Abolish the DEA
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.” Thi
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