Rebutting Jeff Sessions's assertions on drug use and crime - Washington Post

In his June 18 op-ed, “Lax drug enforcement means more violence,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions wrote that the drug business is “inherently violent.” Disputes are settled not in courts but at the barrels of guns, he writes.

But that’s only the case because drugs are illegal and unregulated.

Since the end of alcohol prohibition, beer and liquor distributors no longer shoot each other in the streets in the battle for market share.

Instead, legal businesses have every incentive to play by the rules. They test and label their products for potency and purity, they avoid selling to children, and they pay taxes.

That will be the case for marijuana and other illegal substances, too, if and when Congress recognizes that prohibition doesn’t stop use but instead only makes drugs more dangerous by removing the possibility of regulation and control.

Tom Angell, Brooklyn

The writer is chairman of Marijuana Majority.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s op-ed contradicted the evidence that every part of the country is suffering from the opioid crisis, including, yes, “our privileged communities,” and the newly changed instructions to prosecutors aren’t going to solve the issue.

Mr. Sessions ignored the more effective solution: devoting enough resources to treatment on demand with follow-up support. Of the 23.5 million people who needed treatment in 2009, only 2.6 million got it, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services). Let me be clear: 9.4 percent of people age 12 or older are abusing illicit drugs. Universal treatment is a better way to solve a crisis that is devouring so many people.

Zohar Rom, Arlington

Causation, correlation. I’m not convinced Attorney General Jeff Sessions understands the difference. If he is going to claim that he is required to end the Obama-era charging instruction to “protect the lives of victims,” he should do Americans the favor of offering evidence of causation, not simply correlation. Is there any evidence that federal drug crime charging policy has in fact been a cause of the recent rise in violence in some of our cities?

Drew Bendon, Arlington

Using the politics of fear, Attorney General Jeff Sessions falsely argued that violent crime is sweeping the nation, though violent crime rates are near their lowest levels since the 1970s.

Reviving the failed policies and rhetoric of the war on drugs will not make our communities safer or reduce the use of illegal drugs. Studies have shown that the incarceration explosion of the past 30 years has had a negligible impact on crime rates. The 17 states that reduced their prison population in the past 10 years saw a reduction in crime rates, not an increase. Mr. Sessions also ignored that the duty of a prosecutor — particularly the nation’s top prosecutor — is not merely to convict people. It’s to seek justice.

Ordering federal prosecutors to seek the toughest sentence possible, even for nonviolent, low-level drug offenders, isn’t seeking justice. It’s denying it — to people of color, the poor and those for whom treatment would be far more effective and rehabilitative than jail time. Studies show that African Americans are 21 percent more likely to receive a mandatory-minimum sentence than whites facing eligible charges, and the U.S. Sentencing Commission shows elevated likelihood of mandatory-minimum sentencing for Hispanics.

Tragically, our prisons and jails are too often used as a warehouse for the mentally ill and the addicted.

Harsh mandatory minimums erode public confidence in our justice system. We’re wasting billions of taxpayer dollars incarcerating people when we could be using the same resources for proven programs that actually reduce crime and improve public safety.

Cory A. Booker, Washington

The writer, a Democrat, is a U.S. senator from New Jersey.

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