MISGUIDED DRUG WAR CLAIMS ANOTHER VICTIM

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, an elderly woman was shot dead by Atlanta 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 GBI, to review the actions of
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 that 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 higher rates of stranger-to-stranger transactions. That makes it
easy for police to pose undercover. "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. 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. 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. And once they've been tainted with
a conviction, 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 an 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 slightly but not substantially.
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.