Obama’s drug war legacy is underappreciated. But it now hangs in the balance — thanks to Trump.
Updated Jan 19, 2017, 8:19 PM UTC
For decades, the war on drugs has been characterized by “stop and frisk,” militarized raids on people’s homes, and prison sentences that can span decades or lifetimes.
This was all under the encouragement of the president. Richard Nixon declared the war on drugs. Ronald Reagan escalated the war with “tough on crime” mandatory minimum sentences. George H.W. Bush gave his first televised national address on drugs, telling the country that drugs are “the greatest domestic threat facing our nation today” while holding up a bag of seized cocaine. Bill Clinton signed laws that pushed for tougher prison sentences and stripped prison inmates of much of their legal defense rights.
Then came hope and change.
Early in 2016, President Barack Obama began pardoning and otherwise shortening the prison sentences of hundreds of federal inmates. In November, Obama said he would like to treat marijuana “as a public-health issue, the same way we do with cigarettes or alcohol.” And recently, Obama signed a bill last week that will spend $1 billion over two years to combat the growing opioid painkiller and heroin epidemic — all through public health, not criminal justice, programs.
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.
Based on my conversations with White House officials and advocates over the years, and a look at the administration’s actions, the Obama administration’s shift has been deliberate — a fundamental reshaping in how America deals with drugs.
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 and thinking about 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 will be the first president in decades to leave office with a smaller federal prison population than the one he inherited, thanks in part to executive efforts to undo harsh sentences against nonviolent drug offenders. And he has looked the other way as states have legalized marijuana, despite his legal ability to crack down on these states and stop the experiment of legalization before it began.
It’s not as much action as drug policy reformers would like. They argue that Obama could have been far more aggressive with pardons and commutations for prisoners. They would have preferred if he came around on pot much earlier, particularly during his first term. And they would like to see the law enforcement side of the war on drugs actually cut back, not just overtaken in terms of spending by new public health efforts; there are still, after all, hundreds of thousands of arrests for marijuana alone each year.
And of course, there’s the real concern that President-elect Donald Trump will undo much of the Obama administration’s progress on these issues. Trump ran on an explicitly “tough on crime” platform. And he appointed Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, who once said matter-of-factly that “good people don’t smoke marijuana,” to head the US Department of Justice, which oversees the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the major law enforcement arm of the federal drug war.
Still, when you look at the big picture, it’s clear that Obama has done a lot. It’s fair to say he will leave office as the most progressive president on drugs to date. Whether it’s through his handling of the opioid epidemic or marijuana’s legalization at the state level, Obama and those in his administration have taken an approach to drugs that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago.
