A Familiar Pattern of Failure
How the Drug Enforcement Administration makes America's drug problem worse
Sean Dunagan, an intelligence analyst for the Drug Enforcement Administration, watched with horror as bodies littered the streets like rotting garbage.
It was the sweltering summer of 2010 in Monterrey, Mexico, a booming modern metropolis with a reputation as one of the safest cities in Latin America, the sort of place you’d expect to see profiled in a glossy business magazine.
That was before daylight shootouts, mass beheadings and grenade attacks on police stations turned the city into a battleground.
Out of nowhere, Monterrey found itself in the grip of a narco-insurgency.
“For a long time, Monterrey was insulated from the drug violence in the rest of Mexico,” said Dunagan. “Then it became Chicago during prohibition.”
The dramatic upsurge in violence was because of a civil war that had broken out between the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas. Los Zetas was a group of hired guns made up of special forces deserters, who used to work as the Gulf Cartel’s enforcement arm, before they figured out there was more money to be made by branching out on their own. Dunagan spent months tracking Los Zetas from his perch in the U.S. Consulate. His job was to analyze intelligence to build a profile of the gang.
He soon realized the underlying reason for the violence was President Felipe Calderon’s decision to send tens of thousands of troops to battle Mexico’s drug lords.
Calderon’s campaign splintered the big cartels. But smaller, more deadly groups took their place. Instead of falling, drug violence rose, as former enforcement units for the major cartels fought for control of the drug trade.
“The escalating violence directly resulted from Calderon’s decision to militarize the conflict,” said Dunagan.
As Los Zetas tightened its control of Monterrey, affluent residents fled, especially after the slayings of two graduate students caught in the crossfire of a gun battle between Mexican soldiers and Los Zetas at the entrance to the Tecnológico de Monterrey, one of Mexico’s top universities.
Then, in August, Los Zetas gunmen killed two security guards in front of the American School Foundation, a private school attended by the children of wealthy expatriates, after mistaking them for rival narcos.
Citing the deteriorating security situation, the U.S. State Department in Washington ordered the emergency evacuation of family members of consular employees.
In early September, a convoy of cars sped out of Monterrey towards the border. Mexican Federales with machine guns mounted on pickup trucks guarded them. The convoy left before dawn to avoid being attacked by Los Zetas gunmen, who were stopping trucks on the highway.
Sitting behind the wheel of his Chrysler minivan, the rolling desert extending on all sides, Dunagan took a moment to gather his thoughts. He tried to make sense of the madness his family was fleeing. As the sun rose over the featureless landscape, Dunagan thought back to his college days as a philosophy major. He recalled a verse from the Tao Te Ching: “Give evil nothing to oppose and it will disappear by itself.”
“I realized that our drug policies only enriched and empowered the very cartels we were fighting,” said Dunagan, who, disillusioned with his job, quit the DEA the following year.
“The War on Drugs is a war of choice,” he said. “The Mexican cartels wouldn’t exist, not in their current form and largely not at all, if it wasn’t for drug prohibition.”
The War on Drugs rages on with victory nowhere in sight.
Fifty years since its inception, a trillion dollars spent on its implementation, tens of thousands of unnecessary fatalities caused by its prosecution, as well as hundreds of thousands of Black, brown and poor people incarcerated under Draconian drug laws that have filled American prisons to their bursting point, the net result of this money and misery is that drugs are now cheaper, more potent and more available than ever before.
“In my opinion, and the opinion of a lot of other ex-law enforcement officers, the War on Drugs has been the most destructive, dysfunctional and immoral policy since slavery and Jim Crow,” said Howard Wooldridge, Washington lobbyist for Citizens Opposing Prohibition, a colorful former cop who patrols the halls of Congress dressed as a cowboy trying to persuade politicians to repeal the federal ban on marijuana. “We in law enforcement have long known that every drug dealer arrested, shot, or killed is replaced within days.”
“It’s a complete waste of money,” he said. “As they say in Texas, it’s like peeing up a rope.”
