Ohio, which is second only to Texas in the number of executions carried out since 2010, said it will run out of the drug it uses in executions, pentobarbital, on Sept. 30. The state has two men scheduled for execution in November, and eight more set to be killed after that. Every state’s supply of pentotbarbital, which has been the principal execution drug, expires at the end of November.

Florida does not face a shortage, but it has forced other death penalty states to scramble on two fronts: They are hunting for new suppliers or different drugs to use, and enacting changes to public records laws to keep the names of suppliers and manufacturers of those alternative drugs secret.

The lack of lethal drugs, and the fight over keeping new ones secret, are partly the result of a remarkably effective campaign by opponents of the death penalty, who have, in effect, taken their efforts from the court room to the boardroom.

A PUSH TO CUT OFF SUPPLY

Each time a state has found a new source for a drug to use in executions, Reprieve, an anti-death penalty organization based in London, in collaboration with death penalty lawyers in the United States, has used freedom of information laws, the local news media and the powers of persuasion to compel the drug’s manufacturer to cut off the supply.

“Who’s easier to persuade? The Supreme Court or a corporation that has financial interests?” said Clive Stafford Smith, a British-American, who was a death penalty lawyer in the South for many years before founding Reprieve. “You can make it not worth their while to allow their drugs in executions.”

The effectiveness of Reprieve’s campaign might well be behind the action taken last year by the state of Texas, which leads the nation in executions.

When a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, Mike Ward, using the state’s Public Information Act, sought information about the drugs used in executions, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice fiercely resisted.

In one legal filing, Patricia Fleming, the agency’s assistant general counsel, said revealing the information about the drugs and who made them would invite “financial intimidation and negative publicity,” as well as “intensive lobbying” and “unrestrained harassment.” Referring to death penalty opponents, Fleming asserted that “essential to their strategy is knowledge of the private companies” that supply the drugs used in lethal injections.

The state attorney general ruled against her, and the department disclosed that it had enough pentobarbital at the time for 23 executions, Ward reported.

STATES PUSH BACK

Death penalty states are now taking measures to keep anti-death penalty activists, and journalists, from learning the identity of suppliers. A Georgia law enacted in March provides that any information about a “person or entity that manufactures, supplies, compounds, or prescribes the drugs, medical supplies or medical equipment” used in an execution shall be considered a “confidential state secret.” Already this year, at least three other states — Arkansas, South Dakota and Tennessee — have amended their public records laws to exempt the names of suppliers from disclosure.

Lethal injection was first proposed as a method of execution in the 19th century by a New York doctor who argued it would be cheaper than hanging. It took 100 years or so for it to be used, but every state that set out to execute people eventually adopted it as the chosen method.

Generally, states have used a three-drug protocol. The first was an anesthetic, sodium thiopental, intended to render the prisoner unconscious so that he or she does not experience the pain and suffering from the drugs to come. The second drug, pancuronium bromide, paralyzes the diaphragm and lungs, making it impossible for the condemned to breathe. Finally, potassium chloride is injected, causing death by cardiac arrest.

In 2008, the Supreme Court, in Baze v. Rees, held that lethal injection did not run afoul of the Eighth Amendment proscription on “cruel and unusual punishment.”

But the Court recognized care had to be taken in the killing, so that it wasn’t unconstitutionally “cruel.” The most critical drug, it emphasized, is the anesthetic.

“It is uncontested that, failing a proper dose of sodium thiopental that would render the prisoner unconscious, there is substantial, unconstitutionally unacceptable risk of suffocation from the administration of pancuronium bromide and pain from the injection of potassium chloride,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.

The problems for death penalty states, and the opening for opponents of the death penalty arose when the only company that had governmental approval to make the anesthetic, Hospira, announced in 2011 that it was suspending production because of manufacturing problems at its plant in North Carolina.

Arizona, with two executions pending in late 2011, managed to find another source of sodium thiopental; but it didn’t want the public to know what it was or where it came from.

LAWYERS SOUGHT NAME OF SUPPLIER

When lawyers for Jeffrey Landrigan, one of the men facing death, sought the name of the supplier, Arizona’s state attorney general refused to say. Ultimately, on the eve of Landrigan’s execution, the attorney general disclosed that the drug had come from Britain. He did so, he said, to allay fears that the drugs had been made in a Third World country and might be contaminated and unsafe.

Tennessee also acknowledged that one of its execution drugs had been made in Britain but refused to divulge the company’s name.

At Reprieve, Maya Foa, head of the lethal investigation project, searched through medical and pharmaceutical directories to identify British companies that made sodium thiopental.

The British company selling sodium thiopental to Arizona, Tennessee and other states turned out to be a tiny wholesaler that operated out of the back of a driving school in a working class neighborhood in West London.

It was called Dream Pharma, and it was basically a one-man operation. It also suddenly became more profitable, as states in America moved to improvise. Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s director, wrote a letter to Dream Pharma.

“You have played a significant role and hold responsibility for the potential deaths of many people in the United States,” he wrote.

Reprieve sent the letter, along with Dream Pharma’s address and phone number, to journalists, and articles appeared in British newspapers and on the BBC. Dream Pharma shut down. The company has declined to comment on its battles with Reprieve or the sale of drugs to the U.S. for executions.

Reprieve then successfully lobbied the British government to ban exports of any drugs to the U.S. for executions. Capital punishment for murder was abolished in Britain in the early 1960s even though polls showed the public supported it.

With Hospira out of the business, states had become fairly desperate. That urgency was captured in government emails and documents obtained by death penalty defense lawyers.

