Feds massively overstate anti-drug spending

Talk about fuzzy math. A study to determine if federal agencies overreport how much they spend on drug treatment found the agencies to be off by $1 billion.

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According to a report by the RAND corporation, the overreporting was caused by some wacky accounting: The Department of Veterans Affairs figure, for example, was more than 30 percent too high because of that agencies creative definition of drug treatment: Treatment of, say, a broken arm was classified as "drug treatment" if the arm was attached to, say, a heroin addict. The Border Patrol reported that 15 percent of its budget was spent on drug treatment, but that figure appears to simply have been made up: The agency decided 10 percent seemed too low and 20 percent seemed too high.