[DEA] Yanked Inspector General Report Reposted

On this page, the Justice Department’s Inspector General posts some of its reports concerning the Drug Enforcement Administration. In early June 2008 one of the reports suddenly went missing - the PDF and HTML versions, and all mention of the report, simply were gone.

The Memory Hole has obtained this pulled report: “Follow-Up Review of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Efforts to Control the Diversion of Controlled Pharmaceuticals, Evaluation and Inspections Report I-2006-004, July 2006″

CLICK HERE FOR THE REPORT [PDF | 3.25 meg]

Excerpt:

The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) conducted this follow-up review to assess the DEA’s actions to control pharmaceutical diversion since our previous review in October 2002….

Despite these positive actions, we identified several continuing concerns. We found that although the need for special agent assistance in diversion investigations had increased significantly since our previous review, the time spent by special agents assisting diversion investigations still constitutes a small share of their total investigative effort.8 In addition, we found that the DEA still had not resolved the complicated issue of providing law enforcement authority for its diversion investigators, although it is actively pursuing the matter. Further, we found that few DEA special agents have received diversion control training beyond the 2-hour module provided during basic agent training. In addition, the support provided by intelligence analysts to diversion groups in the field has continued to be limited, and intelligence analysts still received minimal diversion control training.

With respect to the DEA’s Internet efforts, we examined several of the intelligence, technological, and investigative tools that are part of the DEA’s operational strategy, including the Online Investigations Project (OIP), telephone and online hotlines, undercover equipment, and training in conducting Internet diversion investigations. We found that the OIP, under development since 2001, has become a valuable investigative tool even though it cannot automatically identify web sites with the highest volume of suspect pharmaceutical sales as originally intended. In addition, since 2002 the DEA has established telephone and online hotlines for reporting suspicious Internet pharmacies. However, these hotlines have yielded few leads that resulted in diversion investigations. Further, while the DEA has started to provide undercover equipment to its diversion groups, as of May 2006 most diversion groups still did not have this equipment. And while over half of the 482 diversion investigators have received training in Internet investigations, most have not received the types of specialized training that diversion investigators said would prove useful for conducting Internet investigations.