Guest Lecturer Bill Murphy Talks Drugs
Every so often, Edina High School students have the distinct pleasure of getting to welcome a guest lecturer into their classroom. On Thursday, the Drug Education class was lucky enough to listen to seasoned Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officer Bill Murphy.
Murphy grew up outside of Newark, New Jersey, moved to Minnesota, and graduated from St. Cloud State – a school he chose for three distinct reasons, “rugby, drinking, and girls.” Upon graduating from St. Cloud, he went to work for the DEA where “after graduation they give you a gun and off you go.” After this, Murphy moved to Detroit, Michigan where he spent the next five years working DEA operations, many of them undercover.
Five years elapsed and Murphy made the move back to Minnesota where he has been working ever since. In addition to stories about finding crack hidden in a vacuum hose, over three thousand pounds of weed in one home, and a trunk full of cocaine, Murphy offered students some advice that stemmed from his own personal beliefs.
This included his belief in the necessity of personal responsibility as opposed to the constant use of “sociology” as an excuse to blame one’s actions on others, the extreme liberalization of the media to pit audiences against what sentences they deem to be “too long,” along with his strong dissuasion of individuals to abuse any sort of substance even if they do not believe the repercussions to be severe.
One of the most interesting parts of the talk was learning the ways in which the DEA is connected on an international level. Murphy specializes in “building cases,” which means he works on a local level to gather information and put pieces together in order to pass along so that the DEA can make its way up to prosecuting “the top end of stuff.” This works through the constant compilations being inserted into the DEA database that is used in both the United States (heavily concentrated on the US/Mexico border) and Europe.
Despite working on such an international level, Murphy asserted that the biggest allies of the DEA are “the state and local law enforcement agents.” This demonstrated that so much of the process to prosecute international criminals happens on more of a grassroots level.
The talk proved to be enlightening, debate-sparking, and shocking.
After spending eleven years as part of Lancaster's Amish community, senior Bess Pearson moved to Edina to give the "English life" a go. She let her hair...
Mark Osler • Feb 19, 2014 at 8:43 pm
It’s not just the “extreme liberal media” who thinks drug sentences are too long– it is Mr. Murphy’s boss, Attorney General Eric Holder. Here is what he said in a speech to the ABA in August:
” It’s clear – as we come together today – that too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason. It’s clear, at a basic level, that 20th-century criminal justice solutions are not adequate to overcome our 21st-century challenges….
As we come together this morning, this same promise must lead us all to acknowledge that – although incarceration has a significant role to play in our justice system – widespread incarceration at the federal, state,and local levels is both ineffective and unsustainable. It imposes a significant economic burden – totaling $80 billion in 2010 alone – and it comes with human and moral costs that are impossible to calculate.
As a nation, we are coldly efficient in our incarceration efforts. While the entire U.S. population has increased by about a third since 1980, the federal prison population has grown at an astonishing rate –
by almost 800 percent. It’s still growing – despite the fact that federal prisons are operating at nearly 40 percent above capacity. Even though this country comprises just 5 percent of the world’s population,
we incarcerate almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. More than 219,000 federal inmates are currently behind bars. Almost half of them are serving time for drug-related crimes, and many have substance use
disorders.”