War on Steroids Versus War on Drugs

I previously reported how the federal expenditures for the war on steroids and congressional steroid investigations have come at the expense of slashing programs used in the traditional war on drugs.

The federal government’s obsession with eliminating anabolic steroids from Major League Baseball is compromising state law enforcement efforts to fight drug dealers and violent criminals thereby jeopardizing the public safety…

The feds are spending more and more taxpayer money pursuing steroid-related investigations while at the same time cutting funding for narcotic-related investigations (via Byrne task force investigations). Grits for Breakfast responded by pointing out how the Byrne task force programs had no meaningful effect on public safety (“Byrne task force funds mainly financing low-grade drug enforcement,” March 10).

That means 5/8 of the arrests Cooper made as a drug task force officer were for less than 4 oz of pot, not for harder drugs.

I’ll bet an investigation into the specifics of who drug task forces arrest in other states would yield similar results, but that’s not been the focus of recent press coverage on the subject. Those are pretty low-level targets, in the scheme of things, and helps explain why eliminating drug task forces in Texas didn’t really harm public safety.

I’ve since been following Grits for Breakfast’s excellent coverage of the Bryne funding cuts; Grits has concluded the funding cuts are a good thing (“Hyping Harm: Media should welcome, not decry cuts to federal Byrne grant program,” April 2).

Drug task forces funded by the federal Byrne grant program are a failed experiment, and it’s time to try a different approach.

Let’s hope that taxpayers, the media and bureacrats start to ask critical questions about whether the government’s newest drug war, the war on steroids, is having any demonstrable effect of public safety or public health (or even integrity in sports); hopefully we can avoid wasting any further funds on another failed experiment targeting low level personal users of anabolic steroids that have negligible effects on public safety.