The War on Drugs is being fought much as it was during the Reagan administration -- when most of the money and attention was focused on interdicting boatloads of cocaine coming north from Colombia -- even though most of nation's current drug problems are domestic in origin, according to budget analyst John Carnevale.

Carnevale Associates recently released an analysis of the proposed FY2009 drug budget which states that the Bush administration continues to favor supply-reduction programs over demand-reduction programs, with the former receiving at least two-thirds of all federal antidrug funding.

"Since FY02, the budget has emphasized what research has shown to be the least effective ingredients of a federal drug-control policy," the analysis states. "This translates into almost a decade of lost opportunities in achieving performance results."

In fact, Carnevale notes, the supply-reduction side of the budget -- which includes law-enforcement, interdiction, and source-country programs -- has grown 57 percent since FY02, while demand-reduction funding has increased just 3 percent. "If research were our guide, then one would expect the opposite ordering of increases in budgetary resources for drug control," according to the policy brief.

Much of the growth in demand-reduction funding has been in basic research, and funding for prevention has actually declined by 25 percent, according to the analysis. Meanwhile, funding for interdiction has increased 100 percent, while funding for source-country programs has increased 50 percent and law-enforcement funding has risen 31 percent, Carnevale estimated.

Carnevale is skeptical about complaints that the Iraq war has drained resources from the War on Drugs, which he said actually did occur during the Gulf War in 1991. "It's hard to find evidence that this war is affecting the interdiction budget," he told Join Together.

From a historical perspective, the trend toward supply-reduction funding looks even more pronounced. Carnevale notes that, in 2002, current drug czar John Walters changed the methodology that had been used for two decades to calculate the drug budget, eliminating programs that were tangentially related to drug control. If the older calculation methods were used, said Carnevale, the budget would appear even more skewed, with about 80 percent of funding going towards supply reduction.

"Walters has taken us back to the Reagan-era budget," he said.

Perfomance Evaluation Lacking

Carnevale contends that the current budget priorities "make no sense" when viewed through the lens of the stated priorities of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), which currently emphasize preventing use of marijuana, prescription drugs and, to a lesser extent, methamphetamine -- all drugs that can be, and often are, produced domestically.

"Cocaine and heroin are hardly talked about by this administration," said Carnevale. "The interdiction budget doubling is ridiculous to me ... There's a serious mismatch between our policy needs and what we have to support them."

The Bush administration has used its performance-evaluation Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) to justify cuts to certain demand-reduction programs, notably the Safe and Drug Free Schools and Communities grants, but PART has not been applied to the supply-reduction side of the drug budget.

Carnevale said that a performance-evaluation system adopted by the agency in the 1990s was dumped by the Bush administration. "The only metrics they use now are changes in drug use," said Carnevale, who notes that while youth drug use is down -- a trend that began in the late 1990s -- adult drug use and addiction has remained unchanged. "We've lost the ability to attribute changes to specific areas of drug policy because the administration has eliminated the ability to do that," he said.

Carnevale has emerged in recent years as one of the harshest public critics of Walters and the drug czar's office, but the former ONDCP and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) staffer still believes that the White House drug-policy office has a role to play in any future McCain, Clinton, or Obama administration.

"If you want to do something serious about drug policy this is the agency to work with, and you need to put someone in this office who will be taken seriously," he said. "I think [ONDCP] has a place but it all depends on leadership at the top saying that this is an important issue."