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 Wei and his colleague and our colleague Emily Coltenbach 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 in seven months,

although no drugs were even found in her home.

And, you know, she eventually got clemency.

But those are some of the things that we're going to

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