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Federal Drug Budget Uses Enron-Style Accounting
Report: Approach Understates Law Enforcement; Overstates Treatment
and Prevention; Falsely Cuts Drug War Budget in Half
Washington, D.C.: The Office of National Drug Control Policy has
announced plans to revise reporting of the federal anti-drug budget. An
analysis of the new reporting by Common Sense for Drug Policy finds that
it will falsely appear to cut the drug budget in half and greatly
understate the real cost of law enforcement. CSDP President, Kevin B.
Zeese, charged, "The drug czar realizes that the cost of the drug war is
a political liability especially the expensive military and law
enforcement programs. Creative accounting will allow them to hide the
expenditures on these costly programs." Common Sense's analysis is
available at: http://www.csdp.org.
Cutting drug war cost in half; making drug control balanced via
trickster accounting
The effect of these reporting revisions will be to 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. "This
reporting revision is a transparent attempt to use Enron-style
accounting to fool the public into believing the Administration is
finally putting more money into treatment and prevention," Zeese added.
The changes would make the funding ratio falsely appear to change from
its current 70/30 split, with law enforcement and interdiction making up
the bulk of the spending, to an apparent-though-untrue ratio of 53/47.
Excluding cost of incarceration, minimizing DoD and exaggerating
treatment spending
ONDCP will greatly reduce the reported expenditures on the law
enforcement side 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 --
$3 billion will come from the cost of incarceration. "ONDCP's drug
strategy emphases arrest and incarceration, yet incredibly they are not
planning on counting the cost of prosecution, judging and incarceration
in the drug budget - strangely claiming it is not a cost of the drug
war. They have a responsibility to report on the massive economic and
social cost of incarceration, rather than hiding those costs," Zeese
said. The new budget also underreports spending by the Department
Defense in several ways including not counting the cost of military
personnel. "With DoD the lead agency for interdiction and with troops on
the ground in the Colombian drug war it is dishonest to say military
personnel fighting the drug war are not a cost of the drug war."
ONDCP plans to include the cost of alcohol treatment as part of their
drug budget, yielding an apparent increase of over $500 million in
treatment funding. Alcohol is not within the jurisdiction of ONDCP.
Thus, including alcohol treatment services will greatly - and falsely -
overstate federal drug treatment spending. "Real increases in treatment
are needed, not misreporting of alcohol treatment dollars as drug
treatment dollars to make it look like an increase in treatment
spending," claimed Zeese.
Figuring out how much is really spent on treatment
ONDCP has promised to review the spending estimates reported by the
Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the Dept. of Education, and the Substance
Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration of HHS. The Rand Corp.,
in a report for the Drug Czar's office, estimated that in 1998 these
three federal agencies overstated their actual spending on treatment and
prevention by $1 billion. While this review is much-needed, the actions
taken by the drug czar so far will exacerbate the problems by
artificially increasing reported treatment spending.
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