DON'T EXAGGERATE

Terror And A Bad Deal All Around

Methamphetamine fries the brain and ignites rage. It is a volatile fuel for
spousal battery and child abuse. The manufacture of the drug taints land
and groundwater, props up an organized-crime distribution network and
endangers anyone who happens to be near the combustible chemical should
something go wrong and a whole house blow up.

The people who make and use the chemical are criminals. There is no doubt
about that.

But they are not terrorists.

A North Carolina prosecutor is challenging that notion. He is pressing
forward with plans to charge a drug-crime defendant under state
antiterrorism laws. Other prosecutors are considering following his lead.
They should reverse direction. He isn't the man to follow.

Meth manufacturers and dealers leave families and lives - chiefly their own
- - in ruins. But they are not using sarin to poison shoppers at the mall.
They are not letting loose smallpox on the population and slamming a
fertilizer-filled truck into a federal building with a child-care center
inside.

Drug crimes undermine society. But they are not political acts against the
United States with the sole intent to terrify, destabilize and coerce an
entire nation.

The prosecutor, Watauga County District Attorney Jerry Wilson, is
frustrated that a 24-year-old man accused of running a meth line would get
six months in prison - tops - if convicted.

His sense of helplessness is understandable. Methamphetamine use and
manufacture is rapidly spreading in North Carolina. Considering that
prisons are filled with cocaine users, prosecutors should be confident of
being able to prosecute methamphetamine suspects without equating a
narcotic with nuclear or chemical weapons.

If the prosecutor's problem with the case is a loophole or leniency, then
fix the drug law. Do not, however, dilute antiterrorism law.

Methamphetamine dealers and manufacturers are not friends to society. But
unless drug dealers are operating networks that directly finance acts of
terror, they aren't Osama bin Ladens or Timothy McVeighs.

Antiterrorism laws were drafted to distinguish a terrorist from the
ordinary criminal. Suspects charged with, or even suspected of, an act of
terrorism have fewer rights under federal law. States and the federal
government must guard against the extension of the term "terrorist" to
include the ordinary criminal.

A district attorney can't go shopping for the penalty he wishes to inflict,
and then call the crime by another name to make the case fit.

That's exactly what DA Wilson has done. He should worry less about the
damage meth labs are doing to his county than about the damage he could
inflict on his state if his legal strategy is allowed.