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South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg released a complete program on Friday that calls for “decriminalizing all drug possession” in his initially presidential term as a indicates to combat the opioid epidemic and treat addiction as a public overall health, rather than criminal justice, situation.

Decriminalization is just 1 action the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate mentioned he’d pursue in order to reform the country’s mental overall health care method and bolster substance abuse therapy. His program also involves proposals to lower sentences for drug offenses other than possession, boost access to the opioid overdose reversal drug naloxone and make it less complicated to implement syringe exchange applications.

America’s addiction and mental overall health care crisis has been creating for decades—due to decades of neglect by political leaders in Washington. Nowadays, I’m proposing a new method that tackles this crisis with the urgency and care it deserves. pic.twitter.com/U8F9DXJPC2 — Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) August 23, 2019

Buttigieg’s “Healing and Belonging in America” program emphasizes the have to have to divert men and women suffering from addiction away from prisons and into therapy. He mentioned he’d achieve that by expanding diversionary applications and proof-primarily based education “for drug courts, mental overall health courts, and other options to incarceration for justice-involved persons.”

The target of decriminalization and diversion is to lower “the quantity of men and women incarcerated due to mental illness or substance use by 75 % in the initially term.”

Our nation is in the midst of a mental overall health and addiction crisis, worsened by decades of stigma and political neglect. I’ll bring a new method, rooted in commitment and neighborhood, to tackle this crisis with the urgency it deserves. https://t.co/spBoh5KH4X — Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) August 23, 2019

Below his program, sentencing reform for drug offenses other than possession would be applied retroactively and coupled with expungements for previous convictions. Buttigieg pointed to investigation demonstrating that “incarceration for drug offenses has no impact on drug misuse, drug arrests, or overdose deaths” and as an alternative “actually increases the price of overdose deaths.”

“We can not incarcerate ourselves out of this public overall health dilemma.”

“To make certain that men and women with a mental illness or substance use disorder can heal, we will decriminalize these situations,” the proposal states. “When somebody is undergoing a crisis or is caught employing a drug, they must be treated by a overall health experienced rather than punished in a jail cell.”

“All presidential candidates must join Pete Buttigieg in recognizing that the criminalization of men and women for their drug use is incorrect and basically negative policy,” Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, executive director of the Drug Policy Action, mentioned in a press release. “Possession of drugs for individual use is the single most arrested offense in the United States, eclipsing arrest prices for any other offense. With overdose numbers skyrocketing and whole communities, disproportionately black or brown, suffering from criminalization, it is time for policymakers to shift gears. Taking an proof-primarily based, overall health-centered method to address this crisis is not only accurate leadership – it is popular sense.”

The mayor also created harm reduction policies a crucial element of his technique. He mentioned take-house naloxone applications would be expanded to all 50 states by 2024 and that harm reduction solutions would be expanded “to lower overdose deaths and the spread of infectious ailments associated to needle sharing.”

The program would make naloxone “broadly out there in order to reverse overdoses” and get rid of “legislative and regulatory restrictions on the use of federal funds for syringe service applications.”

Buttigieg mentioned the federal government must offer funding for state and nearby overall health departments to obtain the medication, make certain that it is “available in public spaces and workplaces” related to initially help children and encourage “co-prescribing of naloxone with opioids, either by person physicians or direct dispensing by pharmacists.”

Current federal law tends to make it tricky to establish syringe exchange applications, in component for the reason that federal funds cannot be applied to invest in needles. The restrictions “hamper state and nearby responses, each for the reason that they limit sources and for the reason that they convey a damaging message about the worth of these applications, in spite of overwhelming scientific proof that they can avoid transmission of HIV and hepatitis.”

In addition to lifting these barriers, the candidate mentioned the Centers for Illness Manage and Prevention “would also perform with states to get rid of any criminal liability for these participating in” syringe exchange applications.

“Harm reduction applications are a essential component of any helpful response to the opioid and injection drug use crisis. They reduce the damaging influence of drug use without the need of encouraging it, although decreasing other side effects of drug use. In distinct, this indicates access to syringe service applications for men and women who inject drugs, that hyperlink them to therapy, and offers access to sterile syringes. These applications aid avoid transmission of HIV, viral hepatitis, and other infectious ailments connected with needle sharing, and lower overdoses by deploying medication such as naloxone that aid reverse the effects of opioids.”

1 harm reduction policy that didn’t make the reduce in Buttigieg’s program is protected injection internet sites, exactly where men and women could use illicit drugs beneath the supervision of healthcare experts who could reverse overdoses and propose therapy selections. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who are also operating for the Democratic nomination, each proposed legalizing such facilities as component of criminal justice reform plans they released this month.

“Decades of failed mental overall health and addiction policy, coupled with mass incarceration that criminalized mental illness and drug use, have left us with a mental overall health and addiction care method so broken that these days there are a lot more men and women with really serious mental illness in prisons than in therapy facilities,” Buttigieg mentioned.

The candidate also created ending incarceration for drug possession—as properly as legalizing marijuana—central principles of his previously released criminal justice reform program, which he released final month.

But although the prior program did not explicitly describe the move as “decriminalizing” drugs, even even though advocates frequently use that word to refer to policies that get rid of the threat of getting imprisoned for possession, the new document does use that terminology—signaling a shift in clarity as Buttigieg continues to create his campaign messaging.

In other situations, he borrowed language from his criminal justice reform program, especially as it issues how criminalizing drug use can boost prices of overdose, for his mental overall health proposal.

“Despite equal prices of use, Black Americans are practically 4 instances as probably to be arrested for employing marijuana,” the criminal justice program states. “Research shows that incarceration for drug offenses has no impact on drug misuse, drug arrests, or overdose deaths. In reality, some research show that incarceration in fact increases the price of overdose deaths.”

Buttigieg described that, as with drug offenses, black men and women are also a lot more probably to die from overdoses. And that is due to “the present broken method that criminalizes mental illness and addiction” that was “built for the duration of the crack epidemic of the 1980s.”

Elizabeth Warren’s Criminal Justice Program Includes Legalizing Marijuana And Protected Injection Web sites

This story was updated to include things like comment from the Drug Policy Action.

Photo courtesy of Flickr/Gage Skidmore.