“I have been given a task to obtain some Sodium Pentothal by any means available,” the director of the pharmacy in the Nebraska department of corrections wrote to her counterparts in several states. “Does anyone know where I might start looking?”

A SUPPLIER FROM INDIA

She eventually found a small wholesaler in Mumbai, India, which operated out of two rooms on the ground floor of an apartment building; it had no air conditioning, raising doubts about the safety and efficacy of any drugs stored there.

Reprieve again went to work, alerting local reporters and holding a news conference in Mumbai. Officials from India’s food and drug administration raided the offices. The company was quickly out of business.

In California, prison officials turned to hospitals throughout the state in search of sodium thiopental, without success. The warden at San Quentin explored buying some in Pakistan.

In the end, Arizona officials solved California’s problems, supplying 12 grams of sodium thiopental from its limited supply, a happy exchange according to government emails unearthed by death penalty opponents.

“You guys in AZ are life savers,” a California corrections officer wrote to his Arizona counterpart. “Buy you a beer next time I get that way.”

Some death penalty states, looking to solve their drug supply problems in a more reliable way, switched drugs — opting for pentobarbital, an anesthetic commonly used in putting animals to sleep. The first state to use it for an execution was Oklahoma, in December 2010, and it quickly became one of the execution drugs of choice.

This time, however, Reprieve was not up against a small entity. Only one company had government approval to sell pentobarbital in the U.S., and it was a major international pharmaceutical company, Lundbeck Inc. Headquartered in Denmark, it had some 6,000 employees worldwide; its American plant was in Kansas.

When Reprieve approached Lundbeck, in early 2011, the company said it was “adamantly opposed” to its drugs being used in executions — its primary use is in the treatment of epilepsy — but it said it had no control over what happened after its products were sold to wholesalers or distributors.

Reprieve ratcheted up the pressure. Every time Lundbeck’s pentobarbital was used in an execution, it issued a press release.

SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN

Anti-death penalty activists campaigned against Lundbeck on Twitter and Facebook, shareholders raised questions at the company’s annual meeting, a pension fund sold its shares, and the company’s place on an annual ranking of Denmark’s best companies fell from 17 to 40.

Lundbeck then did what it had said it couldn’t do: It devised a distribution system that would keep its pentobarbital from the states that conducted executions.

Last month, Hospira announced that it was putting controls in place so that three of its drugs — pancuronium bromide, potassium chloride and propofol — would not be used in executions.

Once again, that has left states trying to figure out what to do. In Colorado, a man who killed three teenagers and their boss in a pizza restaurant in 1993 is set to be executed in August. But the state does not have the proper drugs, causing the director of prisons to send an urgent plea to the state’s compounding pharmacies. At “compounding pharmacies,” pharmacists mix, or compound, the ingredients for drugs on site.

Last October, South Dakota became the first state to use a compound drug in an execution, and it did so twice.

Lawyers for one of the men to be executed, Robert Moeller, who had kidnapped, raped and murdered a 9-year-old girl, filed a lawsuit to obtain information about the supplying pharmacy. The state resisted, and a federal judge sided with the state.

South Dakota was among the states to recently pass a law exempting the names of suppliers of lethal injection drugs from its public records law. The change was necessary, said South Dakota State Sen. Jean Hunhoff, “because there’s been harassment that has occurred against non-protected manufacturers and pharmacists, thereby causing difficulty for the state in obtaining the necessary chemicals for the lethal injection.”

South Dakota’s law passed in the state senate without opposition, and the house by a lopsided 60-8.

Raymond Bonner, a lawyer and former New York Times reporter, is the author of “Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong.”

The Military Lending Act sought to protect service members and their families from predatory loans. But in practice, the law has defined the types of covered loans so narrowly that it’s been all too easy for lenders to circumvent it.

“We have to revisit this,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who chairs the defense appropriations subcommittee and is the Senate’s second-ranking Democrat. “If we’re serious about protecting military families from exploitation, this law has to be a lot tighter.”

Members of the military can lose their security clearances for falling into debt. As a result, experts say, service members often avoid taking financial problems to their superior officers and instead resort to high-cost loans they don’t fully understand.

The Department of Defense, which defines which loans the Military Lending Act covers, has begun a process to review the law, said Marcus Beauregard, chief of the Pentagon’s state liaison office.

The act mainly targets two products: payday loans, usually two-week loans with annual percentage rates often above 400 percent, and auto-title loans, typically one-month loans with rates above 100 percent and secured by the borrower’s vehicle. The law caps all covered loans at a 36 percent annual rate.

That limit “did do a great deal of good on the products that it covered,” Holly Petraeus, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s head of service member affairs, said in an interview. “But there are a lot of products that it doesn’t cover.”

Representatives from payday and other high-cost lenders said they follow the law. Some defended the proliferation of new products as helpful to consumers.

A 400 Percent Loan

In June 2011, when Levon Tyler, a 37-year-old staff sergeant in the Marines, walked into Smart Choice Title Loans in Columbia, S.C., it was the first time he’d ever gone to such a place, he said. But his bills were mounting. He needed cash right away.

Smart Choice agreed to lend him $1,600. In return, Tyler handed over the title to his 1998 Ford SUV and a copy of his keys. Tyler recalled the saleswoman telling him he’d probably be able to pay off the loan in a year. He said he did not scrutinize the contract he signed that day.

If he had, Tyler would have seen that in exchange for that $1,600, he’d agreed to pay a total of $17,228 over two and a half years. The loan’s annual percentage rate, which includes interest and fees, was 400 percent.

