Reposted with permission from
Radical RussThe
Drug Enforcement Administration was created by President Richard Nixon through an Executive Order [on] July [1,] 1973 in order to establish a single unified command to combat "an
all-out global war on the drug menace." At its outset, the DEA had 1,470
Special Agents and a budget of less than $75 million. Furthermore, in 1974,
the DEA had 43 foreign offices in 31 countries. Today, the DEA has 5,235
Special Agents, a budget of more than $2.3 billion and 86 foreign offices in
62 countries.
*So the DEA turns thirty-five today.* That deserves a special celebration.
Let's bust out our handy-dandy calculator and the official government
stats. Time to play Rate the DEA!
Today the DEA has twice the offices in twice the countries with four times
the manpower than when it started thirty-five years ago. In 1973, the DEA
had $0.075 billion to work with; today you have $2.3 billion. That's an
increase of 3,067%, or a greater than thirty-fold increase. Just what have
the American People received for this
$31.4 billion dollar, thirty-five year investment ?
*Are there thirty-times fewer drugs now?* That's hard to say, since nobody
is out there taking official inventories of illegal drugs. But judging by
the
Office of National Drug Control Policy's
figures that show drug seizures from 1989-2003, it seems that there are plenty of drugs out there. In that time frame, marijuana and heroin seized by law enforcement about doubled and cocaine remained steady.
Well, *those drugs have got to be harder to get, right?* All those seizures
and agents and arrests must mean the price of drugs has gone up
thirty-fold! According to the ONDCP's report on the
Price and Purity of Drugs from 1981-2003, cocaine is one-fifth as expensive (pg 69), crack is about one-third as expensive (pg 71), heroin is one-sixth as expensive (pg 73),and meth is half as expensive (pg 75). However, the safest of all
recreational drugs, marijuana, did double in price (pg 77).
OK, so there are more cheaper drugs that are easier to get, but *surely
they've got to be less potent!* According to the survey previously
mentioned, cocaine is about 50% more pure (pg 70), crack's purity hasn't
changed much (pg 72), heroin is three times more pure (pg 74), meth purity
is about the same (pg 76), and according to the recently released report
from the Drug Czar's
(Marijuana) Potency Monitoring Project, marijuana potency doubled from 1985-2007 (pg 17).
Wow. After thirty-five years of escalating DEA budgets, we've got cheaper,
more powerful, more plentiful drugs. But *maybe we now have thirty-times
fewer drug users?* According to the
National Survey on Drug Use and Health(multiple reports), in 1979 (first year of collected data) 31.3% of the population aged 12 or older had ever used drugs, by 2006 that figure
increased to 45.4%. On a per-capita basis, the percentage of drug users
increased by about half. In raw figures, people who ever used drugs doubled
from 56 million to 111 million.
I would hope, at least, with quadruple the number of agents and thirty times
the budget, the DEA would at least have *more arrests to show for
it.*According to the
, FBI's Uniform Crime Reports we did go from 628,000 drug law arrests in 1973 to almost 1.9 million arrests in 2006 - that's about triple the number of arrests.
Has the increase in arrests at least *helped to save people's lives*?
According to the
Centers for Disease Control & Prevention , back in 1979, 513 Americans died from overdoses on opiates, cocaine, and meth. By 1998, nine-times more Americans died from those illegal drugs (4,942 Americans). (Data from 1999 and later is harder to quantify, as the CDC changed how they
classify overdose deaths .
In 1999, 19,128 Americans died of "drug-induced causes"; in 2005, 33,541
died. However, those figures include the rapidly-increasing deaths from
prescription drug overdoses.
Yikes! More people are dying from using more plentiful, more powerful
drugs. Perhaps we're not getting to them early enough. *What about the
children?* Didn't we at least end up with thirty-times fewer high school
seniors using drugs? According to the
Monitoring the Future survey (Table 5-2, pg 199,) often cited by the DEA, in 1975 (first year of the survey), 45% of 12th graders had ever tried an illicit drug. In 2006 (most recent data), thenumber of seniors who tried drugs was 36.5% - a decline of less than one-fifth, not thirty times.
So, not only more adults using cheaper, more powerful, more plentiful drugs,
but barely a dent in the kids using these drugs. But as the US population
has increased, there are more teenage drug users overall. Has the DEA at
least made it *harder for the kids to get drugs*? According to the
Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration,in 1992, 60% of teenagers said marijuana was easy to obtain, 40% said the
same about cocaine, and about a quarter said they could get heroin easily.
In 2006, half of teenagers say it's easy to get pot, one quarter say it's
easy to get cocaine, and about one seventh say it's easy to get heroin.
All right, then, we've seen the use and availability of drugs drop by
roughly one-fifth among teenagers in fourteen years. But when *a third of
kids have tried drugs and half of them say drugs are easy to get*, I don't
think that's much of a success story for a $31 billion 35-year effort.
Bigger budgets, more drugs. More arrests, more deaths. More seizures, more
potency. More agents, more users. For their thirty-fifth anniversary,
perhaps they should change their name to the *Drug Encouragement* *
Administration*.
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