Drug War

Welcome alternative to failed drug war Mayor Sheila Dixon's plan for fighting crime in the city is another positive initiative in her brief tenure as mayor ("Dixon outlines city crime-fighting plan," May 1). Targeting the most dangerous offenders, cracking down on illegal guns and strengthening community partnerships are all progressive steps. City Police Commissioner Leonard D. Hamm called the mayor's plan the right strategy because he believes the city streets are now manageable.

ATLANTA -- All wars have a way of creating collateral damage, as the desk-bound bureaucrats euphemistically call the dead innocents, destroyed buildings and decimated towns that just happen to be in the way of bombs and bullets. Kathryn Johnston was collateral damage in America's misguided "war on drugs." On Nov. 21, the 88-year-old woman was shot dead by Atlanta undercover police officers who crashed through her door after dark to execute a "no-knock" search warrant for illegal drugs.

THE RECENT closure of the American consulate in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, was the wrong response to the carnage playing out along the U.S.-Mexico border. Last Friday, on the same day that Ambassador Tony Garza announced the consulate's reopening, rival drug gangs vying for control of limited transit routes into the United States claimed their latest victims: the head of the City Council's Public Security Commission and his bodyguard. Both men were gunned down in what has become a routine occurrence on Nuevo Laredo's blood-soaked streets.

JUST AS crack took a destructive march through inner cities in the 1980s and 1990s, methamphetamine is having an increasingly devastating effect on rural families and communities, while also creeping slowly into cities. In a recently released survey by the National Association of Counties, 58 percent of local law enforcement officials said that methamphetamine outstripped cocaine, heroin and marijuana as their largest drug problem. In the Southwest and the Pacific Northwest, at least 75 percent of counties ranked it as the worst drug problem.

The Power of the Dog By Don Winslow. Alfred A. Knopf, 545 pages. $25.95. After a long hiatus (following 1999's Cali-fornia Fire and Life) former private investigator Winslow has returned with a novel far surpassing anything he has done to date. It's a sprawling, multi-viewpoint epic about the decades-old war on drugs, with layer upon layer of uncomfortable ambiguities, changing loyalties and senseless tragedy. The nominal hero here is Art Keller, a DEA agent stationed over the Mexican border to track drug shipments and those who make them.

CHICAGO - For some time, critics have been saying that the war hasn't been going well, has forced us to overextend ourselves and is gobbling up far too many tax dollars. But many of them were skeptical about this effort from the start. The surprise is that President Bush now seems to be moving their way on the war. Not the war in Iraq - the war on drugs. Early on, the Bush administration took a consistently hard line against recreational substances and those who use them - vigorously opposing state medical marijuana initiatives, objecting when Canada considered decriminalizing marijuana and accusing potheads of subsidizing terrorism.

MEXICO CITY - The discovery of an alleged drug traffickers' informant inside President Vicente Fox's office comes at an inopportune time for those trying to smooth new tensions in U.S.-Mexico relations. The arrest 10 days ago of Nahum Acosta Lugo, the president's travel planner, came as Fox and U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza were visiting the border to showcase the two nations' friendship, and as Mexicans were glowing over the engagement of Garza and Corona beer heiress Maria Asuncion Aramburuzabala.

CHICAGO - People learn from experience, but the process can be very slow. In 1973, New York enacted what were known as the Rockefeller drug laws, which imposed some of the harshest sentences in the country. Last week, Gov. George E. Pataki signed a bill retreating from that draconian approach. It only took 31 years, billions of dollars and thousands of lives that were wrecked because of youthful mistakes and very bad luck. Under the Rockefeller laws, low-level drug possession could get you life in prison, even if it was your first offense.