Tyler said he provided his military ID when he got the loan. But even with an annual rate as high as a typical payday loan, the Military Lending Act didn’t apply. The law limits the interest rate of title loans — but only those that have a term of six months or less.

In South Carolina, almost no loans fit that definition, said Sue Berkowitz, director of the nonprofit South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center. The reason? Ten years ago, the state legislature passed consumer protections for short-term auto-title loans. In response, lenders simply lengthened the duration of their loans.

Today, plenty of payday and auto-title lenders cluster near Fort Jackson, an army base in Columbia, legally peddling high-cost loans to the more than 36,000 soldiers who receive basic training there each year.

Tyler’s loan showcases other examples of lenders’ ingenuity. Attached to his contract was an addendum that offered a “Summer Fun Program Payoff.” While the loan’s official term was 32 months, putting it outside both South Carolina’s regulations and the Military Lending Act, the “Summer Fun” option allowed Tyler to pay off the loan in a single month. If he did so, he’d pay an annual rate of 110 percent, the addendum said.

Michael Agostinelli, the chief executive of Smart Choice’s parent company, American Life Enterprises, told ProPublica he wants his customers to pay off their loans early. “They’re meant to be short-term loans,” he said. He also said that customers who pay on time get “a big discount.” In Tyler’s case, he would have paid an annual rate of 192 percent if he had made all his payments on time.

But Tyler fell behind after only a couple of payments. Less than five months after he took out the loan, a repo company came in the middle of the night to take his car. Three weeks later, it was sold at auction.

“This was something new, and I will never do it again,” Tyler said. “I don’t care what type of spot I get in.”

American Life Enterprises companies operate nine title-lending branches in Nevada and South Carolina. Agostinelli said loans to members of the military are rare for his companies but that service members might go to a title lender for the same reason anybody else does: They need money immediately and discreetly.

Loans similar to the one Tyler took out are broadly and legally available from stores and over the Internet. QC Holdings, Advance America, Cash America and Ace Cash Express — all among the country’s largest payday lenders — offer loans that fall outside the definitions of the Military Lending Act, which defined a payday loan as lasting three months or less.

The annual rates can be sky high, such as those offered by Ace Cash Express in Texas, where a five-month loan for $400 comes with an annual rate of 585 percent, according to the company’s website.

Ace Cash is among a number of payday lenders just outside the gates of Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, and it has four stores within three miles of Fort Hood in Texas.

A 2012 report on the Military Lending Act by the Consumer Federation of America found there had been no drop in the number of payday lenders around Fort Hood since the 2006 law went into effect.

Amy Cantu of the Community Financial Services Association of America, which represents the payday industry, said payday lenders are careful to screen out service members for their short-term products. But she acknowledged that payday companies may provide soldiers and their families with other types of loans. “We welcome more products in the market,” she said of the trend of payday lenders increasingly offering longer-term loans. “Options are good for consumers.”

Earned a Purple Heart, Lost a Car

A billboard for Title Credit Finance above a TitleMax storefront shows a picture of a hamster on a wheel and urges borrowers to ‘avoid the title pawn treadmill.’ Photo: Mitchell Hartman/Marketplace

Some lenders apparently haven’t bothered to change their loan products in response to the law.

The company was fully aware that its customers were soldiers, because they presented their military identifications, said Roy Barnes, a former governor of Georgia who is representing the plaintiffs.

Community Loans, which boasts more than 900 locations nationwide, argued in court that the transactions were not covered by the Military Lending Act because they weren’t loans but sales. Here’s how Community Loans said the transaction worked: The soldiers sold their vehicles to the company while retaining the option to buy back the cars — for a higher price. In early 2012, the judge rejected that argument. The case is ongoing.

Community Loans, which did not respond to numerous calls and emails, has been making loans to service members through businesses with various names.

Leading up to the gates of Fort Benning in Columbus, Ga., Victory Drive is crowded with lenders. Among them is Georgia Auto Pawn, a Community Loans of America storefront where one of the plaintiffs in the class action, an Army master sergeant, took out his loan.

Just another half-mile down the road is a lender advertising “Signature Loans for the Military.” The lender goes by the name of Title Credit Finance, but the parent company is Community Finance and Loans, which shares the same corporate address as Community Loans of America.

A billboard for Title Credit Finance promises to rescue borrowers: Showing a picture of a hamster on a wheel, it says, “Avoid the title pawn treadmill,” referring to customers who get caught paying only interest month after month.

Title Credit Finance offers installment loans, a product which, as the company advertises, does seem to provide “CASH NOW The Smart Way” — at least when compared to a title loan. Interest rates tend to be lower — though still typically well above 36 percent. And instead of simply paying interest month upon month, the borrower pays down the loan’s principal over time.

But the product comes with traps of its own. Installment lenders often load the loans with insurance products that can double the cost, and the companies thrive by persuading borrowers to use the product like a credit card. Customers can refinance the loan after only a few payments and borrow a little more. But those extra dollars typically come at a far higher cost than the annual rate listed on the contract.

At TitleMax, a title-lender with more than 700 stores in 12 states, soldiers who inquire about a title loan are directed to InstaLoan, TitleMax’s sister company, which provides installment loans, said Suzanne Donovan of the nonprofit Step Up Savannah. A $2,475 installment loan made to a soldier at Fort Stewart near Savannah, Ga., in 2011 and reviewed by ProPublica, for example, carried a 43 percent annual rate over 14 months — but that rate effectively soared to 80 percent when the insurance products were included. To get the loan, the soldier surrendered the title to his car. TMX Finance, the parent company of both TitleMax and InstaLoan, did not respond to multiple calls and emails seeking comment.

