NATION'S DRUG WAR FAILS TO WEED OUT HOMEGROWN THREAT

If U.S. government officials insist on continuing their expensive and
fruitless war on drugs, they might want to consider spending a lot more of
the people's money actually protecting Americans in their own back yard.
Billions of U.S. dollars have been funneled into Colombia and Mexico and
other countries to support local law enforcement efforts to combat cartels
and subsidize the planting of legal crops.

But increasingly, our own national forests are becoming fortified battle
zones and fertile ground for heavily armed marijuana and methamphetamine
producers.

Last October, while strolling on his property in El Dorado County, Calif, a
father and his 8-year-old boy stumbled onto a huge cash crop and were shot
by an AK-47-toting pot warden. Also last year, federal rangers seized
733,427 marijuana plants in national forests nationwide and 8,400 plants on
forest lands in North Carolina. Astonishingly, between 1996 and 1998, the
Forest Service confiscated more illegal drugs than the Border Patrol or the
Customs Service did on the U.S.-Mexican border.

Booby traps and high-caliber shoot-outs are not uncommon. And standing in
the middle of it all are government employees, wildlife enthusiasts and
other visitors to the nation's 192 million acres of federal land being
patrolled by fewer than 500 law enforcement agents.

Fighting drug trafficking in the big cities and in the thickets of Central
and South American countries has been an undeniably hapless initiative.

While we have criminals guarding towering marijuana plants and free-flowing
meth labs ­ while American families are facing such peril in our own back
yard ­ the government should divert the money and the manpower to the home
front.