Intro || Part I || Part II || Appendix || References || Home

Part III: THE AGENCY FOR DRUG MARKET INTERPOSITION

Organization Form and Locus

What form of organization could best carry out the tasks of the proposed ADMI, and where in the larger structure of American institutions would it fit and function best?

We can tentatively identify and consider what appear to be the more likely formal options and make some initial appraisals of their respective attributes. The options appear to be as follows:

First, Congress could create an ADMI as an agency within an existing department of the executive branch of the federal government. The likely place to put it appears to be the Department of Health and Human Services. Under this option, ADMI income and expense would be items of the federal budget, up for renegotiation each fiscal year, and therefore acutely susceptible to political pressures. The ADMI objective of controlling the drug/crime epidemic would perpetually be a bargaining chip in legislative deal making on unrelated issues.

This option looks unpromising for a reason made clear by a recent episode in California's tobacco politics. In 1988, the California electorate adopted by referendum an anti-tobacco initiative. Known as Proposition 99, the new law provided a new tax, at 25¢ per pack, to be used for specified anti-tobacco purposes. Every politician knows that the tobacco companies are politically active in behalf of their economic interests. Any politician would prefer to have tobacco monies flowing into his own campaign coffers, rather than his or her opponent's. It can hardly be coincidental that, a short time after adoption of the new proposition, the governor and a majority in the legislature agreed to divert $102 million of Proposition 99 monies to worthy programs less worrisome to the tobacco companies. It took a lawsuit by pro-health forces to block this illegal misappropriation. (San Francisco Chronicle, April 1, 1995, p. A16).

Unfortunately, as the above story evidences, electoral politics often works at odds with proper administration of adopted laws. Presumably, the illegal drug industry is not less solicitous of its own economic interests than the tobacco industry. To put an ADMI into the general apparatus of the executive branch would render it comparatively susceptible to hidden manipulation, both from Congress and the chief executive.

As a second option, Congress could create an ADMI as an independent quasi-governmental public corporation. The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the much maligned U.S. Postal Service are organizations of this type. If this option were chosen, ADMI would be a chartered public corporation functioning under a congressional mandate defining its role and limits of authority. Congress would also provide oversight and any necessary subsidy to offset any operating deficit.