Pubdate: Fri, 29 Oct 2010
Source: AlterNet (US Web)
Copyright: 2010 Independent Media Institute
Website: http://www.alternet.org/
Author: Stephen Gutwilligt
Note: Stephen Gutwillig is the California state director of the Drug 
Policy Alliance.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Dianne+Feinstein

DIANNE FEINSTEIN IS OUT OF STEP ON THE DRUG WAR

Senator Feinstein Is Out of Step With Californians, Particularly 
Younger Voters, While in Lock-Step With the Regressive Drug War Lobby.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, co-chair of the No on 19 campaign, is 
appearing with law enforcement officials today to express her 
opposition to the landmark marijuana legalization initiative. Her 
hostility to Prop. 19 is undoubtedly discouraging to her many 
progressive fans in California and across the country.

For those of us working to reverse our nation's disastrously failed 
drug policies, it's all-too familiar. California's senior Senator has 
a well-known soft spot for costly, punitive approaches to drug 
issues, despite ample evidence of their ineffectiveness and unpopularity.

Senator Feinstein has vigorously opposed sentencing reforms that 
offer treatment as a cheaper, more effective alternative to 
imprisonment for nonviolent drug offenders.

She opposed Proposition 36 (authored by the Drug Policy Alliance), 
California's historic treatment instead of incarceration initiative 
that was adopted by a whopping 61 percent of voters in 2000. In the 
ensuing decade Prop. 36 has diverted nearly 300,000 people into 
community-based drug treatment, sharply reduced the number of people 
in state prison for simple drug possession, and saved the state over 
$2 billion.

However, Dianne Feinstein opposed expanding that reform in 2008, 
actually serving as the public face of the campaign to defeat 
Proposition 5 (also authored by DPA).

Systematically rejecting the recommendations of expert commissions, 
Senator Feinstein has championed policies that resulted in the United 
States attaining and maintaining the highest rate of incarceration in 
the world.

She was a strong advocate for passage of California's Three Strikes 
initiative in 1994, the most punitive version of the mandatory 
minimum sentence laws that swept the nation in the mid-1990s. A 
majority of California "third strikers" - sentenced to mandatory 
sentences of 25 years to life - are nonviolent offenders, often 
convicted of drug possession crimes.

Even after Three Strikes catastrophically fueled California's 
notorious prison overcrowding crisis, Dianne Feinstein opposed 
amending the law in 2004 to require a serious or violent felony to 
qualify as a third strike.

Feinstein also championed an unforgiving federal version of Three 
Strikes. That anti-crime bill was adopted at the crest of the 1994 
mid-term election campaign, as President Clinton and Congressional 
Democrats were haplessly determined to outdo Republicans in 
tough-on-crime rhetoric and legislation. Like the California law, the 
resulting federal provisions included mandatory life sentences for a 
wide array of offenses that included many nonviolent drug possession 
crimes. Today drug law offenders represent well over half of all 
federal prisoners.

To this day, Dianne Feinstein supports sentencing enhancements for 
nonviolent drug offenses that have filled America's prisons and 
devastated millions of families.

She is currently the author of a bill that would create a new 
mandatory minimum sentence for mixing sweeteners into illicit drugs.

And she has declined to co-sponsor Senator Jim Webb's bill 
establishing a commission to study our nation's bloated prison system 
- - a bill whose co-sponsors already include 37 Democratic Senators, 
including California's Barbara Boxer, and 3 Republicans, including 
Utah's Orrin Hatch. The companion bill, introduced with bipartisan 
support in the House in March, passed unanimously in July.

And finally, Proposition 19 isn't the first marijuana reform to 
encounter Senator Feinstein's open hostility.

While she currently claims to support medical marijuana, she of 
course vehemently opposed California's original medical marijuana 
initiative, Proposition 215. The marijuana criminalization she 
continues to defend costs California hundreds of millions of dollars 
every year in scarce public safety dollars futilely policing a 
massive, unregulated black market.

Marijuana prohibition inflicts criminal sanctions on 61,000 low-level 
possession offenders in California every year - triple the number in 
1990. These failed prohibition policies are universally race-based in 
their selective enforcement, with African Americans and Latinos 
disproportionately targeted by law enforcement.

While Dianne Feinstein has spent the last 18 years in Congress 
escalating the war on drugs, Americans have turned against that war 
and increasingly see regulating marijuana as part of a common sense 
exit strategy. As the public increasingly demands reform, her 
intransigence grows. Senator Feinstein is out of step with 
Californians, particularly younger voters, while in lock-step with 
the regressive drug war lobby. It may simply be too late for the No 
on 19 campaign figurehead to change her ways.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake