By now, anyone who is awake is aware that the country is experiencing a lethal opioid crisis. Opioid overdose deaths are at record highs, President Trump has declared a national public health emergency, and Congress is considering an ever-growing number of bills aimed at addressing the crisis.
Someone needs to tell the DEA and the Justice Department. While their public policy pronouncements identify opioids as a key concern, a look at who is actually being prosecuted for federal drug offenses shows that heroin and prescription opioid cases account for only a small fraction of all federal drug cases.
Most tellingly, at a time when more than 60 million Americans enjoy legal marijuana in their home states and when opinion polls show strong and increasing majorities in favor of legalization nationwide, drug agents and federal prosecutors are still devoting more resources to marijuana than to heroin.
And it's not just marijuana. The feds also pursued more cases against methamphetamine offenders and cocaine offenders than they did against heroin dealers, even though the number of heroin and prescription opioid users far outnumbers either the meth or the cocaine using populations and even though meth and cocaine are far less implicated in the overdose crisis than heroin and prescription opioids.
Rhetoric is one thing; what actually happens on the ground is another. And as these 2016 statistics from United States Sentencing Commission demonstrate, heroin and prescription opioids have not been a high priority for either the DEA agents who bring cases or the US Attorneys' offices that prosecute them.
According to the data, only 14.2% of federal drug prosecutions went after heroin. That's a 29% increase over 2012, but still only a small percentage of all drug cases. An additional 2.8% of cases involved oxycodone, but that figure has been declining for the past several years and is largely a remnant of pill mill prosecutions from early in this decade. Many of the oxycodone cases came from the Eastern District of Kentucky, one of the epicenters of the pill mill phenomenon.
Marijuana cases, on the other hand, made up 17.6% of all federal drug prosecutions last year—more than the heroin and oxycodone cases combined. And remember, this was last year, when the Obama administration was in power. While it's too early for 2017 statistics, it's probably safe to assume that a Justice Department led by marijuana foe Jeff Sessions is not going to oversee a decrease in pot cases.
But what the feds really have their eyes on is meth and cocaine. Meth accounted for a full third (33.6%) of all federal drug prosecutions, while powder and crack cocaine cases accounted for another 27.9%. The numbers don't lie: Federal drug enforcement efforts emphasize meth and coke, and then marijuana, over heroin and prescription opioids.
Anti-prohibitionists will argue that there should be no drug prosecutions; that drug prohibition only exacerbates the problems related to drug use, and that's a fair point. But we live in a prohibition regime, and the priorities of DEA agents and US attorneys in that regime are fair game. That the feds make marijuana a higher prosecutorial priority than heroin is just absurd.
Related Stories
- Opioid Epidemic Shares Chilling Similarities With Past Drug Crises
- Here Is Why Congress Believes Marijuana Is The Same As Heroin And Meth
- Could Cigarettes and Booze Be the Real "Gateway Drugs"?
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News Today: The Feds Think Pot Is a Greater Threat Than Opioids
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