Excerpted from The Grapevine Independent
By Joanne Boyd
October 30, 1991

The war against drugs was the primary focus of Red Ribbon Week activities in Rancho Cordova last week.

But for approximately 175 Mills Jr. High School students in Arch Pritchett's science classes, the real life consequences of using drugs stared them right in the face.

Sacramento Sheriff's Department Detectives James Cooper, an undercover officer with the street gang task force, spent a full day at the school, talking to Pritchett's six classes.

He is extremely effective," Pritchett said of the officer. "This is the third year in a row he has come to Mills and it's totally voluntary – he's on his own time."

Pritchett said Cooper's visual aids have a tremendous impact on the students, most of whom are 13-year-old 8th graders. "The kids keep coming back to talk to him between classes," he said. "When we teach the kids about drugs, we can't pass the drugs around. And we don't have T-shirts taken off of dead gang members."

The officer passed around different types of drugs (in sealed containers), T-shirts and more. A table at the front of the classroom was filled with gang and drug paraphernalia. He showed them a hat taken from a member of the Del Paso Heights Bloods. On the hat was the number 187. "That's the section of the penal code for murder," Cooper said. "This guy was advertising he murdered someone and got away with it."

The students became wide-eyed when shown a T-shirt taken from a 12-years-old gang member who is now dead.

But perhaps most startling were the color photographs of a 41-year-old heroin addict. She had exhausted the veins in her arms and had resorted to shooting up in her thighs. The result was huge abscesses on both her legs. "You could see the bones in her leg," Cooper said. "I could have fit my whole fist inside the holes from the abscesses." The women, who said she never expected she would become addicted to heroin, agreed to having the photographs shown to students in hopes of deterring them from experimenting with drugs.

Tell the kids it can happen to them," the women said. "I thought I could try it just once and not get hooked. Show them what it did to me."

In Sacramento, there are approximately 1,000 known gang members, 300 of them hard core. "Where there are gangs, there are drugs," said Cooper. "And no one race has the market on gangs. Members come in all sizes, shapes and colors."

The greater Sacramento area is usually ranked number one in the nation in the production of methamphetamine, an operation run primarily by outlaw motorcycle gangs such as the Hell's Angels. But it is rock cocaine that is most frequently dealt on the streets.

"Rock is not water soluble, so it is very easily transported…you can stick it anywhere," the officer said. "It's easy to sell on the street corner and when you smoke it, it hits the brain in seven to ten seconds."

A piece of rock about the size of a little fingernail sells for $20 and is called a 20-piece. "During reverse stings, I've bought and sold drugs from everyone – from 12-year-olds to grandmothers," he said. "One of the hardest things I've had to do is arrest the son of a fellow cop…no one group has the market on dope."

Cooper also told the students possible consequences of being friends with gang-bangers. "You can be identified as a gang –associate," he said.

"There comes a point in your life where you have to start hanging around the right people," the officer added. "Be yourself….don't do what everybody else does."