The DEA is evil. They operate under a pretense of "reducing harm" yet are actively trying to create more crime to validate their existence. In the course of doing so they create far more harm than they ostensibly prevent.
You should instead convince legislators to make drugs less illegal, and use the police resources for something else. If the Preventing Kids From Being Kidnapped Administration was as well-funded as the DEA, these agents would be coming up with clever ways to catch predators instead.
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/24/5341284/obama-administrati...
That's starting to become a very quaint idea.
"...do everything it can to prosecute as many drug violations as they can." That makes no mention of improving society. Or protecting society. Or providing valuable services to the citizens of society. Nor does it even make mention of the validity of the violations in question. Who cares if the violations in question are actually true. Truth and justice have nothing to do with the charter!
So no, the DEA deserves to be perfectly square in the crosshairs of blame. Along with many other agencies and governmental organizations.
It's called the "Rape Creation Agency" It's sole purpose is to rape people, not to make rape policy. Like other agencies, it was created to enforce the policies enacted by politicians (Congresscritters and Senators). Blame the politicians, not the agencies.
This is not comparable to a hypothetical Rape Creation Agency, which is problematic in and of itself because we do not approve of rape under any circumstances and there are no laws that could be changed to make such an agency acceptable. The analogy is not valid for making that particular point.
The DEA isn't staffed by people who were drafted, they all chose to involve themselves. Each individual member of the DEA is free to refuse to participate, but they instead choose to participate. We can and should judge them for that.
You said: "Because if it's just the current laws that are problematic, then it is indeed the laws that are the problem, not the agency."
But it isn't just the laws that are problematic. The agency itself is problematic (being a construct that exists only because of the problematic laws), and the people who voluntarily work for the agency deserve every ounce of criticism that they get. There is no sense in which the agency is not problematic, both it as an abstract concept and it as a collection of free individuals are part of the problem.
Neither the agency nor the people that comprise are blameless just because they did not write the laws.
Drug War, on the contrary, is very practical evil existing right now in America. And no amount of theory would change that until the laws that create that evil would be removed and replaced with ones that are not evil.
In the U.S. people actively encourage rape in prison as a form of revenge, even an inherent part of incarceration. Especially if the person being incarcerated did something that fits the common definition of "wrong", like robbing someone at gunpoint, carjacking, murder, drug trafficking, or rape. How much sympathy do people usually have for a rapist being raped in prison? Or a child molester?
That's approval waiting for a chance to surface, because someone "deserved it", and it's not even close to being isolated to prisoners or criminals either, that attitude is horrifically common.
Rape is illegal, hence, the legislative branch could not and would not create a "rape agency" to rape people without also making rape legal. Obviously, if they were to do that, the problem is the politicians would make rape legal.
Our duly elected representatives made laws prohibiting drugs, and an agency to enforce those laws. We've had many chances to replace those representatives in the decades since, and have chosen not to replace them with representatives who would remove those laws or water down the enforcement provisions.
If our "duly elected representatives" made laws that made rape legal, would that be moral?
If there are 100 people in a room and 51 people vote for the other 49 to become their lunch, is that ok?
What if they made laws that made killing certain ethic groups legal, would that be moral?
What if both of the candidates in a race are for the drug war and I don't have a choice?
Does voting really imply consent? If it does, what if the candidate was lying during the campaign? What if he/she changed their mind about an issue? Do I still imply consent?
An agency or officer that's justifying their actions as "enforcing the law" had better be talking about the every bit as important and legitimate laws that limit their activities and powers, as well as the criminal statutes.
Otherwise, they're doing something else besides law enforcement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Enforcement_Administratio...
They believe they are the genius third party that is playing cartels against each other, when really the cartel soldiers don't stop working over the weekend and will happily take whatever support the DEA has to offer while shielding the upper echelons.
On the contrary, that's the only problem. Once you have an agency mission to violate human rights and the Constitution, all the abuses follow directly.
The problem isn't corrupt behavior from the DEA and drug police. The problem is that prohibition is illegal and unconstitutional and inherently contrary to basic human rights.
You can't create and run an operation to deprive people of their agency, choices, and rights and then conduct that operation in a decent, honest, and civilized manner. That would be self-contradictory; everything the operation does is wrong; doing it well can't make it right.
In fact, the abuses documented in op and widely elsewhere are really not a part of the problem at all. If we had an agency that read people's minds and imprisoned them if they did not love big brother enough, then failures of the mind reading device would be a benefit because at least some people would retain freedom of conscience by accident. Likewise, every time the DEA or drug police kill and imprison innocents, it's good for the country. They would be killing and imprisoning someone no matter what and at least when the victims are innocent, someone out there is retaining his fundamental right to choose what substances to use or not use inside his own body.
Stop kicking the can. The DEA is part of the problem in that any organization's goal is self-propogation and continued existence to benefit it's membership.
That they were given a corrupt charter doesn't mean they're innocent actors. They are part and parcel of the security state combined with private interests, corrupt legislators, bribed judges and other agencies whose mission has strayed from public benefit to lining their own pockets.
In fact, I wouldn't doubt that given their power, they are increasingly targeted/infiltrated by the very criminal interests they're trying to control - meaning their purpose is skewed for vendetta resolution and clearing out markets for drug cartels (note: HSBC was caught laundering money for the cartels, why would the DEA be less corruptible?).
The severity of the punishments, and the level of funding, is the fault of congress, but a well-funded DEA which stuck strictly to the law would be a lot better than what we have now. Part of it is that drug smuggling gangs are some of the worst criminals, and putting police agencies in constant contact with them seems to corrupt them (Nietzsche...).
That isn't necessarily an interesting observation however, since the ATF only gets involved in operations that are far less common.