When Right Goes Wrong : Aggressive War on Drugs Hits Home for the Guilty and the Innocent Alike

Charlene Goodman lives by the law and tries to teach her two children to do the same. But when her 17-year-old son was charged with selling cocaine, it almost cost her family something very precious: their home.

For three months, the Wilmington, Del., housing authority fought to evict the Goodmans from their $311-a-month apartment, saying the drug dealing--which occurred miles away near other agency property--violated terms of their lease.

Ultimately, Goodman won her court battle. The 32-year-old seamstress, who testified that she wasn’t aware of her son’s actions and tried her best to control him, was bewildered.

“I felt like I was being prosecuted for something someone else did,” she said. “I didn’t break any law.”

Her case typifies the growing efforts by law enforcement and political leaders to wage war on drugs with tactics--evictions, raids, even criminal charges against pregnant women--that have stirred new debate and sparked numerous lawsuits.

Legal Efforts Intensify

* In Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, Va., people suspected of drug involvement have been evicted without being convicted. A new Maryland program asks landlords to include in leases a clause stating that anyone selling drugs will be evicted.

* In several states, prosecutors seek to convict women for using drugs during pregnancy. Minnesota lawmakers recently passed a measure to permit doctors who suspect a pregnant woman is abusing drugs to test her without her knowledge; drug users are not punished but urged to seek treatment.

* In Chicago, public housing raids have been conducted without warrants or tenants’ consent. A suit also claims personal belongings were searched. A city alderman wants a law that would authorize the arrest of loiterers in areas where drugs are sold.

Civil libertarians say these are grandstanding acts that victimize the innocent, discriminate against the poor and reek of McCarthyism. Beyond that, they say, they’re ineffective.

“The war on drugs is really a war on the American people, whose rights are being invaded,” said professor Steven Wisotsky of Nova Law Center in Florida. “There’s a mass invasion of civil liberties on the grounds it’s necessary to win the war.”

“Attempts to legislate away social problems are usually very unsuccessful,” said James Fyfe, an American University criminologist and former police officer.

But frustrated prosecutors and politicians, pressured to act and act fast, say aggressive isn’t necessarily invasive. There are enough legal checks and balances to protect the innocent, they say.

“I don’t see where anybody has the civil rights to use drugs,” said prosecutor Paul Logli of Winnebago County, Ill. A grand jury recently refused to indict a woman he charged with involuntary manslaughter after claiming her cocaine use led to her baby’s death.

“If people are going to do drugs, sell drugs or buy drugs, they have to be discouraged in any way possible,” Logli added. “People who introduce this cancer or support this cancer have to pay a price. If it’s losing housing, it’s an appropriate response.”

In one week last month in Washington, marshals evicted 257 people from residences where suspected drug activity occurred.

Some of the most intense efforts have been in drug-infested public housing. Housing and Urban Development officials have issued waivers to public housing agencies in Boston, Washington, New York and Alexandria, allowing them to streamline the eviction process by up to nine months.

HUD Secretary Jack Kemp has vowed to ensure due process, but some worry that people will be harmed, especially parents unable to control drug-dealing children.

“If it happened to a middle-class person in their own house, they would not lose their abode,” said American Civil Liberties Union attorney Loren Siegel. “It’s picking on the most vulnerable people in society and creating a whole new group of homeless.”

Sometimes, she said, people not even suspected of wrongdoing are hurt. The ACLU is representing a woman and her children in Peekskill, N.Y., ordered out when their building was seized as a suspected drug den.

Citizen Support

But those directing the raids insist there is local support.

“The people want it,” said Vincent Lane, the Chicago Housing Authority’s chairman. “I have received requests for sweeps from every development in the city.”

And Alexandria Mayor James Moran agrees: “The strongest pressure I’m getting to clamp down harder is coming from the residents of public housing. If it were up to them, they’d have public executions in the courtyard.”

Alexandria has evicted 18 families from public and private housing after two controlled drug buys from each residence, Moran said.

“We don’t want to take any risk of evicting an innocent person,” he said. “We don’t want to ruin it for the rest of the country.”

Moran said the city is compiling a public file of Social Security numbers of people evicted in drug cases, and landlords can then deny them housing.

Limited Impact

Still, the impact is limited, he and others concede.

“It nowhere near begins to really address the major problems of drugs,” said Richard Nelson, director of the National Assn. of Housing and Redevelopment Officials. “That requires a lot more than pure enforcement pressure.”

A similar criticism was made of the District of Columbia’s plans for a juvenile curfew aimed at curbing drug-related violence. It was rejected in May by U.S. District Judge Charles Richey, who called it a “bull in a china shop of constitutional values.”

Pregnant Women Prosecuted

Other crackdown efforts, such as prosecuting pregnant drug abusers, have been denounced as senseless and damaging to those needing help.

“They’re creating out of thin air a new crime--the mother’s failure to provide the perfect womb,” said Lynn Paltrow of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project.

“The biggest effect of all this attention is to have a pregnant woman currently using any type of drug to shy away from going to a hospital and delivering,” said Rockford, Ill., attorney Alberto Altamore, who represented a woman convicted of prenatal child abuse for using cocaine up to a few hours before birth.

But prosecutor Logli responded: “It may be something that drives them underground or it may be the last straw that convinces them to do something about their own problem.”

Similar cases are emerging elsewhere. In Florida, a woman who allegedly took cocaine during pregnancy is charged with child abuse and distributing drugs.

Get-Tough Approach

In a different type of get-tough program, criminal court judges in two Tennessee counties have begun asking people convicted of possessing or selling drugs to name their supplier. Refusal could earn a contempt charge. The program is modeled after one in Columbus, Neb.

This aggressive approach follows other controversial measures, including widespread drug testing in industry and government, and forfeiture laws in many places allowing property, such as cars and boats, to be seized from people accused but not convicted of drug offenses.

A survey of more than 1,000 corporate members of the American Management Assn. found that in 1988, 48% of companies tested for drugs, compared with 21% in 1986.

Although all of these steps have come under attack, even critics understand the motive.

Constituents clamor for politicians “to solve the drug problem,” said Arthur Spitzer, ACLU legal director in Washington.

But he cautions against quick fixes. “It’s a problem that’s been a long time in coming,” he said, “and it will be a long time in going away.”

Wrong is wrong. Drug abuse, for example. Racism, for another. What’s not as clear-cut is how far U.S. society should go to redress such wrongs. Some say recent responses go too far, jeopardizing the promises of the Constitution. Rights are rights, they say. Associated Press reporters Lee Mitgang and Sharon Cohen examine the dilemma of societal wrongs and individual rights: a perceived threat to free speech as colleges fight racism, and worries about due process as police and politicians use evictions and other measures to fight drugs.