SWAT

I've blogged before about the effect of the War on Drugs on the US:
The War on Drugs
The Land of the Free?
To add to these, here's another social cost paid by citizens of the United States for the War on Drugs is the prevalent use of SWAT teams to serve warrants and make arrests. From the ACLU "Blog of Rights: Officer Acquitted in Fatal Shooting of Unarmed Woman and Baby":

SWAT raids are usually forced, aggressive, unannounced entry by heavily armed policemen dressed as soldiers, and are often accompanied by flash-bang grenades and major damage to the residence or business.

And they occure roughly 40,000 times a year! From "Overkill: the Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America":

Americans have long maintained that a man’s home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

3 million Americans behind bars, paramilitary home invasions, Rockerfeller laws that make selling two ounces of marijuana punishable the same as second degree murder (a minimum of 15 years to life in prison, and a maximum of 25 years to life in prison)... boy am I happy Canada didn't follow the US down this awefull rabbit hole.