PROSECUTORS GET PATHETIC IN COLORADO

Veteran Denver Broncos linebacker Bill Romanowski, acquitted by a Colorado
jury last week on four charges involving prescription-drug fraud, may or
may not be the most fitting role model for America's youth. Folks will
differ. Perhaps we all can agree, though, that he's no Juan Raul Garza.

Garza was the major-league Texas drug smuggler who was convicted of
shooting one man to death and leaving his body on a road and of ordering
the killings of two others - and who finally was executed last month by the
federal government in Terre Haute, Ind.

If a national government is to conduct a war on drugs, you'd think Garza is
the kind of foe it would have in mind. How an aging jock and his diet pills
wound up in the crosshairs isn't entirely clear.

Prosecutors had claimed the 35-year-old Pro Bowler obtained the appetite
suppressant phentermine from prescriptions written for his wife, Julie, and
two other people, during the 1998 season, when the Broncos won the Super
Bowl. Investigators said Romanowski took phentermine to enhance his play.

The defense said Romanowski took phentermine only to suppress his hunger
before games. His attorneys say he was prescribed the drug as a diet aid
after a medical examination, but that the prescription was routed through
his wife and a family friend to avoid publicity. His lawyers also argued
that investigators had targeted their client because of his fame.

Even if you happen to believe that Romanowski's real intent for the drug
was to give him an edge on the field, so what? The drug isn't on the
National Football League's list of banned substances. Nor is it a
mood-altering drug, the abuse of which arguably is the biggest reason
prescriptions are government-regulated in the first place.

And yet, no less than the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration got in on
the act, in conjunction with Douglas County, Colo., authorities (where the
Romanowskis live), conducting more than a yearlong surveillance.

Court papers filed by the Romanowskis' lawyer contended that agents went so
far as to threaten the family's nanny with deportation as well as to
threaten and entice Julie Romanowski's doctor to secretly record his phone
conversations with the couple. The agents even are said to have staked out
and harassed the couple during a public autograph session.

It looks like the justice system went to a lot of trouble just to try Bill
Romanowski and plans to go to more trouble still, as Julie Romanowski is
scheduled to go on trial Aug. 14 on charges she conspired to obtain the
phentermine for her husband.

And all for what?

At the very least, the decision to pursue the Romanowskis looks silly, even
absurd. And jurors seemed to be telling the prosecution as much.

But was this case just a mistake - an unintended consequence of the drug
war? Was Bill Romanowski a bystander caught up in one of those
local-federal dragnets meant to catch bigger quarry? Or was his prosecution
an inevitable byproduct of that war? Were authorities in fact trying to
make an example of a celebrity?

Is that what the drug war is supposed to be about?