The Drug War: Where The Money Goes

In 1996, the FAA, an arm of the DOT, conducted 740 drug-related investigations, and its Drug Investigations Support Program investigative teams revoked 160 airman certificates, suspended another 29 and revoked four aircraft-registration certificates while assisting the DEA and other law-enforcement agencies in the seizure of nine aircraft. Additionally, the FAA spends around $9 million a year conducting drug tests.

Bureau of Indian Affairs

FY '97: $16 million; FY '98: $18 million

Of the Bureau's 385 police officers and 100 criminal investigators, only about 10 Drug War specialize in drug enforcement. Most of the Bureau's drug-control money is used to fund tribal-law-enforcement programs; about 100 tribal police officers are supported by BIA funds for antidrug work. In 1996, the Bureau, part of the Department of the Interior, destroyed almost a half million marijuana plants and made 219,230 drug seizures on tribal lands.

Special Supplemental Food Program For Women, Infants and Children

FY '97: $15 million; FY '98: $15 million

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's WIC program serves nearly 1.7 million people a year, chiefly aiming its anti-drug efforts at warning women not to take drugs or smoke when pregnant. According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, agencies that manage the WIC program refer about 10 percent of their female participants to drug-treatment centers.

Financial Crimes Enforcement Network

FY '97: $12 million; FY '98: $13 million

The Treasury Department's FinCEN is a fledgling agency that tracks money-laundering activities. As the agency assigned to administer the Bank Secrecy Act, FinCEN watches for suspicious patterns and links a network of federal, state and local law-enforcement agencies; last year, FinCEN responded to 55,000 queries from those agencies. As part of the $11.7 million in '97 drug-control work, FinCEN allocated $500,000 to studying the use of "emerging cyberpayment technologies."

National Park Service

FY '97: $9 million; FY '98: $9 million

Throughout the vast system of national parks, just 50 park rangers (out of 1,524 total) have been assigned full-time responsibility for drug control. At a cost of about $9 million a year, the National Park Service destroys about 100,000 marijuana plants, and rangers make 2,500 arrests annually for drug offenses. The Park Service uses aerial reconnaissance and electronic surveillance, and deploys mounted photographic devices triggered by tripwires, to track traffickers and growers. In parks in Florida, Georgia, Texas and California, there is significant drug-smuggling activity.

U.S. Forest Service

FY '97: $9 million; FY '98: $9 million

The Forest Service governs a vast empire of federal land and protected national forests, covering 191.6 million acres. With just 600 personnel devoted to law enforcement and criminal investigations, which equals one officer for each 497 square miles, drug control in the national forest system is a tall order. "Our primary emphasis is domestic marijuana cultivation," says Roger Seewald, a special agent with the U.S. Forest Service, who adds that up to $10 million has been authorized for the effort, including the training of up to 1,000 officers. In 1996, the Forest Service eradicated more than 6,000 marijuana sites and arrested 3,482 drug offenders, seizing 235 firearms and $2.18 million in assets.

At the Daniel Boone National Forest, in Kentucky, the marijuana eradication season, from July to October, is a busy time, for the forest is a hotbed of pot plots. "I've got a 12-man team out in the field right now," says Michael Gay, a supervisory law-enforcement officer there. A decade-long crackdown by the U.S. Forest Service, in conjunction with the Kentucky National Guard and local and state police, has seen the number of marijuana plants destroyed in the Daniel Boone National Forest fall from a high of 372,000 in 1991 to 133,000 last year, still nearly half of the total for the entire national forest system. Some of the plots are rigged with booby traps, ranging from crude dynamite mines to shotguns linked to tripwires to simple fish hooks dangling from tree limbs and foliage. According to Gay, most of the growers sell their harvests to middlemen, who ship the pot up Interstate 75 to cities such as Cincinnati, Detroit and Cleveland.

Bureau of Land Management

FY '97: $5 million; FY '98: $5 million

This billion-dollar agency, which devotes only a tiny percentage of its efforts to drug control, is responsible for managing 264 million acres of land, primarily in Alaska and the Western states. Just $5 million is allocated to the War on Drugs by the Bureau. Yet it employs 33 full-time workers, including drug-control coordinators in all 12 Bureau offices, to track marijuana cultivation on federal lands, often in remote areas and along the U.S.-Mexico border. In August, authorities seized around 76,000 marijuana plants in northern Idaho, mostly on BLM land.

Agricultural Research Service

FY '97: $5 million; FY '98: $5 million

The federal government spends more than $700 million for research on agriculture and farming; $2.6 million of that is spent finding new and better ways to kill drug-producing plants. The Agricultural Research Service, part of the USDA, also spent $713,000 in 1997 to identify and improve crops that could replace coca plants in Bolivia and Peru, particularly cocoa and coffee. Another $745,000 went to determining the extent of worldwide narcotics cultivation, and $673,000 was spent teaching law-enforcement agencies how to identify drug crops.