DEA
DEA’s universal function is to implement the nation’s drug rules and to take people who traffick drug to justice. DEA is the front agency accountable for putting into effect the drug control rules, managing, and following the U.S. drug investigations in overseas countries. DEA’s main tasks include (1) reviewing chief drug traffickers’ functioning at limited-access highway and international borders as well as drug gangs and the illegals who commit aggression in restricted communities; (2) dealing with a national drug intelligence scheme; (3) taking hold of and forfeiting traffickers’ possessions; (4) managing and collaborating with federal, state, as well as neighboring law enforcement agencies on shared drug enforcement attempts; and (5) functioning according to the drug law enforcement schemes with its complements in distant countries. (Linda, 2004)
The war on drugs is a vast enterprise. Virtually, every agency of the U.S. government has a piece of it, from the Pentagon and the Coast Guard to the National Park Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Yet unlike a real war, the crusade against drugs has no central command, no coordinated intelligence effort, and very little accountability. Literally, hundreds of thousands of federal government employees are mobilized in the effort often performing their parts superbly, and, as the following report shows, each agency wins its share of tactical victories. Overall, viewed from a strategic standpoint, the War on Drugs has little to show for itself. Millions of hard-core drug users continue to have untrammeled access to heroin, cocaine, and other substances while more than 100,000 Americans are arrested every month in an unending procession into prisons and jails (Crandall, 2002).
Close to 8 percent of the agency’s $3.8 billion budget in 1997, about $336 million, was devoted to drug control, heavily concentrated in the 7th and 8th Coast Guard districts in Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. In October 1996, the Coast Guard, part of the Department of Transportation, launched Operation Frontier Shield joined by the FBI, DEA, Customs and other agencies, and Puerto Rican authorities to combat the growing concentration of narcotics traffickers in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. With nearly $1 billion worth of narcotics seized during June 1997, Frontier Shield reduced drug smuggling through those islands into the United States by one-third according to Lt. Cmdr. Mike Emerson. “We kicked it off as proof that a concentrated surge of forces can have an effect,” he says. In March, the Coast Guard launched Operation Gulf Shield targeting the TexasGulfCoast, and in October implemented Campaign Steel Web, an overarching strategic concept for the transit zone that coordinates all the Coast Guard’s individual operations (Pacula and Beau, 2004).
Unlike smuggling operations in the 1970s and 80s, current traffickers have abandoned slower fishing vessels for quick, so-called “go-fast” boats that can cover 300 to 400 miles a day. “We’re seeing a lot more smaller loads coming in at a faster pace,” says Emerson. In addition, he says that traffickers are hiding drug caches in large ocean-going cargo ships. The Coast Guard deploys sophisticated tools for detecting hidden drug shipments: ion-scanning instruments, which sense the presence of cocaine and heroin, and Compact Integrated Narcotics Detection Instruments, which can measure density changes in walls and bulkheads, where drugs might be hidden. The Coast Guard operates three classes of cutters (including 12 378-foot high-endurance cutters carrying helicopters and armed with anti-aircraft machine guns) along with fast patrol boats, HC-130H transport planes, reconnaissance aircraft, and more than 130 helicopters.
There have been successes. Among the biggest seizures are the Don Celso, a vessel seized in October 1996 near Panama with 7 tons of cocaine aboard and the Nataly I seized in the Pacific and bound for California with more than 12 tons of cocaine. Long term, the Coast Guard’s goal is to reduce by 60 percent the estimated 381 tons of cocaine headed for the United States.
Gen Barry McCaffrey is the director of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy. Usually, he is called the drug “czar.” Yet he and his small staff of about 150 are the first ones to admit that they have nothing resembling the autocratic powers of Russian monarchs. While McCaffrey provides a modicum of interdepartmental planning, his office gets by on a paltry budget of just $36 million. Almost all of the proposed $16 billion War on Drugs budget for next year will be spent by Cabinet departments, sub-Cabinet offices, and a handful of independent U.S. agencies that do not report to McCaffrey (Youngers, 2005).
What officials of these agencies pay attention to is Congress. Specifically, they bow down before one of 13 congressional appropriations committees which holds the purse strings for every part of the federal government. In Congress, the War on Drugs is golden; Republican skinflints eager to cut government spending make an exception for drug warriors, so if you happen to run a federal agency, it is a big plus to underline the important work you are doing to fight the scourge of illegal drugs (Jaccard and Turrisi, 2003).
The biggest chunk of the $16 billion, fully one-eighth of the entire War on Drugs budget, goes to the Justice Department's Bureau of Prisons. That of $2 billion is just the federal share; it does not include the $5 billion or more spent by states and local governments to jail drug offenders.
Another thing that stands out is that Washington agencies involved in the drug crusade dole out billions of dollars to the states in the form of block grants and other monies with little oversight and often with no strings attached. The Department of Education, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Justice Department’s Office of Justice Programs and other agencies provide a steady stream of pork to state and local governments, researchers, law enforcement, community organizations, and the like. Some of this is vital and necessary, and some is wasted, but few in Congress question where the money goes since no one wants to be accused of being soft on drugs. (Burrus, 2006).
Some years ago, the drug-czar’s office created five special task forces called High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area units to coordinate anti-drug work in New York, Miami, and other severely affected regions. Each year, more HIDTAs have been created; there are now 15 of them across the country. However, no one asks whether we really need these things. Moreover, no one asks the more basic question: “Who is in charge?”
Besides the HIDTAs, there are Organized Crime/Drug Enforcement task forces, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, regional task forces, the police, etc. The rule seems to be: why have one anti-drug enforcement unit when you can have six or seven? Several years ago, a seemingly sensible proposal to merge the DEA with the FBI was ignored thanks to bureaucratic inertia; therefore, today the DEA and the FBI each spend about $1 billion a year on fighting drugs. There are more than a dozen “intelligence centers” that concern themselves with the War on Drugs. Somehow, despite the confusion, the military, the Customs Service, the Coast Guard, the DEA, the Border Police, the FBI, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service manage to sit cheek by jowl along America's southern border (Gilhooley, 2008).
