DRUG WAR FAILS, JUDGE BELIEVES

A federal judge said Sunday that the war on drugs discriminates against
minorities, results in illegal searches and seizures and compromises police
officials who benefit from money they seize.

"It is absolutely destroying our inner-city communities," District Judge
Scott O. Wright said.

Wright was keynote speaker Sunday night at the Kansas City Jewish Community
Relations Bureau/American Jewish Committee's human-relations awards banquet.

Drugs are a "real cancer" in America, Wright acknowledged. But the war on
drugs has failed, he said.

Statistics show the number of Americans in prison for drug offenses this
year was 458,000, up from 41,000 in 1980. He said that just 13 percent of
drug users are black but 62.7 percent of convicted drug offenders are black.

"We have more young black men in jail than we have in college," he said.

Since 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court has "authorized cascading exceptions" to
the Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans from unreasonable searches
and seizures.

Those exceptions now allow "police helicopters to peer into windows, police
to search the passengers in cars whose drivers seem suspicious, and most
notoriously, state agents to smash down doors without warning or without
evidence of crime," Wright said.

Wright also raised concerns about racial profiling.

Kansas City police searching for drugs regularly look for suspicious
passengers getting on and off trains and buses, he said. All the suspects
who have come before him in such cases, Wright said, "are persons who
police officers said were suspicious because they were either black or
Mexican or Latino."

In one case, Wright said, he asked a Drug Enforcement Administration agent
who has worked at Kansas City International Airport how many of the people
he had stopped were carrying drugs. More than 80 percent did not have
drugs, the agent testified.

Wright said police agencies face a corrupting influence because they have
found a way to keep money that should go to other funds.

"I think that many of you here in this room read in The Kansas City Star in
recent months about the revelations of the forfeiture laws for people
suspected of carrying drugs," Wright said.

He said the stories detailed how police stop cars or invade a home to seize
property or money. Local and state police then hand off the case to a
federal agency because generally state law has tighter requirements for
forfeiture than federal law.

Federal authorities return "most of the loot" to the local or state
law-enforcement agencies, he said.

Under Missouri law, forfeited property and money goes to a school fund, he
said.

Wright offered several solutions:

Do away with mandatory sentence guidelines that require severe penalties,
because compassion should be shown in some cases.

Redirect some money used to confine defendants toward effective drug treatment.

Implement drug education programs in early elementary grades.