Pompo

Senators' plan would restore funding for anti-drug effort
1/31/08|The Des Moines Register| by Nigel Duara, Register Staff Writer

A drug-interdiction program devastated by funding cuts could be saved by a group of U.S. senators from both sides of the aisle who announced plans on Wednesday to tack on money to the federal omnibus spending bill.

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, along with four other senators, announced plans to replace money cut from the federal Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant program as part of an emergency supplemental funding bill.

They would return $660 million to the program, which was cut to $170 million in December by the Bush administration.

In Iowa, the cuts removed 70 percent of the $4.22 million that came to the state in federal anti-drug dollars.

The money goes to drug investigations, and slashing the program's budget could impede or end smaller Iowa counties' ability to chase "the real movers and shakers" in the drug business, said Gary Kendell, director of the Iowa Office of Drug Control Policy.

"We're very pleased that they're taking this on," Kendell said. "With the previous year's funding cuts, we're pretty much bare bones right now."

Kendell noted that 85 percent of Iowa's drug cases originate from the multi-jurisdictional task forces that face extinction if the program isn't supplemented.

The cuts would become effective at the start of the fiscal year in July.

Rep. Dave Loebsack, D-Ia., proposed a stand-alone bill in the House on Tuesday night that would replace the money.

"It's difficult for everybody to come up with resources, but for a Muscatine or Burlington or Keokuk to lose several tens of thousands of dollars, that means they lose an officer," Loebsack said.

The Byrne program, named for a rookie New York City police officer killed by drug dealers in 1998, has endured heavy criticism that includes a 2005 report from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget that said it lacked planning, specific goals and solid management.

Forty percent of the Byrne money, $520 million this year, goes to local law enforcement like the North-Central Iowa Narcotics Task Force; 60 percent goes to states.

The result is inefficiency and a lack of oversight, according to the report.

About $500 million was cut and later replaced in 2003. Iowa lost about $2 million from a round of cuts two years later.

Harkin objected to the conclusions of the report, which his aides said was "disproportionately focused" on the federal side of the program and ignored how the grants were used at the state and local levels.

The grant program is also under fire from groups who oppose the war on drugs.

Ethan Nadlemann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance in Washington, D.C., has said that the decisions of task forces are "made in a void" and that the trend among federal drug-policy makers has been to focus on treatment rather than street busts.

But Kendell said street-level enforcement wouldn't suffer as much as deeper investigations into drug dealers in smaller counties, where local law enforcement officials rely heavily on multi-jurisdictional task forces for drug enforcement.

Buzzby

Perhaps, if they stopped wasting a majority of their funding on fighting one fairly benign drug, they'd have enough left to do their jobs.

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