The DEA is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, marking half a century of abject mission failure.
This from reason.com.
During five decades as a bottomless money pit that has destroyed countless lives while targeting Americans for personal choices and peaceful transactions, the agency’s annual budget has ballooned from $75 million to $3.2 billion.
– The DEA currently operates 90 foreign offices in 67 countries.
– It has seized billions of dollars in drugs, cash, vehicles, and real property.
– Since 1986, it has arrested more than 1 million people for manufacturing, distributing, or possessing illegal drugs.
– Yet in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) counted more than 107,600 drug-related deaths—an all-time high.
– The DEA’s own data show a steady, gradual decline in price and rise in purity for most street drugs since the 1980s.
– The DEA’s 2020 National Drug Threat Assessment notes that methamphetamine “purity and potency remain high while prices remain relatively low,” and cocaine availability remains steady.
While there are some reasons to believe Americans may finally have tired of the DEA’s oversized role in their lives, the agency remains a powerful force. To understand what went wrong—and why it will keep going wrong—you have to go back to the agency’s origins. Below are six examples to help understand the failures of the DEA.
Although still long, this is a severely cut-down version of the original article. Click HERE to read in full.
Example 1: Drug Bust Gone Bad
On April 4, 1972, President Richard Nixon’s drug war landed in Humboldt County, California. The DEA, which was established the following year, was still only a glimmer in Nixon’s eye at this point. But its playbook was being written here, outside the backwoods cabin of 24-year-old Dirk Dickenson.
As a Huey helicopter touched down near the cabin, plainclothes law enforcement officers brandishing pistols and long guns leaped out.
Dickenson and his girlfriend both initially wandered outside to gawk and wave at the helicopter landing on their property. Dickenson, like many other California hippies, had drifted into rugged Humboldt County to escape the bummers of city life. When they caught sight of the guns, Dickenson and his girlfriend realized this wasn’t a friendly house call and rushed back inside.
The officers broke down the front door of the cabin. Dickenson ran out the back and bolted for the treeline. Several officers gave chase, but one of them stumbled and fell. Lloyd Clifton, a former Berkeley police officer and an agent of the federal government’s 4-year-old Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), assumed his bumbling comrade had been shot. Clifton stopped, leveled his .38 revolver at the fleeing, unarmed hippie, and shot Dickenson in the back while TV cameras rolled.
Dickenson died from massive internal bleeding while waiting to be evacuated to the hospital. Police found personal-use amounts of marijuana, hashish, peyote buttons, and LSD in Dickenson’s cabin, but no giant drug lab. A judge later dismissed charges of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter against Clifton, the first federal drug agent to be charged with homicide.
Example 2: Doubling Down on a Failed Strategy
Federal marijuana enforcement in the 1970s was a failure by every objective measure. “By the 1980s,” an official DEA history notes without further reflection, “more than 60 percent of American teenagers had experimented with marijuana and 40 percent became regular users. Supply also continued to increase.”
The Reagan administration’s solution was to double down. In April 1981, presidential adviser (and future attorney general) Edwin Meese announced to a room of 250 prosecutors that the administration would mount “a more massive and extensive” campaign against drug trafficking than ever before attempted.
In 1985, another helicopter landed in Humboldt County, this time outside the home of Judy Rolicheck and her family. The air power was part of the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, a task force of federal, state, and local law enforcement officers that used helicopters—and even U-2 spy planes—to surveil Northern California for outdoor marijuana grows. After the helicopter landed, around 25 task force members held the Rolichecks at gunpoint for two and a half hours and shot their dog. There was a marijuana grow about 600 yards away, out of sight of the house, but the Rolichecks had nothing to do with it. The agents left, and the family was never charged with a crime.
President Ronald Reagan and Attorney General Edwin Meese pursued increasingly aggressive and unscrupulous tactics of entrapment, seizure, surveillance, and paramilitary violence. Due to public antidrug hysteria, a compliant Congress, an uncritical press, and a court system increasingly dominated by Reaganite judges, the DEA enjoyed virtual carte blanche to trample on individuals’ rights.
Example 3: Tough on Crime
In a televised 1989 speech, President George H.W. Bush announced yet another escalation of the war on drugs while waving a plastic baggie of crack purchased from a dealer whom DEA agents had lured to “a park just across the street from the White House.” The dealer got almost a decade in prison, and Bush got his prop. Describing illegal drug use as “the gravest domestic threat facing our nation,” he said “we won’t have safe neighborhoods unless we are tough on drug criminals—much tougher than we are now.”
