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Four years ago, a delegation of state and federal law enforcement officials from Alabama traveled to Mexico on the federal government’s dime to tour a meth lab.

My colleague Ashley Remkus wondered how much such a trip cost. The junket in the jungle seemed quite a production — complete with a five-minute hype video, with soundtrack, that might make Michael Bay put a call in to his lawyer.

The group of 12 narco-toursists included three United States attorneys, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall and ALEA Director Hal Taylor, in addition to two district attorneys, one police chief and one sheriff.

After a stop in Mexico City, the United States Marines flew the group into the jungle in a Blackhawk helicopter. If you want to see what they saw, you can watch the video they made.

When they returned, they told how secret the whole thing had been and how much jeopardy they had been in, like they’d been riding shotgun with Seal Team Six.

“It was dangerous. We had to use encrypted applications on our phones to even communicate because we knew the cartels knew we were in town. Folks knew we were in town and they knew why we were there and they didn’t like it,’’ then-U.S. Attorney Jay Town said after returning from the trip. “What we saw was exactly what we thought we were going to see, and more.”

We saw exactly what we thought we were going to see …

Look, there are some obvious questions here.

Like, why do you have to travel to Mexico to see a meth lab when we have our red-blooded American meth labs here in the U.S. of A.

Or, why do you need to see a meth lab to know we have a drug problem? You don’t have to see Apple’s factories in China to know there are iPhones in America.

Or if a thing was so secret and so dangerous, why did they stop to pose for so many pictures?

But all those things aside, the most important one, perhaps, is the question Remkus later asked …

How much did this cost?

First, she asked the local officials, who told her the Drug Enforcement Agency paid for the trip and she’d have to ask them.

Then she asked the DEA, submitting her request under the Freedom of Information Act, the federal law that is supposed to make public information public.

And then she waited.

And waited.

An Olympic Games, a leap year and a presidential administration went by.

Finally, last Tuesday, the DEA responded with its reply — more than four years after the request.

The DEA’s answer, not in so many words: None of your business.

“Please be advised that for each of the exemptions cited, it is reasonably foreseeable that disclosure of the information withheld would harm the interests protected by these exemptions,” the DEA wrote back, not giving so much as the name of the official who wrote the denial.

It took the federal government four years to come up with a boilerplate denial.

Specifically, the DEA cited an exemption to FOIA — Section 552 (b)(4).

“Trade secrets or commercial or financial information that is confidential or privileged.”

Trade secrets?

Do Mexican cartels have a patent on meth?

Confidential commercial information?

Would this put the Mexican cartels at a competitive disadvantage to Colombian cartels?

Privileged financial information?

What makes the financial information privileged? Is it the DEA embarrassed to let the public know how much its publicity stunt cost?

Because that’s what it looks like.

These are our tax dollars at work, and we deserve to know how much we paid for this. If there’s a sensitive issue — say, who got paid to guide our officials through the woods — the DEA could have redacted that. FOIA responses get redacted all the time.

But that’s not what happened here. Instead, the DEA says what you paid for is none of your business.

I’d like to ask the DEA, but when it takes 4 years to answer a simple question, who knows how many Olympiads I’ll have to watch by then?

Kyle Whitmire is the 2023 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. You can follow him on Threads here and subscribe to his weekly newsletter, Alabamafication.