Another lender on Victory Drive is the publicly traded World Finance, one of the country’s largest installment lenders, with a market capitalization of about $1 billion and more than 1,000 stores around the country. World was the subject of an investigation by ProPublica and Marketplace earlier this week. Of World’s loans, about 5 percent, approximately 40,000 loans, are made to service members or their families, according to the company. Active-duty military personnel and their dependents comprise less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Defense Department.

Bill Himpler, the executive vice president of the American Financial Services Association, which represents installment lenders, said the industry’s products had been rightfully excluded from the Military Lending Act. The Pentagon had done a good job preserving soldiers’ access to affordable credit, he said, and only “tweaking the regulations here or there to tighten them up” was necessary.

The Commander and the Collectors

When service members ask about title loans at TitleMax, they’re directed to InstaLoan, TitleMax’s sister company, which provides installment loans. Outside of Fort Stewart in Hinesville, Ga., that’s next door. Photo: Mitchell Hartman/Marketplace

It’s not known how many service members have high-priced loans. The Pentagon says it intends to conduct a survey on the matter soon and issue a report by the end of the year.

But some commanders, such as Capt. Brandon Archuleta, say that dealing with soldiers’ financial problems is simply part of being an officer. Archuleta, who has commanded soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, recalled fielding numerous calls from lenders trying to track down soldiers who were delinquent on debts.

“In the last 12 years we’ve seen military officers as war fighters, we’ve seen them as diplomats, we’ve seen them as scholars,” Archuleta said. “But what we don’t see is the officer as social worker, financial adviser and personal caregiver.”

While some soldiers seek help from their superior officers, many don’t. That’s because debt troubles can result in soldiers losing their security clearance.

“Instead of trying to negotiate this with their command structure, the service member will typically end up refinancing,” said Michael Hayden, director of government relations for the Military Officers Association of America and a retired Air Force colonel. “It’ll typically start out with some type of small crisis. And then the real crisis is just how you get that loan paid off.”

Soldiers who hide their debt often forego the military’s special aid options. Army Emergency Relief and the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society offer zero-interest loans. But in seeking that help, a soldier risks alerting the commanding officer to his or her troubles, particularly if the sum needed is a large one.

Russell Putnam, a legal-assistance attorney at Fort Stewart, says he often finds himself making a simple argument to soldiers: “A zero percent loan sure as heck beats a 36 percent plus or a 25 percent plus loan.”

When the Obama administration released its 2013 Drug Control Strategy recently, drug czar Gil Kerlikowske called it a “21^stcentury” approach to drug policy. “It should be a public health issue, not just a criminal justice issue,” he said.

The latest plan builds on Obama’s initial strategy outlined in 2010. Obama said then the U.S. needed “a new direction in drug policy,” and that “a well-crafted strategy is only as successful as its implementation.” Many reform advocates were hopeful the appointment of former Seattle Police Chief Kerlikowske as head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy signaled a shift in the long-lasting “war on drugs.”

But a government report released a day after the latest proposal questioned the office’s impact so far.

“As of March 2013, GAO’s analysis showed that of the five goals for which primary data on results are available, one shows progress and four show no progress,” the report by the Government Accountability Office found. For instance, the GAO noted that there’s actually been an increase in HIV transmissions among drug users and drug-related deaths, as well as no difference in the prevalence of drug use among teens.

Many public health experts say the administration deserves credit for increasing access to drug treatment. But others say despite an increase in funding for rehab, the administration has continued to push programs and policies built to punish drug users.

As the administration lays out its latest plan on a new approach to drugs, here’s look at what’s in it, and what they’ve done so far.

“Break the cycle of drug use, crime, delinquency and incarceration”

“While smart law enforcement efforts will always play a vital role in protecting communities from drug-related crime and violence,” the latest strategy says, “we cannot arrest our way out of the drug problem.”

FBI records indeed show a drop in drug arrests, from 1.8 million in 2007 to 1.5 million in 2011.

But overall, the government spends roughly the same proportion of the drug policy budget on law enforcement now as was spent during Bush’s final years in office. In Obama’s 2014 budget proposal, 38 percent is allocated for domestic drug law enforcement, while another 20 percent would be spent to crack down on drugs along U.S. borders and abroad.

The Obama administration has also renewed funding for controversial programs like the Justice Assistance Grant program, formerly known as Byrne Grants, which had been cut under President Bush. The funding created local drug task forces, which critics saywere quota-driven and increased corruption and misconduct. Budget-minded conservatives like the Heritage Foundation also argued the grants hadn’t led to a decrease in crime. States like California and New York have used some funding from the program for treatment instead of enforcement.

The administration has made progress when it comes to overcrowding in prisons: One Department of Justice program gives states money to support research toward policymaking that reduces recidivism. Several state legislatures have independently lessened mandatory minimums, reformed parole policies, and passed other laws aimed at cutting the high cost of incarceration.

Obama also signed the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010, which ended a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for crack possession at the federal level, and lessened the sentencing disparity between crack and cocaine.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of inmates in state prisons dropped roughly two percent from 2010 to 2011. Seventy percent of that is from a decrease in California’s prison population, after the Supreme Court upheld an order for the state to reduce overcrowding.

But as a recent Congressional Research report highlights, the number of inmates in federal prisons continues to rise, increasing over three percent from 2010 to 2011. Over half the current federal prison population is drug offenders.

“Support alternatives to incarceration”

In his latest budget, the president is requesting $85 million to go toward drug courts, which some have pushed as an alternative to criminal trials. Since 1999, the number of drug courts has grown from just under 500 to 2,734 today. Drug courts allow for non-violent offenders to avoid being charged, or to have their convictions expunged and sentences waived after completion of a rehab program and passing regular drug tests.Proponents of the system say it allows non-violent drug offenders to serve their time in treatment, instead of in prison.

A 2011 GAO report found statistics suggest drug courts reduce recidivism, but there’s not enough data to fully assess their effectiveness.

Some critics argue drug courts still fall short, by taking a criminal justice approach to a public health problem.

“Increase addiction treatment services”

Obama has indeed repeatedly increased funding for addiction treatment. He proposed $9 billion in his latest budget, up 18 percent from 2012.

Despite that, only 1 in 10 of the 21.6 million Americans in need of drug or alcohol addiction treatment received it in 2011. The number of people receiving treatment has stayed roughly the same since 2002.

The treatment gap should narrow as Obamacare goes into effect: Roughly five million more Americans currently facing drug addictions will soon have insurance coverage for treatment. “That’s the biggest expansion of treatment in 40 years, and maybe in the history of the U.S., ” said public health professor Keith Humphreys, who has served as a policy advisor to the ONDCP.

But a recent Associated Press analysis said current clinics will be overwhelmed by the new demand for treatment. State-level budget cuts have hit organizations hard, and treatment centers in over two-thirds of states are at or close to 100 percent capacity.

ONDCP spokesperson Rafael Lematire said the administration’s latest plan calls for an increase in the number of health care workers to treat newly insured patients.

“Review laws and regulations that impede recovery from addiction”

The latest drug strategy highlights the need to reduce “collateral consequences” (barriers to public benefits, employment and other opportunities) for those convicted of drug crimes. But Obama has little leverage on those issues, which are mostly decided on the state and local levels. For example, while HUD has encouraged public housing authorities to not disqualify former drug offenders from receiving public housing or Section 8 vouchers, it’s up to each city housing authority to determine their own rules.

“While we encourage housing authorities to give ex-offenders a second chance, the decision to admit or deny to public housing remains with the housing authorities,” said HUD spokeswoman Donna White.

Obama’s administration has not announced any plans to address the 1996 federal ban on food stamps or cash assistance for those convicted of drug felonies. Most states have opted out of or amended the law.

“Reduce drug-induced deaths”

The GAO noted that drug-induced deaths and emergency room visits increased from 2009 to 2010. Much of that is likely due to pharmaceutical abuse, which contributes to more accidental overdose deaths than illegal drugs or alcohol.

In 2011, the government released a plan to crack down on the abuse of prescription drugs. There’s little current data on overdose deaths, but recent studies have indeed noted a drop in prescription drug abuse.

Advocates have praised Obama‘s decision to endorse increasing access to emergency drug Naloxone, which can reverse opioid overdoses. Some lawmakers have criticized that position, saying it essentially encourages drug abuse.

In 2009, Obama also attempted to end the federal ban on funding for clean needle exchange programs, but Congress reversed the decision.

“Curtail illicit drug consumption in America”

The GAO report notes that the prevalence of drug use among teens and young adults has stayed the same since 2009. “With the exception of marijuana use, illicit drug use is trending down, specially prescription drug abuse and use of cocaine, hallucinogens, inhalants, and methamphetamine,” said ONDCP spokesperson Lemaitre. Research cited in the GAO report suggests the increase in marijuana use is tied to a decreased perception of risk.

Obama remains staunchly opposed to legalization, but it’s unclear how hard the administration plans to come down on states loosening marijuana laws. Obama has overseen far more medical marijuana raids than under the Bush administration. For states that have legalized pot, Attorney General Eric Holder said he intends to “enforce federal law”, though Obama said he had “bigger fish to fry.” The Department of Justice said it is still reviewing the latest laws.

The nation’s airline passengers also caught a break last month when Congress passed (and President Obama quickly signed) a bill allowing the Federal Aviation Administration to shift some funds and halt the furloughs of air traffic controllers that had been blamed for long flight delays around the country.

But other programs haven’t been so lucky. Children in Indiana have been cut from the federally funded Head Start preschool program, and one Head Start program in Maine is being cut altogether. Furloughs have begun for employees of agencies from the U.S. Park Police to the Environmental Protection Agency. And cuts to Medicare have forced cancer clinics to turn away thousands of patients who are being treated with drugs the clinics can no longer afford.

We’ve taken a look at what’s actually happened in the two months since sequestration took effect.

Remind me, what is sequestration again?

Remember the clash over the debt ceiling back in 2011?

When Republicans and Obama struck a deal to raise it, they created a “super committee” of six Democrats and six Republicans and gave them three and a half months to hash out $1.2 trillion worth of cuts to the federal budget over the next decade. If they failed, a package of automatic cuts designed to slash funding to programs dear to both parties (military spending, in the Republicans’ case, and Medicare and other domestic programs in the Democrats’) would go into effect on Jan. 1, 2013.

Needless to say, the super committee failed, leading to the cuts we’re seeing now.

How does this fit in with the “fiscal cliff”?

Sequestration was one element of the so-called “fiscal cliff,” which also included a number of other spending cuts and tax increases. Congress passed a last-minute deal Jan. 1 to blunt the cliff’s impact, which included pushing back the effective date for sequestration to March 1. While Obama and members of Congress spoke out against sequestration in February — Senate Democrats announced a plan to put it off for another 10 months — those efforts failed to stop the cuts.

