For more information, contact:
Eric E. Sterling, President
The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation
Tel. (301) 301-589-6020

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WASHINGTON–The House Subcommittee on Crime is holding the first Congressional oversight hearing on the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in a decade on Thursday, July 29, 1999, 9:30 a.m., in Room 2141, Rayburn House Office Building. “DEA’s performance has been abysmal. Its strategy is a fraud” said Eric E. Sterling, President of The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, in a statement prepared for the subcommittee. Sterling was counsel to the House Subcommittee on Crime from 1981 to 1989 responsible for DEA oversight, among other issues. “DEA’s most important performance measure ought to be making it hard for kids to get drugs, but teenagers say heroin and crack cocaine have never been easier to get!” said Sterling. "Data from HHS’ Monitoring the Future survey released last winter reported that 35.6% of the nation’s high school seniors reported heroin was ‘fairly easy’ or ‘very easy to get,’ the highest percentage since the survey was commenced in 1975. 43.8% said the same about crack cocaine, the highest percentage since the question was first asked in 1987.

“In the early 1980s, when I was counsel to the Judiciary Committee and DEA Administrator Bensinger testified, he pointed to the increasing price and decreasing purity of heroin as evidence of DEA’s successful efforts. In these terms, DEA’s performance has been worse than abysmal. The price of a gram of pure heroin at retail has declined from $3,114.80 in 1981 to $1,798.80 in 1998. The average purity of retail heroin has increased from 4.69% in 1981 to 24.49% in 1998.“

In 1998, ONDCP Director Barry McCaffrey announced a detailed “Performance Measurement System” for our national anti-drug strategy. He announced specific “targets” to be reduced by specific percentages over the next five and ten years. But there are no baselines for most of those targets. GAO is concerned DEA has not developed baselines or targets for its role in the strategy, and is not collecting data, such as the number of drug trafficking organizations to support the strategy, according to a report to be presented to the Crime Subcommittee on Thursday. With no known baselines to reduce, the targets are bogus – the drug strategy is a fraud; it’s not real.

“This is ironic. Because in a comprehensive, international anti-drug fight, DEA and other Federal agencies are probably the only highly equipped, highly trained, mostly-honest agencies that can effectively target the global drug and crime organizations that are subverting governments, national economies, and the rule of law. It is unrealistic to think that Mexican or Colombian law enforcement agencies will effectively combat drug trafficking organizations. But DEA is going in the wrong direction. DEA is increasing its efforts against insignificant defendants in the U.S. These cases can best be handled by the hundreds of thousands of state and local law enforcement officers and prosecutors around the nation. Almost 40% of DEA’s effort is targeted on local cases, and that percentage has roughly doubled in the past decade. DEA is wasting scarce, precious resources.

“DEA claims to be fighting the highest level traffickers, but the evidence of Federal drug enforcement efforts are seen in who goes to prison -- overwhelmingly low-level offenders. Last year, two-thirds of Federal drug prisoners didn’t meet the very low quantity thresholds required to be sentenced to a ten-year mandatory minimum. Only 41 defendants, out of over 20,266 prosecuted for drug offenses, were sentenced under the Federal drug kingpin statute. More than ten times that number were sentenced for simple possession – that’s the population of entire Federal prison, with an annual cost of more than $80,000,000.

“If these failures weren’t bad enough, Federal drug enforcement (particularly cocaine enforcement) is prima facie a racist enterprise. In 1998, less than one in four Federal drug defendants was white. Yet in 1997 there were 10.3 million white current drug users and only 1.8 million current black drug users.

“Black cocaine defendants were 11.3% of all persons sentenced to Federal prison in 1998. 85.2% of all black Federal drug defendants were charged with cocaine offenses. Black cocaine defendants were 27.8% of all Federal drug offenders sentenced to prison in 1998. Federal crack cocaine defendants are 84.8% black, and 93% American citizens. In 1997 there were 970,000 white and 342,000 black current cocaine users. One-quarter to one-half of the Federal defendants for other types of drugs are non-citizens.

“Many of these problems are due to the fact that informants – who are actively in the drug trade – have more impact on case selection than DEA managers, the Justice Department, or ONDCP. Informants feed cases to agents, agents feed cases to prosecutors. As long as you provide information on low-level and mid-level traffickers, you can make a good living as a DEA informant. But your life is in jeopardy if you inform against a truly high-level trafficker.

“DEA can play an important role in fighting violent drug gangs in cooperative efforts, for example, targeting murders in Operation Ceasefire in Boston.

“DEA is not being held accountable. Since the House and Senate Judiciary Committees -- the congressional committees with oversight responsibility -- haven’t held DEA oversight hearings in a decade, DEA’s non-performance has been ignored, even though its budget increased by 82.5% between 1990 and 1999.”

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