marsmellow
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2008
- Messages
- 2,942
Rep. Steve Cohen: The war on drugs has been a terrible mistake
Congressman Steve Cohen (D-TN) called Wednesday on the U.S. House floor for an end to the 40-year war on drugs, which Cohen said had spent trillions of dollars to incarcerate millions of people for non-violent crimes.
“Now don’t get the wrong impression; I’m not suggesting that drug abuse and drug addiction is not a great problem that we must deal with,” he said. “But our approach in treating it as a law enforcement and not as a health matter, a health care issue, has led to prison populations increasing, racial disparities of the greatest source in this nation in the arrest process, and a lost generation of people with no education and no job prospects because those arrests haunt them for the rest of their lives.”
Cohen introduced the Justice Integrity Act to the House in May. The legislation would create an advisory group to investigate racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system.
