PITTING DRUGS AGAINST RIGHTS

Last month the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling that said it's
OK for police to keep you out of your home if they reasonably believe
you would destroy evidence of criminal wrongdoing that might be
inside. You might ask, isn't a man's home his castle?

Well, since the vote was 8-1, with Justice John Paul Stevens
dissenting, the foremost constitutional lawyers in the country said
that the case boiled down to a "probable cause" issue.

In this case an Illinois woman asked for a police escort to keep the
peace while she was removing her possessions from the home she shared
with her husband. As she was taking her things to her car, she
mentioned to one of the two officers accompanying her that her husband
had a small amount of marijuana in the home. The officer spoke with
the homeowner, Charles McArthur, on the porch of the home and related
what the woman had said and asked for permission to come in and
search. McArthur declined to allow the search without a warrant, at
which point the officer told McArthur he would not be allowed back
into the house without an escort while the other officer went for a
search warrant. When the warrant arrived two hours later the police
found less than 2.5 grams of marijuana under the couch and arrested
McArthur on a charge of possession, a misdemeanor in Illinois.

McArthur was able to suppress the evidence at his trial and an appeals
court upheld the suppression. The state appealed to the U.S. Supreme
Court, which sent the case back to the state, ordering it to allow the
marijuana to be introduced as evidence. The justices disagreed with
the Illinois courts for several reasons. They noted that because the
police had enough probable cause to obtain a search warrant they most
likely would have been within constitutional boundaries if they had
searched the house without a warrant. The court also wrote that
because the officers believed evidence would have been destroyed if
McArthur had been allowed to return to the house, that belief
constituted a "pressing or urgent law enforcement need."

Stevens dissented on this point. He didn't believe that the
circumstances - a misdemeanor marijuana possession charge - rose to
the level of urgency needed to detain McArthur.

For our money, that could be said for much of our nation's war on
drugs.

The government went to a lot of trouble and expense - testing our
civil rights along the way - in prosecuting a man for a tiny amount of
pot. It's one of the biggest problems with the government's
second-guessing of what, for consenting adults, is arguably a personal
choice.

Certainly a drug dealer who kills to protect his turf deserves to be
prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But what about those
adults in Middle America who light up a joint after a tough day at the
office?

We tried banning alcohol once and got the same results; providers who
broke the law became quite wealthy and demand skyrocketed.

Increased crime is one of the unintended consequences of the war on
drugs as some users turn to crime to support their costly habits;
prohibition of anything pushes its price up. But drugs themselves
aren't necessarily the cause.

And prisons have filled with people who have run afoul of Draconian
sentencing laws that are a result of government's get-tough-on-drugs
stance.

Granted, plenty of those might well be in prison in any event; those
who have no intention of earning an honest buck and who simply have
found another lucrative, illegal activity in drugs. But if that is
their penchant, then let them serve their time for real crimes against
other people.

All of which brings us back to the inescapable conclusion that America
needs to re-examine its treatment of what is really a social problem.