LONG-RUNNING WAR ON DRUGS HAS BEEN AN ABJECT FAILURE

You don't hear much about the nation's "war on drugs" these
days. It's a has-been, a glamourless geezer.

Its glitz has been stolen by the "war on terror," which gets the
media hype and campaign trail rhetoric.

Railing against recreational drug use and demanding that offenders be
locked away is so '90s.

But the drug war proceeds, mostly away from news cameras and
photo-ops, still chewing up federal and state resources and casting
criminal sanctions over entire neighborhoods. Some four or so
decades into an intensive effort to stamp out recreational drug use,
billions of dollars have been spent; thousands of criminals, many of
them foreigners, have been enriched; and hundreds of thousands of
Americans have been imprisoned. And the use of illegal substances
continues unabated.

With the nation poised on the brink of a new political era, isn't it
time to abandon the wrongheaded war on drugs?

Isn't it time to admit that this second Prohibition has been as big a
failure as the last - the one aimed at alcohol?

Every war has its collateral damage, and the war on drugs is no
different. As it happens, its unintended victims have been
disproportionately black. The stunning rise in incarceration rates
for black men began after the nation became serious about stamping
out recreational drug use. In 1954, black inmates accounted for 30
percent of the nation's prison population, according to Marc Mauer,
assistant director of The Sentencing Project, a Washington,
D.C.-based group that advocates alternative sentencing. Fifty years
later, he wrote, blacks account for almost half of all prison
admissions. Much of that increase has come from arrests for drug
crimes. Very few of those black men are wildly successful drug lords
like Harlem kingpin Frank Lucas, portrayed by Denzel Washington in
"American Gangster." They are usually penny-ante dealers addicted to
their product.

As violent crime dropped in the '90s, some argued that harsh
penalties meted out under punitive drug laws were responsible for
safer streets.

But that argument is seriously undermined by a resurgence in violent
crime, even as drug arrests continue.

While violent offenders such as Frank Lucas deserve hefty prison
sentences, there is no justification for lengthy sentences for
nonviolent drug offenders.

Recently, criminal justice officials have begun to tacitly
acknowledge the racism embedded in the drug war. Earlier this month,
the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which sets federal sentencing
guidelines, retroactively reduced the penalties for some crimes
related to crack cocaine, reducing the stark disparity between
sentences for crack cocaine, used more frequently by black Americans,
and powder cocaine, more often used by whites. A day earlier, the
U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that judges could deviate from harsh
guidelines in sentencing drug offenders.

But the ravages of the drug war are too many to be eased by narrow
changes in policy.

They won't help victims such as Kathryn Johnston, an elderly Atlanta
woman killed by police a year ago. Under pressure to make drug
arrests, they said, members of an Atlanta narcotics squad lied to a
judge to obtain a "no knock" warrant for Johnston's house, where they
believed they would find illegal substances. But the elderly woman
thought she was the victim of a robbery and fired on the officers.

They returned fire. No drugs were found on her premises.

The nation's so-called war on drugs recalls that old Vietnam War
phrase about "burning the village" in order to save it. It also
brings to mind Albert Einstein's famous definition of insanity: Doing
the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Our war on drugs really is a war on people.

That's true insanity.