So what’s happened since March 1?

The indiscriminate cuts affected a wide range of federal programs and departments, making them difficult to track. (Even the White House struggled to explain exactly which programs they’d hit while it was denouncing them.) Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, told reporters Feb. 28 that sequestration would have “a rolling impact, an effect that will build and build and build.”

Congress passed a bill, signed by Obama on March 26, to spare a few programs from cuts this year, including an infant nutrition program, the nuclear weapons program and funding for security at U.S. embassies abroad — a sensitive area since the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, last September. The bill also gave some agencies, including the Pentagon, more flexibility in carrying out the sequester. And last week, Congress quickly passed (and Obama signed) a bill allowing the F.A.A. to scrap its furloughs of air traffic controllers, which had been blamed for long flight delays. But neither bill reduced the total amount the government is required to cut — $85 billion — by the end of the fiscal year in October.

Gotcha. What has all this done to the economy?

The Congressional Budget Office estimates sequestration will cost around 750,000 jobs in total, and forecasters think it could reduce economic growth by half a percentage point this year. But two months into sequestration, the effects are difficult to see. The economy added a relatively respectable 165,000 jobs in April, the Labor Department reported (though the federal government shed 8,000 jobs during the same period). And defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, which warned that the sequester would lead to layoffs, have seen only a slight decline in their business.

Indeed, there’s at least one slice of the workforce that seems to be benefitting from sequestration: Washington lawyers. Contractors short on cash have hired attorneys to help them restructure loan payments.

Do we know any more about what’s been affected?

Yes. Sequestration is still playing out, but here’s what we know has happened so far:

Congress:

While lawmakers’ salaries are exempt from cuts, sequestration hasn’t spared congressional offices, which have had to slash spending by 8.2 percent. “Magazine subscriptions have been canceled,” the Washington Post reported. “Constituents are getting e-mail instead of snail mail. Invoices are getting a second look.” Sequestration has also cut into funding for the overseas fact-finding trips lawmakers often take, known as “codels.” House Speaker John A. Boehner, a Republican, has banned his caucus from using military aircraft for codels.

The White House:

While the egg hunt was saved, the White House announced in March that it would stop giving tours due to sequestration. (Republicans criticized the decision, with Rep. James Lankford of Oklahoma calling it “a dramatic overreaction.”) The White House has also furloughed 480 Office of Management and Budget staffers, and the president will voluntarily return 5 percent of his salary. Sam Kass, the assistant White House chef, has said he is also being furloughed. But Roll Call reported that the White House — which spent “more than a month of dodging questions” about the effects of sequestration on West Wing staffers —seems to have been spared from deep cuts.

Federal Agencies:

A few agencies, such as Department of Veterans Affairs, are mostly exempt from the sequester.

But the budget cuts have hit most others, sometimes with unpredictable consequences. After sequestration forced Yellowstone National Park to cut $1.75 million from its $35 million budget, the park — run by the National Park Service — trimmed its payroll and decided to cut back on snowplowing, which would delay the park’s opening. Plowing was saved only when the Cody and Jackson Hole, Wyo., chambers of commerce, fearing the economic impact of a late park opening, kicked in $170,000.

In Washington, agency after agency is planning to furlough its employees. “The Department of Housing and Urban Development,” the Washington Post reported, “will shut down for seven days starting in May, after concluding that staggering furloughs for 9,000 employees would create too much paperwork.” The Internal Revenue Service will also shut down almost entirely on furlough days. And Department of Labor employees have already started taking their furlough days, which they can do a half-day at a time.

(The Justice Department and the State Department, however, have managed to avoid furloughs.)

The Department of Labor is also planning to lay off 30 of the 74 lawyers it hired to work through a backlog of mine-safety citations that are under appeal. The department had hired the lawyers after a 2010 explosion at a mine run by a company that had received many such citations but fought them, preventing regulatory action against it. The move will save the Labor Department $2.1 million.

And while air traffic controllers won’t be furloughed, it’s unclear whether the FAA will follow through on its plans to close 149 airport control towers, most of them at rural airports. New Jersey officials, for instance, remain uncertain whether the Trenton, N.J., airport tower will be closed or receive a reprieve.

Meanwhile, IRS furloughs have the potential to be counterproductive. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew told a House Appropriations subcommittee in April that the cuts would lead the IRS to answer fewer calls and take longer to respond to taxpayer questions.

“It will also lead to fewer enforcement actions and reduce revenue collection,” Lew said — which could cost the government money rather than saving it.

The Pentagon:

Despite the bill Obama signed in March giving the Pentagon more flexibility in carrying out the sequester, it still must cut $41 billion from its budget this year, which Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described as “the steepest decline in our budget ever.” (The Pentagon has been asked to cut more before, but never halfway through the fiscal year.)

Hundreds of thousands of civilian Defense Department employees will likely have to take 14 furlough days by October, though it’s unclear which branches will face them. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has said that everything from salaries and benefits to the number of generals and admirals could be cut.

Medicare:

Cancer clinics in March began turning away thousands of Medicare patients being treated with expensive chemotherapy drugs, which the clinics say they can no longer afford. “Legislators meant to partially shield Medicare from the automatic budget cuts triggered by the sequester, limiting the program to a 2 percent reduction — a fraction of the cuts seen by other federal programs,” the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff reported. “But oncologists say the cut is unexpectedly damaging for cancer patients because of the way those treatments are covered.” Medicare has said that it doesn’t have the power to restore funding for the drugs. (Rep. Renee Ellmers, a North Carolina Republican, introduced a bill that would reverse the cuts, but the legislation remains in committee.)

