WHEN WILL WE END THE FAILED DRUG WAR?

ATLANTA - You don't hear much about the nation's "war on drugs" these
days. It's a has-been, a glamourless geezer, a holdover from bygone
days. Its glitz has been stolen by the "war on terror," which gets
the news 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 the Harlem
kingpin Frank Lucas, portrayed by Denzel Washington in the film
American Gangster. Instead, they are usually penny-ante dealers
addicted to their product.

As violent crime dropped in the '90s, some law-and-order types argued
that the 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.

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 those
narrow changes in policy. They won't help victims such as Kathryn
Johnston, an elderly Atlanta woman killed by local police in a hail
of gunfire 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 Ms. Johnston's house, where they believed
they would find illegal substances. But the woman, who lived behind
barred windows, 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.