THE ILL-CONCEIVED WAR ON DRUGS DESTROYING AMERICA

America's ill-conceived War on Drugs cost another life this month
when a police officer in Lima accidentally shot and killed a woman
and injured her baby during a drug raid. They were looking for her boyfriend.

The accidental shooting of 26-year-old Tarika Wilson was just the
latest in more than a quarter-century of bloodshed.

For example, in Belpre in October 1998, police shot 57-year-old
Delbert Bonnar eight times. They were looking for his son.

In March 1994, a retired Methodist minister, Accelyne Williams, of
Boston, died after a police special weapons and tactics team, given a
bad address by an informant, raided his home. He died of a heart
attack after police tackled him.

In February 2003, Drug Enforcement Administration agents looking for
her father shot Ashley Villareal, 14, of San Antonio. The agents
thought he was driving the car in which Ashley was sitting so they
shot and killed her. The agents, by the way, did not even have a
warrant for the father.

In August 1999, SWAT team officers looking for marijuana shot Mario
Paz, 65, of Compton, Calif., twice in the back. Police found no drugs.

The casualties are not limited to women, children and retired
ministers, either. Law-enforcement agents are also losing their lives
in these senseless and hastily arranged drug raids.

Alarmed homeowners have killed quite a few police officers raiding
the wrong house. This usually results in the death of the homeowner.

The list of the innocents killed in this war is long and depressing.

How many more people must the government kill in this war on U.S.
citizens? How much more treasury and blood must be spilled before the
government recognizes the folly of this policy? Already this year,
government has spent more than $1.3 billion on the war on drugs.
Police have made more than 51,000 arrests this year. This is only January.

In 2006, government agents made 1.89 million arrests for drug law
violations (13.1 percent of the total number of arrests and more than
for any other offense), according to FBI statistics. In fact, police
arrest someone every 17 seconds for violating a drug law.

Yet, illegal drugs continue to permeate our society.

Clearly, in a free society, a person's choice to take drugs is his or
hers alone. It is no business of government what a person puts into
his or her body.

Still, the illegality of drugs is no excuse for the government to
wage war on a large segment of its society, especially considering
there are no beneficial results, only death and misery and an
increasingly overcrowded prison system.

In fact, the United States, supposedly a free nation, imprisons more
people than any other country in the world, in actual numbers and as
a percentage of the population. Even China and Russia imprison fewer
people than the United States. That was not always the case. The
dramatic increase in the prison population is largely from the war on drugs.

Another ill-effect of the war on drugs is the increasing
militarization of our community police forces. They are no longer
keepers of the peace; they have morphed into quasi-military
organizations that have adopted a siege mentality in their own
cities. They take millions of dollars in grants from the federal
government and purchase armored vehicles, helicopters and automatic
weapons. They use this equipment in macho shows of force to keep the
populace in line.

This "us against them" attitude makes it increasingly easier for them
to bust down doors on unsuspecting residents based on often-spurious
tips from shady characters. They conduct pre-dawn raids with very
little intelligence on what they will find in the house. Then, when
an officer kills someone, they put up a wall of silence and claim the
whole operation was "by the book."

Well, whatever book they are using has no place in a free society
where police should be protecting the liberties and freedoms of
citizens -- even if that freedom includes the recreational use of drugs.

The Constitution has become nothing but a doormat for government
agents to trample on as they bust down another door to another
American home looking for drugs that may or may not be there.