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Drugs

How ‘El Chapo’s’ Attorney is Fighting For His Client’s Right to a Fair Trial

Each day in his small cell in a Manhattan federal prison, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera battles severe headaches and vomiting, his lawyer says. He spends several hours with members of his defense team, reviewing 300,000 pages of discovery to prepare for his upcoming trial on charges including “leading a continuing criminal enterprise,” drug distribution, use of firearms, and […]

The Biggest Winners in Trump Budget: The DEA and the War on Drugs

President Trump’s 2019 budget proposal, released Monday, requests nearly $30 billion for drug control. The majority of that funding is slated for law enforcement and an $18 billion border wall, with the purported dual purpose of stopping the flow of immigrants and illicit drugs from entering the country. The budget requests $2.2 billion in funding for […]

Philadelphia to Make History with Nation’s First Supervised Injection Facility

For decades, Philadelphia held the dubious honor of hosting America’s largest open-air heroin market in a tangle of pockmarked streets on the city’s north side, known as the “Badlands.” On Tuesday, less than two weeks after Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf declared the overdose crisis a public health emergency, city officials, including District Attorney Larry Krasner and […]

What’s Said Is Not What’s Done: How Reagan-Era Drug Warrior Politics Dominate in Progressive Massachusetts — and What We Can Do About It.

It’s de rigueur these days in progressive circles to decry attempts by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “bring back the war on drugs.” A cursory internet search for the phrase “Sessions wants to bring back the war on drugs” returns nearly identical headlines containing a variation on the theme from the Washington Post, New York Magazine, the New Republic, Vice, […]

Dispatches from the Still Raging Drug War

Note: This first appeared in our daily In Justice Today newsletter. To get stories like these in your inbox every day, you can sign up here. Media narratives around drug prosecutions have tended to overstate a turn away from punishment and towards rehabilitation for substance users. While this has been true in some instances, many jurisdictions are continuing […]

Dallas Doobies in Doubt

Texas residents have recently been coming around to the idea that carrying small amounts of pot shouldn’t be a crime. Houston’s current district attorney Kim Ogg announced in this year that she would no longer prosecute cases involving small amounts of marijuana, instead recommending a diversion program that would prevent a criminal record. DA Nico LaHood also […]

New policy in San Antonio could lead to fewer arrests for marijuana possession

After he was elected as Bexar County District Attorney in 2014, Nico LaHood said he would consider implementing cite-and-release for some possession of marijuana charges. Nearly three years later, LaHood proposed a new “catch and release” pilot program that that gives officers discretion to ticket those accused of certain low level offenses, including possession of marijuana […]

Oregon makes drug possession a misdemeanor over prosecutor objections

The state of Oregon has made drug possession a misdemeanor over the objections of multiple district attorneys in the state. The new law went into effect as soon as Governor Kate Brown signed it earlier this month. It makes most instances of first-time simple possession of illegal drugs — including cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines — a misdemeanor rather than a felony. The […]

Safe injection sites save lives, but most U.S. politicians are still running scared

Tens of thousands of people are dying every year. The President recently declared it a national emergency. Yet most politicians in the U.S. are still shying away from an empirically proven way to save lives claimed by the ever-growing opioid epidemic: supervised injection facilities. Sixty-six cities across the world have opened these facilities, which permit intravenous […]

Indiana prosecutors want to incarcerate the opioid crisis away

For years, Indiana has been at the center of the national conversation about opioid addiction, which has ravaged the state since the late 1990s. Between 1999 and 2014, the number of drug overdoses skyrocketed 500 percent. There was also a 60 percent increase in emergency visits for non-fatal overdoses between 2011 and 2015. By and large, the medical community […]

Treatment-first approach to the opioid epidemic? Not for local prosecutors

On Thursday, President Trump announced that his administration will soon declare the opioid crisis a national emergency, following the interim recommendation of his Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis. “We’re going to spend a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money on the opioid crisis,” said Trump. “We are going to […]