Various federal, state and local perspectives on the latest fronts in the latest battles of the never-ending drug war

As noted in this prior post, the new Drug Enforcement and Policy Center (DEPC) at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law has a lot of programming and resources already assembled on the interesting and intricate drug sentencing and prison reform initiative headed for the November 2018 ballot here in Ohio called the "Neighborhood Safety, Drug Treatment and Rehabilitation Amendment" or just Issue 1.  In particular today, Thursday, September 13 at 12noon, starts a series five public panels about Issue 1 under the title Ballot Insights (and DEPC has also created a Resources Page for Issue 1 and Commentary Page on Issue 1).  I find Issue 1 fascinating because the players involved and perspectives shared on drug enforcement and drug policy amidst a state-wide direct democracy campaign is already proving remarkable (e.g., Ohio judges have been very vocal so far fiercely opposing Issue 1's drug sentencing reforms). 

Meanwhile, this week also brought an interesting local perspective (mostly from Ohio) on another front of the drug war in the form of this very lengthy piece by Jack Shuler in The New Republic titled "Overdose and Punishment." The sub title of the piece highlights its themes: "When Chad Baker died from a lethal combination of cocaine and heroin, prosecutors charged Tommy Kosto, his friend and fellow drug user, with killing him — a tactic from the Reagan-era war on drugs that is gaining popularity around the country and making today's opioid crisis even worse."

Providing yet another perspective on these matters is Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who yesterday delivered this speech to the National Narcotics Officers' Association’s Coalition Drug Enforcement Forum.  Those who regularly read the AG's speeches will find a lot in this latest speech familiar, but I still though it useful to reprint some of his discussion of the drug war "surge" now on-going at the federal level:

[I]n the districts where drug deaths are the highest, we are now vigorously prosecuting synthetic opioid trafficking cases, even when the amount is small. It’s called Operation Synthetic Opioid Surge — or S.O.S.

We are in a desperate fight to curtail the availability and spread of this killer drug. Synthetic opioids are so strong that there is no such thing as a small case. Three milligrams of fentanyl can be fatal. That’s equivalent to a pinch of salt. Depending on the purity, you could fit more than 1,000 fatal doses of fentanyl in a teaspoon.

I want to be clear about this: we are not focusing on users, but on those supplying them with deadly drugs.

In Manatee County, Florida, in partnership with the Sheriff, we tried this strategy and it worked. This past January, they had half the number of overdose deaths as the previous January. The Manatee County Sheriff’s Office went from responding to 11 overdose calls a day to an average of one a day. Those are promising results. We want to replicate those results in the places that have been hardest hit.

And so I have also sent 10 more prosecutors to help implement this strategy in ten districts where drug deaths are especially high. And that is in addition to the 12 prosecutors I sent to prosecute opioid fraud in drug “hot spot districts.” To help them do that, I have begun a new data analytics program at the Department called the Opioid Fraud and Abuse Detection Unit to use data to find opioid-related health care fraud....

I have also sent more than 300 new federal prosecutors to our U.S. Attorneys offices across America. This is the largest surge in prosecutors in decades. You can be sure drugs, gangs, and related violence will be a priority for them.