WAR ON DRUGS NEEDS NEW STRATEGY PUBLISHED

Just a few days ago, three Atlanta police officers shot down and
killed a 92 year-old woman in her home while executing a search warrant.

The frightened elderly woman lived alone in a high-crime neighborhood
and had burglar bars on all her doors and windows. When the officers
attempted to batter down her door, she fired on them and was killed
when the officers returned fire.

What is most disturbing about this is that the officers were
apparently following standard procedure, in which the homes of
suspected non-violent drug offenders are routinely broken into by
armed police officers or SWAT teams without knocking or identifying
themselves first.

There has been a strong movement towards the increased use of highly
confrontational police tactics and the militarization of civilian
police forces in the 25 years since the war on drugs began.

The annual number of SWAT deployments has surged from 3,000 to 40,000
in that time. Tactics once reserved for only the most dangerous
criminals are now used regularly in the execution of routine search warrants.

Though the use of warrants was limited by the 1995 Supreme Court
decision Wilson v. Arkansas, they are still permissible under an
array of exigent circumstances which are arguably present in most cases.

Since President Reagan announced the war on drugs in the early 80s,
federal and state spending on drug enforcement and incarceration has
grown to more than $75 billion per year.

Roughly half of our prison cells and a similar proportion of our
judicial resources are consumed by drug enforcement.

The American prison population has ballooned to more than two million
incarcerated citizens, making it the largest in the world in both
absolute and per capita terms, and more than four times larger per
capita than any Western European democracy.

During this time the rate of drug arrests has increased rather than
decreased, by a factor of three.

The exigencies of our perpetual drug war have led to an erosion of
our civil liberties and have undermined respect for the rule of law.

The fear and distrust of police, which has become endemic among
younger and less affluent Americans is a direct result of the
diversion of police resources from the protection of the citizenry to
the enforcement of morals.

The police officers wounded or killed as a result of the drug war are
victims just as the innocent civilians. One need not adhere to a
Millian conception of liberty in which the rights of the individual
may only be restricted to protect the rights of others.

It is only necessary to rationally assess the costs and benefits of
our current drug policy to come to the conclusion that it has been an
abject failure.

This may be the approach most likely to lead to re-election, but
addiction treatment, education and the creation of economic
opportunity are much more effective at combating drug usage than
Gestapo-style tactics.

How many lives and liberties are we willing to sacrifice for a
solution which has only compounded the problem it sought to solve?