Terminate The DEA
Put It Out Of Our Misery
With all of the protest and criminal trial blathering yesterday, you may have missed a story about the Biden Administration planning to reclassify marijuana as a Schedule III drug. This would open the door to recognizing its medical uses and allow for further research. While not outright legalizing it for rescreational use, this is good news for many reasons, not the least of which is that I hope it will lead to the eventual demise of a hopelessly corrupt government agency. In a recent Distant Perspective, I wrote that there are several agencies of the U.S. government that should be shut down. It was just one sentence in a commentary about the need to break up the Republican/Democrat duopoly. While this action on marijuana won’t accomplish that goal, it will neuter a terrible government operation.
Imagine a federal agency that has been around since 1973. It has burned through more than a trillion taxpayer dollars, currently spending $5.5 million dollars a day. This agency has engaged in “structural racism” that has resulted in the incarceration of a wildly disproportionate percentage of Blacks and Hispanics. It has employed secret and probably illegal methods and massive amounts of questionable surveillance techniques to prosecute its cases. This agency pays no attention to prevailing knowledge of the subject in which it engages. Many U.S. residents have died because of the actions AND inactions of this agency. Because of this, the nation faces the most devastating health care crisis in history, and it gets worse every day. Interestingly, this office of the U.S. government doesn’t even acknowledge the worst categories of dangers. The rules it enforces are arbitrary, influenced more by money than facts, and lead to more criminal behavior than before its creation. By every conceivable measure, this agency is a wildly dismal failure.
Even the Drug Enforcement Administration itself admits that it will never succeed in it’s War on Drugs. It is a shame that taxpayers should have to spend one more penny on this abject debacle of government.
The brainchild of President Richard Nixon, the DEA was another step in his effort to control dangerous drugs. Two years earlier, he had declared drugs to be “public enemy number one” and announced a “Schedule” system for classifying illegal narcotics. Schedule One, the most dangerous category, included drugs like heroin, LSD, and Ecstasy (MDMA). Also on the Schedule One list was marijuana, and until the Biden initiative takes effect, it is still there. Fentanyl, the opioid that kills more than 70,000 people in the U.S. every year is only listed as a Schedule Two drug.
Alcohol causes 140,000 deaths every year. Nicotine claims more than half a million lives annually. Yet, these most deadly, addictive drugs with no medical use are not even listed on any of the drug schedules. You can thank the tobacco and liquor lobbyists, with cash falling out of their pockets as they prowl the halls of Congress, for that one. It is with this deeply flawed categorizing of drugs, that the DEA sets about waging its war.
It gets worse. Even Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, John Erlichman (who would spend 18 months in prison for his Watergate role) admitted the racist undertones in the DEA’s mandate, telling Harper magazine the drug war was aimed at “the antiwar left and Black people.”
But Erlichman’s confession goes much further. He continues, “We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Pot was (and still is) perceived by the racist mandate of the DEA to be a drug favored by Blacks. Crack cocaine is also viewed this way. Many Blacks have been imprisoned or even killed by the DEA for possessing these substances. But powder cocaine, the white stuff snorted by cool white people, while also on that same Schedule One, barely gets a traffic ticket. For many years, prison sentences for crack (which is no more or less dangerous and addictive) were 100 times more stringent than for powder cocaine. If you were wondering what the term structural racism means, well, now you know.
"The drug war is a game…It was a very fun game that we were playing." Those are the words of a DEA agent who is now behind bars. José Irizarry is doing 12 years in a federal prison for engaging in wild DEA parties paid for by the Columbia drug cartels. Agents took millions of dollars in payoffs from the cartels and engaged in boozy sex parties around the globe.
“You can’t win an unwinnable war. DEA knows this and the agents know this,” Irizarry tells the Associated Press. “There’s so much dope leaving Colombia. And there’s so much money. We know we’re not making a difference.”
The fifty year war on drugs is the U.S. government’s most dismal failure. It is a greater failure than any military defeat the U.S. has experienced, and much of it is being waged on home turf. The DEA is the one policing agency that needs to be defunded, down to its last penny.
Drug abuse is a medical issue. It needs to be treated as such. With the staggering number of people dying and the millions of lives of their families being shattered along the way, this is a national crisis that needs to be brought to the forefront with solid information, real solutions, and a substantially better foundation than the antiquated “Schedule” by which drugs are categorized.
It is time to close the book on the Drug Enforcement Administration.