Dude, where's my grandma?

Great-grandmother Pearlie Rucker is hardly the kind of person who one would expect to find on the wrong side of the law. Nor, for that matter, is 75 year-old Hermann Walker, a retired minister now confined to a wheelchair. Yet while both Rucker and Walker are not guilty of any crime, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that they can be forced from their publicly subsidized apartments and left to the streets, just two more casualties of the government's unending war on drugs. When it comes to drug use among the urban poor, the Rehnquist Politburo which so recently crowned our beloved, unelected leader has now decided that innocent Americans can be punished for the crimes of others.

The sad story of our two senior citizens begins in 1988, at the height of the Reagan-Bush anti-drug hysteria. At this time, Cong-ress and the good bureaucrats at HUD grew tired of the reliance on chemical relief by so many of those who also rely on federally subsidized housing. So Washing-ton instituted a tough zero-tolerance policy, authorizing local administrators to evict tenants for all drug-related offenses. Fair enough, you say. Right or wrong, recreational drug use is illegal, and there's no reason why public housing projects should tolerate even the most harmless of criminal activities.

But this was not your ordinary zero-tolerance policy. This was a freaked-out, hyper-paranoid zero-tolerance policy which had majorly OD'd on the brown acid. Congress, in its infinite reasonableness, didn't require that a tenant be convicted of drug-related crimes in a court of law to merit eviction from public housing. Indeed, it didn't even mandate that it be the tenant him or herself who was caught passing the doobie. Instead, all that eviction required was evidence of drug-related activity "engaged in by a public housing tenant, any member of the tenant's household, or any guest or other person under the tenant's control." Now, neither Grandma Pearlie Rucker nor the Reverend Mr. Walker are the kind of people who would allow drug-use in their "household."

But the city authorities who administer their Oakland projects felt free to interpret the 1988 statute rather broadly. Rucker, for one, was evicted when her mentally disabled daughter was found in possession of a crack pipe two or three blocks from their shared apartment, far from her mot-her's benevolent "control." Walker, in turn, was thrown out on the streets when an eld-ercare worker was found to be secretly st-ashing drugs in his apartment. And two of their fellow Oak-landers were put in equally dire straights when their grandkids were found smoking pot in a parking lot.

The inequity and irrationality of these evictions, of the federal statute authorizing them, and of the court decision upholding them are all self-evident. I'm not a lawyer, and I can't judge the legal reasoning behind Rehnquist's decision not to correct this obvious injustice. But anyone with eyes to see can tell that there is something rotten in a country which mistreats its poor, innocent and elderly citizens so shamelessly. That something is the war on drugs: A sort of decades-long collective madness which has led Americans to continually compromise their cherished principles of liberty and equality in order to stop their fellow citizens from getting high.

In a more trivial example of anti-drug lunacy — a series of public service announcements which would be laughable if they weren't so shockingly exploitative — Washington's "Just Say No" squad has been charging the users of illegal drugs with supporting international terrorism. Admit-tedly, Osama bin Laden and his ilk are believed to profit from the illegal traffic in opiates. They also are known, however, to trade profitably in everything from firearms to honey. (Apparently, the NRA and the all-powerful Golden Blossom lobby nixed any public service announcements about that). By the same logic used in the ads, moreover, it could easily be claimed that the government's drug war is the source of the filthy, poppy-based lucre behind 9/11. If drugs were legalized, after all, their trade and sale would no longer be the monopoly of terrorists, Mafiosi and other assorted criminals. Nothing did more to get organized crime out of the booze business, remember, than the end of legal prohibition.

Openly funding al-Qaida. Remorselessly removing innocent grandmas from their homes. Pauperizing semi-paralyzed preachers without compunction. Sounds to me like the war on drugs is a good candidate for Bush's axis of evil — if not quite as bad as Saddam's Iraq, perhaps on a par with Khatami's reformist Iran. I'm sure that Grandma Pearlie would agree. Michael Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu.