Michael Botticelli is the Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), commonly referred to as the ‘Drug Czar.’ The title for the position originated in the early 1980’s. Mr. Botticelli is tasked with providing guidance and strategy to the White House on national drug policy control issues. In theory, the position is supposed to give fair and balanced recommendations to the federal government. That has rarely (if ever) been the case with past Drug Czars.
Recently Michael Botticelli testified at a Congressional hearing about federal spending on drug policy control, during which he stated the following:
“The vast majority of the resources that ONDCP and the federal government looks at are really for enhanced prevention and treatment programs,”
When he made that statement, he forgot about two things – the first being math, and the second being Tom Angell from the Marijuana Majority. Tom Angell instantly picked up on the fact that Mr. Botticelli was lying when he used the term ‘vast majority,’ as that’s simply not the case as proven by math. Tom Angell highlighted the glaring lie in an article that he recently published on Marijuana.Com. Per that article:
According to the chart above, which is part of the National Drug Control Strategy that ONDCP released last month, treatment and prevention programs only account for 44.8 percent of federal drug control spending under the president’s proposed Fiscal Year 2016 budget. This year’s actual drug policy spending only devotes 43.9 percent of funds to the health strategies.
That’s not a majority and it’s certainly not the “vast majority” Botticelli claimed in the hearing before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s Subcommittee on Government Operations.
So either the Drug Czar doesn’t know how to do basic math (potentially possible), or he was purposefully trying to mislead Congress. Either way, he is not fit to do his job, and hopefully there will be a petition started calling for his termination, similar to what Marijuana Majority did recently with the head of the DEA (134,413 signatures and counting!).
