Drug war is a complete fraud
By Charley Reese

EZEQUIEL Hernandez 18, was by accounts of his family and friends a good
boy. He was out herding his family's goats in southwest Texas near the
border when he was shot to death by U.S. Marines on May 20.

A grand Jury is currently investigating. Some people who knew the boy
speculate that his ' death was the result of mistakes an honest,
understandable mistake on the part of the Marines and a more serious, less
forgivable mistake by politicians. They say it is inconceivable that
Hernandez would have knowingly fired at Marines.

The boy had a .22 rifle, and he did fire it. Family and friends believe he
may have just been plinking at a target like a stone or a tin can, not
aware that beyond the target Marines in heavy camouflage were concealed on
a stakeout looking for drug dealers. But the Marines thought he was firing
at them, returned fire and killed him.

If that's the way it happened and at the moment we don't knowit's a
tragedy, but the Marines are not to blame. The people who are to blame are
the politicians who insist on using the military in civilian police
functions.

Lt. Gen. Carlton Fulford, the commander of these Marines from the 1st
Marine Expeditionary Force, has said publicly hat he wishes they weren't
involved.

There are good reasons why he military should not be used in civilian
police work. The raining for the military and for

the police is quite different because their Jobs are quite different.

The military's job, to use the current slang, is to "break things and kill
people." The police's job is to take into custody people they have probable
cause to believe committed a crime but who are presumed to be innocent
until proven guilty.

The welltrained police officer's instincts are to avoid violence if at all
possible. The well trained soldier's instincts are to inflict violence and
to inflict it aggressively. The military spends a lot of money training
soldiers to be aggressive because in war, aggressiveness wins battles and
ultimately saves lives (our side's) by killing the enemy soldiers first.

We should be careful that our civilian police are not militarized and that
our military forces are not "civilianized." And one way to do that is keep
the military out of civilian police work and to avoid militarystyle
training and uniforms for civilian police.

Another way is to stop this political demagoguery about a drug war. It's
not a war. It's plain, oldfashioned smuggling and sale of contraband. Even
some of our Revolutionary forefathers were involved in smuggling.

Whenever a government designates some commodity as il

legal, it automatically creates a black market for the commodity. It
doesn't matter whether it's rum or marijuana or untaxed bolts of cloth. If
a government says people can't have it and enough people want it, somebody
will supply it.

So all we are doing is what governments have always done: trying to catch
the smugglers and their distributors. What's that got to do with war?
Nothing. Illegal drugs may not be good for you, but they are not that much
worse if at all than the stuff that is legal.

If you look at the deaths attributed to alcohol, take note that
doctorprescribed drugs kill 60,000 to 140,000 people per year, according
to a November 1994 article in Hospital Practice.

,` AND if you believe the government ernment's claim that tobacco kills
400,000 people a year (I think that's a phony number, but it's the official
government line), then the ban on narcotics really doesn't make any sense.
The last number I could find for deaths attributed to drug abuse was for
the year 1991it was just under 7000.

That boy out in Texas was killed by political posturing by demagogic
politicians. And his isn't the only government caused tragedy in this
stupid replay of Prohibition. But I think we'll find a Martian sooner than
we'll find a politician with the courage to say that the drug war is an
overblown fraud.

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Charley Reese writes for the Orlando Sentinel. Email OSOreese@aol.com