War On Drugs

Two years ago, my 23-year-old brother became addicted to painkillers after breaking his leg and undergoing several operations to repair it. Last year, while he was checking into rehab for abusing OxyContin, I was drafting a chapter in my new book calling for drug legalization. It was a difficult moment to believe in individual liberty: I felt firsthand the effects of what it's like when people make bad decisions. I saw how hard my brother struggled to get clean, first moving forward and then backsliding again into substance abuse.

Guys needed. Nothing against the women who have called here to offer to be mentors to people climbing out of drug addiction and incarceration, but we need guys, too. And right now there are about five women offering to help for every guy who's picked up the phone or tapped out an e-mail. A lot of guys, including the governor and lieutenant governor of Maryland and the executive of Baltimore County, have expressed support for the efforts to get recovering addicts and other ex-offenders into the working mainstream.

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- A few weeks ago, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy was ballyhooing statistics showing that the price of cocaine on the streets of America was up 19 percent to $170 a gram and the quality was down 15 percent. This was supposed to be good news for America's second-most-important and second-most-expensive war, the war on drugs, in which the United States has spent billions of dollars. If the price is up and the quality is down, it means the shippers aren't getting as much good junk into America.

Quibdo, Colombia -- The last time Eleana Cordova saw her husband was nine years ago today. His torso was lying in the dirt near the family's modest dwelling in a farming community called Bojaya near the banks of the Atrato River. Nearby lay his legs, and his arms and his head, which, Mrs. Cordova said, had been severed one at a time by a Colombian paramilitary militiaman. Why? Because her husband hesitated when he was ordered to cut the hair of his 1-year-old son. A tradition exists among her people, she explained, in which a boy's hair is not cut until he reaches a certain age, 1 1/2 or 2. But the paramilitary did not care.

BALTIMORE DRUG dealers and former dealers, drug addicts and recovering addicts didn't vote for Bob Ehrlich in 2002. Check me if I'm wrong, brothers and sisters, but many of you either have felony convictions, which means you weren't allowed to vote, or you were incarcerated at the time of the gubernatorial election. Others were just "distracted," committing crimes to feed your addictions, and therefore not engaged in that grand thing we call democracy. And even if you were, you were not inclined to vote for a Republican.

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.

JAMES WATKINS went to his grave this week with his secrets locked away forever. The Baltimore Police Department once made him a deputy chief, but the state's attorney's office called him a criminal. The courts haltingly gave Watkins legal vindication, and maybe even peace of mind. But, a quarter-century after his ordeal, only the Bear knew the final truth of things. They called him the Bear for his bulk and his larger-than-life persona. One summer afternoon -- this goes back to 1971, before we had 14-year-olds running crack cocaine and Stop Snitching DVDs all over town, when people still had naive delusions about controlling drug traffic -- Watkins led his Tactical Division's Stop Squad onto Pennsylvania Avenue and randomly arrested 35 people for the crime of standing on a sidewalk in America.

CONSIDERING his situation, it wasn't surprising Jamal Lewis was the only Ravens player visibly repulsed by Monday night's loss to Kansas City. Defensive stars Ed Reed and Ray Lewis all but shrugged off the physical whipping by the Chiefs. Quarterback Kyle Boller speed-talked through a list of cliches. Jamal Lewis, meanwhile, stood in the middle of a scrum, agitated. He spewed an emphatic stream of consciousness -- most of it frustration. He wanted the ball. He wants to win. Funny how a man gets stricken with a heightened sense of urgency when facing prison.

Taking the profit out of drug trade is cure for killing Why is the Baltimore homicide rate so high ("Homicides on pace for nearly 300 by year's end," Oct. 2)? Why are so many young black men being murdered by other young black men? The reason seems pretty obvious. Directly or indirectly, it can all be traced back to the illegal drug trade. Street drug dealers in poor black neighborhoods are the role models. They are the ones with money in their pockets. They set the fashions. It's their values that spread through the neighborhoods: Take no stuff and get quick revenge.

REGRETTABLY, Baltimore often has been considered the nation's heroin haven, and it remains among the top heroin-abusing cities. It has among the most hospitalizations, treatment cases and heroin-related crime; 35.8 percent of those arrested last year tested positive for heroin. From 1994 to 1998, the frequency of drug-related emergency room visits in the Baltimore area was nearly triple the national rate. More Baltimore residents died of drug overdoses (324) than by homicide (309) in 1999.