ENRON STYLE ACCOUNTING HIDES REAL COSTS OF THE DRUG WAR

John Walters must be desperate to be so deceptive. Only a desperate man
could keep a straight face while claiming that the prosecution and
incarceration of drug offenders is not a cost of the drug war.

Walters, the Bush administration's drug czar, recently announced that the
nation's new drug war budget is not going to count the cost of prosecuting,
sentencing or incarcerating drug offenders. It also will not count the cost
of military personnel working on drug enforcement. However, the cost of
alcohol treatment will be included in the budget -- even though the Office
of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), Walter's agency, has no
jurisdiction over alcohol.

Why the Enron-like accounting tricks? Through these fiscal manipulations,
Walters can claim that the split in his budget between law
enforcement/military costs and treatment/prevention costs is nearly 50-50,
rather than what it really is -- about 70-30. In other words, Walters can
now back up the claim that he is taking America into a new era of the drug
war, where treatment and prevention -- strategies that the public
overwhelmingly supports -- outweigh punitive measures.

Drug war advocates realize that the cost of the expensive law enforcement
and military programs are a political liability. And they know they've lost
fourteen state-based political battles over the last three election cycles
- -- the public has repeatedly voted for medical marijuana, treatment instead
of prison, stopping police forfeiture abuse and even marijuana
decriminalization. They've seen the polls showing that the same percentage
of the public that believes the drug war is winnable believes that Elvis is
alive. So the ONDCP is hiding the expenditures on these costly, unpopular
and ineffective programs.

These reporting revisions will take some of the enforcement costs "off the
books" and artificially reduce the cost of the drug budget from $19.2
billion to just over $11 billion. The new drug budget is a transparent
attempt to fool the public into believing the Bush Administration is putting
less into law enforcement and finally putting more money into treatment and
prevention.

ONDCP will falsely reduce the reported expenditures on the law enforcement
while actually spending record amounts on enforcement. The Department of
Justice will cut its drug budget by $5 billion by not counting the cost of
prosecution and incarceration of drug offenders. Three billion alone will
come from the cost of incarceration. While drug warriors have always
understated the human costs of mass incarceration, we certainly did not
expect them to hide the massive economic costs of incarcerating hundreds of
thousands of drug offenders.

On the military side, the U.S. is increasing its involvement in the
Colombian drug war -- sending active duty troops and civilian military
contractors to the Andes -- but the drug budget will underreport Defense
Department spending in several ways. One significant item that will continue
to not be counted is the cost of military personnel. That's right --
military personnel fighting the drug war are not a cost of the drug war. We
don't know how many troops are involved in the drug war worldwide, but in
Colombia there are up to 800 U.S. troops and "private military contractors"
on Uncle Sam's payroll.

By including the cost of alcohol treatment as part of their drug budget,
ONDCP can chalk up an apparent increase of over $500 million in treatment
funding -- without the Feds spending a penny more to help people. Sadly,
real increases in funding for treatment are desperately needed, not
misreporting of alcohol treatment expenditures in the drug treatment budget.

Admittedly, these latest accounting shenanigans only add to an existing
problem of inflating figures for drug treatment. A 1998 review by the Rand
Corporation found that the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of
Education and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
overstated their actual spending on treatment and prevention programs by $1
billion. For example, under current reporting procedures, if a Vet who use
drugs breaks his leg and needs medical care, the Veterans Administration
counts it as drug treatment. So far, the drug czar has not announced any
plans to correct this problem.

It may seem like a dark moment in drug policy history, but actually,
reformers should take heart. The ONDCP wouldn't blatantly risk its
credibility unless reform was making progress. They know that in the midst
of a recession, with deficit spending returning to the federal budget and
with the costly demands of the terrorism war, they risk losing support of
policy makers if they continue to spend tens of billions of dollars on a
drug strategy that does not work. Hopefully, this desperate act will come to
the American public's attention and escalate the erosion of support for the
drug war. If so, our elected officials may finally realize that we can no
longer afford the war on drugs.