Drug policy reform: a different approach
Taylor Kerns

The United States is home to about four and a half percent to the world’s population, but nearly a quarter of all people in prison.  As of 2014, American prisons exceeded their official total capacity of 2.14 million by more than 80,000. Roughly 20 percent of those in American prisons were sentenced there for drug offenses.

The FBI estimates that in 2014, more than 1.5 million drug-related arrests were made in the United States. About 84 percent of these were for possession. More than 250,000 arrests were made for possession of “heroin or cocaine and their derivatives.”

A 2014 World Health Organization report on HIV recommended national governments decriminalize recreational drug use in favor of treating it as a public health rather than a criminal justice issue.

[more to come]