Monthly Archives: May 2017

Sen. Kamala Harris on Tuesday took Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions to task for ordering federal prosecutors to crack down on drug offenders last week.

Harris (D-Calif.) was speaking at the Center for American Progress Ideas Conference in Washington, one of a host of potential 2020 presidentialcandidates invited to address progressive thought leaders on what the next priorities should be for the Democratic Party.

Harris started her career in the Alameda County district attorneys office at the height of the crack epidemic. She said there were so many nonviolent offenders being charged then that prosecutors might have only five minutes to review a casefile before appearing in court.

"I saw the war on drugs up close, and let me tell you, the war on drugs was an abject failure," Harris said. "It offered taxpayers a bad return on investment, it was bad for public safety, it was bad for budgets and our economy,and it was bad for people of color and those struggling to make ends meet."

In a memo last week, Sessions instructed federal prosecutors to charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offensein drug cases, even when that would trigger mandatory minimum sentencing.

Harris,who was also San Francisco district attorney before being elected California attorney general, said, This administration and Jeff Sessions want to take us back to the dark ages."

The Justice Department has also indicated that it may aggressively go after marijuana users again, even in states like California that have legalized it. Under the Obama administration, federal officials largely deferred to local policy.

California needs federal help dealing with international criminal organizations and human trafficking, not going after Grandmas medicinal marijuana, she said.

Harris said the United States needs to stop treating marijuana use as a crime.

We need to do the smart thing and the right thing and finally decriminalize marijuana, she said.

Afterward, her staff emphasized that Harris wants marijuana to be reclassified as a Schedule II drug by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which opens the door to approval for medical use.

Schedule II drugs have medicinal uses. Schedule I drugs, as marijuana is currently listed, have the highest criminal penalties for use and are considered as having no medical use.

Harris said criminal justice reform should be equitable and U.S.drug policy should treat addiction as a disease rather than as a crime.

This is not a black and brown issue, this is not an urban and blue state issue. This has always been an American issue, Harris said. We need this administration to understand that if they care about the opioid crisis in rural America as they say they do, they have also got to care about the drug-addicted young man in Chicago or East L.A."

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Sen. Kamala Harris to Trump administration: Start a war on drug abuse, don't restart the war on drugs - Los Angeles Times

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said over and over again that he sees the uptick in violent crime in a few major cities in the US as the start of a "dangerous trend." Let's take a look at the numbers. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)

Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants to reverse the policies of the Obama administration, by prosecuting more cases involving guns and drugs, and seeking more mandatory minimum sentences. John Pfaff is a professor of law at Fordham University, and the author of Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform, a new book on Americas prison system. I interviewed him via email about the causes of incarceration, and the likely consequences of Sessionss policy shift.

Many people have argued that the war on drugs has led to the great increase in the prison population. You argue that this theory doesnt explain most of the increase. Why not?

At its simplest, its just a matter of numbers. Over half of all people in state prison are there for violent crimes, and over half the growth in state prisons since 1980 is due to locking up people for violent offenses. As of 2015, only about 16percent of those in prison are there for drugs crimes. Of course, its true that drug prohibition can cause non-drug crimes, ranging from theft to fund a (more-expensive) habit to murder over a drug deal gone bad, so not everyone in prison as a result of the war on drugs is there for a drug crime. But studies suggest that ending the war on drugs would have complicated, off-setting impacts. For example, there would be fewer deaths over drug deals but more murders committed by people while abusing (some but not all) drugs.

There would be no more people arrested for selling drugs and almost everyone in prison for drugs is there for dealing, not possession but many of those who currently sell would still struggle to find gainful employment and would thus likely turn to other forms of crime to make ends meet.

One problem that both scholars and reformers face is that they think of the justice system as just that a system with a coherent logic, design and goals. Youve argued that its something much more messy a kind of Kafkaesque ecology, in which unintended outcomes happen all the time. How does that ecology work, and how has it led to more people in prison?

