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Drug Laws

Drug laws, which are surely motivated by the desire to prevent people from harming themselves, take a tremendous toll on the privacy of innocents. While the War on Drugs has raged, a string of U.S. Supreme Court cases has eroded the Fourth Amendment protections that protect people's privacy from government.

Because the majority of Fourth Amendment Search and Seizure cases have dealt with the question of whether evidence of pernicious drugs should be suppressed, courts have sometimes bent over backwards to validate searches. The result is that every American has a weakened right to walk or drive public streets free of searches of their persons and seizure of their possessions.

Links:

Privacy a Victim of the Drug War by Declan McCullagh, Wired News (December 11, 2000)

Comments? comments@privacilla.org (Subject: Drugs)

[updated 02/19/01]