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Is the Drug Czar Head of the DEA?

Emily YoffePosted Thursday, May 10, 2001, at 5:42 PM ET

The Bush administration has nominated John Walters to be the nation's drug czar and indicated it will nominate Rep. Asa Hutchinson, R-Ark., to be head of the Drug Enforcement Administration. What's the difference between the two jobs?

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The head of the DEA gets to oversee the folks with guns who bust down doors and wear cool windbreakers that say DEA. The DEA is a law enforcement division of the Department of Justice; its mandate is to investigate and arrest people who aren't obeying the nation's drug laws. The agency has 9,132 employees, of whom 4,561 are special agents, and a congressionally authorized budget of $1.44 billion for this year. The DEA was formally created as a separate agency in 1973, but its functions go back to Prohibition. It also has its own museum.

The drug czar, formally known as the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, gets to oversee the folks who write a lot of reports about how the war on drugs is going and scrutinize how other federal agencies are spending their drug-fighting money. ONDCP reports directly to the White House, has about 150 employees, and has a budget this year of about $500 million. Its mandate is to create and implement a national drug control strategy and make sure the $18 billion the federal government will dole out this year to fight drugs really fights drugs in a way that is creative, implementable, and strategic. ONDCP was created in 1988, and the first drug czar was William Bennett (who wrote with Walters and John J. DiIulio, head of Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, a now-discredited book on juvenile criminals). Each year the drug czar is required to release a lengthy annual report on our nation's drug control strategy that can be summed up as "We can lick this if we get more money." The ONDCP does not have cool jackets or a museum.

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Emily Yoffe is the author of What the Dog Did: Tales From a Formerly Reluctant Dog Owner. You can send your Human Guinea Pig suggestions or comments to .

COMMENTS

Reader Comments From The Fray:

Not making any comment about whether we should even have a DEA (and assuming Explainer's figures are correct) but did you notice: There are roughly 10,000 people who do the work for a $1.4 billion budget. But the 150 people who only talk about the work take $500 million. Something is wrong there.

--Fred Waltman

(To reply, click here.)

Czar = failure. Leave aside the Romanovs, though they prove the point too. Energy Czar? Drug Czar? AIDS Czar? Has any Czar ever actually succeeded?

--A.G.Android

(To reply, click here.)

So, where does Michael Douglas fit into all of this? Is Explainer basically saying that in the movie Traffic, the Drug Czar was in the perfect position to influence how we deal with drugs in this country, without being responsible for doing so himself? This makes the character even less believable than I thought in the first place.

--Mangar

(To reply, click here.)

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