Just say no to Sessions’ War on Drugs

Donald Trump should just say no to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision to restart the disastrous War on Drugs.

Even Republicans are saying being dumb on crime is not the answer to curbing Americans’ illicit drug use. Conservatives and liberals agreed years ago that health-based education, prevention and rehabilitation programs offer far more effective solutions than Sessions’ law and order approach..

Trump’s lack of historic perspective is, well, historic, for a president. But even he should realize the extent to which Republican Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan tried and failed miserably to rein in drug use.

It was Nixon who in June 1971 first declared a “War on Drugs.” Nixon racheted up the budgets and manpower allocated to federal drug control agencies and scored breakthroughs on mandatory sentences in the courts. Jimmy Carter tried to rein in the effort and called for decriminalizing marijuana in 1979 and minimizing criminal punishment for drug crimes. But Reagan doubled down on the War on Drugs, and by the year 1997, the number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug law offenses increased from 50,000 in 1980 to more than 400,000, at taxpayer expense.

The effort continued until President Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, instructed prosecutors in 2013 to avoid charging non-violent drug defendants with offenses that would trigger lengthy, mandatory sentences. The goal instead, wrote Holder, should be to go hard after violent drug criminals and those who were dealing in massive quantities of drugs.

All told, more than $1 trillion was spent on funding the War on Drugs, but the investment failed miserably at curtailing drug use. What the War on Drugs did do was devastate poor and minority communities. Studies show while five times as many whites used drugs as blacks in the United States, blacks were sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of whites.

Now Sessions has ordered federal prosecutors to return to the tough policies against drug offenders that led to the failures of the past five decades. The attorney general, a former U.S. attorney in Alabama, is especially opposed to efforts to legalize the use of marijuana and has built a reputation for being a champion of using the harshest tools available to fight the drug war.

It’s small consolation that some federal prosecutors argue that the impact of Sessions’ order will be less than feared. They point out that U.S. attorneys will still have the ability to use their discretion on how hard to go after drug offenders.

The president and the attorney general’s ignorance of the lessons of history is appalling. Study after study has demonstrated that drug treatment programs not only reduce drug abuse and related healthcare costs, but they also increase the odds that offenders will become productive members of society.

The War on Drugs is a war that President Trump has zero chance of winning with Sessions in command.

All told, more than $1 trillion was spent on funding the War on Drugs, but the investment failed miserably at curtailing drug use. What the War on Drugs did do was devastate poor and minority communities. Studies show while five times as many whites used drugs as blacks in the United States, blacks were sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of whites.