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against drugs that led me to change my attitude about drug-control
policy.  The analogy to the Vietnam War is fitting.  I was a willing
foot soldier at the start of the modern drug war, pounding a beat in
Harlem.  During the early 1960s, as heroin use spread, we made many
arrests, but it did not take long before cops realized that arrests did
not lessen drug selling or drug use.
I came to realize just how ineffective we were in deterring drug use
one day when my partner and I arrested an addict for possession of a
hypodermic needle and heroin.  Our prisoner had already shot up, but
the heroin charge we were prepared to level at him was based on the
tiny residue in the bottle cap used to heat the fix.  It was petty, but
then-and now-such arrests are valued because they can be used to claim
success, like the body counts during the Vietnam War.
In this case the addict offered to "give" us a pusher in exchange for
letting him go.  He would lure the pusher into a hallway where we could
then arrest him in the act of selling drugs.  We trailed the addict
along Lenox Avenue.  To our surprise, he spoke to one man after another.
It suddenly struck me as humiliating, the whole scene.  Here it was,
broad daylight.  We were brilliantly visible, in uniform, in a marked
police car: and yet a few feet away, our quarry was attempting one drug
transaction after another.  The first two dealers weren't deterred by
our presence - they were simply sold out, and we could not arrest them
without the goods.  We finally arrested the third pusher, letting the
first addict escape, as we had covenanted.  The man we brought in was
selling drugs only to support his own habit.
Another inherent difficulty in drug enforcement is that violators are
engaging in consensual activity and seek privacy.  Every day, millions
of drug crimes similar to what took place in front of our police car
occur without police knowledge.  To enforce drug laws the police have
to resort to undercover work, which is dangerous to them and also to
innocent bystanders.  Drug enforcement often involves questionable
ethical behavior by the police, such as what we did in letting a guilty
person go free because he enticed someone else into violating the law.
Soldiers in a war need to dehumanize the enemy, and many cops took on
drug users as less than human.  The former police chief of Los Angeles,
Darvi Gates, testified before the United States Senate that casual
users should be taken out and shot.  He defended the statement to the
Los Angeles Times by saving, "We're in a war." New York police officers
convicted of beating and robbing drug dealers (their boss at the time
is now Director of the White House's Office of National Drug Control
Policy) rationalized their crimes by saving it was impossible to stop
drug dealing and these guys were the enemy.  Why should they get to
keep all the money?
Police scandals are an untallied cost of the drug war.  The FBI, the
Drug Enforcement Administration, and even the Coast Guard have had to
admit to corruption.  The gravity of the police crimes is as disturbing
as the volume.  In New Orleans, a uniformed cop in league with a drug
dealer has been convicted of murdering her partner and shop owners
during a robbery committed while she was on patrol.  In Washington DC,
and in Atlanta, cops in drug stings were arrested for stealing and
taking bribes.  New York State troopers falsified drug evidence that
sent people to prison.
And it is not just the rank and file.  The former police chief of
Detroit went to prison for stealing police drug-buy money.  In a small
New England town, the chief stole drugs from the evidence locker for
his own use.  And the DEA agent who arrested Panama's General Noriega
is in jail for stealing laundered drug money.
The drug war is as lethal as it is corrupting.  And the police and drug
criminals are not the only casualties. An innocent 75-year-old African-
American minister died of a heart attack 'struggling with Boston cops
who were mistakenly arresting him because an informant had given them
the wrong address.  A rancher in Ventura County, California, was killed
by a police SWAT team serving a search warrant in the mistaken belief
that he was growing marijuana.  In Los Angeles, a three-year-old girl
died of gunshot wounds after her mother took a wrong turn into a street
controlled by a drug-dealing gang.  They fired on the car because it
had invaded their marketplace.
The violence comes from the competition for illegal profits among
dealers, not from crazed drug users.  Professor Milton Friedman has
estimated that as many as 10,000 additional homicides a year are
plausibly attributed to the drug war.
Worse still, the drug war has become a race war in which non-whites are
arrested and imprisoned at four to five times the rate whites are, even
though most drug crimes are committed by whites.  The Sentencing
Research Project reports that one-third of black men are in ail or
under penal supervision, largely because of drug arrests.  The drug war
has established thriving criminal enterprises which recruit teenagers
into criminal careers.
It was such issues that engaged law-enforcement leaders-most of them
police chiefs-from fifty agencies during a two-day conference at the
Hoover Institution in May 1995.  Among the speakers was our colleague
in this symposium, Mayor Kurt Schmoke, who told the group that he had
visited a high school and asked the students if the high dropout rate
was due to kids' being hooked on drugs.  He was told that the kids were
dropping out because they were hooked on drug money, not drugs.  He
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