55 years for selling pot? Yep. It’s mandatory.

Don’t make a mistake when you’re young with marijuana. You could end up like Weldon Angelos and be sentenced to 55 years in prison because of mandatory federal sentencing – even for first-time, non-violent offenses.

Generation Opportunity, together with the Heritage Foundation, ACLU, and Families Against Mandatory Minimums,is hoping to increase awareness of this issue. A topic that obviously has political odd-couples finding commonsense and common ground.

But as Jeff Scully, Virginia State Director of GenOpp explains in this podcast, there are certainly conservative reasons to support criminal justice reform.

Quoting Republican Congressman Thomas Massie from Kentucky, Scully said that this isn’t only a moral problem, but also a financial problem that costs taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars to keep someone in prison for this significant amount of time.

Scully has been barnstorming college campuses, having already spoken at George Mason, William & Mary, and UVA on the subject and getting a positive response from the students. Often the program expands from being a 45 minute talk to more than two hours, due to the level of engagement and interest by the students – many of them College Republicans. Scully and GenOpp President Evan Feinberg will be at Washington and Lee in Lexington Tuesday evening and are looking to get to Richmond soon.

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