A WAR WE SHOULD CALL OFF

Being some time away from learning specific details of the Jan. 4
shooting that killed Lima resident Tarika Wilson, a lot of people are
doing what people do in the absence of facts: They're blaming the
victim, the veteran police officer who shot her, or Anthony Terry,
the target of the Third Street drug raid.

Without knowing those specific details, all anyone outside the
investigation has to go on is his own particular world view. Two
recent reports from groups advocating reform of the justice system
show that, no matter what happened in that house on Third Street, all
parties involved stood to be the victims of a war that has gone on
for too long with no overall success. This most recent battle in our
War on Drugs has claimed at least three lives directly, many more
indirectly, all to take one alleged dealer out of circulation. The
lives involved include a 26-year mother of six and a 31-year veteran officer.

But, truth be told, we can go to many corners of this region to find
some manner of drugs, and that's without counting alcohol as the drug
it is. If Terry is everything prosecutors accuse him of being, is his
being off the streets doing anything other than shifting traffic just a little?

But, lawmakers, who want to appear to be keeping us safe, pass
increasingly tougher laws. They can claim credit for tougher laws,
but we don't hold them accountable enough for their role in what
happened on Third Street. Police agencies that want to show they're
cleaning up the streets keep making busts without cutting very much
into the overall supply. We end up locking many more people away,
which means we're spending billions of extra tax dollars, but the
rate at which people use drugs isn't declining.

The Cato Institute offers on a map (www.cato.org/raidmap) showing
botched SWAT and paramilitary drug raids. Ohio is well-represented.

The Justice Policy Institute and The Sentencing Project, both, as is
Cato, based in Washington, D.C., last month issued reports
demonstrating the War on Drugs has been a failure. The reports are
available on the group's Web sites -- www.justicepolicy.org and
www.sentencingproject.org -- but some highlights of this nation's War on Drugs:

. For the first 70 years of the last century, the Justice Policy
Institute reported, U.S. incarceration rates remained at about 100
per 100,000 citizens. Since 1970, the rate has ballooned to 491 per
100,000 citizens. That massive increase is due in large part to those
we lock up for drugs. The cost for locking up drug offenders in state
and federal prisons comes to $8 billion a year, the Justice Policy
Institute reports.

But, "There is little evidence to suggest that high rates of
incarceration affect drug use rates or deter drug users. Researchers
have previously found that decreases in crime in the 1990s were not
attributable to an increase in the number of prisons or the increase
in the incarceration rate. A Justice Policy Institute study further
substantiated these findings by investigating the relationship of
incarcerations to the rate of drug use in states. In fact, when
observed over a three-year period, states with high incarceration
rates tended to have higher rates of drug use."

. The Sentencing Project, in looking at what it calls a 25-year
quagmire -- indeed, this country's longest war by far -- reports drug
arrests have more than tripled in that time. Authorities arrested a
record 1.8 million people -- more than six-tenths of 1 percent of the
total population -- in 2005 for drugs alone. In 2005, 42.6 percent of
the arrests were for marijuana alone. Pot arrests alone accounted for
79 percent of the increase in drug arrests during the 1990s. And, the
number of drug offenders in jails and prisons has increased 1,100
percent -- meaning 11 times more drug offenders are living at
taxpayers' expense. But, nearly six in 10 people in state prisons for
a drug offense have no history of violence or high-level drug sales.

The War on Drugs has gone on more than twice as long as this country
tolerated Prohibition. No one dismisses the need to lock up violent
drunks and those who endanger others by getting behind the wheel
smashed. Society would have much more money and much more prison
space if we limited our police actions against drug users and dealers
to those who actually present a serious risk.