THE DRUG WAR IS FOUGHT AS A CLASS WAR - WEALTH AND POWER

Do you suppose they were racially profiling Whitney Houston when they looked
for pot in her luggage? Maybe her case suggests that even if authorities
did use race to seek out a suspect, they were also intimidated by her wealth
and power. Indeed, the wealthy and the powerful don't usually object to drug
law enforcement-as long as it's not enforced on them.

On Jan. 11, the black singer was stopped at an airport security checkpoint
in Hawaii when authorities allegedly found half an ounce of marijuana in one
of her bags. Security officers, who can only make arrests for violations
relating to airplane safety, asked her to wait for the police, but she
boarded her flight, which took off 30 minutes before the cops arrived.

However, just as the cops weren't exactly racing to keep her from leaving,
so prosecutors seemed content to merely warn her against returning to the
Aloha State. After all, what law enforcer wants a hassle with a
well-lawyered defendant?

Everyone fighting the drug war knows it's OK to throw little fish in jail.
But as for the big fish, it's better to throw them back. And so a rainbow
coalition of celebrities-including Oliver Stone, Darryl Strawberry and
Lawrence Taylor-have all been busted recently for drug possession, but none
has suffered more than a fine and probation.

Indeed, the true feelings of the chatter-culture complex were made clear
after a report about the government's screening of prime-time TV scripts.
The Office of National Drug Control Policy has been kibitzing with the
networks to goose shows with antidrug messages. The media establishment was
outraged; The New York Times editorialized against "censorship and
state-sponsored propaganda." Yet, if drugs are the enemy, why shouldn't
everyone be enlisted in the fight?

The answer, of course, is that the elites are far more afraid of Big
Brother-ish meddling with the First Amendment than they are of drugs, as
long as they are politely and privately consumed. So drug enforcement is
OK-if it's aimed at someone else.

There's a word for this: hypocrisy. And because of that hypocrisy, the drug
war rages, not in the elite suites, but on the mean streets. There, mostly
working-class cops-a high percentage of them minority-do battle with mostly
lower-class druggies, and both sides lose.

In Monday's debate in Iowa, Democratic presidential candidates Bill Bradley
and Al Gore noisily declared their opposition to racial profiling, but where
were they when the decision was made to profile whole population groups?
Where were they when the cops instituted zero-tolerance enforcement against
whole neighborhoods?

According to the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based research group,
African Americans constitute 13 percent of all monthly drug users; they
represent 35 percent of arrests for drug possession, 55 percent of
convictions, and 74 percent of prison sentences.

So while some urban areas are being decimated, what's less understood is the
detrimental effect the drug enforcement crusade is having on the police.
Joseph D. McNamara is a former New York City cop, coming from a family of
cops, who went on to be the police chief of Kansas City, Mo., and then San
Jose, Calif. Now a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University, he cites thousands of cases of police corruption and brutality
stemming from the war on drugs in his forthcoming book, "Gangster Cops: The
Hidden Cost of America's War on Drugs."

McNamara's sympathies are still with the police, but he sees the current
antidrug effort as moral quicksand. "We've been telling cops they're in a
war," McNamara says in an interview, "and in a war, there's no due process."

He adds, "The tough tactics that cops use in minority neighborhoods wouldn't
be tolerated for a week in a white neighborhood."

To the elites today, drugs are an occasional source of recreation, an
occasional source of embarrassment, but rarely a topic of serious
discussion. In the meantime, on the other side of the tracks, a furious war
rages on. That war is made all the fiercer because the combatants know, in
their heart of hearts, that the larger society-including singers, sitcom
writers and politicians-doesn't care what horrors are committed in the name
of social order.