Channels His Inner Nancy Reagan…
Remember Nancy Reagan’s famous “just say no to drugs”? Jeff Sessions sure does. The Attorney General clearly hasn’t learned anything about drugs since the 1980’s, telling Americans today several falsehoods, including that debunked claim that marijuana is a gateway to addiction.
The opioid crisis is stealing the lives of more than 60,000 Americans a year now, but battling it takes information, science, and resources – not opinion and failed policies. The Trump administration today on all fronts chose the latter, ensuring likely failure.
“I do think this whole country needs to not be so lackadaisical about drugs,” Sessions told attendees at a forum held by the far right wing Heritage Foundation, as Buzzfeed’s Dominic Holden reports. “When you talk to police chiefs, consistently they say much of the addiction starts with marijuana. It’s not a harmless drug.”
“We’ve got to to reestablish, first, a view that you should just say no,” Sessions said, channeling his inner Nancy Reagan. “People should say no to drug use.”
Sessions is wrong. Regardless what some law enforcement officers may have told him, studies show marijuana is not a so-called gateway drug to dangerous drugs, and it is almost entirely not addictive. A strong majority of Americans – 64% – now support the legalization of marijuana. Even the majority of Republicans support pot legalization.
The Guardian reports “there is no evidence that cannabis use actually causes the use of later drug use.”Â
Bottom line: abstinence programs, from sex ed to drugs, have been proven to just not work.Â
To prove how addicted the attorney general is to Reagan-era policies he literally began his speech in Washington, D.C. Thursday afternoon by praising Reagan’s Attorney General, Edwin Meese, who coincidentally, just like Sessions, was highly criticized for ethical lapses.
“The ‘Just Say No’ slogan was popularized by former First Lady Nancy Reagan as part of a vigorous drug crackdown in the 1980s,” Buzzfeed’s Holden notes, “spurred in part by a fear of crack in urban cores. The push toward abstinence messages accompanied policing efforts to comb cities for drug offenders and sentence convicts to mandatory prison terms of years or decades. The approach has since been blamed for driving up prison populations with a disproportionate number of inmates of color.”
Sessions early on reversed an Obama-era policy that the federal government would stop use of private prisons. Not only does he support the use of private prisons, he has called for an increase in the number of prisoners the federal government can house.Â
“The federal prison population is on the decline,” the Associated Press reported in February, “but a new attorney general who talks tough on drugs and crime and already has indicated a looming need for private prison cells seems poised to usher in a reversal of that trend.”
Jeff Sessions, a former federal prosecutor sworn in this month as the country’s chief law enforcement officer, signaled at his confirmation hearing — and during private meetings in his first days on the job — that he sees a central role for the federal government in combating drug addiction and violence as well as in strict enforcement of immigration laws.
The result could be in an increase not only in the number of drug prosecutions brought by the Justice Department but also in the average length of sentence prosecutors pursue for even lower-level criminals. If that happens, the resources of a prison system that for years has struggled with overcrowding, but experienced a population drop as Justice Department leaders pushed a different approach to drug prosecutions, could be taxed again.
In May Sessions directed all U.S. Attorneys to pursue the harshest possible charges against all criminal defendants, a move that’s guaranteed to vastly increase the U.S. prison population. Private prisons donated big bucks to Trump’s campaign Super PAC and his inauguration fund. Bigly. (And it may have been illegal.)
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Image:Â Official DHS photo by Jetta Disco via Flickr
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