WAR ON DRUGS IS FAILING

Doing the Same Thing Over and Over and Expecting a Different Result.

You don't hear much about the nation's "war on drugs" these days.
It's a has-been, 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, still
chewing up federal and state resources and casting criminal sanctions
over entire neighborhoods. Some four 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 drugs 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. 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. Few of those black men are wildly
successful drug lords like 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. 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 disparity between sentences
for crack cocaine, used more frequently by blacks, 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 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 Johnston's house, where they believed they would
find illegal substances. But the elderly 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 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.