"Racial Justice Requires Ending the War on Drugs"

The title of this post is the title of this new article authored by Brian Earp, Jonathan Lewis and Carl Hart along with with Bioethicists and Allied Professionals for Drug Policy Reform  in the American Journal of Bioethics. Here is its abstract:

Historically, laws and policies to criminalize drug use or possession were rooted in explicit racism, and they continue to wreak havoc on certain racialized communities.  We are a group of bioethicists, drug experts, legal scholars, criminal justice researchers, sociologists, psychologists, and other allied professionals who have come together in support of a policy proposal that is evidence-based and ethically recommended.  We call for the immediate decriminalization of all so-called recreational drugs and, ultimately, for their timely and appropriate legal regulation.  We also call for criminal convictions for nonviolent offenses pertaining to the use or possession of small quantities of such drugs to be expunged, and for those currently serving time for these offenses to be released.  In effect, we call for an end to the “war on drugs.”