Category: War on Drugs

Congress Misses Another Chance To Correct Blatantly Unjust Crack Penalties

The legal distinction between the smoked and snorted forms of cocaine never made sense.

As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R‒Ky.) saw it, Garland’s memo usurped congressional authority by shielding crack defendants from mandatory minimum sentences. So instead of asserting that authority by rectifying a blatantly unjust penalty scheme, Congress has once again kicked the can down the road.

https://reason.com/2022/12/21/congress-misses-another-chance-to-correct-blatantly-unjust-crack-penalties/

DEA Seizes Record Amounts of Fentanyl in 2022

The iron law of prohibition states that, all things being equal, as enforcement ramps up, smugglers prefer higher potency forms of a drug for the same reason those who sneak alcohol into a football game prefer hard alcohol in flasks to 12‐​packs of beer. The lethal logic of the iron law of prohibition means that we cannot enforce our way out of the opioid crisis. And if fentanyl smugglers become somehow easy to catch, there’s always carfentanil, which is about 100 times more potent than fentanyl and has already been showing up in America’s drug supply.

https://www.cato.org/blog/dea-seizes-record-amounts-fentanyl-2022