Education:

The federally funded Head Start early education program is expected to lose around 70,000 of its roughly 1 million slots due to sequestration. Those cuts have already hit children in Indiana, where Head Start programs in two towns resorted to a lottery system in March to determine which kids could remain. A Head Start program in Birmingham, Ala., will shut down for 10 weeks this summer, and one in Pejebscot, Maine, will close for good. Other Head Start programs — such as one in Passaic County, N.J., that expects to lose about $200,000 of its roughly $4 million in federal funding — won’t have to wrestle with cuts until the fall. A program in Colorado Springs faced with cutting 142 spots this fall had children decorate empty chairs that it has sold for $500 apiece to raise money. It has saved two spots so far.

The Head Start cuts have come even as the president called for a massive expansion of preschool.

Sequestration is also hitting schools on Indian reservations, where federal funds can make up 60 percent of a school’s budget. The Fort Peck Indian reservation in Montana “can’t hire a reading teacher in an elementary school where more than half the students do not read or write at grade level,” according to the Washington Post. Summer school may be cancelled. And the Red Lake reservation in Minnesota — where a shooting at the high school left seven people dead in 2005 — has cut its security staff, as well as course offerings and support staff, in response to sequestration.

Scientific Research:

The sequester has also hacked away at funding for scientific research. The National Science Foundation expects to make 1,000 fewer grants this year. Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., will admit fewer science and engineering graduate students. And the directors of the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories expect that the “drop in funding will force us to cancel all new programs and research initiatives, probably for at least two years.”

More than 50 Nobel laureates have signed a letter protesting the cuts, which Hunter R. Rawlings III, the president of the Association of American Universities, has also decried. “To put it kindly, this is an irrational approach to deficit reduction,” he told a Senate committee in February. “To put it not so kindly, it is just plain stupid.”

Court System:

Sequestration has cut the federal judiciary’s budget by almost $350 million for the 2013 fiscal year, which is already half over. In Massachusetts, public defenders will have to take 16½ furlough days — which could lead to a backlog in the court system — and funding for drug and mental health services will be cut by 20 percent. In Dallas, the public defender’s office will shut down every Friday for the next six months. In California, the U.S. District Court of the Northern District will shutter its courtrooms in San Francisco, San Jose and Eureka on the first Friday of every month through September. And in Nebraska, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Kopf said he is “seriously considering” dismissing some criminal cases.

The sequester also has the potential to impact terrorism cases.

Public defenders representing Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a former Al Qaeda spokesman and a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden charged with conspiring to kill Americans, have requested that a federal judge push back the trial date because of furloughs in their office. “It’s extremely troublesome to contemplate the possibility of a case of this nature being delayed because of sequestration,” Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said in Federal District Court in Manhattan. “Let me say only that — stunning.”

And the Massachusetts public defender’s office, which is representing Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, still has to deal with furloughs. “No one knows exactly how it will affect things,” a federal court official told ABC News.

Wow. Anything else?

Sequestration has led a number of states to cut their emergency unemployment benefits. Programs designed to help victims of domestic violence have had their funding slashed.  And less federal funding has meant to cuts to Meals on Wheels programs in places such as Roanoke, Va, which recently started a waiting list. “We’ve never had a waiting list,” Michele Daley, the director of nutrition services at the Local Office on Aging, which administers Meals on Wheels in four Virginia counties, told the Huffington Post. “This is the first time ever and it’s a direct result of sequestration.”

Has anybody beside the FAA beaten sequestration?

Yes. Weeks before the sequester hit, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack started describing how his department would have to furlough meat inspectors if the cuts went through, forcing meat-processing plants to shut down on furlough days. His talk convinced the meat inspectors’ union and other industry heavyweights to start lobbying. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Chicken Council, the National Turkey Federation went to work, and the Senate ended up moving $55 million from other Agriculture Department programs to the inspectors.

Read David A. Fahrenthold and Lisa Rein’s excellent Washington Post story for more details.

The pet industry also successfully lobbied (yes, the pet industry has a lobbying group) for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to restore overtime and weekend inspections of commercial wildlife imports and exports, including exotic snakes, birds and lizards bound for American homes. But the decision may not be as silly as it sounds — the importers and exporters pay substantial fees for the inspections.

How can I keep up with the sequester?

Here are some great resources for tracking the overall impact:

Mother Jones has examples of how sequestration has played out in each of the 50 states.

The Washington Post is charting the sequester’s projected and actual impact on federal agencies.

Government Executive is tracking furloughs by department and agency.

We’ve compiled some of the best charts and graphics explaining the sequester.

In mid-April, Kansas passed a law asserting that federal gun regulations do not apply to guns made and owned in Kansas. Under the law, Kansans could manufacture and sell semi-automatic weapons in-state without a federal license or any federal oversight.

Kansas’ “Second Amendment Protection Act” backs up its states’ rights claims with a penalty aimed at federal agents: when dealing with “Made in Kansas” guns, any attempt to enforce federal law is now a felony. Bills similar to Kansas’ law have been introduced in at least 37 other states. An even broader bill is on the desk of Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell. That bill would exempt any gun owned by an Alaskan from federal regulation. In Missouri, a bill declaring federal gun laws “null and void” passed by an overwhelming majority in the state house, and is headed for debate in the senate.

The head of the Kansas’s State Rifle Association, an  affiliate of the National Rifle Association, says she put the bill together and found it a sponsor. While the NRA regularly lauds passages of states’ gun-rights laws, it stayed silent on Kansas’ law, and, so far, has kept a low profile on nullification. (The group did not respond to our requests for comment.)

