LATEST VICTIM OF DRUG WARS

The War on Drugs has OD'd. That is the real lesson to be learned from
the marijuana sting that left an unarmed Patrick Dorismond dead on a
midtown street by the gun of an undercover New York cop.

"He's got to be the first guy to say no to drugs and be killed for
it," my doorman Lev noted with a wry smile yesterday. Lev, like the
late Dorismond, is black, but he recognizes that the issue goes deeper
than race.

"Why were they trying to get him to sell marijuana, don't they have
anything better to do?" he said.

It's a question that should be asked all over the country. According
to the FBI, an American is arrested on marijuana charges every 45
seconds -- mostly for possession.

It appears to be the only question that hasn't been asked in the wake
of this killing. The War on Drugs opened in 1914, and we haven't even
won a battle. Now, in the new millennium, a man is slain by police
without arms and without drugs, and only the war is sacrosanct.

Mayor Giuliani has done everything to keep our minds off the failure
of the war with his knee-jerk defense of the police and egregious
attack on the victim's character.

Rudy went public with Dorismond's juvenile arrest record, such as it
is -- at age 13, he was charged with robbery and assault. We don't know
the disposition, because Giuliani stopped at the water's edge, but
what the law says is that he had no right to reveal anything about it.
On this basis, the mayor is subject to prosecution, it being a crime
to open juvenile records without court approval. If the press had done
this to a cop, Rudy would be demanding our hearts.

Will Bob Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, convene a grand
jury on Giuliani for this violation of law? Bet the field against the
Derby favorite first.

As for Dorismond's adult criminal record, it hardly exists. Two
disorderly conduct convictions, signifying nothing to anybody but our
mayor the prosecutor, who tells us it was a "plea" to get out of a
more serious charge.

Of course, even if Dorismond had a felony record, it would have
nothing to do with his death. If it did, the cops could kill any
member of the Genovese family at will in what is known as "alley court."

But says Rudy: "People do act in conformity very often with their
prior behavior." He might as well have been looking in the mirror.

Not only does he automatically defend the cops, he has forced the
media in all sorts of cases to fight for everything he is mandated by
law to reveal. The Daily News legal staff spends half its time
fighting him -- and winning.

And yet he has the chutzpah to say in defense of his illegal
revelations on the Dorismond case: "The public has the right to know."

What the public has the right to think is that Giuliani is playing the
politics of crime to beat Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Senate.

It was hardly coincidence that he chose an upstate forum on Sunday to
demonize Dorismond. On almost every issue that would hurt him with the
upstate conservative vote, he is as one with Hillary, from gay rights
to pro-choice to gun control.

But hard on crime he is, and up there it only helps him to run wild
against drugs and street people, which seems to be his euphemism for
blacks, whose votes he has no chance to get.

He is not a racist, but he makes it difficult for those who wish him
well to say no to those who say yes.

And impossible to justify his War on Drugs, which like poor Dorismond,
arrives DOA.