It has gone largely, if not completely, unremarked in all the verbiage spun out by the 24-hour news cycle in the US media that the law under which the president’s son, Hunter Biden was convicted on three felony counts, was something pushed by his own dad, Joe Biden as part of his effort to “lock up drug users” for lengthy terms in 1994.
It’s no secret that Papa Biden, as a Senator and chair of the Senate Judicial Committee, teamed up with President Bill Clinton in a deliberate strategy of passing a get-tough-on-crime bill, undermining habeas corpus, making the death penalty tougher to appeal, and contriving to pile on years of jail time when offenses could be linked to one’s drug use in order to lock up low-level drug users and other perps — mostly nonwhite — for serious time behind bars.. One such handy add-on was a law making it a crime to buy a gun while addicted to a Class A drug (but, of course, not while blitzed on alcohol).
In Hunter Biden’s case, his addiction to crack cocaine in and of itself would not have resulted in a felony conviction. If he had been arrested or been proven to have under 10 grams of crack cocaine, he would have, as a first offender, been put in a diversion program to undergo treatment and avoid jail. But because of a “pile-on” charge of buying a gun while lying on ther federal form required for such purchases, saying he was not a cocaine addict when he was, in fact, one, the case against him has raised to a Class A felony with a maximum 10-year sentence, and because the prosecutor added two related felony charges carrying a 10 and a five year sentence, he faces at least the potential of 25 years in jail (thanks to a US judicial option, frequently used these days, of making sentences run consecutively instead of concurrently).
The idea behind the Biden-Clinton Drug laws of 1994 was decidedly not to help addicts go straight or even to help reduce gun violence (there was no violence........