COPS, LIKE KIDS, LURED BY DRUG-WAR PROFITS

Four cops from the elite Chicago special operations section are charged
with robbing, beating, kidnapping and intimidating suspected drug dealers.
According to published reports, as many as nine cops are suspected of
abusing their police power in the latest episode of drug-war corruption.

Part of the drug-war strategy is to take the ill-gotten goods from the
drug dealers -- take their real estate, their fancy ccars, boats,
airplanes and cash. Seize and forfeit, seize and forfeit -- that's the
drug-war way. Half the confiscated loot goes to the arresting agency and
half to the feds.

Tempting, all that money and property.

"Why not just confiscate it for ourselves?" whiz kid of Chicago's elite
gang crime unit, officer Joseph Miedzianowski, thought. He graduated from
super-drug cop to super-drug conspirator to super-drug prisoner locked
away in a federal hoosegow.

Cops are tempted by drug profits just like our kids -- both sets nurtured,
too often, into drug dealers in the imagined ""drug-free" world our drug
laws have made for us. Drug war saves our kids from drugs, the old saw
goes, and the recently released annual survey of drug use in America shows
that drug use by teenagers is down this past year. Trouble is: Drug use is
up among the baby boomers. (Laughably, it's the old folks that need DARE
classes.) Net change in U.S. drug use: none. Net drug-war success: none.

Tough prison sentences were going to make drug prohibition stick. And our
prisons are packed with drug users, packed to the point where the Land of
the Free is now the Home of the Prisons, as the U.S. sports the highest
rate of incarceration of any country in the world with millions of people
behind bars.

But drug war reduces drug availability, right? Nope. The United Nations
just reported record-breaking opium production in Afghanistan despite an
army of U.S. soldiers on the ground there. Opium production is up 50
percent over the previous year, with the 2006 opium harvest fixed at 6,000
metric tons, enough for 60 tons of heroin. And heroin is the dope of
preference among those drug dealers who have recently taken to lacing
their illegal dope with killer Fentanyl, a legal drug.

All heroin dealers are unlicensed. In fact, all dealers of illegal drugs
are unlicensed. Maybe they should be licensed.

Heroin manufacture is uncontrolled. In fact, the manufacture of all
illegal drugs is uncontrolled. Maybe the manufacture of illegal drugs
should be controlled and regulated. There's been lots of drug-war news,
but it's all bad.

I told my ear doctor that I ran for governor once on a platform of
legalized drugs. He said, "If you run to legalize drugs again, I'll vote
for you." Now that's an earful.