President Obama will nominate Vanita Gupta, a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union, for the top position in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, the Washington Post reports.
Gupta is currently the director of the ACLU’s Center for Justice. She has voiced strong opinions against mandatory minimum sentencing, particularly involving drug offenses, and has made a progressive name for herself in regards to cannabis reform, calling the War on Drugs “a war on communities of color.”
She wrote in an op-ed for CNN last month that harsh sentencing laws and current drug policies have “devastated families and communities, generated high recidivism rates, drained state budgets from more productive investments, and [have] reinforced generations of poverty and disadvantage that disproportionately fall on communities of color.”
She argues that the U.S. should follow Colorado and Washington’s lead by collecting tax revenue from recreational marijuana sales and investing it “in education, substance abuse treatment, and prevention and other health care.”
Sources:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/02/opinion/vanita-gupta-marijuana-life-sentence/
Photo Credit: DonkeyHotey
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