l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 Exclusive: DEA chief says heroin ‘back with a vengeance,’ drugs a national
security threat
By James Rosen, Matt DeanPublished September 05, 2015
“Not much of a gambler,” Chuck Rosenberg says about himself, a tad
sheepishly. Indeed, in the seven deadly sins department, the new chief of
the Drug Enforcement Administration is something of a zero: He’s never
smoked marijuana, doesn’t drink alcohol, and lists as his only vice an
excessive intake of Diet Dr. Pepper.
Such abstemiousness may be a prized attribute in the head of the lead agency
in the War on Drugs, which kicked off with the founding of DEA, under a
measure signed by President Nixon, in July 1973. From his office
headquarters in Northern Virginia, Rosenberg oversees nearly 5,000 federal
agents in 220 U.S. cities and nearly 90 other locales around the world.
These are some of America’s toughest and bravest uniformed – and
undercover – officers, men and women who risk their lives to take down the
most ruthless and heavily-armed narco-trafficking cartels.
The irony for the mild-mannered, bespectacled Rosenberg, a career federal
prosecutor and former FBI official, is that someone so averse to gambling
now spends his days grappling with the very thing gamblers court most
assiduously. “We incur a lot of risk in our operations: legal risk,
personal risk, all sorts of risk,” the DEA chief said at his agency’s
headquarters. “And managing that risk in a smart way – figuring out where
we ought to be and what we ought to be doing, prioritizing our work without
stepping on the creativity and the passion of the men and women in the field
– that’s a challenge.”
Foremost on Rosenberg’s agenda – the issue that every one of his 21
special agents in charge, fanned out across the country, cite as the number
one problem in their respective jurisdictions – is the surge in heroin use
in the United States over the past few years. The Centers for Disease
Control reports that heroin usage or dependency surged by nearly 150 percent
between 2007 and 2013, and that casualty rates from the drug nearly doubled
in the last two years of that span.
“It’s back, and it’s back with a vengeance,” Rosenberg told Fox News in
his first TV interview since taking the reins of the agency in May. “There'
s an enormous supply of heroin; it's cheap. In fact, it's a lot cheaper than
prescription pills. If you take oxycodone and hydrocodone for a football
injury and you get hooked, you're going to pay a dollar a milligram on the
street for a pill – thirty milligrams, thirty dollars, give or take. Heroin
is probably one-fifth the price, and because it has a similar chemical
effect, a similar pharmacological reaction, folks make that transition.”
Asked if he sees substance abuse as a national security threat, Rosenberg at
first demurred, seeking the reporter’s definition of a threat to national
security. Encouraged to employ his own, Rosenberg replied: “Potentially.
This is a multi-billion dollar industry. What are the bad guys doing with
the money that Americans are paying for drugs? What's it funding overseas? I
'm sure some of it's going to terrorist organizations; we've seen that. And
so that worries me quite a bit.”
U.S. officials note that drug overdoses claim the lives of approximately 44,
000 Americans each year – more than firearms or car accidents – and that
half of those deaths are attributable to prescription pills. Asked if legal
or illegal drugs pose the greater threat, Rosenberg said “both dimensions”
are creating major problems for law enforcement and society in general. The
acting administrator would not say outright that legal drugs are over-
prescribed, but he hinted at his harboring such views, saying: “I’m not a
doctor but I do know this … We’re about 5 percent of the world’s
population. We use about 95 percent of the world’s hydrocodone. So draw
your own conclusion.”
The recent decriminalization of marijuana usage in selected jurisdictions
across the United States – Colorado and Washington state, most notably –
has created a conflict between local law enforcement, sworn to uphold local
laws, and federal law enforcement officers, for whom the federal statutes
outlawing marijuana remain very much in effect. “I’ve been very clear to
my special agents in charge: If you have a big marijuana case, if that in
your jurisdiction is one of your biggest problems, then bring it,”
Rosenberg said.
