More Drug War Collateral Damage

Radley Balco has more on another innocent death in the collateral damage of the drug war, here and here. (More kudos to Balco, who deserves the Internet equivalent of a Pulitzer for his work on the war on drugs.)

This time it's an 81 year-old man, Issac Singletary, who found two undercover police officers attempting to make a drug deal on his property. When the undercover officers wouldn't leave the property, Singletary came after them with a gun and the officers fired to defend themselves. And now Singletary is dead.

Balco makes the point that this is not the sort of scenario that could have been easily avoided- there appears to have been no police misconduct and no excessive use of force. End the war on drugs and you don't have SWAT-teams and undercover officers roaming the streets. How many deaths are too many? How many deaths before we say enough? How long until we realize that the cost of individuals' own choices ruining their own lives is a lot less than the cost of the lives of the innocent victims of the war on drugs.