Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1999 14:17:19 -0700 (MST)

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GAO REPORT SPOTLIGHTS DISCONNECT BETWEEN DEA PRACTICES, RESULTS

DEA ADMITS ITS TACTICS OFTEN HAVE NO LASTING IMPACT ON LOCAL DRUG TRADES

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WASHINGTON, July 27 -- In a General Accounting Office report timed to coincide with tomorrow's House Subcommittee on Crime oversight hearing of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA makes a rare admission that drug arrests often make no impact on local drug trades. The admission highlights the need for a shift away from criminal justice drug policy approaches and the need for more effective, demand-reduction-based drug control strategies.

(The Subcommittee on Crime will meet at 9:30 tomorrow morning at 2141 Rayburn HOB. The GAO report is entitled "DEA's Strategies and Operations in the 1990s," and can be found at http://www.gao.gov. The report number is GAO/GGD-99-108.)

[Direct link: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/gg99108.pdf]

DEA's analysis stemmed from GAO reporting on Mobile Enforcement Teams (MET), the DEA unit that works with local law enforcement agencies on drug operations. In a random survey of four MET deployments, GAO found that violent crime often increased after MET had come in and made high numbers of arrests. In Los Angeles homicides increased 12 percent, aggravated assaults increased 37 percent and sex crimes increased 59 percent in the six months after the DEA MET team made high-volume arrests. In Pine Bluff, Arkansas, homicides increased 75 percent and assaults increased 62 percent. According to GAO:

"In commenting on these results, DEA noted that the effectiveness of MET deployments in removing a specific, targeted violent drug gang, for example, cannot by itself eliminate a community's drug trafficking problems because DEA cannot continue to control deployment areas to prevent other drug dealers from filling the void that a MET deployment might have created."

DPF senior analyst Rob Stewart said that DEA's admission of shortcomings in its own strategy should be impetus for a broad change.

"DEA's own experience with the fluency of the drug trade speaks volumes for the need for a change of approach," Stewart said. "DEA has finally acknowledged that if you scrape away the top layer of the drug trade, it quickly grows back. Market economics apply as readily to the drug trade as to any other trade. Right now we spend over two-thirds of our national drug control budget on this kind of approach. We should shift our anti-drug resources more toward public health, treatment and effective educational anti-drug efforts."

GAO also found the same type of effects with DEA's efforts in overseas interdiction and eradication efforts. While DEA repeatedly boasted to GAO that it had busted the Cali cartel, it acknowledged that business had simply shifted to Mexican suppliers and traffickers and to new, smaller, decentralized South American groups. The net result in this country hasn't been more expensive illegal narcotics or lower availability. To the contrary, cocaine costs almost half as much and is twice as pure as it was in 1981. Heroin also costs about half as much and is five times as pure as it was when the government started keeping statistics in 1981.

"Shutting down the dominant organizations did not slow drug flow into the United States," Stewart said. "The foreign-intervention model of drug control policy has failed. We should concentrate our resources on lowering the demand for illegal narcotics within the United States and not on military drug surveillance missions."

For more information, please contact DPF's Deputy Communications Director, Tyler Green, at (202) 537-5005. After hours and immediately after tomorrow's hearing he'll be available at (202) 487-6241.