Surveys show the overwhelming majority of Americans agree the War on Drugs has turned out to be a fiasco.
A June poll commissioned by the American Civil Liberties Union found 83% of American voters believe the War on Drugs has failed, 65% support ending the drug war, and 66% favor eliminating criminal penalties for drug possession.
Not since the days when Jimmy Carter was president has the climate for drug policy reform been so promising.
This historic shift in the way the American public views combating illegal substances is why there’s a growing bipartisan consensus that America needs to start de-escalating the War on Drugs.
California just abolished mandatory minimum prison sentences for non-violent drug offenders, New York recently opened supervised injection sites for intravenous drug users, and in 2020, Oregon was the first state to decriminalize possession of small amounts of recreational drugs, including cocaine and heroin.
In the past few years, voters in eighteen U.S. states, and the District of Columbia, have legalized marijuana for recreational use.
But legalizing pot does nothing about the other drugs people consume.
You’re still going to have a massive black market in cocaine, crystal meth and heroin populated by the usual cast of gunmen, gangsters and shady dealers who profit from prohibition.
We need a more radical approach, says a small but growing band of ex-drug warriors and drug policy reformers, something they believe will attract broad support from fiscal conservatives worried about the cost of the drug war, libertarians concerned about the loss of freedoms, and liberals appalled at the racial inequities inherent in fighting drugs.
If you’re serious about winding down the drug war, they argue, disbanding the Drug Enforcement Administration—the law enforcement agency most associated with the failed war effort—and folding its functions into the FBI is an important step.
Why does America need a single-mission agency devoted to combating drugs, ask the critics, when the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, as well as state and local police, already investigate drug crimes?
Why does America continue to pour $3 billion a year into the DEA when there’s ample evidence the agency does more harm than good?
Three administrations—Carter, Reagan and Clinton—explored the possibility of merging the DEA with the FBI. The last time was in 1993, when Vice President Al Gore launched a crusade to reduce government waste. He argued that merging the DEA with the FBI would save money by eliminating overlap and duplication.
Attorney General Janet Reno backed the proposal but changed her mind after consulting with DEA officials.
“The idea of abolishing the DEA has been floated three times in the last decades and each time the DEA rallied its allies to block the proposal,” said Phil Smith, editor of Drug War Chronicle, which has been covering the War on Drugs since 1997. “But the DEA is now politically weaker than at any point since its inception. If someone made a proposal to disband the DEA, I’m not saying it would be successful. The DEA still has powerful allies in Congress, but we’re in a better place to get it done.”
On June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs at a press conference when he named drug abuse as “public enemy number one in the United States.”
Nixon was exaggerating. In those days, more Americans died falling down the stairs than from drug overdoses.
Still, Nixon argued that urgent action was required to combat this threat. Two years later, he set up a “super agency,” the Drug Enforcement Administration. Nixon intended the DEA as a unified command to handle all aspects of drug trafficking into the United States. Its mission was to wage “an all-out global war on the drug menace.”
In 1977, the DEA launched Operation Condor. The goal of the campaign was to eliminate America’s drug problem at its source.
Hundreds of DEA agents streamed into northwestern Mexico to help the Mexican military eradicate marijuana cultivation by spraying toxic herbicides from helicopters supplied by the U.S. military.
Some of the poisoned plants turned up in America and made pot smokers sick. Operation Condor drastically cut the amount of marijuana smuggled across the border, leading to a steep rise in prices and frequent droughts. In 1976, Mexico accounted for 70 percent of the U.S. supply of marijuana; by 1980, the figure had dropped to 10 percent. American politicians hailed Operation Condor as a major victory in the War on Drugs. But if it was, it was a short-lived one. All it did was encourage drug smugglers to shift from one commodity to another.
Temporarily forced out of the pot business, Mexican traffickers struck a deal with Colombian cocaine producers: the Colombians would deliver the cocaine to Mexico and pay the local cartels to smuggle the drugs across the border.
“The DEA’s war on marijuana in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a significant factor in the cartels moving from marijuana to cocaine because cocaine was more profitable and easier to compact,” the Drug Policy Alliance Network’s Bill Piper told me before he passed away in October.
