the effect of drugs on ... government

[Universe Prince]

An excerpt from an article by Radley Balko on the use of questionable drug informants:

In one eye-popping exchange, two congressmen?one Democrat and one Republican?confronted Wayne Murphy, the assistant director of the FBI Directorate of Intelligence about the way the FBI uses drug informants. Rep. Dan Lundgren, R-Calif., and Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., told Murphy they were troubled by reports that the FBI had looked the other way while some of its drug informants participated in violent crimes, and that the agency then failed to notify local authorities, leaving many of those crimes unsolved. Lundgren and Delahunt said they were also troubled by reports that in order to protect the identity of its informants, the FBI had withheld exculpatory evidence from criminal trials, resulting in innocent people going to prison. This is worth repeating. The FBI has determined that in some cases, it's better to let innocent people be assaulted, murdered, or wrongly sent to prison than to halt a drug investigation involving one of its confidential informants. Could Murphy assure the U.S. Congress, Delahunt and Lundgren asked, that the FBI has since instituted policies to ensure that kind of thing never happens again? Murphy hemmed and hawed, but ultimately said that he could not make any such assurance. That in itself should have been huge news.

And some people wonder why I don't trust the FBI.

Moreover, I don't trust the whole "war on drugs" for exactly that kind of reason. It isn't just the FBI. Local law enforcement has gotten into trouble with drug informants, as the rest of the article points out quite well. The whole article can be found at the other end of this link.

[BT]

I looked at both links on the Balko article and did not see any specific wrongdoings by the FBI. I saw a lot of misdeeds by the DEA, ICE and local police forces.
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