EDITORIAL
Drug war's important; so are our freedoms
State and federal law enforcement officials have picked an opportune time to lobby state lawmakers for tougher drug laws, as communities around the state mobilize to fight what is seen as a crystal methamphetamine epidemic.
Although it is difficult to know with precision the extent of this plague, there's no doubting its seriousness. It's critical that no momentum in the campaigns against ice in our neighborhoods be lost to any argument over statistics.
At the same time, it's vital that we resist being stampeded into abandoning important individual legal protections in favor of marginal gains in the drug war.
The provenance of some often-cited figures — that Hawai'i has 30,000 hard-core ice users and 90,000 "recreational" users — is now in question. Officials aren't immediately able to say where they got these numbers.
But there is no shortage of other numbers:
• Deaths among crystal methamphetamine users have quadrupled in the past decade to a record 62 fatalities last year, according to the Honolulu medical examiner's office.
• 40 percent of people arrested by police in Honolulu tested positive for methamphetamine use, according to a Justice Department report cited by U.S. Attorney Ed Kubo — more than 10 percent higher than any other American city.
Other numbers suggest frightening trends in child abuse and teenage drug use.
We owe it to ourselves to take a harder look at the derivation of these ice numbers, the better to know the enemy.
But anyone who has seen the ravages of ice addiction at work realizes that even one case is too many.
That said, we worry that prosecutors are lobbying lawmakers, under the rubric of the ice crisis, for the same tougher anti-drug measures they thought they needed before ice became a household word. In particular, they want it much easier to get approval for wiretaps, and they want a constitutional change to allow them to resume the so-called "walk-and-talk" program at the airport.
The latter practice, in which police question and possibly search suspicious-looking passengers at the airport, and which obviously depends upon "profiling" to be successful, was found unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court in 1992.
There will always be a dynamic tension between law enforcement people who want more legal tools to make their jobs easier and the legal protections that make this nation the envy of most others. There are many weapons that can be effective in the war on ice, including community mobilization, that won't jeopardize those protections.
