DEA

[exclusive] Final volume of Kerry hearings into narco-corruption

The Memory Hole has posted the fourth, final volume of the rare transcripts from 1987/8 Senate hearings into official nacro-corruption in Central America, South America, the Caribbean, and the United States.

This four-volume set of transcripts was available for a single week in 1989. The Government Printing Office then declared that it was unavailable and would never be reprinted.

The volumes are an indispensable resource for anyone interested in governmental connections to the illegal drug trade.

All four volumes - and background info - are posted on this page.

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[exclusive] Readable redactions: DEA uses SearchPointe to investigate pharmaceutical diversion

In early June, a 2006 Justice Dept Inspector General’s report that had been posted online went missing. It concerned the Drug Enforcement Administration’s “Efforts to Control the Diversion of Controlled Pharmaceuticals” (i.e. prescription drugs being sold on the black market). The Memory Hole obtained a copy and posted it on July 9 [here]. Five days later, it reappeared on the Justice Dept Inspector General’s website [here], with no indication of why it had been pulled (in fact, there was no indication it had been pulled).

Comparing the newly posted version with the original version, I discovered that the first version is improperly redacted. A small black bar appears eight times in “Appendix 1: Group Supervisor Questionnaire,” in the subsection “D. Intelligence Support for Diversion Investigations” (pages 46-7).

Selecting the text under the black bars, then copying and pasting it into Word, I found that they all hide a single term: SearchPointe.

The website for SearchPointe (now called ChoiceTrust) explains its purpose:

Conduct an instant national search for doctors, dentists, chiropractors and nurses across several specialty areas. Check out their credentials, including general contact information, education and license details.

Nearly 100,000 sanctions and disciplinary actions exist for health care providers throughout the country. Before entrusting your health and your family’s health to a health care provider, confirm the provider you selected has an active license and clean credential history.

According to the questionnaire in the Inspector General’s report, the DEA uses SearchPointe/ChoiceTrust to generate tips and leads for opening pharmaceutical-diversion investigations. It also uses LexisNexis, FinCEN, ARCOS, and other sources, although none of these was redacted in either version. Only SearchPointe was deemed worthy of hiding.

In the newly posted version of the report, the redactions of “SearchPointe” are secure.

See The Memory Hole’s original post

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[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.