I Used What I Wanted

The dealer picked up a gun, cocked it and placed the barrel against Jay Tarver's temple. "If you don't do this," the dealer said, nodding toward four neat rows of cocaine gleaming on a round mirror, "I'll kill you." So Tarver, an undercover narcotics officer on the Houston police force, leaned over the old oak desk and snorted his first "rail" of coke. The high was a revelation, one Tarver still remembers with vivid longing.

"It was instant euphoria. My problems drained away." Before that night in June 1980, Tarver, 35, had often posed as a coke buyer. He was an ambitious, model police officer, a survivor of 25 shootouts. He was Houston's 1978 Officer of the Year. But he had always glibly talked his way out of testing the merchandise, insisting that the coke was too expensive to waste in a tryout. Undercover agents avoid such tests because they are against the law--and because there is no way to tell what suspicious dealers may have mixed into the drugs. This time, however, his host insisted. "I think they began to think I was a cop," Tarver recalls. It was the beginning of an obsession that shattered Tarver's ten-year career. He stopped trying to sidestep the sniffing and began indulging during assignments, telling himself that this enabled him to gain the confidence of his targets and make bigger busts.

"It was like somebody with a shoe fetish getting a job at a shoe store," he says. "I used what I wanted and then turned in the rest." At first the drug gave Tarver energy for his moonlighting as a security officer. But later it began to confuse him. "I suffered large personality swings. Once I remember getting lost in a parking lot."

In April 1981, suspicious investigators from the internal-affairs division devised a plan to catch Sergeant Tarver with his hand in the cocaine jar. They planted 236 grams of coke in an unclaimed suitcase turned over to Tarver at the Houston airport. Police followed him, stopped his car and found that he had siphoned off an ounce from the stash. He was fired and charged with possession of cocaine. Tarver took the crash calmly: "I just wonder what took them so long to figure it out." At his trial, he was convicted, placed on ten years' probation and fined $10,000. He is appealing his conviction.

His wife Ellen, also a former police officer, was shocked to learn of his addiction but stood by him as he struggled to right his capsized life. Tarver is now a drug counselor and a candidate for a master's degree in social work at the University of Houston. Having seen the problem from both sides, he doubts whether the new federal crackdown will curb cocaine use. "Suppose you have just one cop on a corner writing tickets, but everybody in town is running the stop sign? How can police stop them?" This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.