Nathaniel Jones Used PCP

Courtland Milloy, Washington Post Metro Columnist, writes:

Well before Nathaniel Jones had his violent and ultimately fatal confrontation with Cincinnati police Sunday, something happened that pretty much sealed his fate.

He used PCP.

And what we saw on that police video was a predictable result from a drug with its own special ways of killing and getting people killed.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse classifies PCP as a "dissociative anesthetic," meaning the user becomes disconnected from his environment; he knows where he is, but does not feel as if he is part of it.

The condition is sometimes referred to as an "out of body" experience. But what we're really talking about is the walking dead. PCP, or phencyclidine, aka "Angel Dust," "Peace Pill" and "DOA," does nothing if not ruin lives.

Jones, 41, was reportedly lying in the grass outside a White Castle restaurant about 6 a.m. when an employee heard him yelling "19" and called police. For all we know, Jones could have been calling for help -- the number 19 being 911 in his mind.

Such is the illogical speech, confused thinking and sensory distortions that PCP brings about.

Emergency medical personnel showed up before police. But Jones became a "nuisance," as one firefighter put it. With the man standing 5 foot 6 and weighing at least 350 pounds, that's got to be an understatement. In the District, ambulance drivers have been known to bail out of their vehicles because of unruly PCP users who weighed a lot less than that.

Soon after the police arrived, the camera began to roll -- but not at the very start, which has caused some to question whether police provoked Jones into a fight. For an agitated PCP user, it wouldn't take much; the sounds of silence would be enough to push him over the edge.

On PCP, Jones would be more likely to perceive himself as under attack by ninjas from outer space than to see himself being questioned by police.

Then there's the change in body image, another deadly feature of the drug. Some PCP users have come to see themselves as Superman, for instance, and, believing they could fly, jumped to their deaths from buildings.

Others have imagined themselves as surgeons -- with X-ray vision, no less -- and used knives to get at things they saw moving beneath their skin. And sometimes the skin of others.

Just recently, Antron Singleton, a rapper who goes by the name of "Big Lurch," was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a 21-year-old woman in a gruesome PCP-induced attack last year. The woman's chest had been ripped open, and police found bite marks on her face and lungs.

Did Jones see himself as Mr. Invincible His aggressive behavior said yes, but his moans and sad facial expressions said no. So severe is the mental and physical discombobulation caused by PCP that Jones may well have wanted to give up but was too disconnected from his body to stop it from fighting.

Consider the horror of it all a wake-up call.

In the Washington area, for instance, there was a 148 percent increase in patients showing up at hospital emergency rooms with PCP in their systems from 2001 to 2002, according to estimates recently released by the Drug Abuse Warning Network. The total rose from 525 patients to 1,302 -- a return to a level not seen since 1995, the report said.

The Prince George's police lab, which tests all drugs seized in the county, received more than 115 PCP samples in 2002 -- up from eight in 2000.

No doubt all of the ingredients for another Nathaniel Jones, and worse, are in abundant supply right here.

In the wake of Jones's death, Calvert Smith, president of the Cincinnati chapter of the NAACP, assessed what he'd seen on the video. "If proper police procedure means that you can use that kind of force to clobber people who are clearly disarmed, there is something wrong," he said.

That something, at least in this case, is the use of PCP by Jones. Do not underestimate the dangers posed by this drug, especially as it seeps in and spreads throughout mostly black urban areas.

If there is concern in Cincinnati that police are targeting blacks, there must also be concern when blacks make targets of themselves. And anyone on PCP is a walking bull's-eye.

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