YOU CAN COUNT THE LAW AMONG DRUG WAR CASUALTIES

Sometimes force doesn't work. Two discouraging reports at the end of
November indicate that force is not working in the war against drugs.

U.S. law-enforcement agencies report dramatic increases in drug production
in Colombia and Mexico, rising marijuana use among U.S. teen-agers, and a
large increase in the quantity of drugs arriving in the United States.

This is despite draconian penalties for drug possession in the United States
and the use of U.S. forces in destroying drug-production fields and
facilities in Colombia.

Violence has proliferated. In Mexico, two mass graves have just been
discovered near Ciudad Juarez, headquarters of one of Mexico's most powerful
drug cartels. According to the Mexican attorney general, the remains of 22
missing U.S. citizens are believed to be among the100 or more bodies.

Like the war against alcohol during the Prohibition Era, the war against
drugs has created a powerful and rich criminal class, with the ability to
intimidate and bribe law-enforcement and government officials in Mexico,
Columbia and the United States.

In Columbia, drug lords control vast areas of the country.

In Mexico, not only the police but also the army and agents of the attorney
general are accused of protecting drug traffickers and even helping their
paymasters to eliminate rivals.

In the United States, the corruption of law has taken a far worse turn. Like
Mexico, America suffers from the routine corruption of law-enforcement
officials by drug money, but the greatest toll has been taken on the law
itself.

Humiliated and frustrated by drug war defeats, the U.S. government has
adopted drastic measures that have stripped away the protective functions of
law.

Asset-forfeiture laws that were supposed to corral the profits of drug
traffickers are instead used widely against innocent citizens. Not even the
chairman of the House Judiciary Committee can get legislation passed to stop
the routine abuses of asset forfeiture.

In the name of fighting drugs, there are now massive invasions of privacy.
Recently, we barely escaped regulations that would have required financial
institutions to report every cash deposit and withdrawal by every customer.
Everyone who needed a few hundred dollars cash could have expected police to
show up and confiscate it on the "probable cause" that it was intended for
drug transactions.

Consider the case of Richard Lowe, MD., a doctor in the small Alabama town
of Haleyville. Scarred as a youngster by the impact of bank failure on his
family, he hoarded cash over the course of his life. In 1990, when he
consolidated his assets in a charitable account for a small private school
in his hometown, his wife prevailed on him to include his cash hoard in the
school's account.

In the United States today, law-enforcement officials automatically infer
criminal behavior from the presence of cash. Even $100 in cash is sufficient
for police to presume an intent to buy or sell drugs. When Lowe's cash was
counted, it totaled $316,911.

Lowe's entire account was seized. The bank president was indicted for
accepting the deposit and forced to make a guilty plea to a trumped-up
charge in order to save his son, a bank employee, from a similar indictment.
Lowe spent six years of his old age fighting the seizure of his assets
before the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cleared him and ordered the
return of his money.

When the war on drugs destroys an honest old man's life simply because he
wanted to give a large sum to a private school, the war on drugs has gone
too far.

The war on drugs is even a greater failure than Prohibition. Hardened
criminals are "crowded out" of prisons by early release orders in order to
warehouse drug users caught with small amounts in their possession and
people framed by stings and false testimony. The large increase in the
prison population is entirely drug related. But the war has not snared the
kingpins or major traffickers, just small-time pushers and hapless users.

The battle against drugs must be fought with persuasion, just like the
battle against tobacco. Drugs must be legalized, not so they can corrupt our
children, but in order to prevent the war against drugs from destroying out
property rights, our privacy and the protective function of law.