The DEA, Drugs and Sex

Although it sounds like a song (“Violence, drugs, and sex are like rock ‘n’ roll; violence, drugs, and sex are the path to the goal”), it is a comical story of the ordeal in which the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has been embroiled for the last three years; a story that ended this week with the fall of Michele Leonhart, the head of the DEA since 2007.

Like everything that happens in Washington, two versions of the story exist: the official and the actual. The official version is that Leonhart lost the job she held for almost a decade at the world’s leading anti-drug machine that operates with a $3 million budget because the agents under her command in Colombia regularly spent debauched nights with prostitutes hired through drug dealers. The real story, although less colorful, is more important. It concerns how the Obama administration is changing the war on drugs.

For many years, Leonhart has been trying to reverse the government’s increasingly tolerant attitude toward the legalization of marijuana and prosecution of its cultivation, commercialization and consumption. However, Obama and his outgoing attorney general, Eric Holder, stood strong, and Leonhart, weakened by the prostitution scandal, threw in the towel.

Everything began a few days before the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena in 2012. The press disclosed the story that a group of DEA agents who were preparing for the arrival of President Obama had sexual relations with local prostitutes, and that one of the agents refused to pay. The U.S. media feasted on the details of scandal, and Obama’s visit lost a great part of its formal nature. For once, a presidential summit gave the public some entertaining news.

Inside the DEA, the situation took a less cheerful tone. Like any bureaucratic organization worth its weight, the DEA began a paper-heavy investigation that would take three years to reach any definitive conclusions.

From the first moment, it was clear that the agents had hired prostitutes, had risked becoming victims of blackmail, and had made deals with members of the Colombian drug lords’ underworld. However, the extent of the damage took longer to surface. The investigations finally revealed that the DEA offices had long been the headquarters of parties with prostitutes hired by agents linked to drug traffickers.

All of this information is included in the recently released report by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General. A group of congressmen asked for Leonhart to step down. Nevertheless, that information alone was not enough to remove Leonhart since she had already survived three difficult years dealing with her agents’ sex scandal. The government cares so little about its agents’ errors that the punishments given were nothing more than suspension without pay from two to 10 days.

Her problem was a political one. Leonhart carried out a silent but intense bureaucratic battle against what she perceived as the softening of the government’s position toward certain drugs. Although the Obama administration gave several signs that it wanted to break away from its predecessors’ approach, Leonhart’s fall defined the change like no other action had before. One of her predecessors, Peter Bensinger, claims that the sexual episode was “a pretext” to force her to resign due to the clear rifts with reference to “the federal law against drugs, the law of the confiscation of assets, and the minimum sentences for actions related to the traffic of prohibited substances.”*

What is happening? Essentially, Leonhart, a woman with a 35-year career that began in the Baltimore Police Department, embodied the old mentality against marijuana. Her bosses, including the attorney general, think that the time has come to implement a new mindset. They have found administrative and political ways of relaxing or avoiding the application of federal laws, which implies that the state is beginning to align itself with the radical changes that have occurred with the voters and public opinion.

The surveys indicate that between 54 percent and 60 percent of the U.S. public are in favor of legalizing marijuana. Only four states, Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Alaska, have legalized both recreational and medicinal use of cannabis. Two cities in Maine (Portland and South Portland) have done the same. The capital, Washington, D.C., has approved legalization, but because of its special status, certain decisions must be endorsed by Congress, and so legalization has been deadlocked in this case.

The trend seems unstoppable. Five other states are presenting or will soon present similar initiatives in their legislatures, some of which could be approved before 2016. That number does not include the 20 or more states that have already permitted the use of medical marijuana.

From the White House’s perspective, the legal challenge is complex. The federal law regarding drugs, which comes from Richard Nixon’s era, places marijuana among the “most dangerous” substances (all of which belong to Schedule 1: the first of five categories in descending order of health risks). The DEA created the list in 1973 with the intention of mercilessly hunting down those prohibited drugs.

According to the Constitution, federal law overrides state law unless the Supreme Court declares it unconstitutional. Therefore, Obama would have to pursue – through the Department of Justice and the attorneys general in every state – the people who grow, sell and take drugs. However, this action would involve unleashing a political and police war against almost half of the states in the country.

In principle, governments depend on the federal law to reverse the trend of legalization. President Clinton behaved similarly when California approved the use of medical marijuana in 1996, a fact that marked the beginning of a trend. Before Clinton, previous episodes of decriminalization had not reached, in legal terms, the equivalent of legalization, and so they had left a loophole for prosecution. Oregon was the first state to decriminalize marijuana in the 1970s. California’s case, on the other hand, represents a qualitative leap. Clinton and George H.W. Bush instructed their attorneys general to apply the federal law over the states’ decisions.

Obama arrived with a different attitude, but he acted carefully not to force changes during his first years in office.

Obama maintained emphatic rhetoric against legalization, assuring that that he would continue to apply the law, and gave Eric Holder instructions to follow the federal law. However, he left hints that he supported applying softer sentences for minor offenses and would prioritize the prosecution of trafficking over consumption (especially trafficking on a grand scale). The attitude toward medical marijuana shows the clearest change. In 2009, at the beginning of Obama’s first term, Holder announced that he would not pursue “patients with serious illnesses or their caregivers who are complying with state laws on medical marijuana.”

Similar to his actions with respect to same-sex marriage, Obama varied his posture little by little, echoing public opinion, and so the change began to appear publicly at the beginning of his second term. The key moment occurred when Oregon and Washington approved initial steps to legalize the recreational use of drugs. Defeating the tenacious resistance of the DEA’s boss, Holder communicated to the governors of both states that Obama would not apply the federal law over state legislation, and, instead, he would only demand that they regulate marijuana according to certain rules. Among them, for example, was prohibiting minors from legally accessing cannabis.

This decision split the government’s attitude with regard to the application of the anti-drug law and the DEA. The internal fight became public when the press disclosed the events surrounding the anti-drug officials in Colombia, which began to undermine the head of the DEA.

Obama’s position did not change enough to push him to accept legalization on a federal scale, but, for the first time, in an interview with The New Yorker, he showed signs of what he was really thinking. “As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol … I’ve told my daughters I think it’s a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy,” Obama said.

These were clearly the expressions of a counseling father, not a sheriff. His words reflected the attitude of someone who sees a future for the legal and criminal treatment of cannabis that is similar to our treatment of alcohol.

Similarly, evidence existed that Obama was restricting federal prosecution. One of the signs was the significant reduction of federal confiscation of property from crimes linked to narcotic drugs. That tactic had been an important resource for the eradication of marijuana farms. The decline in confiscated property was linked to reduced instances of the destruction of marijuana farms, which troubled the DEA chief. When Obama came to power, more than 10.4 million plants were destroyed. Last year, something like 4 million plants were destroyed; in other words, less than half.

The global implications are not small. The United States has spent more than $100 billion through the DEA on the war against drugs, including marijuana. From all perspectives, the consequences have been traumatic, especially concerning the disproportionate number of African-Americans in prison for non-violent offenses and the institutional destabilization of many Latin American countries in which the illegality of the drug trade has considerably increased the mafias’ power. The fact that in the United States, although it has been slow and partial, an unequivocal tendency has surfaced against the repressive methods of previous administrations indicates that we could be approaching a Copernican twist in the way we confront this problem.

*Editor’s Note: This quote, although accurately translated, could not be verified.