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But some legal experts have also begun to talk about an emerging "drug exception" to the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures -- a willingness by courts, where drugs are concerned, to permit searches they might otherwise disallow. In recent years, for example, the Supreme Court has allowed expanded use of so-called drug-courier profiles -- descriptions of a smuggler's characteristic behavior and appearance -- as a basis upon which to stop and question suspects, despite complaints that such profiles give police license to stop blacks and Hispanics. It has also upheld the right of police to inspect a drug suspect's garbage without a warrant. "There is a sense that what they're dealing with is the rights of drug dealers," says UCLA law professor Peter Arenella. "But they're dealing in all our rights."
Law-enforcement officials maintain that fears of rampant intrusions into privacy are exaggerated. "Concern that police or federal agents will be searching everybody's trash is kind of ridiculous," says Federal District Judge Robert Bonner, former U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles. Administration drug czar William Bennett says he was "infuriated" by criticisms last week that the Administration's program relied too heavily on law enforcement at the expense of treatment. Complains Bennett: "If anything like this kind of situation were going on in the suburbs, residents would raise holy hell and say, 'Call in the police!' But if we're talking about the inner city, people are saying, 'Well, this sounds repressive.' "
Sometimes the push and pull between tough tactics and constitutional requirements result in a compromise. For years, drug dealers had made Chicago's public housing projects their roosting ground, selling from apartments and raking the hallways with gunfire during turf wars. Last September the Chicago Housing Authority launched "Operation Clean Sweep." Housing authority agents and police made surprise apartment visits looking for unauthorized residents, many of them alleged drug dealers who had moved in with girlfriends. But some inspectors tended to treat tenants like students in a dormitory, demanding that visitors leave by midnight and nosing through drawers, in effect conducting searches without a warrant.
A suit filed by the A.C.L.U. resulted last month in a modification of those tactics. Visitors may now obtain guest cards allowing them to stay in a building for as long as two weeks. And housing agents and police have agreed to stop house and body searches. But the sweeps go on, to the relief of tenants. "It's so much better since the sweeps," says Delores Wilson, president of a tenants group. "Before, you could hear machine-gun fire all during the day." The danger is that as they search for a way out of the drug crisis, many other Americans would settle for a similar trade-off: less freedom for more security.