NARC'S Game - Organizational and Informational Limits on Drug Law Enforcement

• NCJ Number: 71020
• Author(s): P K Manning
• Date Published: 1980
• Length: 331 pages
• Grant Number(s): 74-NI-99-0029
• Sponsoring Agency: US Dept of Justice; US Dept of Justice NIJ Pub
• Sale Source: MIT Press
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

Taking readers into the daily world of narcotics agents, this book points out features common to drug enforcement agencies that obscure the agencies' purposes and in the end interfere with their effectiveness in drug control.

Abstract

The study draws on the author's extensive field experience (episodes of enforcement practice, raids, interrogations, investigations, surveillances, and planning sessions), records analysis, and interviews gathered in two southeastern U.S. drug enforcement units. It seeks to strip away the rhetoric, the self-serving organizational myths, and the conventional wisdom that surround drug-law enforcement. After an analysis of traditional organizations, the book examines the historical influences on drug-law enforcement. The prohibition model was predicated upon modes of pharmacological action, potential for addiction, and the threat of the spread of opiates. The model was applied to a great diversity of drugs which were termed intrinsically evil. The legal mandate regarding drug enforcement, as well as the control organizations that were created as a result, developed on a corrective-control model. This book examines the site, settings, and methods of drug enforcement within this model. It maintains that enforcement units have grown in response to a projected sense of the drug problem (rather than from empirical evidence of a drug problem), a sense of its place and character, and a projected image of the dealing-using world. Ambiguity colors narcotics enforcement organizations, as does a feeling of inability to gain control, and individual narcotics agents make decisions on perceptions of organizational policy rather than on writtten policy. This ambiguity is further complicated by the limited and largely unsystematic flow of data to narcotics enforcement agencies, the lack of clear links from these data to future plans, and the lack of planning from an empirical base. Three target models of enforcement are examined: the military, the goals-meanings (common to drug enforcement agencies and characterized by lack of clear terms for guiding action), and the citizen complaint. Alternatives to the current and ineffective approach to drug enforcement are suggested, including decriminalization and limiting the Federal enforcement structure. Footnotes, references, and an index are provided.