"I don't like drugs," Bernie Sanders said during his recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.





Of course, Berniewant to decriminalize marijuana. Eleven states have legalized it for recreational use and seen none of the social harms conservatives spent years shouting about. And yet, on the federal level, you can still be prosecuted for it. It's an absurd situation, and it's time to end it. But Sanders was quick to clarify:I don't mean that he personally doesn't do drugs, or enjoy recreational use of elicit substances - even though, as he noted on the podcast, "I’ve smoked marijuana a couple times… it didn’t do much for me." This, of course, does not matter at all. People who don't want to use these substances shouldn't use them.But Bernie was saying something beyond this: he doesn't like thatare using them. He doesn't like what drug addiction does to American communities. He used the example of the opioid crisis, which is particularly salient given what it's doing to poor and rural Americans, and the affect it has had on American life expectancy.These are real problems, and Sanders is right to bring them up. And it's worth highlighting that the deadliest drug addiction plague we've seen in recent years was initially caused, not by street dealers getting their supply from cartels, but by doctors over-prescribing opioids because of the perverse incentives of the medical industry. Big pharma needs to be taken to task for their role in this. We need to examine the incentives in our broken healthcare system. Check and check. Sanders is right in his approaches to both issues.But then, he went on to explain that he would not decriminalize drugs other than marijuana. To Bernie, the issues to emphasize are the disparities in how poor people and people of color experience our criminal justice system. It's the bloated prison population. It's the fact that we're not following science in how marijuana is classified and scheduled by the Federal government. It's still considered to be a drug of equal harmfulness as heroin - despite the latter's substantially more addictive features and marijuana's numerous medicinal benefits."Marijuana is not heroin," he explained, rather bluntly, and as such, it does not deserve to receive the same Federal scheduling as heroin.But when it comes to drugs like heroin, meth and opioids, we're left to infer that Sanders would prefer to keep locking people in cages for using and distributing them. This is because, you see, Sanders "doesn't like" these drugs. He doesn't like what they do to people and communities. So, in response, Sanders, like decades of drug warriors before him, takes the approach that we need to lock up and punishwho use the drugs.It's not that we should give compassion to addicts and their families, and options for rehabilitation to addicts. It's not that we should give liberty to drug users who are not problematic - and the vast majority of drug users aren't. While they may be spending loads of money, wasting it on cocaine or crack or whatever the case may be, even according to the UN statistics for drug policy, upwards of 90% of most users of recreational drugs are still not hurting anyone else. To Sanders, it doesn't occur to him that they shouldn't be wrenched from the free world and put in a cell with a rapist.In Portugal, prior to the decriminalization of all drugs, the chief of the Lisbon Drugs Squad (the closest thing to the equivalent of the head of the DEA), a man named Joao Figueira, was operating under the same assumptions.He describes himself as "very conservative". When the government conducted research into the most effective means of combating their rampant drug problems, and settled on decriminalization and rehabilitation, Figueira was there with the majority of the right-wingers in Portugal: don't do it. "We could have an explosion of consumption... lots of people start consuming, and then we lose control of the situation," he says; which is his description today as his logic at the time.But things have changed since then. Figueira admits now that everything bad that the conservatives claimed would happen failed to every emerge. Everything the scientists and researchers told the government - the drug use overall would actually fall, that criminality surrounding drugs and the black market funding the underworld would be dealt a serious blow, and that public health would improve - all transpired in an almost miraculous fashion within a few decades. It turns out that most of the adverse consequences of drug addiction in our societies are caused not by the drugs themselves - the mere substances - but by law enforcement."The things we were afraid of," Figueira says, "didn't happen."The Portuguese Ministry of Health says that the number of drug addicts has been halved. The British Journal of Criminology confirmed the assessment of a decline but offers the more conservative figure that it is down from 7.6 people per thousand to 6.8; however, they do confirm that intravenous drug use has in fact been halved. The percentage of HIV cases caused by drug use (sharing needles, etc.) has fallen from 52 percent down to 20 percent.Figueira realized he was dead-wrong, and is now a full supporter of the decriminalization policy. He says: "We don't see a drug addict as a [criminal] anymore. He's someone that needs help... They are not marginalized. They are just like a traffic accident. They are not on the other side of the line. They are regular citizens. They have a problem."Now, let's return to the "progressive" Senator Bernie Sanders. Bernie wants to keep drug addicts on the other side of that line. When he says he wants "drugs" to remain illegal, remember what that means. The drugs don't stand trial, get ripped away from their families, and locked in a cage. That happens to drug. That happens to drug. That happens to human beings: human beings who have a problem, be it a sickness, or whatever you want to call it.The truth of the matter, Bernie, is this: it doesn't matter what you like. We shouldn't be locking people up in cages for the substances they choose to put in their own bodies. And this is actually even more true if you loathe the affects that drug addiction and the drug war have had on poor and marginalized communities, because the drug enforcement is the reason for this suffering, not the drugs.And when we dig into Bernie's record, we see that he supported the Clinton-era 'War on Crime', hand-in-hand with the likes of Joe Biden. From an article by The Week:"For instance, Sanders sounded a similar note back in April 1994, decrying America's ballooning prison population and its ties to poverty. But just one week later, he voted to pass the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 , a centerpiece of Bill Clinton's "tough on crime" shtick, which, among other things, mandated a life sentence for anyone convicted of three drug crimes; expanded the list of death penalty crimes; lowered the age at which a juvenile could be tried as an adult to just 13; and appropriated billions to expand the prison system and hire 100,000 new police officers."Does Bernie still believe that life in prison is the correct response for anyone convicted of three drug crimes? The expansion of death penalty crimes also included, in certain circumstances, drug trafficking. That's right: Sanders voted for policy that instantiates execution for drug dealers into our law books. But in all fairness, this legislation is from decades ago. His 2018 vote on the bipartisan bill to address the opioid crisis was a positive move - albeit one that does not reveal him as especially progressive, since virtually all republicans and democrats in the senate voted for it. The bill publicly funds treatment/rehabilitation for opioid addicts, which is a good start.Nevertheless, Sanders' words make it clear that he is otherwise still working on the assumptions of the old drug war: that the way to stop drug use is to make it illegal. This is based on the fantasy that we can stop the supply of drugs coming into the country or being trafficked within the country. The thousand-times disproven idea that Sanders invokes is that we're somehow fighting drug addiction by criminalizing drug addiction.In truth, the reverse happens. We exacerbate the problem through drug prohibition. And this is painfully obvious from even a cursory look at the scientific data, or the history of drug prohibition in America.Joao Figueira, the "very conservative" drug warrior of Portugal, was able to change his views on this issue and ultimately embraced the correct policy position. I can only conclude that Bernie is not familiar with the facts on drug addiction. Or, he doesn't understand it. But how could this be? Bernie it seems, who is touted as a hero of progressivism and warrior for social justice in state and federal lawmaking for over four decades, has still not caught up. So how progressive is he, really?----Quotes from Figueira and information on Portugal's successful decriminalization of drugs can be found in Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari, ppg. 248-253