Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
As a conscientious AnCap, few things on this planet gall me more than the 45-year-old boondoggle known as the so-called “War on Drugs,” which has wasted a trillion dollars of taxpayer money, ruined countless lives via the penal system and has indelibly corrupted police departments across the nation via the siren song of asset forfeiture; all while utterly failing to make a meaningful impact on the numbers of Americans abusing dangerous drugs.
The net results of doggedly pursuing this idiotic and evil policy for four-and-a-half decades are easy to see: America has a greater percentage of its citizens mired in some stage of the penal system than any other country on Earth; drug prohibition fuels inner-city gang wars much the same way alcohol prohibition did; “drug-activity” brings cops to “high-crime neighborhoods” where they end up shooting young black men; and the aforementioned asset forfeiture saw cops stealing more from people than burglars did last year, fact.
Then, to make matters even worse, in 1994 Bill Clinton signed a raft of legislation that increased penalties for some drug offenses, penalties that hurt the black community more than any other; but, with “Clinton” as a surname, he and the wife get a pass, of course. The penalties for drug crimes got so onerous and out of relationship with the actual offense that anyone would seek to get out of those penalties if they could. When, in 2008, young Florida college student Rachel Hoffman accepted an offer to do just that, turn informant to get out of a marijuana possession charge, she was murdered by drug dealers when they found the wire on her. Of course, the cops didn’t just send her to buy marijuana, that’s too small-potatoes. No, they sent her to buy a healthy quantity of cocaine, pills and a handgun, because that’s what all college girls who like to smoke a little pot are into.
So, as bad as the drug war is, as big a boondoggle as it has proven to be, as disastrous as these last 45 years of American history have been, it goes on. And, worse yet, the idiots in charge of waging it are doing the sort of job you’d expect cops working for the federal government to do: a real shit one.
According to an audit conducted by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration has figured out new and exciting ways of wasting our money on its existence.
“The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s program for paying confidential sources to assist with narcotics-trafficking investigations is riddled with deficiencies that could open the door to fraud and abuse, the Justice Department’s internal watchdog said on Thursday. The Justice Department’s Inspector General found in an audit that the DEA continued to pay so-called deactivated sources, or people who did not qualify to receive money because they had been arrested or had committed serious crimes,” reads the first two paragraphs of Sarah N. Lynch’s Reuters piece yesterday.
The article mentions one confidential source whom provided false testimony in both trials and depositions; but was used by 13 different field offices anyway and paid a handsome sum of $469,158 of our money. As a guy who has written two unpublished novels, I’d love to have been paid nearly a half-million for making stuff up. Better still, the audit found that more than 800 deactivated sources were paid a total of $9.4 million of our money from 2011-2015 alone.
“’While we did not review the circumstances of all of these payments in depth, for available information it appears that paying deactivated sources is common enough to justify much closer managerial oversight and review of such payments,’” Lynch quoted a portion of the report in her article.
Really? Paying a lot of money to uninformative informants is a common and big enough problem to warrant some management oversight? Ya think? Maybe? I mean, I know it isn’t their money and, well, so do they; and that’s the problem.
The audit also looked at so-called “limited use sources” which the article described as informants who come forward to offer up tips on their own. These snitches were considered low-risk, as they weren’t typically “working undercover.” Yet, despite the low risk, there was a high reward because there are no actual market forces at work here. The audit reviewed 477 of those “limited sources” and found they took home a hefty total of $26.8 million, or just more than $56,000 apiece. Apparently, if you go to the DEA with even remotely useful information, snitches get riches.
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