The Drug War: Where the Money Goes

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. But 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.

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 don’t report to McCaffrey. What officials of these agencies pay attention to is Congress: Specifically, they bow down before one of 13 congressional appropriations committees which hold 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’s a big plus to underline the important work you are doing to fight the scourge of illegal drugs.

One sign of where the priorities are: 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. And that $2 billion is just the federal share; it doesn’t 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 it is vital and necessary, and some of it is wasted, but few in Congress question where the money goes, since no one wants to be accused of being soft on drugs. So it flows.

Case in point: 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. Only, no one asks: Do we really need these things?

Not only that, no one asks the more basic question: Who’s in charge? Besides the HIDTAs, there are Organized Crime/Drug Enforcement task forces, there is the FBI, there is the Drug Enforcement Agency, there are regional task forces, the police —– and on and on. 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, so today the DEA and the FBI each spend about $1 billion a year on fighting drugs. Ditto for intelligence: 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.

What follows is a comprehensive accounting of Washington’s attempts to rid the nation of illegal drugs, a sprawling effort encompassing 44 federal agencies, which are listed in order of their proposed ’98 budgets, from largest to smallest.