Karen Tandy is Mel and Betty's wet dream of a DEA head. She thinks everyone who uses illicit drugs needs treatment and that 3 out of 4 of them don't know it. And, with 10,000 officers and agents at her disposal, she thinks the agency is thinly spread to do the job.
They're building our kids' prison beds right now.
Publication Date: October 22, 03
Source: SanDiego Union Tribune
Author: Lionel Van Deerlin
Link:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/op-e ... eerli.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Throwing money at this war and losing it
Lionel Van Deerlin
Van Deerlin represented a San Diego County district in Congress for 18 years.
October 22, 2003
Think two or three hundred years into the future. May Americans then view our 21st century drug laws in the same way this generation looks back on horrors of the Salem witch trials or the Spanish Inquisition?
But why wait? Shouldn't it already be clear that America's war on drugs is a cruel, costly failure?
Most immediately on our minds is the unenviable corner into which Rush Limbaugh painted himself. A persuasive molder of public opinion, this man has long supported punitive drug laws. His characterstic vitriol left no option toward violators but to "lock 'em up."
Limbaugh's credibility on drugs is clouded by discovery that the host to 20 million radio listeners is himself fighting an addiction. He has been popping as many as 100 pain pills a day, obtained at black market prices in admitted violation of the law.
So do we lock up Rush Limbaugh? Beyond the intense satisfaction this might afford certain of his detractors, it would achieve nothing. The man poses no threat. His only predictable violence is to public discourse. He's undergoing a rehabilitation program that few dittoheads could afford. No serious advocate of reform can wish for Limbaugh's prosecution or punishment.
On the other hand, it would seem outrageous if Limbaugh were to go scot-free while the law cracks down on his ex-housekeeper and principal provider. Wilma Cline's illegal purchases enabled a wealthy addict to feed the habit. Only her cooperation with prosecutors may enable this woman to remain free ? such is the cat and mouse game passing for public policy.
Any semblance of evenhandedness in the government's drug war went by the boards earlier this year in the West Texas town of Tulia. The Drug Enforcement Administration has not explained the targeting of a rural Panhandle outpost halfway between Lubbock and Amarillo. Nor has anyone at DEA sought to defend an inept, almost clownish undercover officer, one Tom Coleman, who faked evidence against dozens of Tulia's mainly black residents. His false charges led to prison sentences of two to six, and in one instance 90 years.
A judge last May found almost all the Tulia cases without merit. He commuted the sentences of 35 prisoners ? but not before their corrupt accuser had accepted an award as "Texas Lawman of the Year."
Our tax dollars at work, we may assume.
On such ragtag doings rests the most sizable segment of U.S. law enforcement. At least in part, it explains why the year 2003 will have witnessed the sharpest increase ever in our federal prison population ? which officials expect will rise by nearly one-third over the next three years.
Their figures, I fear, are not loosely drawn. Ponder the following:
The Bureau of Prisons estimates it will be holding 198,000 inmates by the year 2006 ? a 3l.8 percent rise from the most recently tabulated prison population, 150,152.
An average 26,000 Americans each year are being sentenced to federal confinement on drug charges alone. Druggies now account for 58 percent of the total number behind bars.
The Bush administration has asked Congress to appropriate $4.66 billion for the Bureau of Prisons in the next fiscal year. That's up by 8.3 percent from current spending and about what it would cost to house all offenders in 3-star hotels.
Our war on drugs is proving as worrisome as the war in Iraq. The DEA has gone through four chief administrators in a little more than a year. Its newest leader, the careerist Karen Tandy, issued an unusual call for loyalty in addressing the National Narcotics Officer Coalition last Aug. 25.
"We are a small agency," she began. "We are spread pretty thin."
Small? Thinly spread? The thin blue line of Administrator Tandy's bureaucracy numbers more than 10,000 ? including 4,800 agents in 72 offices across the United States and 58 foreign countries. In at least one of those faraway places, Colombia, a separate $2 billion budget underwrites a government army in combat against an equally well organized guerrilla force that keeps the drug contraband flowing to us gringos.
Tandy recognizes the lively U.S. market sustaining this trade. It consists of "6 million people who need treatment," she acknowledged in that August pep talk, adding:
"But three out of four of these don't think they need it. ... They're drugged and working in our marketplace."
Their leader having suggested no alternative, those DEA functionaries know their duty ? lock 'em up.
But the Tandy troopers were left with an anatomically confusing challenge:
"We have the national security of this country on our backs, on our shoulders and in the palm of our hands," she concluded.
Even Abbott & Costello wouldn't touch that one
