THERE IS A POINT where the nation's war on drugs and the recent killing in Littleton intersect. The war on drugs has made the United States a quasi-police state, where specific classes or races are under constant suspicion or surveillance while others who may be dangerous are not.

Recently, New Jersey finally admitted that its state troopers were using the tactic of racial profiling despite Gov. Christine Todd Whitman's adamant denials regarding the existence of the practice. However, a recent report by the state attorney general confirmed its use. But the quasi-police-state techniques were more extensive than previously thought.

The New York Times reported that the Garden State's troopers had also enlisted workers at hotels and motels along the New Jersey Turnpike to tip them off about "suspicious guests who pay for rooms in cash, make frequent phone calls or simply spoke Spanish." We're talking about informers.

An isolated incident? Not really. This is all part of the war on drugs. As a matter of fact, it is the logical consequence of Operation Pipeline, a program that was instituted by the Drug Enforcement Agency. The program entails 301 police commands in 48 states that monitor the nation's highways, byways and municipalities in search of "mules" (drug couriers).

But what has happened, as Gary Webb detailed in his article "DWB" in the April issue of Esquire magazine, is that the program has zeroed in on blacks and Latinos even though guns and drugs turn up in whites' vehicles with the same frequency as the other two groups.