In 1973, the year the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was born, the federal government counted about three drug-related deaths per 100,000 Americans. By 2022, when the DEA had been waging the war on drugs for half a century, that rate had risen tenfold.
That does not look like success. Nor do trends in drug use. In a 1973 Gallup poll, 12 percent of Americans admitted they had tried marijuana. According to federal survey data, the share had risen fourfold by 2023, when the percentage reporting past-year drug use was more than double the 1995 number.
What about drug prices, which the DEA aims to boost through source control and interdiction? From 1981 to 2012, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the average, inflation-adjusted retail price for a pure gram of heroin fell by 86 percent. During the same period, the average retail price for cocaine and methamphetamine fell by 75 percent and 72 percent, respectively. In 2021, the DEA reported that methamphetamine's "purity and potency remain high while prices remain low," that "availability of cocaine throughout the United States remains steady," and that "availability and use of cheap and highly potent fentanyl has increased."
The DEA's attempts to enforce the nation's drug laws have been a resounding failure by pretty much any measure—except perhaps drug seizures, which can be expected to rise along with consumption, and arrests, which send people to prison without bringing the agency any closer to achieving its avowed goal of "deal[ing] with America's growing drug problem." This is what the DEA calls "the long, proud, and honorable tradition of federal drug law enforcement."
The DEA has not only failed to make things better. It has played a key role in making things worse, even leaving aside the pointless incarceration of people whose only crimes consisted of exchanging politically disfavored intoxicants for money.
Consider what happened when the DEA decided that doctors were overprescribing pain medication. The agency, along with its allies in government and the private sector, indisputably succeeded in reducing opioid prescriptions, which fell by more than half from 2010 to 2022. But that crackdown predictably drove nonmedical users toward black market drugs, which are much more dangerous because their composition is highly variable and unpredictable.
That hazard was magnified by the simultaneous proliferation of illicit fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute—a development driven by prohibition enforcement, which favors potent drugs that are easier to conceal and smuggle. The upshot: The opioid-related death rate, which had doubled in the first decade of this century, tripled in the second decade. In 2022, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) counted more than 80,000 opioid-related deaths, nearly four times the number in 2010.
Meanwhile, pain patients across the country suffered needlessly as the medication that made their lives bearable became increasingly difficult to obtain. The American Medical Association, the Food and Drug Administration, and even the CDC (which contributed to the problem by publishing guidelines that discouraged doctors from prescribing opioids) acknowledged the resulting human wreckage, including undertreatment, patient abandonment, and suicide.
As demonstrably unqualified as the DEA is to prevent substance abuse, it is even less qualified to regulate medicine, which it does by setting production quotas, deciding who may prescribe controlled substances, and threatening prosecution of doctors whose practices it deems unacceptable. By itself, this interference, which harms patients without any countervailing benefit, would make the agency worthy of the chopping block.
Without the DEA, who would strive to "stop the flow" of illegal drugs, as presidents have risibly promised to do for more than a century of prohibition? Maybe nobody, which would be an improvement when you consider all the damage caused by that doomed crusade.
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