Sheila Jackson Lee: “It has been refreshing and important to listen to the many Members from all over the country discussing this important…”

“It has been refreshing and important to listen to the many Members from all over the country discussing this important initiative and, more proudly, it is from the Judiciary Committee, which is the holder of the laws and the Constitution of this land. We are here indicating an admittance and a recognition that addiction, and opioids, and all kinds of addictions are not necessarily a crime, and that we do not come to this floor, in this bill, with mandatory minimums. So I want to follow up on some statements that I made on the floor yesterday and also in the Rules Committee concerning the contrast in the way we are dealing with the opioid crisis and the way we addressed crack cocaine in the 1980s. Many of those individuals from neighborhoods like mine, many of them still are incarcerated. And at that time, we--I was not here--Congress took action that we are still trying to rectify. At one point, more than 80 percent of the defendants sentenced for crack cocaine offenses were African Americans, despite the fact that more than 66 percent of crack users were either White or Hispanic. As we work on other legislation to address the enforcement and sentencing disparities related to crack issues, we must reexamine our approach to that and other drug issues. I think we are on the right track. I think we are being fair. This week, the House has been engaged in a comprehensive approach to addressing a serious public health crisis involving heroin and other opioids.…”