7 - The federal role in a national drug strategy

Summary

This chapter will explore the role of the federal government in determining and carrying out drug control policy. The United States is a nation of myriad different governments that share responsibility for public order and crime control. There are thousands of different police forces in the United States, and many cities have police from three or four different levels of government deployed in the same domain. Fifty-one different prison systems and thousands of local jails share responsibility in the United States. Often, just as government functions overlap, some responsibilities that all would agree should belong to some form of government lie substantially unperformed, as each level of government waits for another level to take the lead in providing or paying for a service. An effective drug control policy thus cannot be designed without taking into account the distinctiveness and complexity of the governmental system in the United States.

A whole chapter on the role of the federal government? Intergovernmental relations seems like an arid, technical topic altogether lacking the elements that enliven debates about drug control. Not surprisingly, the issue of an appropriate federal role has attracted little interest as a conceptual matter, and important issues regarding federal responsibility have been decided in Congress in an offhanded manner on an ad hoc basis. Yet drug control is the important test case of federalism in criminal justice in the 1990s: the subject of the most significant experiment in enlarging the federal lead in taking responsibility for crime control in this century.