DEA agents who left man for 5 days without food or water are somehow not fired

DEA agents who left man for 5 days without food or water are somehow not fired
(Image credit: Eric Kayne/Getty Images)

I haven't confirmed this with my editors or anything, but I'm pretty positive that if I accidentally confined someone to a room for almost a week without any food or water, I wouldn't be contributing here at The Week anymore.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), however, has no such qualms. In 2012, the agency arrested Daniel Chong, a student at University of California-San Diego, when he was caught smoking pot. They handcuffed him in an unlit holding cell and promptly forgot about him for five days, leaving him to drink his own urine to survive.

In March, the DEA finally punished the six agents responsible, subjecting them to nothing more serious than a short suspension. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has called the DEA's decision "unacceptable," and is calling on Congress to pursue reform.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Continue reading for free

We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.

Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.

Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.