“COCAINE UNIQUELY FITS THE FAST-PACED AMERICAN LIFESTYLE,” reads a caption for an exhibit at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Museum in Arlington, Virginia. “The Federal Bureau of Narcotics considered cocaine a nearly defeated drug,” it continues. “However, cocaine use rebounded, reaching its highest use level ever at the end of the 20th century.” It’s an oddly candid observation to find in a place you’d expect to celebrate the federal agency whose mission is to “enforce the controlled substances laws and regulations of the United States.”
The DEA is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, marking half a century of abject mission failure. During five decades as a bottomless money pit that has destroyed countless lives while targeting Americans for personal choices and peaceful transactions, the agency’s annual budget has ballooned from $75 million to $3.2 billion. The DEA currently operates 90 foreign offices in 67 countries. It has seized billions of dollars in drugs, cash, vehicles, and real property. Since 1986, it has arrested more than 1 million people for manufacturing, distributing, or possessing illegal drugs. Yet in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) counted more than 107,600 drug-related deaths—an all-time high. The DEA’s own data show a steady, gradual decline in price and rise in purity for most street drugs since the 1980s. The DEA’s 2020 National Drug Threat Assessment notes that methamphetamine “purity and potency remain high while prices remain relatively low,” and cocaine availability remains steady.
While there are some reasons to believe Americans may finally have tired of the DEA’s oversized role in their lives, the agency remains a powerful force. To understand what went wrong—and why it will keep going wrong—you have to go back to the agency’s origins.
‘PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE’
ON APRIL 4, 1972, President Richard Nixon’s drug war landed in Humboldt County, California. The DEA, which was established the following year, was still only a glimmer in Nixon’s eye at this point. But its playbook was being written here, outside the backwoods cabin of 24-year-old Dirk Dickenson.
As a Huey helicopter touched down near the cabin, plainclothes law enforcement officers brandishing pistols and long guns leaped out. The chopper was accompanied by five police cars. There were 19 law enforcement agents in total, including the county dogcatcher. Two television cameramen and a newspaper photographer were in tow as well, lured by a deputy sheriff’s promise of the biggest drug bust in county history. They were expecting to find a huge PCP lab guarded by gun-toting, long-haired freaks.
The officers were the tip of the spear in a new campaign. A year earlier, Nixon had declared drug abuse “America’s public enemy number
