A Bloated Vestige of the Past, the DEA Struggles for Relevancy

-->

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) website, when the agency was established in 1973, it had 1,470 special agents and a budget of less than $75 million. Today it boasts over 5,000 special agents (which doesn’t include what must be tens of thousands of support staff) and a budget of $2.03 billion. That’s a sizable organization and one with a long reach into the various branches of government and the military.

Yet today there is an article in the Huffington Post in which the author seems befuddled by the recent efforts of the DEA to place the rather benign herbal supplement Kratom into Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act along with heroin, cocaine and crack. The author correctly notes the softening trend nationwide toward marijuana prohibition, and wonders why the DEA would be taking such a Draconian stance against an herb that has little potential for abuse and that many people use for help with various medical ailments.

The obvious answer to the Kratom conundrum is found in the first paragraph. The DEA has become a huge, bloated bureaucracy over the past 43 years that is now fighting for its survival. The change in attitude toward marijuana and drug prohibition in general has the agency running scared, and it is now grasping at straws to try and retain its relevance. We saw this just recently when it refused to take marijuana off the Schedule 1 list despite the mountains of data and research attesting to the drug’s relative safety and proven medical benefits.

The question is, what do you do with a large government agency that history has passed by and is now doing more harm than good (if it ever did do any good)? In Washington, you plug your ears and sing “Na, na, na” for as long as you’re able so that you can hopefully hand-off your expensive White Elephant to the next administration. Not long ago, Obama appointed a new head of the DEA who is only a slightly less maniacal drug warrior than his predecessor, indicating that this president isn’t going to walk into the political minefield associated with downsizing the Pentagon of the drug war.

Not surprisingly, there has been no indication from either Trump or Clinton that their administrations will take a more reasoned approach to drug prohibition than Obama. So the prognosis is that our government will spend more billions of tax dollars and keep increasing the prison population for base political reasons. And people are upset that an athlete won’t stand during the pledge of allegiance.

Pushing policy to improve profits is business as usual in D.C.

No one should ever wonder why Americans are cynical about what goes on in Washington D.C. Let’s take the case of former DEA administrator Peter Bensinger who served as a drug warrior under three presidents. Yahoo has posted an interview with him and, as one might predict, he rails against the current legalization trend and makes a boatload of absurd statements about the evils of marijuana that are contrary to science and common sense.

You might be tempted to feel some pity for the silver-haired veteran of the doomed war on drugs, but not so fast. There’s more behind the rantings of an old drug war propagandist than meets the eye. To the credit of the article’s authors, and in a move that is rare in the mainstream press, there is an editor’s note at the end of the story, revealing that, “Bensinger is currently president and CEO of Bensinger, DuPont & Associates, a private consulting firm that promotes drug-free workplaces. Among the services offered to clients are employee drug testing, health and safety training programs and risk management.”

So Bensinger isn’t merely misinformed, there is a method to his reefer madness. Relaxed attitudes about marijuana could directly affect the bottom line of his business. His anti-drug passion is not so much about saving the souls of America’s youth, but about keeping his consulting firm in the black. And so it goes.

Our addiction to the drug war

  As momentum builds here in the U.S. and around the world to bring the costly war on drugs to an end, our government continues to drag its feet, stubbornly feeding the international war machine with billions of dollars annually while continuing to harass medical marijuana distributors around this nation. Some will contribute this continued emphasis on law enforcement and interdiction to older men and women in positions of authority still clinging to mid-twentieth century drug hysteria, and that is a factor, but there is a much more practical rationale for our government’s reluctance to end the futile drug war.

 In the same way that the surveillance state grew into a many-headed monster with a will of its own, so went the war on drugs. From the mid-seventies when Richard Nixon birthed his mutant baby, the drug war machine has grown tentacles that reach deep into the government infrastructure. From the DEA, CIA, FBI and on down the line, there are scores of departments and agencies and tens of thousands of employees carrying out this endless war. In other words, the heads of these agencies, just like the heads of the various surveillance groups, will argue until their dying breath that what they do is vital to America’s security and safety. After all, there are billions of dollars involved here.

Once again, our government fails us as it sacrifices our tax dollars to continue fruitless policies that are of no value to anyone except the elites who have their hands on the controls of these dead-end programs. The war on drugs was a boneheaded idea from the very beginning, but now we are stuck with an immense bureaucracy employing many thousands of people, and, of course, our political leaders don’t have the courage to admit their folly and shut the damn thing down.