[R. Scott]

No knock raids are not confined to illegal drugs.

All too true. They are now used routinely for most raids including IRS looking for computer records.
I don’t blame the individual officers. I blame the bureaucracy that has made it the norm, the courts that have allowed it and The People that accept it.

[CWOJackson]

The implications also tend to be regional as well. For intance, in this area no knock raids are not that frequent and usually confined to residences where the suspect(s) are considered a threat to the officers. The only recent exception to that was a recent child porn case...same as your IRS example, to get to the computer.

An interesting side to this is a raid a few years back where the suspect still pulled a gun and tried to shoot it out with the police. A fatal mistake, he was killed. A local Seattle area reporter did an expo piece claiming that the police had stormed in an executed the suspect; she even had a witness.

Fortunately there had been a couple of reporters doing a ride-along with the officers and who not only knew the truth, they recognized the witness who showed up on the edge of the crowd later asking questions. By the way, that lady reporter was the producer for Dan Rather's forged document hit piece on the President.