Joseph McNamara, Novelist and Retired Police chief of San Jose, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

The drug war has become a race war in which cops, most of them white, arrest non-whites for drug crimes at four to five times the rate whites are arrested.

Drug war hysteria unfortunately causes a lot of cops to see non-whites as the enemy even though studies show that most consumption of illegal drugs is by whites.

Furthermore, the huge increase in arrests has not deterred either drug sellers or drug users, but it does cause daily confrontations between the police and minority kids.

Thus, in February, I was happy to join a politically and racially diverse group in signing a resolution asking the government to end the harmful war on drugs while increasing preventive education and treatment.

The signers included former Secretary of State George Schultz, Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, doctors, educators, clergy from riot areas of Los Angeles and the African American mayor of Baltimore, Kurt Schmoke, a former federal prosecutor.

All of the signers recommended the appointment of an objective commission to find better ways to discourage drug abuse.

The resolution touched a nerve. As news of it spread, people around the world asked for copies and signed the resolution, including many in American law enforcement.

Dean Alfred Blumstein of the School of Public Affairs at Carnegie-Mellon University wrote that he made similar proposals last year as president of the American Society of Criminology. Blumstein's analysis of arrest data led him to call the drug war a major assault upon the African American community.

As a retired career policeman, it pains me to see cops forced into a dehumanizing war they cannot win.

General Colin Powell told us during the Persian Gulf war that a soldier's duty was to kill the enemy. But police officers are not soldiers. They are peace officers whose fundamental duty is to protect human life.

So, when the former Los Angeles police chief told the U.S. Senate that casual drug users should be taken out and shot, he was articulating the occupation army model of policing consistent with the drug war.

And when the chief dehumanizes people who use drugs, it is not surprising to see street cops drift into inhumane beatings such as those shown in the Rodney King tapes.

Recently, I described the reasons behind the resolution to a meeting of 200 or so Bay Area law enforcement officers attending a conference on community policing. For many of those in the audience, the negative analysis of enforcement efforts was unexpected and unpleasant. After all, they and their colleagues risked their lives in enforcing drug laws.

But after the panel discussion ended, I was surrounded by cops asking to sign the resolution.

For years, many people in law enforcement, ranging from narcs to major city police chiefs, prosecutors and judges, recognized that the war on drugs was doomed to failure because too many people are more than willing to buy mind- altering substances despite their illegality.

The demand is so great that around $500 worth of illegal drugs in Columbia, Mexico, Bolivia or Peru will bring $100,000 in an American city.

It is clear that something must be done to reduce demand and the incredible profits that drive the illegal market. Because of the profit margin, dealers are quickly replaced when they are killed or go to prison.

Nor are drug users rehabilitated by strip searches and incarceration. Yet most of the government funding goes to enforcement and interdiction rather than toward reducing demand through preventive education and treatment programs.

For too many years, our elected officials have outdone each other in being "tough" on crime and drugs despite evidence that increased enforcement and mandatory penalties for drug crimes were not working. Indeed, these policies contributed to increases in crime and violence.

The politicians need to learn that it is not political suicide to seek a more rational way of handling a serious national problem.

In a couple of months, we will send signed resolutions to President Clinton and Congress showing that those of us in the real America are against a costly and inhumane war that does not reduce drug abuse but does increase violence and racial tensions.

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This article has been published on the San Francisco Examiner, 17 April 1993.