In the meantime, Colombian drug traffickers opened up a new smuggling corridor when they started moving tons of cocaine into South Florida via the Caribbean.
As the price of pot shot up, the price of cocaine plummeted. By 1982, cocaine, once a rich person’s pleasure, had attracted 10 million users in America. The DEA, with the help of the U.S. Navy, launched an aggressive effort to shut down the Caribbean smuggling routes, which caused Colombian cartels to re-route more of their product through Mexico.
Drug policy experts call this the “balloon effect”: pushing down on the drug trade in one location causes it to pop up somewhere else. Sensing a shift in the balance of power, the Mexicans renegotiated their deal in 1992. They insisted the Colombians give up half their shipments as payment.
As a result, the Mexican cartels went from being couriers for the Colombian cartels to becoming the primary exporters of illegal substances into the United States.
According to criminologist and author Chris Eskridge: “The deal was a major turning point in the fortunes of the Mexican cartels. With this new business arrangement, the power and wealth of the Mexican drug cartels exploded.”
Responding to the growing power of the drug cartels, the DEA embarked on a new policy christened “the kingpin strategy.”
The brainchild of the then DEA head, Robert Bonner, the idea was simple: capture or kill high-ranking narcos to cripple the cartels’ ability to smuggle drugs into America.
The strategy seemed to prove successful when the world’s most infamous drug lord, Pablo Escobar, was killed in 1993. Assisted by the DEA and U.S. special forces, the Colombian police shot Escobar during a rooftop chase in his hometown of Medellin.
Escobar’s death left the Medellin Cartel in tatters. But instead of rising as the DEA expected, the retail price of cocaine in America fell from $80 a gram to $60 a gram. The collapse of Escobar’s organization had created a power vacuum. It allowed smaller cocaine producing operations to thrive, leading to a glut. Taking down one drug boss cleared the way for other drug bosses to fill his shoes and did nothing to prevent cocaine from coming across the border. Chopping off the snake’s head resulted in multiple heads regrowing in its place.
A 2011 memo from the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged the failure of the kingpin strategy: “There is no perceptible pattern that correlates either a decrease or increase in drug seizures because of the removal of key drug trafficking organization personnel.”
Another unexpected consequence of the kingpin strategy was instead of lowering the level of drug violence, removing cartel leaders had the opposite effect.
After taking office in 2006, Mexican president Felipe Calderon declared war on the country’s drug lords. Calderon’s campaign took out twenty-five of Mexico’s most wanted drug traffickers, but at a cost of 50,000 lives. Civilians caught in the crossfire between narcos and the military accounted for many of the dead. While the kingpin strategy failed to decrease drug violence, it succeeded in one respect. It generated splashy headlines for the DEA, which helped justify the billions of dollars spent on the agency.
In 2016, when Mexican marines captured Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, head of the Sinaloa Cartel, the DEA put out a press release celebrating the arrest: “The arrest is a significant achievement in our shared fight against transnational organized crime, violence, and drug trafficking.”
The U.S. government extradited Guzman to America. He was tried in federal court and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison for drug trafficking and money laundering. But the organization he left behind recovered.
Implicit in the kingpin strategy is the belief that drug cartels are like multinational corporations—hierarchical organizations that law enforcement can dismantle by attacking the top management.
But the Sinaloa Cartel was nothing like Apple or Amazon. It was a federation of gangs. El Chapo was the dominant faction’s leader. With Guzman gone, leaders of the other factions stepped in to replace him.
In 2019, after Sinaloa Cartel gunmen seized control of the Mexican city of Culiacan, the Los Angeles Times reported the cartel was “stronger than ever,” and “Guzman’s capture hasn’t weakened the cartel, which continues to send millions of dollars of drugs to the United States each month.”
Falco Ernst, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, recently told Business Insider: "U.S. authorities used El Chapo's case to justify their presence in Mexico, but his arrest doesn't solve a thing."
The latest target of the kingpin strategy is Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, also known as El Mencho, who leads the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which, according to Mexican newspaper reports, trains its sicarios by forcing them to eat human flesh.
The DEA believes Cervantes’ organization smuggles tons of meth and fentanyl into the United States each month and is offering a £10 million reward for information leading to his arrest.
Cervantes has so far eluded law enforcement by hiding in rural areas in his home state of Jalisco, where he’s guarded around the clock by mercenaries who shot down a military helicopter to prevent his capture.
But if history is any guide, whether authorities capture El Mencho, the smuggling of illegal drugs into America will continue unabated.
“No matter how many drug kingpins you arrest, there's always somebody behind to take their place,” said former DEA agent Sean Dunagan.
We see a similar pattern of failure in the way the DEA dealt with methamphetamine, the Most Evil Drug Ever, until fentanyl, the latest Most Evil Drug Ever, replaced it.
In the Ozark Mountains of Missouri in the 1980s, the Hells Angels manufactured the powerful stimulant in ramshackle laboratories hidden in the woods using a colorless oil known as P2P, a common industrial chemical.
“It was a complicated process,” said John Cornille, a retired DEA agent who busted meth cooks in the Ozarks. “It took a person with chemical knowledge to manufacture the drug. You needed hard-to-get items like triple neck flasks and condenser coils.”
Further adding to the difficulties of manufacturing the drug this way, the P2P method produced a telltale smell, which meant the labs needed to be located away from population centers to prevent detection by the DEA.
In 1980, the federal government listed P2P as a controlled substance. The DEA clamped down on chemical supply stores selling P2P to biker gangs. So meth cooks in Missouri devised a different synthetic route to making meth by using ephedrine, a stimulant derived from the ephedra plant.
When the DEA began seizing barrels of ephedrine, cooks changed to pseudoephedrine, an active ingredient in common cold medicines. You could make meth almost anywhere using this new method. People manufactured the drug in motel rooms, kitchens, and in the flatbeds of pickup trucks. An outlaw subculture of hillbilly meth cooks sprang up who were as much addicted to making the drug as the drug itself. With a small outlay and a little chemical savvy, every addict could become a cook, who taught others to cook. A banned substance that the DEA admitted attracted few users prior to the mid-1990s, now emerged as a major drug threat.
“Once meth users realized they didn't need the bikers, they could make it themselves, and not only supply their habit but have some left to sell, that's when the problem spiraled out of control,” said former assistant U.S. attorney David Rush, who saw first hand the dramatic rise of home meth manufacturing in the Ozarks.
By the turn of the century, this buckle of the Bible Belt had become the mom-and-pop meth lab capital of America, an unintended knock-on consequence of the DEA’s attempt to control P2P.
The DEA shut down the small labs with the help of the Combat Methamphetamine Act of 2005. The law banned over-the-counter sales of cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine. Unable to get the ingredients to make meth, kitchen chemists went out of business. As a result, methamphetamine use plummeted in the first decade of the 21st century.
What the DEA didn’t expect was how these laws provided an unexpected boon for Mexican drug traffickers, who once again proved adept at adapting to the vagaries of gringo drug war politics, when they set up industrial-sized laboratories to replace the mom-and-pop labs.
“I call these precursor laws the Mexican Meth Market Share Enhancement Act,” said Phil Smith, editor of Drug War Chronicle.
By 2010, the number of American meth users started to climb again, thanks to the massive amount of meth produced by the Mexican labs.
The Mexican government tried to stem the flood of meth by adopting the same precursor controls that led to a steep decline in American meth production: restricting bulk imports of Chinese ephedrine and banning over-the-counter medicines containing pseudoephedrine.
But limiting precursor ingredients didn’t cause the Mexican labs to close. Instead, the cartels looked for another way to manufacture the drug. They rediscovered the P2P method, the same chemical synthesis that biker gangs used in the 1970s and 1980s.
While P2P was difficult to get hold of, cartel chemists realized you could make P2P with available chemicals, such as phenylacetic acid, which they began purchasing in bulk from China.
