The Little Brown Reader

This past Tuesday night, as part of a group organized by Students for Sensible Drug Policy, I attended a speech by US drug czar John Walters at The George Washington University here in DC. You may remember that our lead article from last week's issue discussed the warping in this year's "National Drug Control Strategy" document of the presentation of federal drug budget numbers to create an appearance of equality between enforcement and interdiction vs. treatment and prevention spending (http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/327/budget2005.shtml). In reality the budget split is still roughly 2-1 in favor of enforcement. ONDCP created a 1-1 appearance by omitting the cost of incarcerating drug offenders from the budget numbers. (!)

I was amazed by how brazenly Walters not only stood by, but bragged about, his budget deception. We didn't even have to wait for his speech to hear about it. It was built into the introduction a student gave for him, which was almost certainly provided by his office, in which she listed among Walters' accomplishments the reworking of the budget presentation to be more honest or accurate.

I raised the issue with Walters during the question-and-answer session following his speech. His answer doesn't pass the straight face test, though remarkably he did manage to keep a straight face. Walters' line was that there are some budget items that are not exclusively focused on drugs. He brought up the example of the Headstart program, for which the federal government provides some drug prevention money. He then pointed out that some drug offenders are also convicted of other crimes and are sentenced to prison time for all of them. In order to make the budget reporting more "honest," Walters stated, they now omit all drug spending, be it enforcement or demand reduction, from the budget entirely.