“There’s always the hope that states function as laboratories of democracy, and when one state does something that makes sense and seems to work, that other states will adopt it,” says Davis. “Arrests went way down, overdoses didn’t change: To me, that’s an improvement over the previously existing system.”
It’s almost as though the entire war on drugs was used to give police an excuse to selectively enforce drug laws against minorities whose communities Republicans wanted to disrupt, leading to the overincarceration of demographics Republicans don’t want voting.