By Rady Ananda
Activist Post

Attorney General Eric Holder today announced an Obama Administration policy change on mandatory sentences as they relate to drugs. The new policy includes the “compassionate release” of some prisoners and expanding “at-risk” programs for teens.

“Prisons are operating at 40% above capacity,” Holder told the audience at the American Bar Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco, which was broadcast on C-SPAN.

“Incarceration rates have increased 800% since 1980,” he added, putting over 200,000 people in federal prisons this year. Half of those inmates are incarcerated for drug-related crimes, he said, costing $80 billion a year.

"The plain and simple truth is that alcohol fuels violent behavior and marijuana does not," said Norm Stamper, Seattle's former Chief of Police, in the forward to Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?"

In the 2013 updated and expanded edition, a team of authors describe the education campaign that preceded Colorado voters legalizing marijuana in 2012. High and Dry, one campaign targeting college campuses steered students away from alcohol. SAFER (Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recreation) was founded by co-author Mason Tvert.

The book details the different intoxicating effects between alcohol and pot, while acknowledging the severe laws for smokers vs. drinkers.We see this in the following graph created for a prior article, which takes a look at US incarceration rates from 1910. That spike beginning in the mid-80s is a direct result of the 1984 Sentencing Reform Act, along with state level mandatory minimum sentencing laws:

Sources: Justice Policy Institute, Bureau of Prisons, and PEW Center on the States

Not only does the US have the highest incarceration rate in the world, but also the highest number of all prisoners worldwide. At 5% of the world’s population, the US imprisons a fourth of the 10 million reported prisoners globally. Of 218 nations surveyed by the International Centre for Prison Studies, the US ranks No. 1, far and away jailing more of its citizens, by numbers and percentages, than China, which ranks 118.

Not to be outdone, the US also incarcerates women at much higher rates than any other nation, and at any other time US history. Female incarceration rates jumped 64% from 1995 to 2006. For a longer view, in 1925, the US jailed one in 100,000 women; by 2006, it jailed one in 746.

Most interesting about Holder’s announcement today is the timing. It followed last night’s airing of the documentary, Weed, an investigative report by TV doctor Sanjay Gupta who pre-empted the broadcast with an apology for his stance on marijuana.

“I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a Schedule 1 substance because of sound scientific proof,” he wrote. Schedule 1 drugs are considered extremely dangerous with no medical value.

But, like medical marijuana advocates have been saying for years, that just ain’t so.

Weed featured the story of six-year-old Charlotte Figi, who has a severe type of epilepsy known as Dravet syndrome. She suffered 300 seizures a week. Modern medicine was unable to help. The family finally pursued medical marijuana, the kind that’s high in CBD, the medicinal cannabinoid, and low in THC, the psychoactive one. She's now down to seven seizures a week, and the results were immediate.

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