SESSIONS QUESTIONS DRUG INTERDICTION POLICIES

Senator's Letter To General Accounting Office Prompts Inquiry.

The drug trade isn't just big business for traffickers trying to smuggle
cocaine and other illegal substances into the United States. Each year, an
array of federal agencies get billions of taxpayer dollars in the
never-ending battle to keep drugs out.

Questions about that policy are now coming from a somewhat surprising
Source: U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, who as U.S. Attorney in Mobile from
1981-93, spearheaded an aggressive expansion of the federal government's
role in prosecuting drug offenders.

"I think on drug interdiction, we're just plowing ahead with old ideas that
I'm afraid aren't very effective," Sessions, R-Mobile, said at a Monday
news conference in his office. "And we're spending a good bit of money."

Leading his concerns: That different federal bureaucracies are double or
triple-counting the same drug seizures, thus making their overall
performances look rosier than they actually are.

Sessions has no hard evidence to back up those suspicions, which were
prompted by a constituent's letter and information gathered through his
work in Congress. But in a letter to the General Accounting Office last
September, he asked the congressional watchdog agency to review drug
interdiction efforts by the U.S. Defense Department and the U.S. Coast Guard.

Sessions wrote that he wanted "to determine if multiple agencies are taking
credit for the same drug busts and interdictions, thus falsely inflating
their numbers, which allows them (to) justify their annual funding requests."

The GAO inquiry is only now gathering steam. It has since been expanded to
include the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Customs Service. A
preliminary report could be ready later this spring.

Attempts to get comment from each of those agencies were unsuccessful Monday.

There appeared to be some confusion, however, over which bears
responsibility for keeping statistics on drug seizures involving more than
one federal office. At both DEA and the Coast Guard, spokesmen said that
was the responsibility of the White House Office of National Drug Control
Policy.

There, spokesman Bob Weiner said he believed that it is the job of the Drug
Enforcement Administration. While not able to comment specifically on
Sessions' concerns, Weiner said, "Obviously everybody tries for the most
efficient data possible and the most accurate data possible. But as to
whether there's errors, we'd have to check and that is also possible."

As South Alabama's top federal prosecutor in the '80s and early '90s,
Sessions used tough anti-drug laws to prosecute even small-town crack
dealers. His approach helped give the region one of the highest per-capita
federal drug conviction rates in the nation. It also led to criticism that
too many small fry were filling federal prisons with lengthy no-parole
sentences.

But one critic of Sessions' actions as a prosecutor applauded his
willingness as a senator to explore the effectiveness of drug interdiction.

"The government is eager to claim success even when there isn't a solid
basis for it," said Eric E. Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice
Policy Foundation, a Washington, D.C.- organization that advocates more
drug treatment and prevention.

But Sterling added that the real test will be whether Sessions seeks to
remedy any problems unearthed by the GAO.

"The responsibility of oversight then is to demand accountability," he said.

Sessions said he already plans to ask Attorney General John Ashcroft to
investigate a Miami Herald report last week that the DEA could not back up
the success claimed for a major drug crackdown in Latin America and the
Caribbean last fall.

While the agency reported 2,876 arrests, those included hundreds for
misdemeanor marijuana possession in Jamaica, where most of the defendants
were fined and released, the newspaper reported. The Herald also reported
that much of the marijuana eradication credited to "Operation Libertador"
had already been counted as part of a separate State Department program.

While the DEA denies any impropriety, "I think heads need to roll on this,"
Sessions said.