Drug War's Latest Victims

WASHINGTON -- If you believe Secretary of State Colin Powell, the blame for
the Peruvian air force shootdown of a plane carrying a Baptist missionary
family lies with Robert Downey Jr. and other drug users in the United States.

I respectfully disagree.

The blame, I'm afraid, lies with the U.S. government's fruitless, wasteful
and destructive war on drugs.

In congressional testimony last week, Powell pointed the finger of blame at
wealthy American drug users as the cause of the cocaine scourge ravaging
Colombia and other Latin American countries. It is that demand, he
explained, that makes the costly war on drugs necessary.

"The real problem in the region is not caused by the region, it is caused
by what happens on the streets of New York, the streets of all our other
major cities," Powell told a House of Representatives budget subcommittee.
"And it is not just a poor kid's problem, a poor kid taking pot on the
street corner, it's corporate lawyers, it's actors who over and over and
over again continue to use drugs in an unlawful way," he said.

Powell, speaking to the lawmakers about U.S. plans to fund
counter-narcotics efforts in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, said the
multibillion-dollar program would never be completely effective unless the
demand, as demonstrated by his examples, was eliminated. I say, since the
multibillion-dollar program has shown no signs of curtailing supply, it's
time to kill it.

It was the U.S. Congress that created this monster -- the very one that
killed Veronica Bowers and her 7-month-old daughter, Charity -- and it is
the U.S. Congress that has the power to destroy it now, before more damage
is done and more money is wasted and more abuses occur.

The private Cessna the Bowerses were flying in was strafed and forced to
crash land in the Amazon after a CIA-operated surveillance plane mistook
the missionaries for drug smugglers. Mrs. Bowers' husband and son survived
the machine-gunning and the crash-landing.

The U.S. government plans to send officials to Peru for talks on "what went
wrong." I'll tell you what went wrong. The U.S. has trained a
trigger-happy, drug-police air force because it has billions of dollars to
throw around in programs that show no signs of effectiveness.

I don't have much sympathy for privileged and wealthy people like Robert
Downey or Darryl Strawberry who repeatedly allow themselves to fall prey to
drug abuse. But it wasn't they who launched the deadly drug war that
infringes not only on the lives and liberties of South Americans, but on
the lives and liberties of North Americans, too.

The downing of the missionary plane was hardly an isolated incident. Since
1992, the U.S. government has aided the Peruvian military in shooting down
or damaging more than 100 airplanes. The U.S. government now wastes $731
million a year of your tax dollars providing military and other aid to
South American countries for anti-drug operations.

And this was not some rogue Peruvian operation. It was a U.S. Air Force jet
- -- operated by CIA employees -- that spotted the missionaries' plane and
called it to the attention of the Peruvian military.

Even in light of this recent tragedy, many U.S. politicians are failing to
see the light. Last week, Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee, R-R.I., chairman of a
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, boasted about the "shoot-first,
ask-questions-later policy" responsible for the deaths of the American
missionaries. Chafee said giving Peruvian military officials the power to
blast unarmed, civilian planes out of the sky is "a very successful policy."

The terror of the drug warriors is hardly limited to the skies above the
jungles in Latin America. The terror is just as fierce right here in United
States. Our rights are being trampled. Innocent lives are being snuffed
out. And property is being unjustly seized by government.

Enough is enough. The government is merely empowering the drug lords with
its phony "war." America is losing its civil liberties in the name of law
and order. It's time to call off the dogs, get the federal troops out of
our communities and send them packing -- disarmed -- back to Washington
where they belong.

Once again, I declare the drug war over.