"We're Not At War With People In This Country."

Obama's drug czar is going to stop calling drug prohibition the "war on drugs." Radley Balko thinks this is significant:

The change in rhetoric obviously isn't an end to the federal prohibition on drugs. But it isn't mere symbolism, either. Rhetoric matters.

The drug war imagery started by Nixon, subdued by Carter, then ratcheted up again in the Reagan administration (and remaining basically level since) has had significant repercussions on the way drug policy is enforced, from policymakers on down to street-level cops. It's war rhetoric that gave us the Pentagon giveaway program, where millions of pieces of surplus military equipment (such as tanks) have been transferred to local police departments. War imagery set the stage for the approximately 1,200 percent rise in the use of SWAT teams since the early 1980s, and has fostered the militaristic, "us vs. them" mentality too prevalent in too many police departments today.