As detailed in this press release, yesterday "the Drug Policy Alliance released a new report making the case for rethinking the way the United States responds to the 'drug dealer'." Here is more from the press release that serves as a kind of summary of the full report:
The report demonstrates how the United States’ punitive approach to people who sell or distribute drugs — rooted in stigma, ignorance and fear, rather than evidence — has done nothing to reduce the harms of drug use or improve public safety, while instead creating new problems and compounding those that already exist....
“With a record 70,000 deaths from accidental overdose in 2017, people are understandably searching for solutions, but applying harsh penalties to drug sellers scapegoats people who are more often than not drug users as well, while ignoring the larger issue,” said Lindsay LaSalle, Managing Director of Public Health Law and Policy at the Drug Policy Alliance. “Instead, we should be using the same resources and determination to reduce the actual harms of both drug use and drug prohibition, repair the criminal legal system’s discriminatory response to the drug trade, and increase access to evidence-based treatment and support services that benefit health, public safety and economic opportunity in the long term.”
Among the flaws in the current system, the report highlights the following:
- Current laws were created on the premise that they would reduce overall supply, and in turn, consumption. In reality, the opposite has occurred. We have increased the number of people incarcerated for selling or distribution offenses by 3000% — from 15,000 in 1980 to 450,000 today — and drugs are more readily available, at significantly lower prices.
- Nearly half of people who have reported selling drugs also meet the criteria for a substance use disorder, supporting the idea that they are selling drugs, to an extent, to support their own dependency.
- Laws against drug selling are so broadly written that people arrested with drugs for personal use can get charged as “dealers,” even if they were not involved in selling at all.
- While the criminal legal system purports to focus on high-level sellers, the data show that supply-side criminalization disproportionately impacts the lowest-level people on the supply chain.
- The current system has a discriminatory impact on communities of color, despite the fact that data suggest white people are slightly more likely than Black or Latinx people to report having sold drugs....
Accordingly, DPA has provided a set of tailored recommendations based on three broad principles:
- First, to the maximum extent possible, society should deal with drug involvement outside the destructive apparatus of criminalization — and to the extent that the criminal justice system continues to focus on drug selling and distribution, it must do so with a commitment to proportionality and due process.
- Second, we should focus on reducing the harms of drug distribution (for example, reducing drug market-related violence), rather than attempting to eliminate drug market activity.
- Third, we must take seriously the criminal justice system’s discriminatory response to the drug trade and work toward reforms that both repair the harm already done while preventing further harm to communities of color and poor communities. With the report public, DPA aims to expand the current public dialogue around drug reform, to focus on who the people now labeled “drug dealers” in the United States really are and how we, as a society, can respond to them in ways that will keep people and communities safer and healthier.
The full 76-page report can be accessed at this link and a two-page executive summary is available here.
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