I'm reading a great book,"Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America" by Cato Institute scholar Ted Galen Carpenter. It is a penetrating examination of America's vain attempts, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, to stop drug trafficking in Latin America and the Caribbean.

When he first declared a "war on drugs," Richard Nixon was simply using a metaphor. We should make the same effort to eliminate drug abuse, Nixon was saying, as we do when we wage war. Nevertheless, as Carpenter astutely observes, by framing American efforts to end drug abuse as a "war," he shaped America's response to the problem.

By the 1980's, the war on drugs had become an actual shooting war, with the Panama invasion to capture Noriega (under US drug-trafficking indictments) being one of its notable battles. But, more than that, declaring a war on drugs created a war mentality in the United States.

Carpenter cites a 1989 Washington Post/ABCNews Poll, where respondents declared that, in service of the war on drugs, they would permit the following:

1. 62% would give up a few freedoms ;
2. 67% would allow random car searches for drugs;
3. 52% would allow police, without a warrant, to search suspected drug traffickers' homes, even if some homes were searched by mistake;
4. 71% supported making it against the law to portray illegal drug use in movies.

The poll results are troubling, since they reveal Americans' willingness to surrender their consitutional rights. But, as Carpenter observes, resort to such desperate measures is to be expected when a nation is engaged in a protracted conflict that it is on the verge of losing.

Carpenter's book was published in 2003, right at the dawn of the "war on terror," so it doesn't directly address the matter. I bet, though, that if you took that same poll today, substituting the word terror for drugs, you woud get the same results.