LAST summer, when Siddharth Patel stepped off the plane in Newark Airport on the way back from his honeymoon in India, a team of federal agents was waiting for him. They snatched the surprised newlywed from the customs gate and spirited him down in handcuffs to a detention cell where they told him he was under arrest. He asked to know what he had done wrong, but the arresting officials refused to tell him. Over the next twelve days, Patel would be transported to and from several prisons across the country, often unable to talk to his family or even to his attorneys for days at a time. Discussing it after the fact, his tone is still heavy with bewilderment: “I had no idea what was going on.”
Patel, a U.S. citizen, had been snared in the dragnet of “Operation Meth Merchant,” an undercover federal sting operation designed to crack down on the manufacturing of illegal methamphetamines in the state of Georgia. As his luck would have it, he was quickly being cast as yet another unhappy player in the perverse drama that is the federal war on drugs.
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