A committee established by President Donald Trump recently released a report on law enforcement issues that criticizes local efforts to legalize marijuana or decriminalize drugs.
The Presidential Law Enforcement Commission’s 300-page document covers a lot of ground, but focuses on cannabis and drug policies in several sections.
For example, he discusses the need to address issues such as substance misuse and homelessness, but says they must be balanced with “enforcing the law and maintaining public safety”.
The report notes that “locations across the country have decriminalized or reduced sanctions for drug use, as in the case of marijuana, or ‘quality of life’ crimes – actions that are often the result of homelessness – such as urinating in public”.
The panel argued that drug policy reforms “only increase the level of police arrests”, but “do not take into account the reality that police officers must still address community members’ complaints about these individuals, respond to non-criminal results. of untreated substances use problems (for example, overdoses) or interact with large populations of homeless people. “
The commission recommends that “the Department of Justice should examine how local laws and policies that decriminalize or reduce sanctions for drug use or homelessness-related activities impact law enforcement and public safety.”
The commission, which was established by Trump through a 2019 executive order, argued that enacting counterintuitively decriminalization policies “often results in an increase in the number of needy people interacting with law enforcement, while mechanisms to sanction these behaviors and lead people to the treatment programs required by the court are removed ”.
“This can be more costly to the community, including increased and long-term drug use,” says the report, concluding that the Department of Justice and state and local governments must weigh the “impact and side effects that laws and local policies and jurisdictions have on the safety of your community and the effectiveness of your criminal justice system. “
The document also quotes the United States attorney from Vermont saying that decriminalization “takes away a tool from law enforcement, signals that the behavior is OK and will have no consequences, and logically will lead to more undesirable behavior.”
The 18 panel members are primarily experienced in law enforcement. One member is the head of operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration, for example, and another is deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Florida’s attorney general is also a member, as are several local sheriffs.
The commission’s report also counters the reformers’ argument that punitive anti-drug laws mainly contribute to mass incarceration, claiming that nonviolent drug offenders represent a small fraction of the general federal prison population.
That said, he acknowledges that law enforcement alone “cannot remedy the scourge of drug addiction”.
“Law enforcement is part of a government architecture of social welfare and public security systems that work collaboratively to keep communities safe,” says the report. “However, in many communities, law enforcement still has the primary responsibility for managing the social ills that motivate crime – be it mental illness, drug addiction or homelessness.”
“As law enforcement took over public safety and social janitorial functions, finite resources within its agencies were diverted from traditional police work to the domain of the social provider – where law enforcement often lacks resources, experience relevant authority or authority, ”he continues.
The commission held 15 hearings to testify in preparation for the report, and cannabis policy was raised at several of these meetings.
In one of the most interesting exchanges, the sheriff of Orange County, California, testified that the federal government should “defend the removal [marijuana] as a Table I narcotic ”to promote public safety because it could help facilitate the creation of a marijuana compromise test.
That said, he said that products with high THC cause psychosis and expressed frustration with the broader reform movement, saying that California’s effort to reduce the prison population “is being done at the expense of our residents, families [and] kids. “
A California federal prosecutor was asked how he handles the federal-state conflict over cannabis policy and told the panel that his office focuses on “what we consider to be the classic cases of federal marijuana and that it is largely interstate trafficking. of marijuana ”.
Testimony by McGregor Scott, the US attorney for the Eastern District of California, reported a section of the final report on the prosecutor’s discretion.
“A threat to the rule of law and the ability of law enforcement to maintain it has recently come from prosecutors who identify themselves as ‘progressive’ or ‘social reform’, who claim to share the suspicion and cynicism of police authorities that some in their communities have, ”says the report.
“Despite their election to a position to enforce the law, these prosecutors see the very laws they apply as unjust and illegitimate and therefore seek to undermine this system by unilaterally deciding not to enforce certain laws,” says the document. “Contrary to the prosecutor’s standard discretion, in which a prosecutor assesses whether to pursue charges after a case-by-case examination of individual circumstances, non-enforcement policies remove that discretion entirely by prescribing that certain laws will be categorically broken.”
An Obama-era Justice Department memo provided prosecutors with guidance on the type of discretion they should use when it comes to pursuing cannabis cases amid the statewide legalization movement, but this was rescinded by the first attorney general of Trump, Jeff Sessions.
The Trump administration’s approach to marijuana is difficult to define. On the one hand, the president appointed several officials with hostile attitudes towards cannabis reform; on the other hand, there was no federal crackdown on legal marijuana states.
In a sense, the commission’s report reflects this dichotomy. While critical of cannabis legalization and broader drug decriminalization, members have stopped suggesting that the federal government should step up prosecutions in the growing state legal market.
What remains to be seen is how cannabis will be treated by President-elect Joe Biden’s Justice Department.
He favors the legalization of medical marijuana, modest rescheduling, decriminalization, purges for low-level convictions and allowing states to make their own policies without fear of federal intervention. However, he has not yet appointed an attorney general who could fill the guidance gap for federal prosecutors – and his continuing opposition to legalizing adult use is keeping defenders on alert.
Illinois sold more than $ 1 billion in legal marijuana in 2020, new state data show
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