How YOU Advanced Drug Policy Reform in 2024:

Criminalization is the foundation of the drug war. Large sums of money are spent on punishment. And there are few resources for services. The result: drug possession is the most arrested offense in the United States, while overdose is the leading cause of accidental death. 

That’s why we’ve fought to expand access to health and harm reduction services, and reduce or eliminate criminal penalties for drugs, by:

• Passing legislation to establish overdose prevention centers in Vermont – and building such a strong coalition that the legislature overrode the governor’s veto!
• Enacting legislation in California to decriminalize and expand community-based drug checking services. These tools detect the presence of fentanyl and xylazine to prevent overdoses and save lives.
• Persuading Congress to block new mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug offenses.
• Preventing efforts in Oregon to fully repeal Measure 110. We protected hundreds of millions of dollars for health and harm reduction services.

The movement for marijuana legalization has grown exponentially. But in 2024 there still were more than 200,000 arrests. And there is still a lot of work to be done to repair the harms caused by punishment and prohibition.

DPA continues to lead the marijuana reform movement centered on community reinvestment, racial equity, and social justice, by:

• Forcing the DEA, after many years of pressure, to propose downgrading marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III in the federal list of controlled substances.

• Generating more than 10,000 public comments demanding legalization from experts, activists, and other concerned people, ahead of the public hearing to determine scheduling.

• Supporting local campaigns to decriminalize marijuana, including in Dallas, one of the largest cities in the United States.

The drug war has crept into many aspects of our lives well beyond the criminal legal system. Surveillance, forced drug testing, mandatory reporting, and zero tolerance policies separate families, make people homeless, and fuel intergenerational poverty. 

DPA has moved to eliminate these civil punishments that cause so much harm, by:

• Co-producing a report with Human Rights Watch, “Disrupt and Vilify: The War on Immigrants Inside the U.S. War on Drugs.” The report counters the misinformation and hateful rhetoric about immigrants and drugs.

• Influencing the Governor of New York to propose stopping non-consensual drug testing of people who are pregnant, new parents, and their infants. This testing causes routine family separations.

• Providing technical assistance to allies working on informed consent in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, and North Carolina.

Drug policy reform has been under attack for the past few years. It’s part of a larger effort to undermine racial justice and other related issue areas like criminal legal reform. After more than a decade of rapid progress, we have been marching uphill.  

We continued to seed the next generation of drug policy reforms, by:

• Convening the biennial International Drug Policy Reform Conference, hosting more than 1,500 drug policy reformers in Phoenix to strategize, network, and learn from each other.

• Analyzing how we can best work to prevent U.S. foreign policy from exporting the drug war globally.

• Initiating research into alternatives to commercialization in marijuana markets and the developing principles that can apply to future markets for psychedelics.