Does anyone have the courage to say drug war is overblown?

By Charley Reese
of The Sentinel Staff

Ezequiel Hernandez, 18, was, byaccounts of his family and friends, a
good boy. He was out herding his family's goats near the border in
Southwest Texas when he was shot to death by U.S. Marines a few weeks
ago.

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

The boy had a .22 rifle, and he did fire it. Family and friends believe
that he may have been just plinking at a target, such as 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 know), it's
a tragedy, but the Marines are not to blame. The people who are to blame
are the politicians whoinsist on using the military in civilian police
functions.

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

There are good reasons why the military should not be used in civilian
police work. The training for the military and 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 welltrained 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 on our side 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 to 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 illegal, 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 any, 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 (article
in Hospital Practice, November 1994); and if you believe that the
government'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 drugabuse deaths was from 1991 it was just less than 7,000.