Individually, none of these stories may seem related, and it was easy for them to get lost in the train wreck that was the 2016 election. But all of these stories are part of the same overarching story: The Obama administration really has, slowly but surely, worked to reshape how America fights its war on drugs — to treat drugs more as a public health issue than a punitive criminal justice undertaking. [...]
Much of this has been rhetorical. The Obama administration has made it a point to avoid the term “war on drugs” out of concern that it perpetuates the same old way of dealing with drugs. Michael Botticelli, who leads White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) as the “drug czar,” has repeatedly said that “we can’t arrest and incarcerate addiction out of people.” President Obama has echoed the sentiment, suggesting a public health approach makes more sense for drugs.
But there have also been real policy changes attached to the talk. The administration has dramatically increased public health spending for anti-drug efforts, proposing the first drug control budget since President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s that would spend more on treatment and prevention than law enforcement and interdiction programs in the fight against drugs. He has used his clemency powers, particularly for nonviolent drug offenders, more aggressively than any president in decades. And he has looked the other way as states have legalized marijuana, despite a real ability to crack down on these states and stop the experimentation of legalization in its tracks. [...]
“For too long we’ve viewed drug addiction through the lens of criminal justice,” Obama said at a conference in Atlanta earlier this year. “The most important thing to do is reduce demand. And the only way to do that is to provide treatment — to see it as a public health problem and not a criminal problem.”
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