Attorney General Sessions has just announced a sweeping new charging policy for drug cases: federal prosecutors are ordered to “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense.”
This reverses former Attorney General Holder’s 2013 charging policy. For non-violent defendants with no significant criminal history or ties to large-scale trafficking, prosecutors would not trigger mandatory minimum sentences.
While we can complain about Sessions reverting to policies initiated by President Nixon, his decision is possible only because the Obama Administration took no initiative to repeal the drug statutes. They simply declined to enforce the laws on the books.
The logic is the same for the Obama and Trump Administrations: leave bad laws in place and then either enforce/not enforce according to taste. There is no principle here. The Obama policy looked progressive when announced, but left us vulnerable to later Draconian enforcement, and wasted eight years when the underlying problem of drug illegality could have been addressed.
The solution is to legalize in order to regulate. Treat drugs like alcohol and tobacco. Take drugs (all drugs) out of the hands of criminal cartels and establish a regulatory system that promotes treatment, guarantees drug purity and potency, and prevents and penalizes sales to kids.
The Nixonian strategy has produced a trail of death-dealing cartels, inner city violence, broken families, blighted futures, disproportionate effects on minorities, and the highest incarceration rate on the planet. Doubling down on a failed War on Drugs will only compound the damage.