Last Sunday, the Houston Chronicle ran a fluff piece on DEA administrator Karen Tandy. Among the lowlights:

“I have two teenaged daughters and I’m no different than any other parent - I worry about my kids. They are great kids, but peer pressure can be a big issue.”

Her use of maternal instinct may partly explain why during her 32 months as DEA chief, Tandy has been an unapologetic advocate for tough enforcement of laws against marijuana, a substance critics say is less destructive than heroin or cocaine.

“We have more teens in ( counseling ) for marijuana than for all other drugs combined, including alcohol,” she said recently in her office in the agency’s northern Virginia headquarters.

[...]

Regardless of the occasional critic’s shot, Tandy retains her passion for running the government’s largest anti-drug bureaucracy - the kind of job that can be stressful and emotionally exhausting.

“This job is a calling, not just for me but for all of the 11,000 people in this agency. I have the best job on Earth,” she said.

[...]

In the Justice Department, Tandy was a pioneer in the enforcement of asset forfeiture law - a government tactic used to deprive drug merchants of material gain by seizing planes, boats, ranches and more exotic possessions such as strip clubs and golf courses bought with drug cash.

By 1993, she was running the narcotics office at Justice, which put her on the path to being appointed by President Bush to head the DEA in 2003.

With her background in asset forfeiture, Tandy has focused on going after the money of drug pushers.

“When I came through the door, I made money the No. 1 priority,” she said.

Obviously, I have a rather different take on Tandy’s tenure (which started, incidentally, with her cowering and fleeing to avoid a Capitol Hill confrontation with Suzanne Pfeil, a wheelchair-bound medical marijuana and post-polio patient who woke up one morning to the barrel of an assault weapon toted by a DEA goon). My tangle with Tandy on the prescription painkiller issue here. Good primer on asset forfeiture here.

Hat tip.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006 at 10:19 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Alcohol, Pain Treatment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.