That gloss brushed over the fact that, just a few years before he entered the 2020 presidential race, Biden was still bragging about the incarceration-expanding Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act-or, as he preferred to call it, "The 1994 Biden Crime Bill.".
Two years later, Biden wrote the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which prescribed new mandatory minimums for drug crimes and created the notorious weight-based sentencing distinction that treated crack cocaine as if it were 100 times worse than cocaine powder, even though these are simply two different ways of consuming the same drug.
Two years later, Biden co-sponsored another Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which established the "Drug czar" position he had been pushing for years and created additional mandatory minimums, including a five-year sentence for crack users caught with as little as five grams, even if they were not involved in distribution.
As Biden explained it on the Senate floor in 1991 while holding up a quarter, "We said crack cocaine is such a bad deal that if you find someone with this much of it-a quarter's worth, not in value, but in size-five years in jail." To be clear: Biden was not marveling at the blatant injustice of that punishment but touting his anti-drug bona fides.
Nor did Biden think through the implications of his Reducing Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act, part of a long campaign against "Club drugs." The RAVE Act, which Biden renamed the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act in 2003 after critics complained that he was attacking a specific musical genre and the lifestyle associated with it, amended the so-called crack house statute, a provision of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 that made it a felony, punishable by up to 20 years in prison, large fines, and property forfeiture, to "Manage or control any building, room, or enclosure" and knowingly make it available for illegal drug use.
"Mass incarceration has put hundreds of thousands behind bars for minor offenses," says a Trump campaign video released in May. "Joe Biden wrote those laws." In a June 2 blog post, the campaign slammed Biden as "The chief architect of mass incarceration and the War on Drugs, which targeted Black Americans."
When President George W. Bush reacted to Al Qaeda's attacks by targeting a country that had nothing to do with them, Biden did not just vote to authorize the use of military force against Iraq.
https://reason.com/2020/10/03/the-case-against-biden-joe-bidens-politics-of-panic/
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