The Drug Enforcement Agency ( Dea )

It a ludacris ratio, but they stuck with it and stuck it to a lot of low level users and dealers. There was an even harsher punishment for those who carried 5 grams of crack cocaine or more. A first time offender who was in possession of 5 grams of crack would be given a mandatory 5 years in prison. That means that you would be given the same amount of prison time for having 500 grams of powdered cocaine in your possession. If an individual was caught we 50 grams of crack, it would be an automatic 10 years. There has never been a class of drug in the history of the United States that has been as racially skewed in regards to the number of offenses. According to the United States Sentencing Commission, which I might add came about as a product of the Anti-Drug-Abuse Act, 79% of the 5,669 sentenced crack offenders in 2015 were African American 10% where Hispanic, and the remaining 10% were white. When you contrast that with the 6,103 cases were cocaine was the charge, the numbers are a little more spread out along the playing field: 53% Hispanic, 27% Black, 18% white. Rightfully so, someone finally took care of the injustice that was created back in 1986. In 2010, President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act. What the Act did was it lowered the ratio of crack to cocaine from 100-1 to 18-1. That’s still a very high number for two almost identical drugs that have the same effects, has the same molecular structure, and is just as addictive. Bills are currently being presented in order to lower the sentencing ratio down to

The United States has the world's highest incarceration rate. With five percent of the world's population, our country houses nearly twenty-five percent of the world's reported prisoners. Currently there are approximately two million people in American prisons or jails. Since 1984 the prison population for drug offenders has risen from ten percent to now over thirty percent of the total prison population. Federal prisons were estimated to hold 179,204 sentenced inmates in 2007; 95,446 for drug offenses. State prisons held a total of 1,296,700 inmates in 2005; 253,300 for drug offenses. Sixty percent of the drug offenders in prisons are nonviolent and were purely in prison because of drug offenses (Drug War Facts). The question then arises,

The drug war and racial profiling is a huge cause to mass incarceration. Vanita Gupta from the New York times wrote, “in 2003 I represented dozens of African-American residents in Tulia, Tex., who had been convicted after a botched drug sting. Jason Jerome Williams, a 22-year-old with no prior criminal record, had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for four sales of an eighth of an ounce of cocaine…, Others accepted plea deals to try to avoid such lengthy prison terms.” I do not think that drugs are okay to have, be sold, or to be under the influence of. But I do think that all of these sentences are way to long for these people. These are the sentences’ of those that commit way worse crimes like maybe killing someone or endangering some one else’s’ life.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is best known for its role on protecting the health of the public by making sure that food, medications are safe and effective. Especially when it comes to the pharmaceutical industry, its mission is to regulate pharmaceutical manufacturers, as well as the drug approval process. However, in the recent years, many arguments and controversy regarding drug development and regulation have risen. Drug advertisements make false and misleading claims, products are being put out on the market without any proof of safety, causing many unwanted incidents such as the Avandia incident and Vioxx incident, which could have been prevented in the first place.

Mandatory minimum laws, which set different minimum sentences for crack and powder cocaine possession, are policies that are inflexible, “one-size-fits-all” sentencing laws that undermine the constitutional principle that the punishment should fit the crime and undermine the judicial power to punish an individual in context of the specific circumstances. Similarly, 3-strikes laws also ignores judicial discretion. Truth-in-sentencing policies refer to policies created to have a convict serve the full sentence, regardless of good behavior or other deterrent. These policies are created to only incapacitate people—more specifically minorities—not to rehabilitate them. More people in jail and longer sentences are not helping ensure public safety.

The United States features a prison population that is more than quadruple the highest prison population in Western Europe (Pettit, 2004). In the 1980s, U.S. legislation issued a number of new drug laws with stiffer penalties that ranged from drug possession to drug trafficking. Many of those charged with drug crimes saw longer prison sentences and less judicial leniency when facing trial. The War on Drugs has furthered the boom in prison population even though violent crime has continued to decrease steadily. Many urban areas in the U.S. have a majority black population. With crime tendencies high in these areas, drugs are also prevalent. This means that a greater percentage of those in prison are going to be black because law

Food and drug administration is a department of U.S health and human services. It’s responsibility is to test the safety and efficacy of new drugs entering the market as well as to make sure that these medicines are quickly accessible to people. The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act has been passed in 1938 to ensure that foods other than meat, poultry and fish are clinically hygienic and safe to eat. This act also requires that the food should be labelled according to its content. (FDA.org) Drugs and tobacco are also regulated by FDA and in 1996, FDA strictly regulated the use of tobacco products like nicotine, cigarettes and smokeless tobacco, by children and adolescents because of the increase in diseases prevalence and tobacco addiction. Annually 40000 deaths are attributable to its use and most of them are of premature. Therefore the goal of FDA is to stop the tobacco addiction by minors and prevent the deaths and diseases due to nicotine addiction. (FDA vs Brown, n.d) This essay will cover the food and drug administration’s role in under and over regulating drugs and medicines and how it effects our economy, health care system and patients health and safety.

