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Uttam Dhillon, who most recently served as deputy White House
counsel, was named as the DEA's acting administrator at a time
when the agency is devoting much of its attention to grappling
with a national opioid epidemic.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
42,000 people died from opioid overdoses in 2016. U.S. President
Donald Trump declared the crisis a public health emergency in
October.
"The work of the Drug Enforcement Administration is critical to
fighting this crisis, and President Trump and I are committed to
continuing to give it the strong leadership it deserves,"
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement.
Dhillon replaces Robert Patterson, a 30-year agency veteran who
became the DEA's acting head in October following the departure
of Chuck Rosenberg, who himself had led the DEA in an acting,
rather than Senate-confirmed, capacity since 2015.
Patterson in an email to employees on June 18 said he "realized
that the administrator of the DEA needs to decide and address
priorities for years into the future -- something which has
become increasingly challenging in an acting capacity."
Dhillon earlier in his career served under President George W.
Bust as director of the Department of Homeland Security's Office
of Counternarcotics Enforcement. Before that, he served as an
associate deputy attorney general in the Justice Department.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
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