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The Daily Signal
The New Civil
Rights Division Head Wants to Decriminalize Possession of All Drugs
Cully Stimson
October 20, 2014
So who supports decriminalizing cocaine, heroin, LSD, methamphetamine,
ecstasy and all dangerous drugs, including marijuana?
No, it’s not your teenage nephew. It’s President Obama’s new acting
head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Vanita Gupta.
In 2012, Gupta wrote that “states should decriminalize simple
possession of all drugs, particularly marijuana, and for small amounts
of other drugs.” (Emphasis mine).
Last week, President Obama appointed Vanita Gupta to the position of
acting head. According to the Washington Post, the administration plans
to nominate her in the next few months to become the permanent
assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division. Her views on
sentencing reform–a bi-partisan effort in recent years–have earned her
qualified kudos from some conservatives.
But her radical views on drug policy–including her opinion that states
should decriminalize possession of alldrugs (cocaine, heroin, LSD,
ecstasy, marijuana etc.) should damper that support of those
conservatives, and raise serious concerns on Capitol Hill.
As the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union and
the director of its Center for Justice, Gupta’s legal and policy
positions are well documented in her long paper trail, which, no doubt,
will be closely scrutinized if and when she is nominated and gets a
hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
To begin, she believes that the misnamed war on drugs “is an atrocity
and that it must be stopped.” She has written that the war on drugs has
been a “war on communities of color” and that the “racial disparities
are staggering.” As the reliably-liberal Huffington Post proclaimed,
she would be one of the most liberal nominees in the Obama
administration.
Throughout her career, 39-year old Gupta has focused mainly on two
things related to the criminal justice system: first, what she terms
draconian “mass incarceration,” which has resulted in a “bloated prison
population, and second, the war on drugs and what she believes are its
perceived failures.
She is particularly open about her support for marijuana legalization,
arguing in a recent CNN.com op-ed that the “solution is clear: …states
could follow Colorado and Washington by taxing and regulating marijuana
and investing saved enforcement dollars in education, substance abuse
treatment, and prevention and other health care.”
Yet just last week the current Democratic Governor of Colorado, John
Hickenlooper, said that legalizing recreational use of marijuana was a
“reckless.” And there is a growing body of evidence to prove his point:
(1) pot-positive auto fatalities have gone up 100 percent in 2012, the
year the state legalized pot; (2) the majority of DUI drug arrests
involve marijuana and 25 to 40 percent were pot alone; (3) from 2011
through 2013 there was a 57 percent increase in marijuana-related
emergency room visits–and there are many other indications of failure.
New research, from a 20-year study, proves the dangers of marijuana.
But Gupta does not stop with marijuana. In calling for all drugs to be
decriminalized–essentially legalizing all dangerous drugs–Gupta
displays a gross lack of understanding of the intrinsic dangers of
these drugs when consumed in any quantity.
Heroin, LSD, ecstasy, and methanqualone are Schedule I drugs, which are
defined as “the most dangerous drugs of all the drug schedules with
potentially severe psychological or physical dependence.” Cocaine,
methamphetamine, Demerol and other drugs are Schedule II drugs, defined
as “drugs with a high potential for abuse…with use potentially leading
to severe psychological or physical dependence.”
Sound public policy must be based on facts, not radical unsafe, and
dangerous theories.
Read this and other stories with links at the Daily Signal
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