Most of us would agree that drug abuse and addiction is no respecter of persons. Regardless of age, race, gender, or economic status drug addiction can rear its ugly head in any situation. Like most Americans, I have personally been affected by the pitfalls of drug addiction from relatives and friends. Therefore, I have witnessed firsthand the devastation that it leaves on family members, friends, and the communities, in which they reside. Since its inception in 1986 the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, as caused more harm than good. At the start of this Act, Congress implemented maximum drug quantities initially targeted at “serious” and “major” drug traffickers. Congress concluded that 500 grams of powder cocaine would trigger a five-year mandatory minimum, and five kilograms would trigger a ten-year mandatory minimum. However, for crack cocaine the triggering quantities were significantly less. Only five grams of crack cocaine would prompt five-years and just fifty grams to prompt a ten-year sentence. This massive gap became known as the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity. Soon after several states began to legislate sentencing disparities between powder cocaine and crack cocaine into their criminal codes. The original targets of

Inconsistent punishment currently issued by judges creates an increase in persons sentenced to prison. There is a moral dilemma by incarcerating a person for a non-violent crime based on the type of drug. Crack cocaine holds a much tougher sentencing guideline than powder cocaine. According to Families Against Mandatory Minimums, prior to the enactment of the Fair Sentencing Act, it took one hundred times as much powder cocaine as crack cocaine to receive the same five, ten, or twenty year mandatory minimum prison sentence. After the Fair Sentencing Act, the ratio is

African Americans constitute 12% of the U.S. population, 13% of the drug using population and fully 74% of the people sent to prison for drug possession. Studies have shown that minorities are subject to disparate treatment at arrest, bail, charging, plea bargaining, trial, sentencing, and every other stage of the criminal process. These disparities accumulate so that African Americans are represented in prison at seven times their rate in the general population; rates of crime in African American communities is often high, but not high enough to justify the disparity. The resentment destabilizes communities and demeans the entire nation. (Justice, 2004)

Longer sentences has been a major cause of mass incarceration. Thus, changing how governments respond to all crime, not just drug crime, is critical to reducing the size of prison

The “War on Drugs” established that the impact of incarceration would be used as a weapon to combat the illegal drug problem in this country. Unfortunately, this war against drugs has fallen disproportionately on black Americans. “Blacks constitute 62.6% of all drug offenders admitted to state prisons in 1996, whereas whites constituted 36.7%. The drug offender admissions rate for black men ranges from 60 to an astonishing 1,146 per 100,000 black men. In contrast, the white rate begins at 6 and rises no higher than 139 per 100,000 white men. Drug offenses accounted for nearly two out of five of all black admissions to state prisons (Human Rights Watch, 2000).” The disproportionate rates at which black drug offenders are sent to prison originate in racially disproportionate rates of arrest.

Since the inception of mandatory minimum cocaine laws in 1986 to the advent of the Armstrong case, not a single white offender had been convicted of a crack cocaine offense in federal courts serving Los Angeles and its six surrounding counties. Rather, virtually all white offenders were prosecuted in state court, where they were not subject to that drug’s lengthy mandatory minimum sentences. The impact of the decision to prosecute the black defendants in federal court was significant. In federal court they faced a mandatory minimum sentence of at least 10 years and a maximum of life without parole if convicted of selling more than 50 grams of crack. By contrast, if prosecuted in California state court, the defendants would have received a minimum sentence of three years and a maximum of five years (United States v. Armstrong, 1996).

Since the 1980s drug offenses have increased from nineteen thousand to two hundred sixty five thousand in 2008. For many years now, our jails have been struggling with overcrowding. In 2010, our President Barack Obama, signed the Fair Sentencing Act. The Fair Sentencing Act helps reduce disproportion between the amount of crack cocaine and powder cocaine. The act helps in determining whether a person who is caught with five grams of crack/ powder cocaine, should receive the same sentencing as someone who has one hundred times more than that. According to the National Governor’s Association, forty-six states were faced with a budget deficit. With the implementation of the Fair sentencing Act in place, we can begin to see the reduction in jail overcrowding.

The DEA is structured into different divisions. At the top of the leadership is the Administrator of the DEA who is Chuck Rosenberg. Per the Drug Enforcement Administration (2017), he is the active administrator since 2015. Under the Administrator is the Deputy Administrator. Below the Deputy Administrator is the division of four offices which are the Office of Compliance, Office of Congressional and Public Affairs, Office of Chief Counsel and the Executive Equal Opportunity and Employee Assistance Staff. The DEA is divided into seven division that each have their own superior administrator. The first division is the Human Resources Division and the head of the division is the Assistant Administrator. The second division is the Intelligence