At first, this produced a poorer quality product because the P2P method yields what chemists call a racemic mixture: d-methamphetamine (which gets you high) and l-methamphetamine (which doesn’t).
But over time, cartel chemists figured out how to make biker meth containing only d-methamphetamine. According to DEA statistics, the potency of Mexican meth increased throughout the last decade from 76% to 98%. By 2020, nearly all the meth smuggled into America was manufactured using an improved version of the same chemical route the DEA tried to outlaw in the early 1980s.
Today, the price of meth is falling, border seizures have increased sixfold, the purity of the drug is at an all-time high, and the number of regular users has doubled in six years.
By any yardstick, America’s meth problem is worse now than it was when the DEA cracked down on biker gangs four decades ago, the agency’s policies having fueled the so-called “meth epidemic” it’s supposed to be fighting.
In a predictable cycle, the DEA cracks down on one intoxicating substance, which causes users and producers to switch to another, often more powerful and dangerous substance.
Marijuana activist Richard Cowan dubbed this “the iron law of prohibition.” As Cowan put it: “The more intense the law enforcement, the more potent drugs will become.” During alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, for instance, drinkers moved from beer to hard liquor because bootleggers realized there was more money to be made shipping a barrel of whiskey than a barrel of beer.
A contemporary example of Cowan’s law is fentanyl, the potent synthetic opioid involved in two-thirds of the over 100,000 drug overdose deaths recorded in America last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
America’s opioid crisis dates back to the late 1990s. Doctors began prescribing large amounts of a new potent painkiller called OxyContin. Between 1997 and 2002, the number of OxyContin prescriptions increased almost tenfold, fueling a rise in overdoses. It was a problem the DEA helped create when it allowed OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma to increase the production of the drug, even though the agency knew there was evidence the pills were being abused. Purdue flooded the market with hundreds of millions of OxyContin pills, setting off a wave of addiction.
The DEA launched a crackdown on pain doctors using the same hardball tactics the agency used to go after drug kingpins. Agents stormed clinics in SWAT gear, ransacked offices, and hauled away doctors and patients in handcuffs. Scared to prescribe the drug, doctors displayed signs in their offices that read “Don’t ask for OxyContin” or “No OxyContin prescribed here.” This left legitimate pain patients to suffer in agony.
“They’re unable to take down the real drug lords, so they’re coming after doctors using the same tactics,” one pain physician complained to me at the time.
Instead of solving the problem, however, curtailing the prescriptions of legal opioids fuelled a new drug boom, as users who couldn’t afford the skyrocketing price of black market OxyContin turned to a cheaper alternative: heroin.
Until this point, addicts who went from doctor to doctor to get multiple prescriptions dominated the underground trade. What they didn’t use themselves, they sold on the street. But with the switch to heroin, Mexican drug traffickers—who had been smuggling heroin since the 1930s—increased the supply to feed the growing demand. Once again, DEA policies favored the cartels. Overdose deaths involving heroin tripled between 2010 and 2015. The amount of heroin seized at the US-Mexico border quintupled during the same period as the DEA stepped up efforts to stem the flow of the drug.
With the DEA intercepting so much heroin, Mexican drug traffickers substituted a less expensive but more lethal alternative, fentanyl, which they mixed with heroin to increase profit margins or pressed into counterfeit OxyContin tablets.
Fentanyl was not a new drug. But until 2013, fentanyl misuse had been a minor problem in America. Heroin laced with fentanyl first appeared on the black market in the late 1970s in California under the street name “China White.” In 1988, China White surfaced in Pennsylvania, where authorities blamed the drug for 18 deaths.
But these outbreaks proved to be short-lived. The supply came from laboratories, which produced only small amounts of the drug for local distribution. Once law enforcement located the labs and arrested the chemists, the outbreaks ended.
With their almost unlimited resources and global reach, Mexican cartels can supply large amounts of fentanyl either by buying the drug from factories in China or using precursor chemicals to manufacture the drug in Mexican labs.