Tapped to deliver the Democratic Party’s response, then-Sen. Joe Biden (D–Del.) complained that Bush was not tough enough. “The president said he wants to wage a war on drugs,” Biden said. “But if that’s true, what we need is another D-Day, not another Vietnam; not another limited war fought on the cheap and destined for stalemate and human tragedy.”
Democrats and Republicans ensured the drug war was not cheap, but the human tragedies continued. During the next two decades, tough-on-crime bills pushed by Biden and like-minded legislators bore their rotten fruit. The total incarcerated population in the United States skyrocketed from roughly 500,000 in 1980 to more than 2.3 million at its peak in 2008.
Drug crimes were not the primary driver of mass incarceration; violent offenses were. But in the federal prison system, about half of all inmates were serving sentences for drug offenses, and they still account for roughly the same share.
Mandatory minimum sentencing laws led to draconian penalties, especially for crack cocaine offenses. Thousands of crack cocaine offenders received federal prison sentences substantially longer than what they would have received for an equivalent cocaine powder violation.
In 1998, for example, Jason Hernandez, then 21, was sentenced to life in federal prison plus 320 years for conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. President Barack Obama commuted his sentence in 2013. “The person who supplied me [with cocaine] ended up getting 12 years,” Hernandez said in 2016. “I got life because I converted it to crack cocaine. I deserved to go to jail. I deserved to go to jail for a long time, but I didn’t deserve to die in there.”
The DEA’s response to the “opioid crisis” offered a stunning example of drug enforcement’s perverse effects. The DEA, working with local and state police, started monitoring doctors and cracking down on those suspected of running “pill mills.” The threat of prosecution, combined with restrictions imposed or encouraged by regulators, legislators, and the CDC, drove opioid prescriptions down. But those efforts had the opposite effect on opioid-related deaths, which not only continued to rise but rose at an accelerated rate.
When local pain clinics were shut down or scared away and anxious doctors began eschewing opioid prescriptions, not only addicts but people with legitimate chronic pain issues were left to suffer—or turn to black market alternatives that were much more dangerous because their composition was highly variable and unpredictable. The DEA Museum obliquely acknowledges the unintended but predictable consequences: “Following a crackdown on overprescribing, users turned to heroin. Overdose deaths increased rapidly.”
The hazards of black market drugs were magnified by the rise of illicit fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute, which made potency even harder to predict. Heroin-related deaths quintupled between 2010 and 2016. That number has fallen since then. But for the category of opioids that includes fentanyl and its analogs, deaths rose more than twentyfold between 2013 and 2021. As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum argued, the DEA’s enforcement efforts were not only futile; they were “remarkably effective at making drug use deadlier.”
An exhibit just outside the DEA Museum is called “Faces of Fentanyl.” Displayed on the walls are thousands of pictures of people who died from fentanyl poisoning, all contributed by family members. The oldest person on the wall is 70. The youngest is 17 months old. The display is sobering but also infuriating given the policy failures that led to its creation.
Example 4: Stories That Never Add Up
In addition to making drug use deadlier, the DEA makes air travel perilous by robbing passengers who dare to carry large amounts of cash. Stacy Jones became one of those victims when a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screener stopped her at the Wilmington, Delaware, airport in May 2020.
Jones was not very worried at first. She and her husband were returning to their home in Tampa after a casino trip. They had $43,000 in cash in a carry-on bag, which the TSA screener found alarming.
Even after the screener called over a sheriff’s deputy, who started to ask about the source of the cash, Jones remained confident that everything would be sorted out. She knew the law, or she thought she did. She knew it was perfectly legal to fly domestically with large amounts of cash. “We’re gamblers,” Jones says. “We’ve hit jackpots, and we’ve traveled with money. So we’ve never, ever thought that this could happen. Never.”
Thanks to the laws passed in the 1980s, DEA agents did not need to charge Jones with a crime to seize her money. They simply needed probable cause to believe the money was connected to illegal activity, a judgment that in practice may amount to nothing more than a hunch.
A 2016 USA Today investigation found the DEA, working with local police departments, had seized more than $209 million from at least 5,200 travelers at 15 major airports during the previous decade. The newspaper reported the DEA regularly snoops on travel records and maintains a network of confidential informants in the travel industry.
Fortunately for Jones, her research showed that many victims of the DEA’s airport seizures were fighting back with help from the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm that combats forfeiture abuse. In July 2020, Jones joined a class action lawsuit the Institute for Justice had filed against the TSA and the DEA.
The lawsuit contends the DEA has a policy or practice of presumptively seizing cash in amounts of $5,000 or more from travelers at airports, “regardless of whether there is probable cause for the seizure.” That practice, the complaint says, violates the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.
