The Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office says it will no longer file charges against most people arrested or cited solely for possessing small amounts of illegal drugs.
The Mercury News reports prosecutors say they want to keep one- and two-time offenders out of the court system and instead divert them to drug-treatment programs. They say the change will allow them to focus on more serious addiction cases, ones that can become community nuisances or public-safety concerns.
Assistant District Attorney David Angel tells the newspaper its office spends the majority of its time on low-level, public-health cases.A review found that in 2018, close to 15% of the roughly 35,000 cases charged in the county were misdemeanor drug possession. About 90% of those, or 4,500 cases, involved people for whom the drug possession charge was their first or second offense of the year."What we're trying to do is shift that back, so that the public health cases are handled by the public health system, and the public safety cases that we'll have left are handled by the criminal justice system," Angel said.