Story highlights Mike Riggs: We're jailing people for growing and selling marijuana when many people can grow and sell it legally

He says one-size-fits-all mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses are arbitrary, harsh, insanely expensive

Mike Riggs is the communications director for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, and a former journalist. The CNN Original Series "High Profits" airs Sunday nights at 10 p.m. ET/PT on CNN. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

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Since 2012, when voters in Colorado and Washington approved the tax and sale of recreational marijuana, the cognitive dissonance of America's drug penalties has become even more absurd.

Where we once incarcerated people for growing and selling "just a plant," we're now incarcerating people for growing and selling "just a plant" that tens of millions of people can grow and sell legally.

Mike Riggs

Marijuana is legal only in certain states, and illegal under federal law. Still, it's worth asking what Congress would do with the thousands of pot offenders sent to federal prison each year if we repealed, or even just reformed, federal pot laws.

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In 2010, Congress voted to change federal penalties for crack cocaine with the Fair Sentencing Act. Prior to the law's passage, 5 grams of crack cocaine triggered the same mandatory minimum sentence as 500 grams of powder cocaine. Congress reduced that disparity, from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1, which significantly reduced crack cocaine sentences. But Congress did nothing to change the sentences of the more than 8,000 federal crack prisoners who were locked up when the bill was signed into law.

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