from the nonsense-all-the-time dept
The DEA has always been ridiculous when it comes to drugs. It overplays the downside, refuses to acknowledge any upside, and has been instrumental in ensuring people suffering from mental health issues are unable to access the drugs that might help them most.
It’s a vindictive agency that acts like a Jack Chick religious tract come to life: the only outcome for drug use is hitting rock-bottom. Were it not for the DEA, every user of hallucinogens (i.e., the drugs that are the most fun!) would have microwaved an infant by now. That’s the narrative we’re paying for. And far too many of our publicly-funded institutions and leaders fall for it.
In recent years, fentanyl has become one of the leading killers of drug users. The DEA has leveraged this death toll to increase its funding and the volume settings of its megaphone, but has done very little to actually stem the tide of overdose deaths. Instead, it has pretended its “discovery” of multi-colored fentanyl is evidence that drug cartels trying to kill children, rather than just illicit drug producers engaging in brand differentiation in hopes of keeping their customers alive.
Anne Milgram took over the DEA nearly two years ago, promising to clean house and make the DEA a leaner, meaner drug-fighting machine. According to this recent Associated Press report, she made good on a least part of those housecleaning promises:
Milgram has… made a point to show zero tolerance for sexual misconduct and racism in the ranks, warning agents they may now be fired for certain first offenses — a departure from previous administrations.
The DEA has a host of problems. Those are just a few of them. While it’s admirable Milgram is attempting to dismantle the part of law enforcement culture that encourages sexism and racism, she seems far less willing to dismantle the most problematic aspects of the DEA, which is its hands-off approach to internal corruption — something that’s incredibly problematic when dealing with organized crime and billions of dollars of constantly moving goods and cash.
Following the late 2022 sentencing of DEA agent Jose Irizarry to prison for 12 years for his conviction for conspiring with a Columbian drug cartel, Milgram opened an investigation into DEA officers and their involvement with their targets.
But she apparently had no intention of actually exposing this corruption, much less rooting it out. Instead, she leveraged her “reformer” reputation and her newly obtained power to give friends and colleagues well-paying, taxpayer-funded positions on the supposedly independent investigatory team, all while apparently ensuring no actual investigation took place.
[T]hose selected to carry out the review raised eyebrows. One, John “Jack” Lawn, is a DEA legend but the 87-year-old’s insights date from his tenure leading the agency in the 1980s. After leaving government, Lawn headed the Century Council, a beverage industry group, which funded research into campus alcohol abuse that was conducted by Milgram’s mother, a Rutgers University expert in the field.
Lawn’s co-author, Boyd Johnson, worked as a prosecutor on international drug cases before becoming a partner at WilmerHale. Both Johnson and Milgram have close ties to Bharara, who after being fired as U.S. attorney by President Donald Trump joined the NYU faculty alongside Milgram and together hosted the legal issues podcast “Cafe Insider.” Last year — as the foreign operations review was being conducted — Bharara joined WilmerHale. And this year, DEA hired away from the firm Milgram’s former NYU research assistant to become her deputy chief of staff.
The end result was an “investigation” that could have been performed for free by anyone with a functioning internet connection:
“It’s a complete waste of taxpayers’ money,” said Matthew Donahue, who led DEA’s foreign operations until he butted heads with Milgram and was transferred to Colombia, a demotion that prompted him to retire.
Donahue said he and several other DEA overseas veterans were never interviewed as part of the review, which scarcely mentioned Irizarry or other scandals, and borrowed heavily from publicly available audits and DEA operating manuals.
“It’s something that could’ve been written in three days,” he said.
That’s not just someone ousted from the agency sour-graping to a journalist. This same sentiment was expressed by Senator Chuck Grassley while condemning the lack of information in the report, as well as its exorbitant cost to taxpayers.
[T]he report glosses over or ignores serious shortcomings at the agency and spends much of its 49 pages quoting from publicly available documents that one could have pulled off a web site…
This half-assery took nearly 18 months to compile, despite being the equivalent of a knocked-out-over-the-weekend term paper one expects from a procrastinating high school student. Good money was spent doing nothing, secured by “no-bid” contracts Director Milgram said were essential to secure the best investigatory resources available — something she said shortly before employing members of her social circle jerk to arrive at inconclusions using data they apparently pulled from the DEA’s online policy manuals.
With this sort of leadership heading up our nation’s most prominent drug warriors, surely it will only be a matter of time before fentanyl starts killing cops, not to mention the rest of us. And while people continue dying (and cops continue to pretend they are), Director Milgram will apparently be working hard to ensure even the most outer branches of her family tree continue to rack up charges on the taxpayers’ water bills.
Filed Under: dea, fentanyl, moral panic
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