Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (big screen ebook reader .TXT) 📕

has held that a search based on an invalid warrant does not require any remedy so long as the police acted in “good faith.”

So people can be stopped in their cars or in airports, trains, or buses, and then submitted to questioning or held to be sniffed by dogs. Police may search an open field without warrant or cause, even if trespassing on it would otherwise be a criminal offense. Police may use helicopters to look into our homes and backyards, private property they could not lawfully or constitutionally enter without a search warrant. They can search our garbage cans without giving a reason. And if they have “reasonable suspicion,” the police may search our bodies.10

The erosion of our Fourth Amendment rights caused by the war on drugs has not been confined to cases involving drugs, either. Duke explains:

The pressure to uphold police activities in drug cases generates new “principles” that thereafter apply to everyone, whether or not drugs are involved. If the police are authorized to search for drugs on suspicion, they can also search for evidence of tax evasion, gambling, mail fraud, pornography, bribery and any other offense. The putative object of a police search does not limit what can be confiscated. If police conduct is a lawful search, they can take and use any evidence they see, however unrelated it may be to what got them into the home—or the body—in the first place.11

So, even people who have never touched a drug in their lives are subject to the loss of Fourth Amendment rights brought about by the war on drugs, because a supine judiciary, cowed by the need to appear antidrugs, has lowered the bar for what police conduct is lawful and constitutional.

There are many examples of “wrong door” raids where the police bust into the homes of individuals only to find that they entered the wrong house and found no drugs. For example, New York City police accidentally entered into the wrong house during a predawn raid. They handcuffed Mini Matos, a deaf, asthmatic Coney Island woman, while her children cried. Ms. Matos begged the police to permit her to use her asthma pump, but she was ignored until the officers realized they had entered the wrong apartment.12

In 2003, the NYPD mistakenly raided the home of a fifty-seven-year-old woman. The violent manner in which they entered the apartment literally scared her to death and she died of a heart attack on the scene.13 And it is far from surprising that one of these raids could scare someone to death. These types of raids are “typically carried out by masked, heavily armed SWAT teams using paramilitary tactics more appropriate for the battlefield than the living room. In fact, the rise in no-knock warrants over the last twenty-five years neatly corresponds with the rise in the number and frequency of use of SWAT teams.”14

One very tragic story involved state law-enforcement agents who raided the home of Cheye Calvo (the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland) after the agents had tracked a package containing marijuana that was left on the front porch of Calvo’s house. Calvo brought the package into his house, and the drug agents “burst into the house without warning, shot and killed Calvo’s two dogs, and bound Calvo and his mother-in-law.”15 Sadly, this was all a mistake made by the agents. Neither Calvo nor anyone in his home had anything to do with the drugs.

In November 2006, a ninety-two-year-old woman was shot and killed in her Atlanta home when three officers raided it on a drug bust. Katherine Johnston, the elderly woman who was killed, did not have any drugs. The police had the wrong house. The officers had obtained a search warrant after an undercover officer had allegedly purchased drugs at Johnston’s home earlier on the day in question. The warrant was also a “no knock” warrant, meaning that they could come into the home without asking the occupant to let them in.

The officers announced themselves as police, and broke down the front door. Out of fear, Johnston used a gun her niece bought her for protection and shot at the officers, wounding them. In retaliation, they shot back and murdered her. Johnston had lived in her home on 933 Neal Street in northwest Atlanta for seventeen years. Johnston’s distraught niece, Sarah Dozier, was “mad as hell,” and stated that the police had “shot her down like a dog.”16 By the end of 2008, all three officers had pled guilty to various felonies in connection with the massacre. They began serving substantial prison sentences in early 2009.

Drug Money Supports Terror

The Office of National Drug Control Policy has begun running ads that say, “Drug money supports terror.” The ads ask, “Where do terrorists get their money? . . . If you buy drugs, some of it might come from you.” This is another lie. Here is a kernel of truth the government fails to comprehend: It is not the demand for drugs that is responsible for nurturing and harboring terrorists, it is the prohibition of the drugs that wreaks the most global havoc. Drugs are profitable because there is a ban on them. And items found on the black market generally are not cheap.17 So while the government goes and blames terrorism on people who buy drugs, it is the government itself that is actually perpetuating terrorism through its nonsensical drug policies. Apart from that, plenty of your tax money was used to fund these fruitless ads.

In fact, the war on drugs is responsible for a great deal of violence around the world. Recently there have been many brutal killings and much horrific violence related to drug cartels in Mexico, who have been warring with Mexican and U.S. officials. All of this was in the name of the drug war. Drug lords are engaging in a violent competition to export illegal drugs into the U.S. and reap the great rewards of the black market. As a result of these gang “drug wars” caused by the