But the project has recently adopted a legal strategy confronting the most egregious abuses through court action. Between The Lines' Melinda Tuhus spoke with staff attorney Graham Boyd about his group's work and the racial disparities he sees as inherent in the drug war. Most people agree that drug abuse is a bad thing, it's a dangerous thing, there's no doubt about that. At the same time, though, the policies that we've developed to deal with drugs have ended up being, in many cases, as harmful, maybe even more harmful than the drugs themselves. We're incarcerating a record number of people and we've focused primarily on people of color.
Drug use continues to go up, the drug prices continue to go down.
And it's really a time to ask if there isn't a better way of getting at the problems we say we're trying to solve. Fifteen years ago, the number of people in prison had been relatively steady for quite a long time. And it was about that time that the War on Drugs really started heating up. Since then, the overall prison population has doubled, and then doubled again and again to the point that as of this month, we actually have two million people behind bars in the U.S. and the increase has been almost entirely due to drug arrests. The number of people arrested for murder, for violent crimes, all that stays relatively the same.