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although African Americans make up the majority of drug arrests, they are not more likely to use drugs or sell them.

ACLU report finding blacks to be 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for possession than whites.

Another study from the Justice Policy Institute found 18- to 29-year old African Americans to be hit with higher bail than both whites and Latinos.

prosecutors pursue mandatory minimum charges against blacks at a rate of 2:1 when compared to whites with similar crimes. The number helps explain why 57 percent of state prison law violators and 77 percent of federal are minorities.

he country has already tried an aggressive enforcement approach to drug crimes — the four-decade-plus war on drugs — and among experts and law enforcement officers , it is almost universally acknowledged as a massive failure in economic and practical terms

Even more concerning, the war on drugs has been disproportionately waged against black and brown people . Escalating the possible sentence for drug crimes to death would just amplify the many injustices already present in a broken system.

He doesn’t recognize that most of our opioid deaths result from drugs that are made in the United States or shipped in from China 

And that self-centered self-assuredness is the slender framework supporting his enthusiasm for adopting the bloodthirsty edicts of a genuine despot and a notoriously repressive quasi-police state

hese policy proposals (such as they are) are terrible ideas considered on their own. But it’s something of an accomplishment to have them combine quite as gruesomely as “more firearms in schools” and “shoot all drug dealers” might — at least Singapore’s tougher gun-control laws prevent the kind of “good guy with a gun” vigilantism that Trump regularly invokes

the government has got to teach children that they’ll die if they take drugs and they’ve got to make drug dealers fear for their lives.”

Laws prohibiting marijuana "are responsible for more than half a million arrests in the United States every year," according to the Drug Policy Alliance, which also supports decriminalization. In a statement to NPR, the group applauded Amazon's announcement as "a huge step forward." "Drug testing has never provided an accurate indication of a person's ability to perform their job," the group said, "and yet this incredibly invasive practice has locked out millions of people who use drugs — both licit and illicit — from the workplace."