Dope Dog
2004-10-28
As we have been told for many decades now, the DEA is winning the war on drugs. After all, it made 27, 635 arrests in 2002, while seizing, amongst other evil substances, 61 000 KGs of cocaine, 195,000 KGs of marijuana and 118 million tabs of meth. While paraphernalia can demonstrate the dramatic incompetence of the DEA across the board, we’ll focus on pot, simply because it's a more obvious story. So let’s see how impotent a government agency can be (and we are not talking about the impotence helped by the blue pill...):
Following an ever increasing number of arrests, the long-term imprisonment of dealers and users alike, as well as a balooning budget, the DEA brags about the following:
“prices for commercial-grade marijuana have remained relatively stable over the past decade, ranging from approximately $400 to $1,000 per pound in U.S. Southwest border areas to between $700 to $2000 per pound in the Midwest and northeastern United States. During the past two decades, marijuana potency has increased. According to the University of Mississippi's 2000 Marijuana Potency Monitoring Project (MPMP), commercial-grade marijuana THC levels rose from under 2 percent in the late 1970s and early 1980s to 6.07 percent in 2000. The MPMP reports that sinsemilla potency also increased, rising from 6 percent in the late 1970s and 1980s to 13.20 percent in 2000.”
As good underlings, DEA officials were obviously trying to cover for untalented front man, John Walters, a former Drug Czar never shying away from ridicule (after all, le ridicule ne tue pas, as the French would say), who insists that THC levels are as high as 29%. Never missing a chance for a quick quote, former president Bill Clinton went over the top, stating “marijuana is 10 times more dangerous than 20 years ago”. Now, how would he know that, since he never inhaled?
So we are left with an interesting result: the quality of marijuana increases a lot, while prices remain stable. In the meantime, the DEA staff increased from 2,775 in 1972 to 10, 565 in 2004, while its budget went from US$ 65 mln to US$ 2 billion. Now, paraphernalia is no statistician, but it seems that some basic regression analysis might show that an increase in DEA staffing and budget contribute directly to the quality of marijuana.
So, why does the DEA still exist? Well, as James Buchanan - a Nobel Prize economist - demonstrated, politicians and bureaucrats act in their own self-interest just the way everybody other organism does. Thus, the DEA’s own survival is its sole objective. Dead bodies, ruined lives, and lovely badges are just the means to that end.
|
|
|
|
