Under President Clinton, the government was prosecuting the drug war with a vehemence never before seen in America. The year I planted my poppies, more than a million Americans were arrested for drug crimes. The penalties for many of those crimes had become draconian under Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, which introduced new “three-strikes” sentencing provisions and led to mandatory minimum sentences for many nonviolent drug offenses. By the mid-1990s, a series of Supreme Court decisions in drug cases had handed the government a raft of new powers that have significantly eroded our civil liberties.
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