Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin magazine.

My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island.

I didn't post a second dig, or diglet, last week, because I was at the Drug Policy

Alliance's conference in Atlanta. I was speaking on a panel about ending the war on drug

dealers. The panel was really powerful, upsetting, and enlightening. This week, to make up for giving you nothing extra last week,

I am going to post that whole panel discussion here, which I think you'll find interesting.

It was moderated by Asha Bendelli, who is the Drug Policy Alliance's senior director of grants,

partnerships, and special projects, and is also just a legendary activist. I'll warn you that I had

a terrible bout of insomnia the night before speaking, so I'm not necessarily operating at my most coherent, but I think you'll get my points.

Okay, here's the panel.

So, you know, we've been having, I think,

in our own discussions in drug policy alliances,

we've taken a deeper dive led by Art Way

and his colleague, and our colleague, Emily Carltonback,

who's not here, a talk about what does it mean to really reform drug

policies if we're only putting it in the context of people who use?

Because when we talk about mandatory minimums and that sort of thing, we're often mostly

talking about black and brown people, and most often they're charged with possession with intent,

if possession makes it into the charge at all. And yet, when we were doing our policies, right,

it didn't necessarily reflect how you were going to specifically deal with and address the

question of people who are incarcerated for selling. And those are the cases that are out there that have put people, Dorothy Gaines, got 19 years and seven months,

although no drugs were even found in her home.

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