Rep. Steve Cohen: "The war on drugs has been a terrible mistake"

Congressman Steve Cohen (D-TN) called on the U.S. House floor for an end to the 40-year war on drugs, which Cohen said had spent trillions of dollars to incarcerate millions of people for non-violent crimes.

“Now don’t get the wrong impression; I’m not suggesting that drug abuse and drug addiction is not a great problem that we must deal with,” he said. “But our approach in treating it as a law enforcement and not as a health matter, a health care issue, has led to prison populations increasing, racial disparities of the greatest source in this nation in the arrest process, and a lost generation of people with no education and no job prospects because those arrests haunt them for the rest of their lives.”