Summary: This month, the White House leaked that Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA) was in the final stages of vetting to become the nation’s Drug Czar. Marino’s record as a prosecutor and legislator is in line with the punitive approach Donald Trump has promised to tackling illicit drugs. Sanho Tree is the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he has spent nearly two decades envisioning alternatives to the "war on drugs." He explains why a border wall won’t stop drugs from coming into the country and why our most pressing drug problem—the opioid overdose crisis—was caused by the very prohibition-oriented drug policies that Trump favors.
