NEW YORK — Gov. David A. Paterson (D) and legislative leaders on Friday announced an agreement to roll back the state’s strict, 36-year-old drug laws, including eliminating tough mandatory minimum sentences for first-time, nonviolent drug offenders. The ‘Rockefeller Drug Laws,’ named after former governor Nelson Rockefeller (R), are among the strictest in the country and for critics have become a symbol of the failure of the ‘war on drugs,’ which locked up large numbers of nonviolent drug offenders while having little apparent effect on drug use. The agreement, announced in the state Capitol, follows a national shift away from criminal penalties to public health and treatment in America’s decades-old fight against illegal drug use. ‘There’s a broader trend picking up steam around the country to roll back the drug war,’ said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, an advocacy group for alternative drug laws. Mandatory sentences, that led to burgeoning prison populations and a spurt of building of new prisons, he said, ‘happened as a result of the drug war hysteria.’ The shift began in the late 1990s as more than a dozen states legalized marijuana for medical purposes, and California voters in […]