88-YEAR-OLD WOMAN IS LATEST COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN SENSELESS DRUG
WAR

All wars have a way of creating collateral damage, as the desk-bound
bureaucrats euphemistically call the dead innocents, destroyed
buildings and decimated towns that just happen to be in the way of
bombs and bullets. Kathryn Johnston was collateral damage in America's
misguided "war on drugs."

On Nov. 21, the 88-year-old woman was shot dead by Atlanta undercover
police officers who crashed through her door after dark to execute a
"no-knock" search warrant for illegal drugs. Living in a high-crime
neighborhood, apparently frightened out of her wits, she fired at the
intruders with a rusty revolver, hitting all three. That's according
to the police account, which says the officers then returned fire,
striking Ms. Johnston in the chest and extremities.

Because there are suggestions of police impropriety in the case,
Police Chief Richard Pennington has asked outside law enforcement
agencies, including the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation,
to review the actions of the narcotics officers.

The investigation may reveal police incompetence, and it may reveal
police malfeasance. Unfortunately, however, it is unlikely to point to
the root cause of this tragedy: a foolish, decades-long effort to curb
illegal drug use through arrests and incarceration. Raging on
mindlessly, the war on drugs has caused untold collateral damage -
leaving children fatherless, helping to exacerbate the spread of AIDS,
and filling prisons with people who, with minimal rehabilitation,
might be contributing to society rather than draining its resources.

Although black Americans are no more likely to use illegal drugs than
whites, they are disproportionately imprisoned for drug offenses.
There are three basic reasons for that, according to The Sentencing
Project, a Washington-based nonprofit that advocates alternatives to
incarceration: the concentration of drug-law enforcement in inner-city
areas; harsher sentencing policies for crack cocaine, used
disproportionately by black Americans, than for powder cocaine; and
the drug war's emphasis on law enforcement at the expense of
prevention and treatment.

It's clear that Ms. Johnston was no drug dealer. Even if she had been,
her crimes would not have justified the intrusive and dangerous
tactics police used. Those tactics flow from a failed policy that
emphasizes arrests - any arrests, no matter the offender's stature in
the drug-trade hierarchy or the size of the cache of drugs. That
policy has kept police busy with penny-ante dealers while the real
drug trade flourishes.

That strategy also heavily burdens black communities. According to The
Sentencing Project's Ryan King, black drug users tend to engage in
more stranger-to-stranger transactions. That makes it easy for police
to pose undercover. By contrast, targeting affluent users who buy from
friends and acquaintances "would require a lot of police work, months
or years of undercover efforts for one or two arrests," Mr. King said.
Most police jurisdictions will choose the easier targets.

Of course, the criminal justice system isn't colorblind, either. Reams
of research have shown that white men tend to get probation for
nonviolent offenses more often than black and Latino men, who are more
often sent to prison.

It's no wonder, then, that an estimated one-third of young black men
are under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system - in prison,
on probation or on parole. And once they've been tainted with a
conviction, they struggle under its stigma for the rest of their lives.

This country imprisons its citizens at five to eight times the rate of
most other industrialized nations, according to The Sentencing
Project. We've learned nothing from the earlier period of Prohibition,
which produced criminal gangs and an epidemic of lawlessness.

Meanwhile, for all the wreckage from this drug war, the use of illicit
substances has declined only slightly. Methamphetamine has replaced
crack cocaine as the drug plague that enlivens local newscasts; the
affluent tend toward "designer" drugs such as Ecstasy, which figure
less prominently in arrest reports.

And Kathryn Johnston? She's not the first victim of our foolish,
futile war on drugs. Sadly, she won't be the last.

Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution. Her column appears Mondays in The Sun.