In November, Mexican police raided a Sinaloa Cartel lab on the outskirts of Culiacan and confiscated a record-breaking 270 pounds of fentanyl destined for the United States.
From the cartels’ point of view, the shift to fentanyl makes good business sense. A shipment of heroin with the same potency as fentanyl costs a hundred times more to produce. Fentanyl not only gives more bang for the buck, it’s easier to smuggle because of its high potency-to-weight ratio, which means it’s more compact. A little fentanyl goes a long way. It’s also simpler to make because, unlike heroin, it doesn’t rely on poppy crops.
But as for the health and safety of drug users, the explosion in fentanyl use has proved catastrophic. With OxyContin, users knew what they were getting in advance. It’s impossible to gauge a safe dose of heroin laced with fentanyl unless you test the combination first. The drug is so lethal that fentanyl overdoses are now the leading cause of death among 18-45-year-olds.
In an unintended but predictable outcome, the DEA helped spark one drug problem, then attempted to fix it, and ended up creating an even bigger drug problem—the deadliest drug overdose crisis in American history.
Meanwhile, the DEA’s multi-billion dollar game of Whac-A-Mole continues.
The latest front in the War on Drugs is China, where unregulated factories pump out metric tons of exotic synthetic drugs, what the DEA calls NPS (New Psychoactive Substances).
Drug dealers market these novel synthetic drugs as legal alternatives to illegal drugs. The most common type of NPS are synthetic cannabinoids, called Spice or K2, and cathinones, known as “bath salts.” One of the major selling points of NPS is they don’t show up on standard drug tests.
New Psychoactive Substances are available online for a fraction of the cost of plant-based drugs. Using anonymizing technology to conceal IP addresses, anyone with an internet connection can buy them from the comfort of their homes and have a package delivered within days. The DEA is scrambling to shut down websites that sell NPS, but close one, then others pop up in their wake. In 2013, the feds arrested Ross Ulbricht, the owner of the infamous drug marketplace Silk Road. Within months, over a dozen similar websites emerged to take its place.
This new category of drugs is difficult to control. Ban one type of NPS then manufacturers tweak the formula to skirt the ban. After the DEA banned the three most popular types of cathinones (mephedrone, methylone and MDPV), Chinese chemists switched to a more powerful cathinone, alpha-PVP, better known as flakka.
Likewise, after the Synthetic Drug Control Act of 2015 outlawed over a hundred synthetic marijuana compounds, producers turned to other variants, which, while similar, were legal.
“People resort to these new categories of synthetic drugs,” said Drug War Chronicle editor Phil Smith, “because they don’t have access to cocaine or heroin or meth or because they want to evade drug tests.”
“To the degree we crack down on familiar drugs, we encourage people to resort to these new, unknown, designer drugs,” he said.
The story of how synthetic marijuana became a multi-million dollar industry illustrates Smith’s point.
In the 1980s, an organic chemist named John Huffman was studying the effects of marijuana on the human brain in his laboratory at Clemson University in South Carolina.
Because marijuana was illegal, the DEA only made limited amounts available for scientific research, so Huffman developed synthetic substitutes that didn’t need the agency’s approval.
The compounds Huffman invented mimicked the effects of marijuana. But they were many times more potent than the natural plant, and were intended for use on lab rats, not humans.
Then, in 2008, Huffman received a phone call from the DEA. The DEA had discovered that one of his compounds was being used as a recreational drug. Rogue chemists had read Huffman’s research in academic journals. They were producing synthetic marijuana based on his formula. Gas stations and convenience stores were selling the product for as little as $5 a packet under the name Spice or K2.
In the next few years, authorities linked Spice to thousands of hospitalizations and dozens of deaths. The number of calls to poison-control centers about the drug increased sixty-fold between 2009 and 2011. By 2012, five percent of adults in the U.S. under 30 said that they had consumed Spice in the previous year, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
A decade later, however, only one percent in the same age group reported consuming the drug, a sharp decline attributable to marijuana decriminalization.
Given the choice between synthetic marijuana and the safer, natural version, drug users prefer the real thing, especially if they don’t have to risk arrest.
