When Congress fundamentally restructured the forfeiture laws by allowing agencies to keep most of the assets they seize, it did so without considering the very substantial costs of these amendments to both the public welfare and the justice system. Now, more than a decade later, Congress can draw on an extensive and disturbing history to reassess the wisdom of these laws. This history is neither subtle nor ambiguous. Together with the narrow drug enforcement focus of the revised federal law enforcement aid program, the asset retention law has wrought a dramatic shift in police motivation, towards practices that seriously undermine rational law enforcement efforts. As we have seen, many police agencies choose the law enforcement strategies that will take maximum advantage of federal forfeiture laws, circumvent their own state forfeiture laws, and maximize property seizures-reducing fairness and crime control issues to an afterthought. Even the alleged mission of the Drug War may become secondary; failed policies are immune to reform because they sustain and profit the law enforcement agencies enlisted in this war.

Police abuses and warped law enforcement policy are only half of this disturbing story. We have also argued that police self-financing raises serious accountability concerns, and threatens to establish a sector of permanent, independent, and self-aggrandizing police forces. This might sound promising to Colonel North or General Pinochet, but it should not be mistaken for a legitimate organ in a democracy. The institutional mechanisms we have explored are but one part of an anti-drug mobilization that continues to have profound effects on the liberties and well-being of our people. We sink more deeply into this war year by year, failing to adequately examine or comprehend the choices we are making. Today commentators urge that we close the "revolving prison doors," apparently unaware that we already incarcerate far more people for longer time than almost every other industrialized country. Our politicians speak casually of enlisting the military, the National Guard, and the CIA to keep drugs away from the Americans who seek them, and for his part Mayor Rudolph Guiliani stations New York City drug police in the Dominican Republic. We routinely deploy numerous federal agencies, and massive numbers of federal and state agents, in military-style raids against low-level drug dealers. All of these changes, mostly unimaginable a generation ago, are largely the products of twenty-five years of trying (and failing) to "win" the War on Drugs. The first step towards recovery, which cannot come too soon, is to look at what we have done to ourselves, and what kind of institutions we have built, on the way to a "drug-free" society.