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List of the innocents killed in drug war is long and depressing
By Hempology | January 14, 2008
Lima News, OH
13 Jan 2008
Thomas J. Lucente, Jr.
THE ILL-CONCEIVED WAR ON DRUGS DESTROYING AMERICA
America’s ill-conceived War on Drugs cost another life this month when a police officer in Lima accidentally shot and killed a woman and injured her baby during a drug raid. They were looking for her boyfriend.
The accidental shooting of 26-year-old Tarika Wilson was just the latest in more than a quarter-century of bloodshed.
For example, in Belpre in October 1998, police shot 57-year-old Delbert Bonnar eight times. They were looking for his son.
In March 1994, a retired Methodist minister, Accelyne Williams, of Boston, died after a police special weapons and tactics team, given a bad address by an informant, raided his home. He died of a heart attack after police tackled him.
In February 2003, Drug Enforcement Administration agents looking for her father shot Ashley Villareal, 14, of San Antonio. The agents thought he was driving the car in which Ashley was sitting so they shot and killed her. The agents, by the way, did not even have a warrant for the father.
In August 1999, SWAT team officers looking for marijuana shot Mario Paz, 65, of Compton, Calif., twice in the back. Police found no drugs.
The casualties are not limited to women, children and retired ministers, either. Law-enforcement agents are also losing their lives in these senseless and hastily arranged drug raids.
Alarmed homeowners have killed quite a few police officers raiding the wrong house. This usually results in the death of the homeowner.
The list of the innocents killed in this war is long and depressing.
How many more people must the government kill in this war on U.S. citizens? How much more treasury and blood must be spilled before the government recognizes the folly of this policy? Already this year, government has spent more than $1.3 billion on the war on drugs. Police have made more than 51,000 arrests this year. This is only January.
In 2006, government agents made 1.89 million arrests for drug law violations ( 13.1 percent of the total number of arrests and more than for any other offense ), according to FBI statistics. In fact, police arrest someone every 17 seconds for violating a drug law.
Yet, illegal drugs continue to permeate our society.
Clearly, in a free society, a person’s choice to take drugs is his or hers alone. It is no business of government what a person puts into his or her body.
Still, the illegality of drugs is no excuse for the government to wage war on a large segment of its society, especially considering there are no beneficial results, only death and misery and an increasingly overcrowded prison system.
In fact, the United States, supposedly a free nation, imprisons more people than any other country in the world, in actual numbers and as a percentage of the population. Even China and Russia imprison fewer people than the United States. That was not always the case. The dramatic increase in the prison population is largely from the war on drugs.
Another ill-effect of the war on drugs is the increasing militarization of our community police forces. They are no longer keepers of the peace; they have morphed into quasi-military organizations that have adopted a siege mentality in their own cities. They take millions of dollars in grants from the federal government and purchase armored vehicles, helicopters and automatic weapons. They use this equipment in macho shows of force to keep the populace in line.
This “us against them” attitude makes it increasingly easier for them to bust down doors on unsuspecting residents based on often-spurious tips from shady characters. They conduct pre-dawn raids with very little intelligence on what they will find in the house. Then, when an officer kills someone, they put up a wall of silence and claim the whole operation was “by the book.”
Well, whatever book they are using has no place in a free society where police should be protecting the liberties and freedoms of citizens — even if that freedom includes the recreational use of drugs.
The Constitution has become nothing but a doormat for government agents to trample on as they bust down another door to another American home looking for drugs that may or may not be there.
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