The fairly incoherent way we divide responsibility across cities (which run police departments), counties (which elect prosecutors and judges and pay for jails), and states (which fund prisons and whose governors control the parole process) leads to all sorts of moral hazard risks by haphazardly separating cost and benefits. My favorite example is that county-elected prosecutors face no limits on how many people they can send to state-funded prison. Prosecutors get all the tough-on-crime credibility from sending people to prison, but their counties bear none of the financial cost. In fact, its cheaper for county prosecutors to charge someone with a more-serious felony (which sends the defendant to state prison) than with a lesser misdemeanor (which lands the defendant in county-funded jail or probation).

Electing prosecutors at the county level also creates a dangerous split in costs and benefits within the county, which helps explain racial disparities in punishment. In more-urban counties, the whiter, more suburban areas have a lot of political power, and they likely play an outsized role in electing the prosecutor, who in turn tends to enforce the law in poorer, more minority urban areas. Those suburbanites feel the benefits of reduced crime but few if any of the costs, which are borne by a population that they are divorced from socially, culturally, economically and geographically, in no small part because of our history of red-lining and other forms of racial exclusion. We should accordingly expect prosecutors to pay too little attention to the costs of aggressive enforcement.

One key group of actors in this ecology are prosecutors you argue that their incentives are one of the key factors driving the increased prison population. Why is this so?

At least since crime and arrests started to drop in the early 1990s, the main engine driving prison growth has been an increased willingness on the part of prosecutors to charge more and more arrestees with felony charges. We lack almost any data on prosecutors, so its hard to say with any certainty why this change happened.

I have a lot of plausible theories, but right now the one that seems like the most important is a boring-but-critical story of employment. Between the early 1970s and 1990, as crime rose steadily, the number of prosecutors rose from 17,000 to 20,000; between 1990 and 2008, as crime dropped, we expanded the number of prosecutors by three times as much, to 30,000. Theres no evidence Ive seen that individual prosecutors are more aggressive today than in the 1990s or even 1970s. We just have a lot more of them who need to justify their positions. We arrest over 10 million people every year: There are plenty of cases for them to take if they need to.

Jeff Sessions has just announced a tough on crime order, intended to push prosecutors to seek longer sentences. How consequential is this order going to be, and for whom?

When it comes to federal policy, its important to realize that the federal system is fairly small, holding only 12percent of U.S. prisoners, and federal policies cannot apply to the states. So while Sessionss new rule may cause an increase in the size of the federal prison (where, unlike the states, about half the inmates are in for drug crimes), its direct impact on the states will be nil, and thus its direct impact on the overall U.S. incarceration will be slight.

More concerning is any sort of bully pulpit effect: Will Sessionss tough on crime and Trumps carnage in America rhetoric shape how local county prosecutors use their vast discretion? Theres no rigorous data on this, but my sense from the snippets of data we have is that any such effect will be slight. Prosecutors, as far as I can tell, focus very much on local conditions and local politics, and peoples attitudes towards crime appear to be fairly local. There are a lot of way prison reform can fail or falter in the years ahead, but I dont think the tough talk coming out of D.C. right now will matter much.

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Jeff Sessions's war on drugs will be less consequential than many believe. Here's why. - Washington Post

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) sharply criticized Attorney General Jeff Sessionson Tuesday for rolling back drug sentencing reforms, arguing that doing so threatens our system of justice.

Sessions instructed federal prosecutors last week to take the most aggressive approach possible against federal criminal defendants, including low-level drug offenders. The memo, a sharp reversal from policies implemented under former President Barack Obama, is likely to result in more jail time for drug offenders and an increase in the federal prison population.

Sessions memo had effectively declare[d] the reviving of the war on drugs, Harris said at the Center for American Progress Ideas Conference in Washington, D.C.

Instead of going after drug cartels and violent crime and major drug traffickers, he is calling for a renewed focus on what is essentially the neighborhood street-level dealer, she said. Instead of addressing the core issues of addiction and getting folks into treatment, were going to overcrowd and build new prisons. That is not justice. That is not smart on crime. And I believe we have to stop this.

Harris, who last week called for Sessions resignation over his role in the firing of FBI Director James Comey, accused the attorney general of holding outdated and out-of-touch views that will take us back to the dark ages. She argued that instead of pursuing harsh sentencing policies that will disproportionately hurt communities of color, the administration should put its resources toward addressing addiction and combatting the opioid crisis.

We need a national drug policy that finally treats substance abuse not as a crime to be punished but as a disease to be treated, she said. We need to build on reforms instead of reviving mandatory minimums or boosting bottom lines for public prisons. And we need to fund, not defund, the Office of National Drug Control Policy. And we need this administration to understand that if they care about the opioid crisis in rural America as they say they do, they also have to care about the drug-addicted man in Chicago or East L.A.

Zach Gibson via Getty Images

Harris was Californias attorney general prior to serving as a U.S. senator. During her tenure, she advocated for keeping low-level offenders out of jail and frequently pointed out how the war on drugs had failed. She also spearheaded the creation of an online database cataloging statistics on arrests, police killings and in-custody deaths, andexpressed support for a bipartisan effort to reform the criminal justice system.

However,Harris drew some criticism during her tenure for not taking a bold enough stance on some drug policy reform issues. Sentencing reform advocates in the state noticed Harrisrelative silence on Proposition 47, a 2014 ballot initiative to reduce most nonviolent crimes to misdemeanors and to help reduce the states prison population.

And during her 2014 campaignfor re-election as attorney general, she declined to take a position on marijuana legalization, even as her Republican opponent spoke out in favor of it. She also didnt speak out on the successful 2016 ballot measure in California to legalize recreational marijuana, due to her offices role in analyzing ballot initiatives, but described legal weed as inevitable.

She now favors decriminalizing the drug, but has not co-sponsored recently introducedlegislation to regulate the substance like alcohol.

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Kamala Harris Condemns Jeff Sessions For 'Reviving' The War On Drugs - HuffPost

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions tough-on-crime approach has irked critics, who fear it may undo years of progress on sentencing, particularly for non-violent drug offenses.

Sessions last week issued a memo to federal prosecutors telling them to pursue the most serious, provable offenses in charging and sentencing. The memo essentially directs federal prosecutors to throw the book at criminal offenders when they can, which is a contrast to the previous administrations stance on criminal justice.

See: Expect greater enforcement of marijuana laws under trump, Spicer says

Under former Attorney General Eric Holder, federal prosecutors were advised against taking the most severe course of action for certain low-level, non-violent drug cases. The action was intended to avoid triggering unnecessary mandatory minimum sentences that disproportionately affect minorities. Now, marijuana legalization advocates, among other groups, are up in arms.

Sessions is taking the country back to the 1980s by escalating the failed policies of the drug war, said Michael Collins, deputy director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, in a statement.

About one in five, or 21% of the U.S. population, live in a state where using marijuana is legal, but the substance is still federally banned and labeled a Schedule I drug along with heroin and LSD.

Also read: Marijuana industry could be worth 5$50 billion annually by 2026

With 60% of Americans in support of legalizing marijuana and roughly 70%, according to a Quinnipiac poll, opposed to the federal government interfering in states where marijuana is legal, some in the industry predict that Sessions action will create major political backlash.

On Tuesday, the Drug Policy Alliance held a rally against Sessions war-on-drug-like policies outside of the Justice Department, that included members of advocacy group The Sentencing Project, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Open Society Policy Center, to name a few.

See also: How the marijuana industry is aiming to undo the harm caused by the war on drugs

Rand Paul, Republican U.S. Senator from Kentucky, on Monday penned an opinion piece for CNN, condemning Sessions policy change.

We should be treating our nations drug epidemic for what it is a public health crisis, not an excuse to send people to prison and turn a mistake into a tragedy, Senator Paul wrote. Mandatory sentencing automatically imposes a minimum number of years in prison for specific crimes usually drug related.

This isnt about legalizing drugs. It is about making the punishment more fitting and not ruining more lives.

Under Sessions directive, the change in how federal government will charge and sentence criminal offenders will be felt most by drug offenders, but it may also provide a clue as to how Sessions Justice Department plans to crack down on crime.

Holder, last week, called Sessions decision unwise and ill-informed.

Read also: Jeff Sessions is not wrong about addiction, but evidence says heroin is still more dangerous than marijuana

The policy announced today is not tough on crime. It is dumb on crime, he wrote in a statement. It is an ideologically motivated, cookie-cutter approach that has only been proven to generate unfairly long sentences that are often applied indiscriminately and do little to achieve long-term public safety.

Holders approach, while avoiding tough sentencing for certain drug offenses, did not change the policy for charging and sentencing for other federal crimes, and the most serious crimes were still treated with severe sentencing. But what Sessions is essentially saying is: We want to be tough on everything.

Sessions says the push to increase prosecutions is part of a plan to increase public safety. And there is an argument that this gives prosecutors more authority and more freedom to threaten criminal offenders with the most severe charge when bargaining plea deals.

The problem is federal criminal prosecutions have declined for the past five years, hitting the lowest level in nearly two decades, while at the same time the number of violent crimes in the U.S. has been on a downward trend for more than two decades, according to data from Pew Research.

And while conditions in federal prisons have improved in the past few years, they are still overcrowded.

The majority of people locked in federal prison arent even violent offenders, according to Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project. And half of the people in federal prison are incarcerated on drug convictions.

Dont miss: War on drugs spokesman now supports marijuana legalization

This move will not only exacerbate overcrowding in prison populations, it will be costly and divert needed resources from prevention and treatment, Mauer said.

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Jeff Sessions' new policy is a 'dumb' and 'ill-informed' continuation of the war on drugs, critics say - MarketWatch

Washington Post

Sen. Harris: War on drugs an 'abject failure' Washington Post May 16, 2017 12:27 PM EDT - Sen. Kamala Harris spoke about prosecution and sentencing for drug crimes at the Center for American Progress Ideas Conference on May 16. (The Washington Post). May 16, 2017 12:27 PM EDT - Sen. Kamala Harris spoke ...

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Sen. Harris: War on drugs an 'abject failure' - Washington Post

GALLATIN , Tn. (WBKO) -- A unique officer training program combining work and play to fight a growing problem.

Introducing the master in the K-9 training world down in Hendersonville, Tennessee is Dean Hunter; Owner of Canine Command.

With the rise in drug trafficking and use in south central Kentucky and the surrounding area, canine trainer Dean has seen an increasing demand for K-9s.

"There's a huge rise in drugs in this area, and I think a dog, especially a narcotic dog, is a great asset for the department. Several departments this year has come on board and trained narcotic or asked me to train narcotic dogs for them. I'm going to say probably four to five departments I work with this year that hadn't worked with in the past."

While officers may be equipped with handguns and cuffs, a four-legged officer packing a tool we humans can't obtain.

"Canines have such a strong sense of smell, it's unbelievable. We don't know how strong a sense of smell a canine has, but we do know that our canine has 10000 co-factors more than a human being. They can also break down our odors where we just smell one specific odor. As you imprint them on the odors, you teach them how to go in to a final response letting you know that this is where the source is," Dean Hunter added.

Once the K-9 arrives to the scene to look for the possible narcotic, they don't realize what they're looking for is an illegal substance. Dean Hunter says all they're looking forward to is their reward after they find the drug.

"You know, over 30 years of fooling with dogs, or training with dogs, they still amaze me sometimes on how strong their sense of smell is and what they can detect," Hunter stated.

But what makes a k-9 truly special, is the relationship with the handler.

Back in 2013, officer Adam Tate was partnered with a dual-purpose K-9 named Yaro by Dean Hunter and have been working together ever since.

"Most of our dogs that Mr. Hunter selects for different departments are actually suited for the handler, and suits the dog's personality to the handler. His personality is a lot like mine, that's why we get along so well. We're so much alike in so many ways. The first day I got him, I was trying to take pictures of him and sent some pictures out and he ate my cell phone, so that was our first encounter," Officer Tate stated.

While being out in the field on a regular basis, officer Tate and Yaro understand why K-9's are an asset to the force.

"Drug issues is widespread all across the U.S. but especially here in middle Tennessee and southern Kentucky. It's growing every day and it's growing at an alarming rate. Not every department can afford to have a K-9. So a lot of times they'll call for mutual aid assistance for drug searches and things like that with a K-9," Officer Tate added.

But those who work with K-9's don't see them as a dog. They see them as a partner.

"Dogs are a joy to work with. I mean, they know they're a man's best friend," Dean Hunter concluded.

"I wouldn't trade it for the world. Best partner I could ever ask for. He's always got my back and I've always got his," Officer Tate explained.

A dynamic duo fighting crime four paws at a time.

According to Dean Hunter, training a K-9 can take up to 10 to 24 weeks with continuous refreshers between a handler and dog.

As far as the price for a trained K-9 goes, you're looking around nine to sixteen thousand dollars, depending on the training.

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SPECIAL REPORT: K9 TRAINING: Fighting the war on drugs - WBKO

by John Pickerill

We see it in the news constantly: The drug abuse epidemic. Sometimes its heroin. Sometimes its meth. Sometimes its prescription-drug abuse, but the results seem to be the same. Those addicted tend to neglect their jobs, their families and themselves. Emergency rooms and emergency medical responders are seeing more and more of these people overdose.

Our societys response is to treat it like a criminal problem instead of a medical problem, and weve been doing it that way for 46 years. We declared the War on Drugs in 1971, aggressively sent the police after users and dealers to get them off the streets. We tried to teach drug users and drug dealers a lesson by making the punishment so awful it would deter others. We made judges hand out mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug-related convictions. We allowed police to conduct civil-asset forfeiture.

Despite these aggressive policies and enforcement actions, illicit drug trade is worse than ever. In 2008, only 81 tons of the 450 tons of heroin trafficked was seized. That same year 865 tons of cocaine was trafficked worldwide, 165 tons of which was consumed in the United States (more than any other nation). In 2009, drug use was responsible for more than 37,000 deaths in the U.S., a number that exceeded traffic accident deaths that year. Over the past decade, drug-related deaths have doubled even though all other causes of death declined. The War on Drugs has failed its primary objective despite receiving over $1 trillion in funding since 1971.

What it has succeeded in doing is filling up our prisons and jails to bursting. In 1974, there were 218,466 inmates in all federal prisons, state prisons and local jails. By 2014, it exploded to 1,508,636 (a 600 percent increase). According to a study by Jonathan Rothwell, a senior economist at Gallup, more people are now admitted to prisons for drug crimes each year than for violent crimes or for property crimes. The cost on the taxpayer to house and care for these inmates is now $12.6 billion a year.

Treating drug abuse as a criminal problem instead of a medical problem is making it worse not better. Our goal should be recovery so that the previously addicted person can overcome addiction, get his life back on track. However, once we as a society label that person a felon, we make it infinitely harder for him to do that. When he tries to get a job, he is forced to check the box labeled Have you ever been convicted of a felony? If he is trying to better his life by going to college, he is ineligible to receive financial aid to pay for college. We are putting obstacles in the way of achieving our goal.

What are we hoping to accomplish by continuing War-on-Drugs policy? Again, the last 46 years have proven that even if we pass a plethora of get-tough-on-drugs laws, spend a trillion dollars and put 600 percent more people behind bars, it will not decrease the number of people getting drugs and getting addicted to drugs.

The first step to reversing all of this is focusing our resources on addiction treatment, recovery and prevention and to try to actually solve the problem.

John Pickerill, past chairman of the Montgomery County Republican Party, wrote this for the Indiana Policy Review Foundation. A graduate of Purdue University and the Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program, Pickerill retired from the U.S. Navy with the rank of Commander.

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Where is the war on drugs headed? - KPCnews.com

Nine months after British journalist Johann Hari toured Australia, urging politicians drop the "war on drugs" and adopt reforms of "love and compassion", we have a new policy: drug test people on Centrelink.

The idea announced in last week's federal budget will see 5,000 new welfare recipients undergo random drug testing from 1 January 2018.

It will apply to people on Newstart or Youth Allowance (meaning students and the unemployed), and anyone who fails will have their payments quarantined.

The idea is new for Australia, but already happening in the US and New Zealand. It has been criticised by a lot of drug experts for putting more pressure and stress on people who are already vulnerable.

But to understand the thinking behind this policy, and how it's part of a broader 100-year-old history of the "war on drugs", we we have to take a deep dive into the nature of addiction and theories around the best way of getting people to stop.

Our guide is Johann Hari, author of Chasing the Scream, an account of his three-year, 50,000-kilometre investigation into which drug policies work, and which don't.

Johann went everywhere from Portugal to Arizona. He had written lots about drugs already, had known friends and family who became drug addicts, and been addicted himself to prescription drugs. He didn't expect too many surprises.

That changed with the Rat Park.

"What surprised me is that I had misunderstood what addiction is at a basic level," he told Hack last year.

"We have the idea that if we inflict more pain on addicts, we can make them stop.

"But once you understand that pain has caused the addiction, you understand that punishing addicts makes them worse."

The Rat Park is a 1970s Canadian experiment. It was a variation on earlier experiments in which caged rats were given two water bottles - one of them laced with heroin or cocaine. "The rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and overdose and die within a couple of weeks."

Pretty grim. These experiments seemed to prove the theory that addiction was almost entirely due to 'chemical hooks' in drugs. Addiction was all about physical need.

Once the hooks are in your body you're as helpless as a coked-up rat in a cage.

Except that doesn't quite add up. Hospital patients are routinely given high-dose medical heroin for pain relief and very few go on to develop addiction. Why are people shooting up outside the hospital vulnerable to addiction? It can't all be chemical hooks.

In the Rat Park experiment, instead of being left in cages where they had nothing in their lives except the drug, the rats were let loose in a "rat heaven". Here they had loads of friends, cheese and sex. The result: they showed little interest in the spiked water.

It doesn't get better than the Rat Park.

None of the heavenly rats became addicted.

This led Johann to conclude:

"The opposition of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection."

Johann saw these two different theories of addiction reflected in the different approaches to drug policy: compassionate or brutal. An example of the brutal kind is Arizona's, where women are made to go out as a chain gang wearing t-shirts saying "I was a drug addict" and "I am breaking the need for weed" while they pick up trash and members of the public mock them.

Prisoners at Tent City jail in Arizona.

Prisoners at Tent City in Arizona.

Humiliation only deepens people's propensity for addiction, Johann said. It's the human equivalent of putting a rat in a lonely cage.

He sees the surging rates of different kinds of addictions as a symptom of a much deeper, fundamental problem of lack of personal connection. In the US, overdose deaths involving prescription painkillers (such as Oxycodone) have tripled over the past 15 years, and rates of heroin deaths have spiked in the last five years.

In Australia, there's been a spike in addiction to codeine, an opiate present in over-the-counter drugs.

"If we want to understand why people are turning to very powerful painkillers, we have to talk about why they're in so much pain," Johann said.

Where addiction is highest are the places where despair is deepest."

Sixteen years ago, the Rat Park came to Portugal. The country had been pursuing a "tough on drugs" policy, but still had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. A re-think was called for, and a special panel looked at the science, including the Rat Park experiment. They came back with a recommendation to decriminalise all drugs."The whole lot," Johann said.

The money that had been spent on arresting and punishing drug users was re-invested in job creation programs and residential rehabilitation. "The goal was to say to every addict in Portugal, we love you we value you we're on your side." In a bit over 10 years, injecting drug use was down 50 per cent, and there were massive reductions in street crime, addiction, overdose deaths and HIV.

"Approaches based on shame and stigma and punishment fail catastrophically.

"Policies that focus on love and compassion are not the magic bullet but they significantly reduce the problem."

Last week's idea of drug testing people on Centrelink suggests we're a long way from moving to less punitive drug policies. Politicians continue to talk about the 'war on drugs'.

But there have been a few surprises; late last year Greens leader Richard Di Natale called for bipartisan support to replicate Portugal's drug policy in Australia. The surprising part was that a Liberal MP backed the move. Sharman Stone, co-convenor with Di Natale of a Senate group on drug law reform, said it would put drug gangs out of business.

"Australians have some of the most sophisticated understanding of the drug debate and the addiction debate," Johann said.

"The gap between ordinary Australians and their government is so frustrating because Australians are so good on this."

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Could finding human connection end the 100yo war on drugs? - ABC Online