In yet another sign of the Drug Enforcement Agency’s utter failure to meet basic accountability standards, a new report from the US Department of Justice finds systemic, and occasionally absurd, errors which could easily lead to the loss or theft of confiscated drugs and the compromising of key drug prosecutions.

Despite an annual budget of over $2 billion per year, the primary law enforcement bureaucracy of the federal drug war is committing embarrassing blunders in its snorting tracking of seized drugs, violating basic chain of custody rules which are vital to bringing the kind of high-level prosecutions favored by the federal government. For example, the audit by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found significant gaps in both the “Temporary Drug Ledger” and the “DEA-12” receipt log, which taken together provide the only system to track drugs before they are sent to evidence vaults to use against defendants in prosecutions. In fact, in 9% of cases, the DEA field office supervisors were unable to locate the requested receipt forms at all. These oversights, embarrassing enough by themselves, are greatly compounded by the fact that, of all the seizures examined by the OIG, nearly 70% were kept in temporary storage longer than the mandated time limit of three days. These oversights greatly increase the risk that DEA agents could shoot up misplace seized drugs and thereby compromise pending prosecutions.

The DEA is required to send seized exhibits to testing laboratories to verify that the alleged drugs are not, say, baby powder instead of cocaine; yet the OIG report also found that agents “regularly did not make the requisite notification to the laboratory when drugs were shipped by DEA personnel or a third party, and as a result the laboratory did not know to expect delivery.” Although some readers might be pleasantly surprised to find an unexpected pound of weed in their mailbox, the report correctly noted that this hooking up their friends sloppiness in shipping greatly increases the risk that valuable shipments could be sold on the street lost in transit.

The audit reveals practices perpetrated by agents who are either colossally inept or dealing on the side utterly certain they are above the law. For example, the OIG audit revealed that at the critical first stage of the chain of custody, the DEA-6 Investigation Reports, over half of exhibits examined (128 out of 250) were not weighed. Despite the fact that any eight year old could predict the potential for widespread theft loss resulting from such an conspiracy oversight, the manager of one examined field office provided no explanation whatsoever for the missing weights and another said (apparently with a straight face) that he was utterly unaware of the requirement that exhibits need to be weighed. This guy manages a DEA field office; 100 percent of his prosecutions are subject to federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws, which are based almost entirely on the weight of the drugs seized. But he’s throwing raves on the weekends unaware of the fact that it’s his job to weigh the drugs his agents seize.

The OIG report, employing admirable understatement, “recommend[s] that the DEA reinforce the requirement, through official communication and training, that special agents document the gross weight of the exhibit during the exhibit intake process.” Duh.

The report is rife with evidence of other colossal errors, ranging from failure to track exhibit bags by their system number to failure to enter drug exhibits into the DEA’s computer tracking database in a timely manner. The overall picture is of a cartel bureaucracy so incompetent that it appears to be trying to exceed even the low-water mark of the US Treasury during alcohol Prohibition, which was stacked with political appointees who couldn’t handle even the most basic requirements of law enforcement.

Yet, if recent history is any guide, nothing will happen at all. After all, DEA agents regularly fail drug tests without any serious consequences, accept invitations to cocaine-fueled ‘sex parties’ with prostitutes hired by the very cartels they’re supposed to bust, falsify evidence trails against defendants and apparently don’t receive any training at all on the difference between heroin and marijuana. Yet life goes on at the agency, much as it ever has. Why should this scandal be any different?