INTERMINABLE DRUG WAR CLAIMS ANOTHER OFFICER Edward M. Toatley, an undercover Maryland state trooper, was killed Monday night trying to help win the "war on drugs." Our community has lost yet another dedicated police officer as well as a loving family man. And because Toatley enjoyed his work and believed he was doing a public service, few will question whether he died in vain. "If anybody out there dealing drugs thinks this will stop our resolve, they are sadly mistaken," Col. David B. Mitchell, head of the Maryland State Police, declared at a news conference yesterday. But I wonder: How many more law enforcement officers will have to be killed, how many more civilians must die, how many more arrests must be made and new prisons built before we say enough of this drug war madness? "Eighty-six years after Congress passed the 1914 Harrison Act that criminalized drugs, America's drug consumption thrives," Jerry Oliver, Richmond's chief of police, wrote in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on Oct. 22. "Our nation's premier drug-war strategy of more police, more interdiction, and more incarceration is failing and the trajectory continues downward." Toatley, 37, was a trooper for 16 years. Mitchell described him as a seasoned police officer who had made "dozens and dozens and dozens" of so-called "hand-to-hand" undercover drug buys. And yet, despite Toatley's courage and apparent successes, you have to wonder why he was repeatedly subjected to this kind of unreasonable danger. From Colombia, South America, cocaine flows into this country by the mega-tonnage--a raging powdered river, profitable beyond belief and so corrosive it threatens to topple national governments. Here, in the District of Columbia, a police officer gives his life making a low-level buy, an act that might have resulted in a "conspiracy to distribute" charge somewhere down the line but would have done little, if anything, to get the drugs off the streets. In the aftermath of the largest drug haul in history--20 tons of cocaine and $10 million seized in Los Angeles a few years ago--the price of street cocaine actually dropped to its lowest levels ever. It was just another sign that we are flooded with drugs. The only thing police are doing, in effect, is keeping the prison industry in business--mostly with a steady supply of poor blacks snagged off the streets of urban America. This is immoral, to say nothing of ineffective. "Former Secretary of State George Shultz said recently that any real and lasting change that occurs in a democratic society is done through education and persuasion and not through coercion and force," Oliver wrote in the Times-Dispatch. "Perhaps it's time to heed this sage advice and search for alternative approaches to our current drug-control strategies that will be more effective, fair and humane in reducing drug usage and drug dependency; that will emphasize treatment, prevention, and education; and that will rely on our social and health systems more than on our criminal justice systems." Proponents of the war on drugs, such as William J. Bennett, drug czar under President George Bush, cite statistics that show a 60 percent drop in drug abuse during the last 20 years and credit the decline to "no-nonsense" police actions. However, the FBI, in a 1997 report that raised serious questions about the effectiveness of the national war on drugs, found that drug arrests had jumped 35 percent between 1990 and 1995--with the nearly 1.5 million people arrested on drug charges in 1995 being the largest number ever recorded. "Trends for overall drug arrests indicate that this social ill shows no signs of abating," the FBI report said. Toatley, most importantly, was a husband and was the father of an 18-year-old son, a 5-year-old son and an 18-month-old daughter. Charming, hardworking and intelligent, he also served as president of the Coalition of Black Maryland State Troopers. He had value to our community that greatly outweighed the risk of disappearing into the dirty, double-dealing shadow world of undercover street dope buys, where a suspect apparently shot him in the head. Arguably, he could have done more to stop drug abuse by simply being seen, in daylight, in uniform, in schools, in neighborhoods, on patrol. And, without this dubious war on drugs, he might still be alive.
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