On November 13, 2020, the U.S. government agreed to return the money the DEA had taken from Jones and her husband. Although Jones was rehired by Delta, the couple never received an apology from the DEA. But why would they? The DEA is only doing what presidential administrations have ordered it to do, and what courts have emboldened it to do for 50 years: fight a pointless, wasteful war that sacrifices the rights of innocent Americans.
Example 5: Foreign Affairs
While all of this has been going on domestically, the DEA’s foreign operations have drawn more scrutiny, for understandable reasons. The history of those efforts is littered with headline-grabbing scandals.
In 1985, drug traffickers abducted and murdered DEA Special Agent Enrique Camarena in Mexico. It was a pivotal moment in DEA history, impelling the agency to focus on transnational cartels. Since then, the DEA’s foreign operations have generated some of its greatest successes: the killing of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar in 1993 with the assistance of DEA technology and manpower, the dismantling of the Cali Cartel, and the interdiction of vast quantities of cocaine and other drugs.
But the massive amount of money flowing through the drug trade makes these foreign posts prone to bribery and corruption. During the last decade, DEA offices in Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, and Haiti have all been plagued by accusations of serious misconduct.
A 2015 report from the Justice Department’s inspector general revealed that at least 10 DEA agents stationed in Colombia had sex parties with prostitutes hired by cartels. Two years later, another inspector general report concluded the DEA had lied to the public, Congress, and the Justice Department about a 2012 incident in which DEA advisers ordered a Honduran law enforcement helicopter to open fire on a water taxi full of civilians, killing four people, including two women and a 14-year-old boy. Although the DEA insisted someone on the boat had fired on them first, video evidence strongly suggested otherwise.
More recently, a veteran DEA agent, José Irizarry, was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for conspiring to launder a Colombian cartel’s money. But before he went to prison in 2022, Irizarry decided to take everyone else down with him. In a series of interviews with the Associated Press (A.P.), he accused dozens of his colleagues of skimming millions of dollars to fund extravagant lifestyles and debauchery across three continents.
“We had free access to do whatever we wanted,” Irizarry told the A.P. “We would generate money pick-ups in places we wanted to go. And once we got there, it was about drinking and girls.”
Irizarry repeated the harshest criticisms of the international war on drugs, but this time from the perspective of someone on the inside. “You can’t win an unwinnable war,” he said. “DEA knows this, and the agents know this….There’s so much dope leaving Colombia. And there’s so much money. We know we’re not making a difference.”
In March, the DEA released a review of its foreign operations, initiated in the wake of the Irizarry scandal. While the report makes several recommendations for improving oversight of the agency’s foreign posts, the fundamental problem with the DEA’s mission to disrupt international drug trafficking can’t be fixed: Everyone knows what the score is.
“The drug war is a game,” Irizarry observed. “It was a very fun game that we were playing.”
Example 6: The DEA Belongs in a Museum
The DEA Museum takes up a couple of large rooms on the first floor of the agency’s headquarters. It’s a muted, occasionally amusing collection. Among the exhibits are several issues of High Times, a Homer Simpson bong, a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, a “life mask” of Pablo Escobar donated by the Colombian National Police, and the Versace-branded, diamond-studded guns of the notorious cartel boss JoaquÃn “El Chapo” Guzmán.
To its credit, the DEA Museum is professional and, if not critical, at least somewhat realistic about the game of whack-a-mole the agency has been playing for the last 50 years. The museum does not ignore marijuana legalization, and it alludes to the disastrous impact of the DEA’s crackdown on prescription opioids. But there’s always the weight of hanging questions and things left unsaid. Visiting the museum is an exercise in ironic distance; it’s a place that public opinion is leaving behind.
In May, Minnesota became the 23rd state to legalize recreational marijuana. A 2022 Pew Survey found that 88 percent of U.S. adults say marijuana should be legal for either medical or recreational use. According to Gallup, two-thirds of Americans favor the latter policy.
In 2020, Oregon became the first state to decriminalize simple possession of all drugs. Another Oregon ballot initiative approved that year authorized the use of psilocybin at state-licensed “service centers.” Last year Colorado voters went further by eliminating criminal penalties for noncommercial production, possession, and distribution of five naturally occurring psychedelics. Several cities have taken more modest steps in the same direction.
The DEA continues to dump sand in the gears of legalization where it can. But as the gulf between public opinion and federal drug policy widens, the agency’s duties seem increasingly farcical. Five decades should be long enough to admit we’ve made a terrible mistake and relegate the DEA to a museum.
Final thoughts: For five decades, the DEA has destroyed countless lives while targeting Americans for personal choices and peaceful transactions.
