Opioid Addiction

Floor Speech

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Mr. ELLISON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding, and I also want to lend my voice to hers as I stand here before you to say that I was happy to vote for the legislation addressing opioid addiction today; sad that Republicans didn't support Democratic initiatives, but overall happy with the work that has been done on this this week.

I know many people fighting opioid addiction. It is debilitating. It is heartbreaking in the lives that it has ruined. And I think that though the steps we took today were positive, we could have taken more.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to reflect upon an issue that is related to this, but give a little historic perspective because I think that Congress' response to opioid addiction has, I think, in the main, been commendable.

Unfortunately, if it were 20 years ago today, in the mid 1990s, perhaps the response of Congress then to crack cocaine was very different.

The response to crack cocaine was massive incarceration. The effect of the crack cocaine epidemic was massive blanketing of police in certain neighborhoods, front-end loaders in poor neighborhoods.

I hope that what this more humane, more medical-oriented response to drug addiction represents is America learning how to deal with drug addiction because I think a more cynical person, not me, might say that because crack cocaine was associated with people who were African Americans, a more harsh, police-oriented, prison-oriented response was warranted and tolerable; and because opioid is more broad and affects the majority community as well, that a more reasoned response is warranted.

Thinking about people like Kemba Smith, who got 24 years in prison when she was a student at Hampton University. She never touched 1 gram of crack cocaine; had a boyfriend who was a drug dealer. He housed some drugs in her house. She got convicted, ended up getting 24 years in prison.

Thank goodness President Clinton gave her a commutation, but ruined her life.

We now have about 2.4 million people in prison, many of them for nonviolent drug offenses, many who were arrested and given an enormous amount of time in the crack cocaine wars of the 1990s.

I hope that the enlightened approach that we have now, which is not marked with helicopters and front-end loaders and all types of weaponry, literally militarizing Black neighborhoods across the United States back in the 1990s--I am glad that that is not the response we have taken this time. I hope it means we have learned something, but I hope it also means that we go back and ask ourselves if some of the exorbitant sentences that people got, life sentences in some cases, 10 years, 20 years, we revisit these; we look at mandatory minimums for some of these offenders; that we look at how we have exploded massive prison rates all around crack, even though, in my opinion, crack and powder cocaine are basically the difference between ice and water. They are essentially the same chemical.

We incarcerate one much more severely than the other. One is used predominantly by Whites; the other, more Blacks are found in possession of it, and the rates of incarceration are dramatically different.

This Congress corrected a grievous injustice where we punished crack cocaine 100 times more severely than we did powder. We changed that to 18 times more. That is improvement; it is not equality.

But I hope that today, the way we dealt with opioids, which I supported and I voted for--because I do believe that we do need to have more of a medical approach to drug addiction than the militarized, police-oriented, incarceration-oriented measure that we have used in the past--I hope that this new way of dealing with drug addiction is an advance in our understanding rather than a reflection of who is being hurt.

I think that if we really want to demonstrate that it is a reflection of what we have learned, then we have some unfinished business to achieve because there are still a lot of people who are dealing with the vestiges of mass incarceration and the war on crack cocaine.

Let me also just say that I remember being a young criminal defense lawyer in Minnesota, and I remember being in court when a courageous young judge named Pam Alexander, an African American female, found that the difference between powder and crack cocaine sentencing was not warranted by the facts or the evidence; in fact, amounted to an equal protection violation under the Minnesota constitution.

To the credit of the Minnesota State Supreme Court, they upheld her ruling, but Pam Alexander paid a heavy toll for her courageous judicial work because she was nominated to be a Federal district judge. That was blocked by people who wanted to maintain the status quo, and she never got to be a Federal district court judge.

Now, she is still a distinguished journalist, to the pride of us all; but, you know, just showing that some people went to prison for this and others had their careers limited because of their willingness to speak up against these equal protection problems.

So I just hope that today represents advancing our understanding rather than just the different treatment that different people historically have received in our country.

I definitely feel that I was proud to vote for the four measures today and enjoyed the debate and definitely was--my heart was in sync with all of my colleagues when they were talking about some of the very horrific problems that people suffer from opioid addiction. I am right there with them and my heart is right there with them and my mind is right there with them.

But I cannot get it out of my head about how differently we dealt with the crack epidemic. According to the Center for Disease Control, Blacks and Whites use crack about the same rate. And yet, there were whole jurisdictions in this country where there was literally no White person being charged with crack possession, and there were African Americans getting 5 years for a few grams, 10 years for a few more, and their lives absolutely devastated because of it.

I mentioned 2.4 million Americans behind bars. Much of this is driven by the war on drugs. There are 2.7 million children whose parents are behind bars. When your parent goes to prison, it devastates family income.

So I am just going to turn it back over; announce that I am proud of the votes that I took in favor of addressing opioid addiction today; say that I hope that it was because we learned something about the war on drugs; say that we must go, sort of fix some of the overzealousness of the war on crack years in the 1990s; and say that I really hope that our sympathies don't return only in favor of people who look like us, but to all Americans.

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