In typical Washington fashion, the congressional Super Committee failed to reach an agreement on debt reduction, triggering automatic sequester cuts. While both political parties freaked over the potential damage of the cuts (which is virtually none) and how they would impact defense and entitlement spending, both President Obama and press secretary Jay Carney fully affirmed the administration’s support for the cuts, with Obama vowing to veto any attempt to circumvent them.
However, one area greatly affected by the sequester cuts, the drug policy budget, went completely ignored. And for the Obama administration, it’s probably how they prefer it. The impact of the sequester cuts leaves the administration’s vocal and public statements regarding their preferred drug control strategy entirely at odds with the realities of the drug policy budget.
Upon taking office, it seemed as if the Obama administration would be a serious ally in the fight to reform drug policy. During the 2008 campaign, Obama expressed his frustration with the War on Drugs, current incarceration practices, and vowed not to use federal resources to go after medical marijuana dispensaries operating in accord with state law – something he and Attorney General Eric Holder have since repeated.
Since coming to power, the administration’s stance remained encouraging. In a YouTube Q&A last year, Obama even said that he thinks of drugs primarily as a public health problem as opposed to a purely criminal one. Moreover, Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) officials are also touting the administration’s alleged, unprecedented effort to reform drug policy by relying on prevention and treatment measures rather than enforcement and incarceration.
However, the administration’s zeal for reform ends with its rhetoric. The gulf between the effects of the sequester cuts on the drug policy budget and the administration’s words is about as wide as the Grand Canyon. When taking the numbers into account, the claims of a drug policy centered on a public health and prevention model just doesn’t add up.
In an analysis of the sequester cuts’ impact, Dr. John Carnevale, a drug policy budget expert, found that “the proposed cuts would be much more detrimental to demand reduction programs than to supply reduction programs. The disproportionate impact on demand reduction programs may impede the Obama administration’s stated aim of implementing the public health approach promoted in its National Drug Control Strategy.”
Contra ONDCP claims, under sequestration, drug prevention funding is cut by 40%, whereas interdiction is cut by only 6%. Law enforcement, treatment, and international operations are all cut by about the same percentage (18%, 16%, and 21%, respectively).
Dr. Carnevale’s analysis leads him to the following conclusion:
“The mandatory $1.2 trillion reduction in federal spending that is scheduled to begin in 2013, and continue to 2021, will limit ONDCP’s effort to reform national drug control policy. ONDCP’s national drug control strategy aims to increase public health and safety through a public health approach. Sequestration’s impact on the federal drug control budget will result in much more emphasis on supply reduction programs that seek to curb America’s demand for illicit drugs by reducing access and availability to those drugs that cross our borders each year. Unless Congress or the administration intervenes with a more rational approach to deficit reduction, our nation’s drug policy and the budget to implement it will be substantially at odds.”
This finding is a stinging indictment of the Obama administration’s drug policy and pulls the veil back on the misinformation campaign by government officials.
All this talk of re-focusing and shifting drug policy towards prevention and away from enforcement is all well and good. But it only matters if that talk is backed up by real reform efforts, not the status quo dressed up in some guise to mislead the public and appeal to a political base.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow when President Obama supports gutting certain aspects of the drug policy budget, contradicting his administration’s stated drug control strategy.
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