Dianne Feinstein Is Out of Step on the Drug War

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.