Sanho Tree is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and leads IPS’s Drug Policy Project. I recently spoke with him about the waging of the Drug War under the Obama administration. For more on Plan Colombia see this powerful video from Sanho Tree and Witness for Peace and my interviews with him from 2001 and 2003.
Sanho Tree: First of all, Obama has about more than 500 appointed positions that require Senate confirmation that he is allowed to appoint, and about half of them have been appointed thus far. And that’s par for the course. He’s actually ahead of the curve in terms of Presidential transitions. But it just takes a long time to put all the people into the bureaucracy and to really set policies.
Having said that, we still don’t have a director of AID (Agency for International Development), for instance, or DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration). So, in that sense, there’s a lot of the permanent bureaucracy that is acting on autopilot. And they are right to do that until they get instructions to the contrary, new guidance, new policies. And we’re talking about a lot of layers of policies. So, without focusing high level attention on this issue, there’s not a lot of radical change that’s gonna happen anytime soon.
The new drug Czar is a fairly decent guy, actually, Gil Kerlikowske, a thoughtful guy, and he’s doing a lot of stuff quietly–not on Plan Colombia, but on other Drug War issues–quietly, that is quite positive, even though he continues to put out the rhetoric that soothes the ($23 billion a year) Drug War bureaucracy… It’s a lot of money and a lot of civil servants, many of whom would love to knife him in the back if they got a chance. Read the rest of this entry »
