Jeff Sessions Just Kicked Off the Next War on Drugs – GQ Magazine

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The attorney general appears poised to revive the country's costliest policy failure.

In a brief address delivered to law enforcement personnel in Richmond, Virginia on Wednesday, Attorney General and maybe-perjurer Jeff Sessions spent most of his allotted time discussing the same talking points he's been recycling since his appointment: Police brutality is a social media-driven myth; America is a hellish, crime-ridden, post-apocalyptic wasteland; and scary, scary drugs will come into your home and kill you in your sleep unless you pray to your bedside portrait of Ronald Reagan.

This version of his stump speech, though, contained some new, alarming hints about his agency's drug enforcement priorities. Sessions made clear that he would direct the Department of Justice to take on the burgeoning, deadly epidemic of heroin and opioid use. After that, though, things quickly went off the rails:

I realize this may be an unfashionable belief in a time of growing tolerance of drug use, but too many lives are at stake to worry about being fashionable. I reject the idea that America will be a better place if marijuana is sold in every corner store. And I am astonished to hear people suggest that we can solve our heroin crisis by legalizing marijuanaso people can trade one life-wrecking dependency for another thats only slightly less awful. Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs will destroy your life.

This is a breathtaking false equivalence. Treating marijuana usage and heroin addiction as the same isn't "unfashionable"it willfully ignores basic medical and scientific research. (Hmmm, where have we heard that before.) Marijuana cannot cause a fatal overdose. To the extent that it leads to addiction, the risk is low, and the symptoms are nothing like those that accompany the crippling, "life-wrecking" condition of heroin dependence. Most maddeningly, the consensus among experts is that the public health risks of marijuana use pale in comparison to those posed by alcohol and tobacco, both of which are substances that you can already go buy from the corner store, probably in the time it takes you to read this post.

In short, there isn't really a good policy argument for initiating this type of hysterical, "Reefer Madness"-esque crackdown on marijuana, unlessand I'm just spitballing hereyou're less interested in "fighting drugs" and more interested in the political and social implications that taking up this fight might entail. President Nixon declared the first War on Drugs in large part to disrupt the organizing activities of his political enemiesAfrican-Americans and, at the time, the anti-war left. His efforts, of course, led to such a massive spike in the minority incarceration rate that the ACLU compared it to mid-century Jim Crow laws in the South. (You know, the same laws Jeff Sessions grew up with in Hybart, Alabama.) The draconian, decades-long War on Drugs is a trillion-dollar failureassuming that your goal is actually stopping drug use, and not any of that other stuff.

This is what happens when law enforcement policy gets entrusted to a bigoted septuagenarian who learned everything he knows about drugs from D.A.R.E. and that very special episode of Saved By The Bell, and does not care to educate himself any further. Jeff Sessions is itching to revive a policy initiative that has succeeded at nothing except disenfranchising and incarcerating low-income Americans and people of color, and if he has to rely on a outrageous falsehood to justify that decision, so be it.

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Jeff Sessions Just Kicked Off the Next War on Drugs - GQ Magazine