Ending the war on drugs is legitimate policy. The science on psilocybin is serious. The reform direction is real. None of that is the problem. The problem is what happens when prosecutorial discretion operates inside a political ecosystem where a top campaign donor runs a psilocybin business, that donor’s local ally faces a political rival, and that rival ends up with felony charges. Reform does not immunize a system from selective enforcement. It just gives selective enforcement a better narrative.
What the Reform Argument Gets Right
Ann Arbor’s move to make entheogenic substance enforcement a lowest law enforcement priority was not a fringe decision. It was anchored in a growing body of clinical research on psilocybin’s therapeutic applications in treating depression, PTSD, and addiction. The scientific literature is serious, the harm-reduction logic is coherent, and the broader trend toward psychedelic reform reflects a genuine reckoning with the failures of blanket criminalization.
Eli Savit’s stated position, that he is firmly committed to ending the war on drugs, is consistent with a policy direction that has been gaining bipartisan traction. Michigan’s reform trajectory is real. None of that is in dispute here.
The question is not whether the policy is right. The question is who is shaping the enforcement architecture around it, and how that shaping operates when political relationships are in play.
The Donor Problem
Savit is the Washtenaw County Prosecutor currently seeking the Democratic nomination for Michigan Attorney General. His office has prosecutorial authority over cases originating in Washtenaw County, including the Kerry matter. His top individual campaign donor, according to Ann Arbor Today, operates a psilocybin mushroom business in Ann Arbor within the enforcement jurisdiction his office controls.
The donor’s identity has not been publicly disclosed in available reporting. What is documented: the business operates in a legal gray zone that Ann Arbor’s lowest-priority enforcement policy actively shapes, and Savit has publicly staked out a reform posture directly aligned with that business’s operating environment.
That alignment is not, by itself, evidence of wrongdoing. Campaigns receive money from people who benefit from their policy positions. That is how political fundraising works. The issue is not the transaction. The issue is what happens when the donor’s local political relationships intersect with prosecutorial decisions made by the same office.
Reform without guardrails does not eliminate power. It redistributes it quietly. When enforcement becomes discretionary, the difference between who gets charged and who gets deprioritized often tracks with proximity to power, not just conduct.
The Jillian Kerry Prosecution
Jillian Kerry is a political actor in Scio Township. She was charged by Savit’s office with felony computer-related offenses tied to alleged unauthorized access to emails belonging to Supervisor Will Hathaway. All claims in this matter are allegations; the case has not been adjudicated.
The Kerry matter involved shared device access, disputed forensic attribution, and at least one technical review that did not yield definitive findings. Her defense raised concerns about political motivation behind the charges explicitly and on the record. The prosecution proceeded despite that unresolved technical ambiguity.
The underlying complaint originated with Will Hathaway, Scio Township Supervisor. Kerry was a political rival in the local election context from which this dispute emerged. Hathaway operates within the same political ecosystem as Savit’s documented donor network. That proximity does not establish coordination. It does establish a conflict of interest that warranted scrutiny before charges were filed.
The Split That Emerges
When both data points are on the table together, a pattern becomes legible even if no individual decision is indefensible in isolation. The donor operates in a space that Savit’s reform posture actively shields from aggressive enforcement. The political rival of an ally within that same ecosystem received an aggressive felony prosecution on technically ambiguous grounds.
Defenders of the prosecution will note that the Kerry charges were based on a formal complaint and proceeded through standard processes. That may be true. But “it followed the process” is a description of how the machinery worked, not evidence that the machinery was applied without regard to political relationships. Process compliance is the floor of accountability, not the ceiling.
There is no structural firewall between campaign donor relationships, the political ecosystem those donors inhabit, and the prosecutorial decisions that office makes about actors within that same ecosystem. Washtenaw County’s system of accountability relies on the prosecutor’s good faith. Good faith is not an institutional control. It is an absence of one.
Why Reform Language Makes This Harder to See
One of the underappreciated risks of reform framing is that it creates a narrative shield. When a prosecutor positions themselves as fighting the war on drugs from the inside, that positioning tends to crowd out scrutiny of how their discretionary power is actually being deployed. The reform story is good. It is also, in this context, incomplete.
Decriminalization in theory and selective prosecution in practice are not mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in systems where enforcement discretion is broad and political relationships are dense. The policy position does not constrain the prosecution decision. It just makes the prosecution decision harder to question without looking like an opponent of reform.
That is a governance problem, not a policy problem. And it is the kind of governance problem that tends to be invisible until it lands on someone without the political standing to make it visible.
What Accountability Would Actually Look Like
Any case involving a complainant or defendant with a documented financial relationship to the prosecutor’s campaign should trigger mandatory recusal review and disclosure. The current system has no such requirement in Washtenaw County.
Cases originating from complaints tied to actors in the prosecutor’s donor or political ecosystem should be reviewed by an independent office before felony charges proceed. This is a standard prosecutorial ethics principle that is rarely operationalized at the county level.
Jurisdictions that formally adopt lowest-priority enforcement policies should be required to publish aggregate enforcement data showing how prosecutorial discretion is applied across demographic and political categories. Decriminalization without transparency data is not accountability. It is a press release.
The Bottom Line
Ending the war on drugs is the easy argument. The hard work is making sure that the discretion reform creates is not quietly redistributed toward the politically convenient. When the top donor to a prosecutorial candidate operates in the exact enforcement space that candidate’s policy shields, and a political rival of that donor’s local ally receives a felony prosecution on technically disputed grounds, the question is not whether reform is good. The question is whether this particular reform, in this particular political ecosystem, is operating without a thumb on the scale.
That question deserves a direct answer. The record so far does not provide one.
Sources
Rita Williams, Reform, Money, and Selective Prosecution: The Risk Sitting Under Ann Arbor’s Psychedelic Narrative, Clutch Justice (Apr. 15, 2026), https://clutchjustice.com/reform-money-selective-prosecution-savit-kerry/.
Williams, R. (2026, April 15). Reform, money, and selective prosecution: The risk sitting under Ann Arbor’s psychedelic narrative. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/reform-money-selective-prosecution-savit-kerry/
Williams, Rita. “Reform, Money, and Selective Prosecution: The Risk Sitting Under Ann Arbor’s Psychedelic Narrative.” Clutch Justice, 15 Apr. 2026, clutchjustice.com/reform-money-selective-prosecution-savit-kerry/.
Williams, Rita. “Reform, Money, and Selective Prosecution: The Risk Sitting Under Ann Arbor’s Psychedelic Narrative.” Clutch Justice, April 15, 2026. https://clutchjustice.com/reform-money-selective-prosecution-savit-kerry/.
