DECADES LATER, WAR ON DRUGS IS STILL A LOSER

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