Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001
WASHINGTON - The conservative movement, long a cheerleader for the war on drugs, is having second thoughts because the cure includes police-state tactics that may be worse than the disease.
In fact, two of the six participants in a Monday news conference condemning the violence against innocent citizens in the name of fighting drugs flatly stated that drugs are the lesser of the two evils.
The war on drugs is inherently invasive of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, argued Solvig Singleton, senior policy analyst for the Competitive Policy Institute. She urged watchdog groups as one means of focusing on the drug problem.
The Libertarian Party finds that the war on drugs poses the greatest privacy threat to those of us who don't do drugs, agreed Steve Dasbach, the party's national director.
The other four panelists took no stand on the war on drugs, but expressed great reservations about the tactics being used to fight it. They were part of a much larger right-left coalition (reported by NewsMax.com over the weekend) signing a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, urging that panel to raise the issue at its hearing today when it meets to consider the nomination of John Walters to be the new drug czar.
Although the coalition's letter stipulates that the group takes no stand on the Walters nomination itself, at least one speaker at Monday's news conference expressed a lack of confidence in President Bush's nominee.
Eric E. Sterling, president of The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, said that what is known about Walters during his tenure at the Office of National Drug Control Policy office (ONDCP) during the Reagan and first Bush administrations is not reassuring.
Sterling was on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee from 1980 to 1988 when that panel was holding hearings on the creation of the Drug Policy office. He says Walters has never expressed any reservations about privacy invasion elements of a cookie scheme launched by the ONDCP.
One of those elements was a plan, never authorized by Congress, to plant surveillance tools in the computers of Americans across the land.