OUR FUTILE DRUG WAR CLAIMS A NEW VICITIM

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 in 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 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. Pennington also
suspended his entire narcotics squad, with pay, pending the outcome.

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.

That only begins to tally the destruction, much of it inflicted on
black communities. While 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.

Whatever led Atlanta police to the small, burglar-barred house in a
downtrodden Atlanta neighborhood -- contradictory claims have been
offered about the search warrant -- it's clear Johnston was no drug
dealer. Even if she had been, her crimes would not have justified the
intrusive, 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 trade flourishes.

That strategy also heavily burdens black communities. According to The
Sentencing Project's Ryan King, black drug users tend to engage in
higher rates of stranger-to-stranger transactions. "It's a lot easier
to come off the streets, buy a couple of rocks and make an arrest,"
King said. 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," King said.

Of course, the criminal justice system isn't color-blind, 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. There is a built-in bigotry that tends to see
men of color as more of a threat.

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. They struggle under its stigma for
the rest of their lives. They're less likely to get gainful
employment, so they're less likely to be attractive husbands or
responsible fathers.

This country now 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 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 slightly but not substantially.
Methamphetamine has replaced crack cocaine as the drug plague that
enlivens local newscasts; the affluent tend toward "designer" drugs,
which figure less prominently in arrest reports.

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

Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution.