Putting People In Prison Under Trump

A WAR ON DRUGS, of some sort, has probably, like drugs themselves, been going on for some time, from time immemorial. People love drugs, and they love to hate drugs. Our modern version began with Trickie Dick Nixon, around 1970. Nancy Reagan came along with her brilliant "just say no", and now, our latest incarnation of conservative futility, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, enters the fray, who wants to ramp the whole crazy War on Drugs back up again, after eight years of Obama sanity, during which we tended to regard drugs as a medical, rather than a legal or criminal problem. Among humans, sanity can only last so long before we start trying to solve problems by doing crazy thing again, instead of rationally. Sessions wants to reinstate irrationally punitive sentences for all manner of drug offenses, mandatory minimum sentences, for crimes from sampling, to addiction, to dealing. Most local, state, and federal judges oppose the war on drugs, because they know, from long experience, how insane, destructive to society, and impossible it is. The United States of Incareration already has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world, thanks largely to drug laws, with what seems like about half of all young African-American men behind bars. Isn't that enough? Haven't we, at long last, after all these years, learned anything? Apparently not, at least not from the socially conservative perspective. Let's decriminalize drugs, and medicalize them, regulate them, like alcohol and tobacco, and do some real educating. Over the next four years, or few weeks, or however long Trump and Sessions are in power instead of prison, the U.S. is going to go on a real witch hunt, and millions more of us will get locked up, along with who knows who else - maybe climate scientists, transgenders, liberals and socialists will be next in line to the privately operated federal pen.