The war on drugs did not officially take off until the 1980s with president Ronald Reagan. He coined the term “war on drugs”, created the Drug Enforcement Agency, and enacted a court procedure that the country is still feeling the effects of to this day: mandatory minimum sentencing. Mandatory minimum sentencing is a procedure in which a judge must sentence a citizen convicted to a minimum amount of years in prison for a crime regardless of circumstance. Because of this, the amount of prisoners in federal prison has skyrocketed from “only about 25,000” inmates in the 80s to “more than 215,000” as of 2014 (Miles). As a direct result of minimum sentencing, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, at least 50% of those incarcerated were convicted on non-violent drug charges. Of those 50%, 27% were convicted for possession of marijuana. This did not stop or discourage drug dealers. What this did was force prisons to begin placing “two or three bunks in a cell, and converting television rooms and open bays into sleeping quarters” (Miles). What this did was waste time and tax dollars to incarcerate non-violent marijuana dealers. What hat this did was send people like Weldon Angelos to jail on a 55 year sentence for just three marijuana sales. A twenty four year old Weldon was sentenced to jail in 2002 after being caught by an undercover cop. His three drug sales were tried as their own separate offences causing the 55 years in prison. Paul Cassell, the judge who made the decision admitted that “that wasn’t the right thing to do” (ABC). It costs roughly $31,000 to keep someone in jail for a year, so why are we spending so much of our money to keep those on marijuana charges locked up for a drug that’s only hard evidence against it is possible complications with short term memory? It is not worth the money to keep these people in prison. If legalization were to happen at the federal level we…
