This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Sunday, August 8, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown. The

Drug War has raged for 50 years. Of course, it's well past time to end it.

Democratic U.S. Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman wants to start by removing federal criminal

penalties for drug possession and move regulatory authority from DOJ to HHS, as well as expunged some criminal records.

She's co-sponsored legislation to that effect.

We spoke in late July.

If you could, detail for me your understanding of what the drug war has done to the

United States. I think that the drug war has devastated black and brown and poor

communities. I think the drug war was a war on people and it was a

divisive tactic and a marginalization tactic and isolation tactic and a criminalization tactic that was targeting populations that were not sort of

supportive of Nixon and his agenda.

And so I think that the result of that

is that there's an overpopulation of black and brown and poor people in prison.

That's devastated families and communities and

it's also had a detrimental effect, I think, on the generations that they came after that and I

think that it has had dire consequences on individuals who have been incarcerated simply because

they were found to be in possession of a substance that they were going to use for their personal use.

What specifically are you proposing?

Proposing a big shift.

A shift of how we address those who have personal substance issues and taking it out of the

hands of the Department of Justice, decriminalizing it, and taking it into the auspices of the Department of Health and

human services, and treating it as a health care issue as opposed to a health care issue as opposed to a criminal issue.

...