With new ballot measures on marijuana cropping up in almost every election
cycle, and decriminalization appearing to be gaining broader support, Fox
News asked Rosenberg about the continued inclusion of the drug in the
federal government’s harshest category of narcotics:
ROSEN: Two of the last three presidents of the United States have
acknowledged having used marijuana. Bill Clinton famously said that he didn'
t inhale. Barack Obama has written fairly extensively about his marijuana
use, has been photographed with marijuana; and others have explicated on
that subject even further. Isn't that itself – the fact that here we have
two men who used marijuana, in varying degrees, and who then went on to
become president of the United States – a kind of a prima facie argument
that it is time to remove marijuana from Schedule I of the Controlled
Substances Act?
ROSENBERG: Yeah, I don't think so.
ROSEN: Why not?
ROSENBERG: Marijuana is dangerous. It certainly is not as dangerous as other
Schedule I controlled substances; it's not as dangerous as heroin, clearly,
but it's still dangerous. It's not good for you. I wouldn't want my
children smoking it. I wouldn't recommend that anyone do it. So I don't
frankly see a reason to remove it. We, by the way, support, and have
supported, a lot of legitimate research on marijuana, fully behind that; I
think it's great. If we come up with a medical use for it, that would be
wonderful. But we haven't.
When the questioning took a slightly different tack, he stood firm:
ROSEN: I’ve never seen two guys get thrown out of a bar because they
started fist-fighting after smoking a joint. All right? But we’ve seen [
that] every Friday and every Saturday night brings just such occasions as a
result of the legal distribution of alcohol. Isn’t there some common-sense
disparity, or irony, or disconnect in that?
ROSENBERG: Probably, yeah. Right? So I don’t know that you’re arguing that
they’re both good; you may be arguing that they’re both bad. As I said
earlier, marijuana is less dangerous – clearly less dangerous – than
heroin. It’s easy to draw that line. But I’m not willing to say that it’s
good for you, or that it ought to be legalized. I think it’s bad for you
and that it ought to remain illegal.
ROSEN: From that answer, one might infer that you think alcohol should also
be illegal.
ROSENBERG: No, I’m not going to say that. We – we tangled with that as a
society in the 1930s. And we know how that went. That’s the law of the land
; I get it. I choose not to drink alcohol but I’m not going to impose that
on anyone else.
Since Mexico is a primary point of origin for illegal drugs consumed in the
United States, including heroin, our neighbor to the south exercises an
outsized claim on the attention of the DEA administrator. The brazen escape
from a Mexican prison in July of the Sinaloa cartel druglord Joaquín
Archivaldo Guzmán, also known as “El Chapo” – one of the world’s most
ruthless and dangerous criminal kingpins, now at large – underscored the
challenges for U.S. law enforcement in collaborating with a nation-state
where official corruption is so widespread. “Not that I can share with you,
” Rosenberg answered when pressed on whether U.S. authorities have any
better idea of El Guapo’s location today than the day after his escape.
Asked if there is a single sector of the Mexican state apparatus that is
free of corruption, Rosenberg answered: “I don't know. I would hope so.”
Later, he cited the Mexican agents who work with DEA task forces and called
them “good and trusted allies,” their very existence evidence that “
pockets” of integrity in the Mexican system exist.
With his cautious demeanor, Rosenberg shrewdly steers away from any question
that smacks, or even faintly reeks, of controversy. Though he is perhaps in
a better position than any other U.S. official to corroborate or refute the
charge, he will not comment on Donald Trump’s recent assertion that the
Mexican government is deliberately sending rapists and gang members across
the U.S. border. Nor will Rosenberg say whether a “spiritual deficit” is
partly to blame for the skyrocketing rates of heroin dependency. And he will
not answer questions about his role in an epic controversy of the Bush-
Cheney era: when an internal clash over reauthorization of a surveillance
program critical to the War on Terror, in March 2004, nearly triggered mass
resignations at the Department of Justice.
“Happy to talk about the Washington Nationals and their diminishing chances
of making the playoffs this year,” he’ll say instead, with a sly smile.
Controversy, it turns out, is not one of the risks the DEA chief is willing
to manage.
James Rosen joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in 1999. He currently serves as
the chief Washington correspondent and hosts the online show "The Foxhole." |
|
