DRUG-CRAZY

Drugs can lead you to do awful things -- and can do serious damage to you --
even when you don't take them. Just look at a bill making its way through
Congress. The Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act, sponsored by
Republican Orrin Hatch and Democrat Dianne Feinstein, contains a couple of
provisions that endanger the rights of all Americans.

The first provision would loosen the rules governing police searches. It
would permit the police to search your residence, vehicle, or workplace and
to take "intangible evidence" (by making a copy of your computer's hard
drive, for example) without telling you. The entirely reasonable
justification for the change: Notifying someone running a methamphetamine
lab before a search gives him time to destroy the evidence or flee the
state.

Yet the cardinal question to ask about any new law, or any change in
existing law, is not "How do supporters say the law will be used?" but "How
could the law be used?" And the change in notification requirements does not
apply only to drug dealers. It is not hard to imagine a pliable judge
approving search warrants for numerous residences in a high-crime
neighborhood where the police are not sure which house (if any) hides the
stuff. The homes of perfectly innocent citizens could be searched, and they
might never learn of it.

The second provision attempts to crack down on drugs by cracking down on
speech. It would punish persons who so much as mention an Internet site that
sells drug paraphernalia. Even anti-drug crusaders who listed some
drug-related Web sites as examples of the heinous stuff out there would be
breaking the law. The bill also would make it illegal to tell someone how to
produce drugs. Thus, someone writing to a relative where marijuana has been
decriminalized about a Web site with advice on growing the weed could face
criminal prosecution. Talk about Reefer Madness.

Several versions of the meth bill are floating around; one piggybacks on a
bankruptcy measure. Congress could reduce such redundancy and increase
efficiency if it simply found a copy of the Bill of Rights and borrowed one
of those rubber stamps for marking things cancelled.