DIANNE FEINSTEIN IS OUT OF STEP ON THE DRUG WAR

Senator Feinstein Is Out of Step With Californians, Particularly
Younger Voters, While in Lock-Step With the Regressive Drug War Lobby.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, co-chair of the No on 19 campaign, is
appearing with law enforcement officials today to express her
opposition to the landmark marijuana legalization initiative. Her
hostility to Prop. 19 is undoubtedly discouraging to her many
progressive fans in California and across the country.

For those of us working to reverse our nation's disastrously failed
drug policies, it's all-too familiar. California's senior Senator has
a well-known soft spot for costly, punitive approaches to drug
issues, despite ample evidence of their ineffectiveness and unpopularity.

Senator Feinstein has vigorously opposed sentencing reforms that
offer treatment as a cheaper, more effective alternative to
imprisonment for nonviolent drug offenders.

She opposed Proposition 36 (authored by the Drug Policy Alliance),
California's historic treatment instead of incarceration initiative
that was adopted by a whopping 61 percent of voters in 2000. In the
ensuing decade Prop. 36 has diverted nearly 300,000 people into
community-based drug treatment, sharply reduced the number of people
in state prison for simple drug possession, and saved the state over
$2 billion.

However, Dianne Feinstein opposed expanding that reform in 2008,
actually serving as the public face of the campaign to defeat
Proposition 5 (also authored by DPA).

Systematically rejecting the recommendations of expert commissions,
Senator Feinstein has championed policies that resulted in the United
States attaining and maintaining the highest rate of incarceration in
the world.

She was a strong advocate for passage of California's Three Strikes
initiative in 1994, the most punitive version of the mandatory
minimum sentence laws that swept the nation in the mid-1990s. A
majority of California "third strikers" - sentenced to mandatory
sentences of 25 years to life - are nonviolent offenders, often
convicted of drug possession crimes.

Even after Three Strikes catastrophically fueled California's
notorious prison overcrowding crisis, Dianne Feinstein opposed
amending the law in 2004 to require a serious or violent felony to
qualify as a third strike.

Feinstein also championed an unforgiving federal version of Three
Strikes. That anti-crime bill was adopted at the crest of the 1994
mid-term election campaign, as President Clinton and Congressional
Democrats were haplessly determined to outdo Republicans in
tough-on-crime rhetoric and legislation. Like the California law, the
resulting federal provisions included mandatory life sentences for a
wide array of offenses that included many nonviolent drug possession
crimes. Today drug law offenders represent well over half of all
federal prisoners.

To this day, Dianne Feinstein supports sentencing enhancements for
nonviolent drug offenses that have filled America's prisons and
devastated millions of families.

She is currently the author of a bill that would create a new
mandatory minimum sentence for mixing sweeteners into illicit drugs.

And she has declined to co-sponsor Senator Jim Webb's bill
establishing a commission to study our nation's bloated prison system
- - a bill whose co-sponsors already include 37 Democratic Senators,
including California's Barbara Boxer, and 3 Republicans, including
Utah's Orrin Hatch. The companion bill, introduced with bipartisan
support in the House in March, passed unanimously in July.

And finally, Proposition 19 isn't the first marijuana reform to
encounter Senator Feinstein's open hostility.

While she currently claims to support medical marijuana, she of
course vehemently opposed California's original medical marijuana
initiative, Proposition 215. The marijuana criminalization she
continues to defend costs California hundreds of millions of dollars
every year in scarce public safety dollars futilely policing a
massive, unregulated black market.

Marijuana prohibition inflicts criminal sanctions on 61,000 low-level
possession offenders in California every year - triple the number in
1990. These failed prohibition policies are universally race-based in
their selective enforcement, with African Americans and Latinos
disproportionately targeted by law enforcement.

While Dianne Feinstein has spent the last 18 years in Congress
escalating the war on drugs, Americans have turned against that war
and increasingly see regulating marijuana as part of a common sense
exit strategy. As the public increasingly demands reform, her
intransigence grows. Senator Feinstein is out of step with
Californians, particularly younger voters, while in lock-step with
the regressive drug war lobby. It may simply be too late for the No
on 19 campaign figurehead to change her ways.