Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg has vowed to not imprison drug dealers and traffickers if he is elected this November.

“What I’ve called for is that incarceration should no longer be the response to drug possession,” Buttigieg said during ABC’s Democrat Debate, when asked about his stance on dealing with the nation’s opioid crisis

“Again, what I’m calling for is that we end the use of incarceration as a response … this does not mean that it would be lawful to produce or distribute those kinds of harmful drugs,” Buttigieg continued.

Breitbart.com reports: Currently, there are nearly 74,000 drug offenders in federal prison — more than 99 percent of which are convicted drug traffickers and drug dealers. Those accused of drug trafficking often plead down to drug possession to secure lesser sentences.

Drug overdoses in 2017 killed an unprecedented 72,287 U.S. residents, nearly three times the number of individuals killed by global terrorism and 10,000 more than the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. Nearly 50,000 of those deadly overdoses were caused by either heroin or fentanyl.