Politics

DOJ shuts down National Drug Intelligence Center, no 2012 reports released

Nicholas Ballasy Senior Video Reporter
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The U.S. Department of Justice has shut down its National Drug Intelligence Center, which produced the annual National Drug Threat Assessments, due to “budgetary reasons,” a DOJ spokesperson told The Daily Caller.

The Drug Threat Assessments contained facts and statistics about Mexican drug cartel activity in the United States. In its 2011 report, the DOJ reported that cartels were operating in over 1,000 U.S. cities in 2010. (RELATED: Mexican drug cartels’ US reach expanded over 300 percent in two years)

In 2011, the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) assessed with “high confidence” that Mexican-based transnational criminal organizations, or TCOs, “control distribution of most of the heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine available in the United States.” It also reported that production of these drugs in Mexico “appears to be increasing.”

The NDIC determined that the drug cartels “control access” to the U.S.-Mexico border, which their 2011 report said is “the primary gateway for moving the bulk of illicit drugs into the United States.”

The last assessment also warned that conditions within “border communities along both sides of the Texas-Mexico border are tantamount to living in a war zone in which civil authorities, law enforcement agencies as well as citizens are under attack around the clock.” (RELATED: DOJ says Mexican cartels operating in over 1,000 U.S. cities)

No 2012 report was released by the NDIC.

“The NDIC was closed last year for budgetary reasons,” a DOJ national security spokesperson told TheDC.

The spokesperson said the Drug Enforcement Administration would be “producing many of the major strategic drug intelligence reports that NDIC had been producing.”

When contacted by TheDC, the DEA was unable to provide any reports on drug cartel activity within the United States published in 2012.

However, an “executive type summary document” will be released in “early March” of this year, a DEA spokesman told TheDC.

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