Many observers see nullification bills as pure political theater, “the ultimate triumph of symbolism over substance,” as UCLA law Professor Adam Winkler put it.  He said he doubts the laws will ever be enforced, and, if they are, expects them to be struck down by the courts.

Winkler and others say nullification laws violate the Constitution, which makes federal law “the supreme law of the land…anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.” Indeed, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder wrote a letterlast week to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, asserting that Kansas’ law is “unconstitutional.” (Brownback, who signed the bill into law, did not immediately respond to our requests for comment.)

But the growing number of such bills — which have passed by large majorities in at least one chamber of seven state legislatures–highlight the challenge gun control advocates face in their attempt to fight for gun regulation at the state level.

It also shows how nullification is fast becoming a mainstream option for state politicians. In Pennsylvania, 76 state legislators signed on to sponsor a measure that would invalidate any new federal ban of certain weapons or ammunition. The bill would impose a minimum penalty of one year in prison for federal agents who attempt to enforce any new law.

Supporters of nullification are not simply frustrated at what they see as congressional and presidential overreach. During a hearing about one of the nullification bills she had introduced, Tennessee State Sen. Mae Beavers called the Supreme Court a“dictatorship.”

“You think that the Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter of any of these laws. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe it was ever granted the authority under the Constitution,” Beavers was quoted as saying in The Tennessean. (Reached by phone, she asked to comment later, then did not respond to further requests.)

The Supreme Court rejected nullification in 1958, after Southern states tried to use the concept to avoid desegregating public schools. “No state legislator or executive or judicial officer can war against the Constitution without violating his solemn oath to support it,” the Court ruled.

Winkler, the UCLA law professor, said that even though the nullification trend was likely to be ineffectual, “It represents a strong, powerful opposition to our government.”

The concept of nullification has had a resurgence since the beginning of President Obama’s administration. More than a dozen states have introduced bills to nullify Obamacare.

The Tenth Amendment Center, a group that advocates nullification as the solution to a range of policy issues, from marijuana legalization to Obamacare, publishes model gun nullification language. The center has little direct contact with state legislators, Michael Boldin, the center’s founder, said.

The roots of guns law nullification trace back nearly a decade.

In 2004, Montana gun rights activist Gary Marbut drafted a bill stating that any guns manufactured and retained in Montana are not part of interstate commerce, and thus are exempt from federal regulation. The bill failed twice, but it became law in 2009 after Republicans took control of the statehouse. By Marbut’s count, at least eight states soon enacted “clones” of the Montana law. (Those laws don’t go quite as far as the more recent nullification legislation. For instance, most of them don’t make it a crime to enforce federal law.)

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms responded to the earlier laws withletters to local firearms dealers explaining that federal laws and regulations “continue to apply.”

The day the Montana law went into effect, Marbut filed a lawsuit in federal court asserting the right to manufacture weapons in the state without a federal license. The suit, now before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, has been backed by a large group of supporters, including Gun Owners of America, the Second Amendment Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Goldwater Institute, and a group of nine attorneys general, some of them from states that had passed their own versions of the Montana law.

Representatives of Goldwater and the Cato Institute said they see the case as not primarily about guns. Instead, they say, it’s meant to persuade the Supreme Court to rollback the Congress’ power to regulate commerce within a state.

“The likelihood of victory is low,” said Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies.

The latest set of bills — including Kansas’ new law —represent a far broader and more aggressive challenge to federal law. Even conservative organizations have been skeptical of the trend.

“A state law that criminalizes federal activity — I would oppose that as both imprudent and wrong,” Burrus said. The Cato Institute’s chairman wrote an op-ed this spring arguing this kind of nullification is invalid.

Goldwater Institute’s Nick Dranias, a constitutional expert, said the term “nullification” is sometimes applied to legitimate attempts to exert state sovereignty, “and sometimes it is essentially lawless civil disobedience.”

States should only pass laws challenging federal power “when there is a reasonable legal argument for sustaining them,” he said. And the penalty for enforcing federal law in “hard cases” should be “a misdemeanor at most.”

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group, released a “fact sheet” last year titled “Nullification: Unlawful and Unconstitutional.” (The fact sheet does not address guns in particular.)

The Montana activist whose helped inspired the nullification movement Kansas is also a bit skeptical. While he simply chose to challenge the federal government’s commerce power, Kansas is “bucking federal power more generally,” he said.

“I think, maybe tactically, they may have gone a little further than they needed to,” Marbut said.

Though he supports the principles behind the Kansas law, “I don’t know how much of that they can uphold when it gets to the courts.”

But Marbut hopes that the rapid spread of gun law nullification bills across the country will encourage the Supreme Court to hear his case.

“I see the tide moving our way,” Marbut said. “I think the Supreme Court has figured out that the people of America are gathering their torches and pitchforks and it’s time to settle things down by reeling in the federal giant.”

A spokeswoman for Alaska Gov. Parnell, who has not either approved or vetoed the state’s nullification bill, said last month that “he is supportive of it.” But, she added, “The bill (as with all bills that pass) is currently undergoing a thorough review by the Department of Law.”

In Kansas, Patricia Stoneking, the president of Kansas State Rifle Association, said she was recommending that Kansans not start manufacturing guns under the new law until its legal status has been clarified.

Even if Kansas’ law ends up being struck down in court, “We actually are not going to roll over and play dead and say, ‘Oh, no, shame on us,’” Stoneking said. “The fight will not be over.”