As countless poor minorities were locked up in Joe Biden’s drug war — something the presidential candidate now regrets — his own children eluded punishment for similar drug offenses.
Criminal justice reform advocates say that being rich and white helped Biden’s kids avoid jail time for the same kind of drug offenses that Biden advocated stiff punishments for throughout his 36 years in the Senate. Biden’s daughter Ashley was never charged for marijuana possession, and his son Hunter eluded jail time for cocaine use that got him kicked out of the Navy.
It’s a double-standard that looks particularly bad for Biden, who has come under fire by progressives for his prominent role in promoting the war on drugs. Biden has been on an apology tour for his past drug policy among other issues.
Joe’s kids evaded jail
Criminal justice advocates have long criticized tough-on-crime policies like Biden’s, saying they disproportionately affect minorities. According to activists, the policies that Biden helped push in the 1980s and 1990s, including mandatory minimum sentences for crack possession, punished blacks at disparate rates.
There might be proof of the theory in Biden’s own family, according to activists. Biden’s daughter Ashley, now 37, was arrested in 1999 for marijuana possession while attending college in New Orleans, but the District Attorney declined to prosecute her. Her father was was by then a well-established senator. Ten years later, police declined to look into a video of Ashley Biden allegedly snorting cocaine that a “friend” attempted to sell to the New York Post.
Biden’s son Hunter, now 49, was discharged from the Navy Reserves one month after joining in 2012. Hunter had received a waiver upon joining for a “drug-related incident as a young man,” but he was out when a random drug test came up positive for cocaine.
Apparently, Hunter’s lifestyle of vice and excess continued. When Hunter got divorced in 2017, his then-wife Kathleen said in the divorce filings that he spent “extravagantly” on prostitutes, drugs and women with whom he was having affairs. Incidentally, it was revealed that year that Hunter was having an affair with the wife of his late brother Beau, who died from brain cancer; Hunter separated from Kathleen five months after Beau’s death in 2015.
The Bidens never went to jail for their drug use. Drug reform advocates say that the privileged treatment afforded to Biden’s children is an example of the kind of disparities that Biden’s drug policies helped promote in drug enforcement and sentencing.
“Whatever kind of privilege Biden’s children experience in those interactions, they certainly are representative of what happens every day in America,” said Betty Aldworth, executive director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy. “The discretion allowed to prosecutors and the police when deciding who to charge and who not to charge is far too often based on factors like race and economic power.”
A change of heart, or pandering?
In recent months, Joe Biden has apologized for his leading role in crafting tough-on-crime drug policy in the 1980s and 1990s when he was a Delaware senator. The former vice president did not play a supporting role: he was a leading actor in the drug war, helping to craft President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime law, which established mandatory life sentences for repeat offenders and supplied $10 billion in funding for prisons. The drug czar under President George H.W. Bush told the Washington Examiner that Biden’s only complaint about drug policy under the administration was that it “wasn’t tough enough.”
Critics say that policies Biden helped promote, like tougher sentencing for crack cocaine than powder, led to ballooning incarceration rates for blacks. Biden has since sought to make amends for his role in pushing that policy, which he recently called a “big mistake” in his career.
“We thought, we were told by experts, that crack, you never go back; it was somehow fundamentally different. It’s not different,” Biden said in January.
But not all drug reform advocates are convinced that Biden’s apology is good enough, or even sincere, with advocates saying he must take action to right the wrong of his role in the drug war. Michael Collins, national director for Drug Policy Action, said that Biden is just pandering to keep up with a new generation of Democrats that is keen on criminal justice reform.
“He’s far and away the worst candidate in the field on drug policy. You could take the worst positions of all the candidates put together and they don’t even come close. He now has to atone for the sins of the past, but I don’t think it’s genuine. I think it’s opportunistic.”
The nation’s leading pro-marijuana group said that Biden has the worst record of any candidate on the issue. Biden’s anti-marijuana stance is strikingly out of step with his party: nearly all Democratic candidates support legalizing marijuana, with the notable exception of John Hickenlooper. Hickenlooper is ironically the former governor of Colorado, an early adopter of legalized marijuana and arguably something of a case study in relaxing marijuana policy.
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