed (not coincidentally, also convicted drug dealers), and even back then in the 70s when Israeli/Turkish relations weren't so advanced, they didn't seem to have been singled out for their nationality or religious beliefs.

The drug being smuggled in the movie was hashish, and this was convenient for the screenwriters since to my knowledge deaths from hashish overdoses have to be incredibly rare occurrences.  This makes the whole 'victimless crime' angle easy to sell to an already sympathetic audience.

But Atuar was convicted in the US of selling Ecstasy, a drug that has been implicated as at least a contributing factor in many deaths worldwide, and is suspected of long term health risks in those who habitually use it.  And heroin... well you don't need me to use pictures and arrows to explain the potential public danger a smuggler/dealer represents.

Many people would argue that the dealers and smugglers aren't responsible for drug-related violence and overdoses.  That it is the end user who makes an informed decision to use the drug... or not.  We'll leave aside the issue of 'informed decision making' because the number of children using drugs makes that argument a non-starter. 

Instead I'd like to approach the concept of 'informed decisionmaking' from another, perhaps unexpected angle:

Don't drug dealers and smugglers also understand the risks of their actions?  Just as the user is responsible for where, how and how much of the drugs they use (and any potential health or legal consequences associated therewith)... don't the dealers and smugglers make the same informed decisions?

Personally, I feel bad for most people who pay the price for bad decisions.  I feel bad because good people often make bad decisions on the spur of the moment... and the difference between the bulk of the people in jail and a good cross-section of the people who are not in jail basically boils down to who was unlucky (or stupid) enough to get caught.

In the case of Lior Atuar, we're not talking about a guy who had the bad luck to buy a dime bag of weed on the only day of the semester his college dorm was raided by campus security.  This is a guy who has gone to considerable time and expense to travel to several foreign countries in order to traffic in dangerous drugs (or at least drugs for which he knew the penalty to be relatively steep).

If the parent of some kid who had OD'ed on heroin or overheated and gone into a coma after taking Ecstasy had confronted Lior Atuar I'm pretty sure he would have told them that he didn't force anyone to take the drugs... it was their decision so the consequences are entirely theirs.  I mean, how could a drug dealer/smuggler say otherwise?

Well, I feel bad for Lior Atuar.   But if the club kids and junkies are expected to suck it up and take legal and medical responsibility for their decisions... then the same rationale should apply to the dealers and smugglers who supply them.

Source: Here