2 MORE LAY DEAD, AS PROHIBITION-ERA THINKING RULES DAY

A Futile War On Drugs

Police said Ronald Beasley, 36, was not a target in the investigation
but died mainly because he was near Earl Murray. Beasley's death, the
lieutenant said, "was unintended, not a mistake."

This unintended death that was not a mistake occurred six days ago in
the parking lot of a busy fast-food restaurant on North Hanley Road
when members of an undercover drug unit attempted to arrest Earl
Murray. According to the cops, Murray was a drug dealer.

At least he allegedly sold drugs to the undercover agents on two
previous occasions. But at best -- or maybe at worst -- he was a very
low-level drug dealer. His relatives told reporters that he sometimes
sold $20 rocks of crack cocaine. The cops say they found about a
quarter of an ounce of cocaine under the seat of his car. That was
after they shot him. According to the cops, a DEA agent and a
detective from Dellwood fired into the car because they thought that
Murray might run over them.

In a legal sense, this could mean that the shooting was justifiable,
even though neither Murray nor his passenger, Ronald Beasley, was
armed. If a reasonable person would feel that his or her life was in
danger, then self-defense can kick in.

But step away from the legalities, and there is a Fearless Fosdick
quality to the case. I'm reminded of the time the cartoon cop fired
into a crowd as he tried to arrest an unlicensed balloon vendor. So it
is with a "multijurisdictional task force" that sets up a drug buy,
and a potential shootout, at a busy fast-food restaurant shortly after
school gets out. Who would approve of such a plan?

Especially when you look at a best-case scenario. What if the arrest
would have gone perfectly? At most, Murray would have caught a little
jail time. A very low-level drug dealer would be off the streets.

The streets, though, would have remained the same.

Not long ago, I was chatting with a judge at the federal courthouse.
He had just sentenced a big-time drug dealer to a ton of time, but he
had a sense that nothing had been accomplished. That's because the
federal agents had told him that this drug dealer had replaced a
dealer that the judge had sentenced to a ton of time a few months
earlier. What's more, the judge had noticed that this dealer had the
same attractive girlfriend as the previous dealer. It was as if she
came with the franchise.

"I have to send people to prison for cocaine," the judge told me, "but
I find it increasingly difficult to do so."

We had this conversation -- this very conservative judge and I --
during the did-he-didn't-he flap concerning George W. Bush and
cocaine. You probably remember that one. Reporters would ask Bush if
he had ever used cocaine, and he would respond with a non-answer. I'm
not going to play that game, he'd say. Or, When I was young and
foolish, I did foolish things.

The message, I suppose, was it didn't really matter. And hey, to
people like me, it didn't, and doesn't. Of course, Bush and I are from
the same generation, the generation that tried most everything. People
forget that at their peril.

Like the time John Ashcroft, during his days as governor, declared war
on casual drug use and then stood back in dismay when the first
casualty of his war was his personal "coordinator" for the state's war
on drugs. It turns out the guy used drugs on a regular basis back in
his college days.

Sadly, the humorous stories about hypocrisy are few and far between.
Most of the tales from our long-standing war against drugs are tragic.
I've written about cops who have been shot and killed by the dealers
during raids, and dealers who've been shot by the cops. Occasionally,
it's cops shooting cops by mistake, and often it's dealers shooting
dealers. This last variety is reminiscent of the gangster wars during
Prohibition. After all, that's what the War Against Drugs really is --
another version of Prohibition.

I have long agreed with the Libertarians that we ought to legalize
drugs. If people want to be junkies, they're going to be junkies. We
can make all the arrests we want - heck, we can bring down the
Medellin Cartel and Pablo Escobar - but supply will somehow meet
demand. We can even cross the line morally ourselves, and it doesn't
help. I think here of Andrew Chambers, the feds' superstar informer
who regularly committed perjury to put druggies in prison. We dirty
ourselves and still don't accomplish anything.

Why not take some of the money we spend on our failed effort to stop
supply and spend it to lessen demand? We're spending billions on
interdiction, and arrests, and trials, and incarceration. Spend it on
education. The most recent statistics I saw said that 60 percent of
federal prisoners were in for drug offenses. More than one-third those
in state prisons were in for drug offenses. If you add the number who
committed crimes to support their drug habits because the War Against
Drugs has artificially inflated drug prices, no telling how high the
number would be.

In fact, Friday afternoon I called the spokesperson for the Missouri
Department of Corrections to see if he knew what percentage of our
prisoners are in for drug offenses. He was out of the office. He was
at the ribbon-cutting for the newly opened South Central Correctional
Institution in Licking. It's not just us. The prison population in
this country hit the 2 million mark earlier this year. We can't build
prisons fast enough.

Still, we soldier on. Two men were killed Monday in a fouled-up sting
set up at a busy fast-food restaurant in the middle of the afternoon.
One of the men who was killed wasn't even a suspect. His death, we're
told, was unintended, but not a mistake.

As usual, I'd like to give the cops a break. It's the war I want to
indict.