Another example of how prohibition makes drugs riskier is the pervasiveness of cathinones on the electronic music scene.
Cathinones, also called bath salts, are amphetamine-like substances that drug dealers often mislabel as Molly or Ecstasy.
Safety data on the toxicity of cathinones remains limited, and the long-term negative effects are unknown.
In 2013, I (and co-author Lera Gavin) wrote a story for Playboy examining the rise of Molly. Molly is the rebranded version of the club drug Ecstasy that drug dealers sell as pure MDMA. After an international law enforcement clampdown on safrole, a precursor chemical used to make MDMA, the purity of Ecstasy had declined, but now it was back better than ever, according to the hype. After testing samples we bought in Miami and New York, what we found shocked us.
While some samples contained MDMA, the active ingredient in Ecstasy, they also contained a potentially deadly combination of other drugs piled on top of each other: cocaine, methamphetamine, opioids, and most commonly, in the Miami area, cathinones.
“I haven’t seen real MDMA in Miami in years,” one drug dealer told me. “Even when I sell people mephedrone and tell them it’s not MDMA, they still come back the next day and say, ‘That’s the best Molly I ever had.’ Most people can’t tell the difference.”
Three years later, a study appeared in the Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence that tested hair samples from festival-goers who used Molly. 40% of them tested positive for bath salts.
“People are so inexperienced, they don’t know what Molly feels like, because they have been taking bath salts the whole time,” one of the study’s researchers told Newsweek.
On-site pill testing might mitigate the risks of dangerous drug cocktails masquerading as Molly, but raves and music festivals refuse to allow harm-reduction organizations such as DanceSafe to test drugs for purity because promoters fear arrest by the DEA.
As columnist Jacob Sullum wrote in Reason: “Prohibition not only makes drugs more dangerous by creating a situation where people are swallowing iffy pills and snorting mystery powders, it blocks attempts to ameliorate those hazards.”
Once again, we see the same pattern repeated. A crackdown on one chemical drives drug users and producers to shift to more harmful chemicals. Except in this case, people taking these untested compounds are often unaware drug dealers are using them as human guinea pigs.
Just because a federal government agency has failed to solve the problem it was founded to combat, and has made the problem worse, doesn’t mean the DEA will disappear overnight.
“It’s almost impossible to eliminate a federal government agency,” the Drug Policy Alliance’s Bill Piper told me before his recent death.
“The DEA’s biggest protection isn’t the drug war because the drug war is increasingly unpopular in Washington, but bureaucracies have a life of their own,” he said.
What drug war critics think is workable isn’t to abolish the DEA, but to merge it with the FBI. Because the FBI isn’t a single-issue agency, it’s able to better gauge the threat posed by drugs compared to other threats like terrorism and computer crime.
“To the extent we need criminal enforcement of drugs at the national level, it should be done with an agency that understands if you take down one drug boss, there’s going to be a power vacuum, and other drug bosses will take their place,” said Piper. “The DEA, because their focus is reducing supply, all they’re doing is arresting drug sellers and filling up our prisons. It makes more sense to get rid of the DEA and move resources to the FBI.”
As for the DEA’s role in regulating dangerous pharmaceuticals, former DEA agent Sean Dunagan said that function is better handled by the Food and Drug Administration.
“The FDA could do a better job deciding how much a particular doctor should prescribe OxyContin,” he said. “DEA agents aren’t doctors. They’re cops.”
“The DEA has been around since 1973 and, by any metric, the drug situation is worse,” said Dunagan. “That should give anybody involved in fighting the drug war pause and the opportunity to consider why this approach isn’t working. Is the DEA having any lasting impact? I think the answer is no.”
The history of the DEA’s counter-narcotics efforts teaches us that short-term victories rarely translate into long-term successes. The paradox of the drug war is that the harder America tries to solve the drug problem, the worse it gets. Instead of being tough on drugs, society needs to learn how to be smart on drugs.
As the Tao Te Ching tells us: “A foolish man is always doing, yet much remains to be done.”