Harsh sentencing guidelines, mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws may indeed have originally targeted drug kingpins and drug-crazed violent criminals. But the real-life result has been that the poorly educated, underemployed urban poor have become the unwitting victims of this drug war. This past October, for instance, the city of El Monte, California, agreed to pay $3 million to the family of resident Mario Paz. The payment comes three years after the 64-year-old grandfather was killed during a 1999 drug raid gone awry. Early one morning thirteen masked SWAT officers--most of whom did not speak Spanish--burst into his home and shot him. No drugs were ever found.

And while drug reform and civil rights activists struggle to change excessively punitive legislation and law enforcement policies, tens of thousands of Americans who live out their lives in this nation's expanding socioeconomic underbelly are subject to racial profiling and street-level buy-and-bust operations.

In Seattle a group of defense attorneys have raised a unique legal challenge to these policies. The consolidated motion, expected to be heard in March 2003, involves thirteen unrelated low-income African-American and Latino co-defendants arrested after undercover agents solicited drugs on the street. Attorneys for the defendants are arguing that the Seattle Police Department practices "selective enforcement," targeting ethnic minorities for buy-and-bust operations.

"In Seattle, 77 percent of those arrested for felony drug delivery in these buy-bust operations are African-American or Hispanic," says lead attorney Kay-C Lee of the Racial Disparity Project of The Defender's Association. "If you are a black male drug user in Seattle--and African-Americans represent only 7 percent of the city's drug users--you're twenty-two times more likely to be arrested than a white male drug user."

Some men and women arrested on drug-related charges are indeed innocent. But many others actually do commit the nonviolent "crimes" for which they are arrested, and sensible jail sentences may give them exactly the time they need to reflect on their crimes.

But more frequently these largely nonviolent offenses speak to an overarching need for job and life-skills training, prevention- and intervention-focused counseling, and widely available substance abuse treatment. More than anything else, a commitment to public education would make all the difference in the lives of those born into economically disadvantaged and drug-addled circumstances.

Instead, between 1985 and 2000, spending on state corrections grew at six times the rate of funding for higher education, according to the Justice Policy Institute's 2002 report, Cellblocks or Classrooms.

While doing their research, JPI's Vincent Schiraldi and Jason Ziedenberg discovered that from 1980 to 2000, three times as many African-American men entered jail or prison as were admitted to colleges and universities nationwide. "When we close the doors to universities, we open the doors to prison," says Schiraldi emphatically.

With findings like these, it's time to face up to the fact that our mindless, fiscally irresponsible war on drugs hasn't made our society safer, smarter or stronger. The struggle ahead, as former Baltimore mayor and outspoken drug war dissident Kurt Schmoke puts it, is one that must cut across racial, ethnic and political lines. The drug war is our problem, and it demands our attention every bit as much as those fought on foreign soil.

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