By now you've probably heard about the brainless July 29 police assault on Cheye Calvo of Berwyn Heights, Md., and his family. First the cops plant marijuana on them, then storm the house, terrorize Calvo, his mother-in-law, and his wife, and shoot dead their two Labrador retrievers. Despite having apparently been investigating a pot-smuggling ring for some time, the cops didn't even know that Calvo is the community's mayor.

Doug Donovan at The Baltimore Sun wrote:

After the raid, Prince George's County police officials who burst into the home of Berwyn Heights' mayor last week seized the same unopened package of marijuana that an undercover officer had delivered an hour earlier. What police left behind was a house stained with blood and a trail of questions about their conduct. No other evidence of illegal activity was found, and no one was arrested at Mayor Cheye Calvo's home in this small bedroom community near College Park. This week Prince George's police arrested two men for orchestrating a plot to deliver marijuana to the addresses of unsuspecting recipients - among them, Calvo's wife, Trinity Tomsic. Yet neither county Police Chief Melvin C. High nor Sheriff Michael A. Jackson have apologized to him, his wife or her mother, Georgia Porter, for the raid that traumatized the family and killed their black Labrador retrievers, Payton and Chase. Yesterday, Calvo called on the U.S. Justice Department's civil rights decision to investigate the raid and other similar actions by Prince George's law enforcement. He said officers burst into his house without knocking or announcing themselves, in violation of the warrant they had.

And for what? Weed. Even the most avid drug foe cannot say with a straight face that marijuana comes within a country mile of equaling the negative impact on society of alcohol. But, of course, one is legal and the other is prohibited and the law must at all costs be enforced.

It would be encouraging at this juncture if the word "unbelievable" could be used to describe what happened to Mayor Calvo and his family. But it is completely believable to anyone who has even cursorily followed the grotesqueries of what Richard Nixon first called the War on Drugs 37 years ago. These sorts of "mistaken" raids happen frequently, but don't get the publicity that an infuriated white mayor in an upscale community can elicit. Calvo and his family were lucky one of them wasn't shot like a dog. It wouldn't have been the first time.

In this case, apparently, not only did the police step over the bounds of commonsense and decency - Calvo claims they shot one Labrador as it was running away - they may well have acted illegally and lied about it.

According to Rosalind S. Helderman at the Washington Post:

Prince George's County authorities did not have a "no-knock" warrant when they burst into the home of a mayor July 29, shooting and killing his two dogs -- contrary to what police said after the incident. ... But a review of the warrant indicates that police neither sought nor received permission from Circuit Court Judge Albert W. Northrup to enter without knocking. Northrup found probable cause to suspect that drugs might be in the house and granted police a standard search warrant. "There's nothing in the four corners of the warrant saying anything about the Calvos being a threat to law enforcement," said Calvo's attorney, Timothy Maloney. "This was a lawless act by law enforcement."

Unlike other illegal raids against innocent people, this is probably going to be an expensive one for the police. Meaning an outlay of county cash in a settlement decree plus the bad publicity. Which is as it should be.

But ultimately it will surely turn out as just another quickly forgotten bump in the road for America's $50 billion-a-year drug interdiction effort.

After nearly four decades of official war and a more informal effort for decades before that, what has all this accomplished? Drugs are used by people across ethnic, gender, class and educational lines. Today they are cheaper and often of higher quality than in the past. They are more accessible to young people. Programs like Drug Abuse Resistance Education are failures. The percentage of people incarcerated for non-violent drug-related crimes is shocking, and even though drugs are used by all segments of society, most of those imprisoned for drug crimes are likely to be poor and non-white. When they emerge from the slam again, they are tainted as drug felons, barred from getting education loans, and face, as do all felons, a tough time finding employment, with all the costs to society of that multifaceted problem.

Crime itself, including much violent crime and a huge proportion of thefts, is exacerbated by drug laws, as is corruption among public officials, including, all-too-often police. Meanwhile, those who need treatment beds for drug addiction have a hard time finding them because of lack of funding that might be available if so many people weren't being stuck in prison beds.

A few years ago, some brave mayors of long incumbency and a few retired police chiefs - notably Norm Stamper of Seattle and Joe McNamara of San Jose - said it was time to stop the insanity and remake American drug laws. Not across-the-board wholesale legalization, but sensible reform, including recognition of the fact that tens of millions use marijuana. However, despite the profound wreckage caused by this long-running war, there isn't a handful of nationally prominent politicians who will dare stand up to say or do anything about it.