Letter to the Editor
The Aberdeen Daily World  2-18-97
letters@thedailyworld.com

The time has come to abandon the concept of a 'drug-free society'

Editor, The Daily World -
     Suppose you're at home doing whatever a normal, law abiding taxpaying
citizen does at any given time.  And a caravan of four patrol cars with four
Drug Task Force officers drives up to your house and issues a search warrant
to search the premises for narcotics.
     If you were involved with drugs in some fashion, you would probably be
nervous.  But if not, you would probably still be nervous.  I imagine you
would be somewhat apprehensive about four strangers roaming through your
house, searching rooms, asking questions and basically trampling over your
civil liberties.
     This is what happened to my neighbor last October.
     After a two hour search, no narcotics were discovered.
     So what lead the Task Force to suspect there were or could possibly be
narcotics on the premises?
     It was an anonymous tip to a supervisor at the Mason County PUD 3. 
Supposedly, she had somehow diverted power past her meter and was stealing
electricity.  What really happened was that , 22 months earlier, the PUD had
hired a crew to replace the power poles and service lines that fed the barn
and two other outbuildings.  The crew had accidently bypassed the meter with
these new lines.
     My neighbor noticed a decrease in her monthly bill but, had no idea
there was a problem.  If your lights are working and your bill is less, that
would not necessarily qualify as a problem anyway!
     The PUD supervisor notified the Task Force, and a few days later, a
search warrant was served.
     CAN the blame for this mistake rest solely on the backs of the Task
Force?  I think not.
     The criteria for securing a search warrant have been relaxed.  In drug
cases, the Supreme Court has permitted the issuance of the search warrants
based on anonymous tips and the tips from informants known to be corrupt and
unreliable:  and it has upheld evidence obtained under defective search
warrants if the officers executing the warrant acted in "good faith."  These
holdings have been characterized as "the drug exception to the Fourth
Amendment."  This in turn has allowed officers to relax their investigations,
and the results are not always favorable to people like my neighbor.
     When you ask most people, "Why are we doing this?", the response is that
"there is so much crime associated with drugs."  But the fact is that drugs
are not the reason for the crime - it's the war against them.
     It was not the police who lobbied in 1914 for the passage of the
Harrison Act, which first criminalized drugs.  It was the protestant
missionary societies in China, the Women's Christian Temperance Union and
other such organizations that viewed the taking of psychoactive substances as
sinful.  These groups gradually got their religious tenets enacted into penal
statutes under which the "sinners" go to jail.
     THE religious origin is significant for two reasons:  If drugs had been
outlawed because the police had complained that the drug use caused crime and
disorder, the policy would have been more acceptable to the public and more
compliance.  And even today prohibitionists who turn to the Bible for
guidance on current affairs can find little justification there for our war
on drugs and the people who use them.
     Drugs are here to stay and it's time we recognized that.  The time has
come to abandon the concept of a "drug-free society."  We need to focus on
learning to live with drugs in such a way that they do the least possible
harm.
     Prohibition is no way to run a drug policy.  We learned that with
alcohol during the first third of this century.
     America's indiscriminate drug prohibition is responsible for too much
crime, disease and death to qualify as a sensible policy.  These are not
problems that are merely tangential to the war on drugs.  These are problems
caused, or made substantially worse, by the war on drugs.
     After hundreds of billions of dollars spent trying to stop the supply
and demand for drugs, after the breakup of thousand of families because of
the arrest of a nonviolent drug offender, after eight decades of failure, we
have to wonder what its purposes really are.
     If its purpose is to create one of the highest crime rates in the world
- and thus provide permanent fodder for demagogues who deny its purpose is
the repeal of the Bill of Rights, victory is well in sight.
     If its purpose is to transfer individual freedom to the central
government, it is carrying that off as well as any of our real wars did.
     If its purpose is to destroy our inner cities by making them war zones,
triumph is near.

          Daniel X. Meldrich / Elma
Power Corrupts
Absolute Power Corrupts... Absolutely
Scott M. Mills --- A Subscriber at Techline