Presidential Politics: Ralph Nader Says Free the Dopers, Jail the Corporate Crooks

from Drug War Chronicle, Issue #547, 8/15/08

At a press conference last Friday, independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader
called for emptying prisons of nonviolent drug offenders and filling them with
corporate criminals. Nader's call came as he unveiled a 12-point program aimed at
reining in the power of corporations.

"Nonviolent drug offenses are being over prosecuted and corporate crime is being
under prosecuted. The Justice Department must begin to reverse course, crank up
the crackdown on corporate crime, and end the cruel and inhumane war on
nonviolent drug possession," the perennial candidate said.

"The criminal justice system is broken -- so badly that one hardly knows where to
begin describing the breakdown," Nader said. "Let's start with the war on drugs,
since commentators across the political spectrum recognize its lunacy. We pour
almost endless resources -- roughly $50 billion every year -- into catching, trying, and
incarcerating people who primarily harm themselves. This insane war on drugs
damages communities and drains crucial resources from the police, courts, and
prisons. These resources could be better used to combat serious street and corporate
crime that directly violates the public's liberty, health, safety, trust, and financial well-
being. As with alcoholics and nicotine addicts, the approach to drug addicts should
be rehabilitation, not incarceration," he argued.

"The current drug policy has consumed tens of billions of dollars and wrecked
countless lives," Nader continued. "The costs of this policy include the increasing
breakdown of families and neighborhoods, endangerment of children, widespread
violation of civil liberties, escalating rates of incarceration, political corruption, and the
imposition of United States policy abroad. In practice, the drug war disproportionately
targets people
of color and people who are poverty-stricken. Coercive measures have not reduced
drug use, but they have clogged our criminal justice system with nonviolent
offenders. It is time to explore alternative approaches and to end this costly war."

Nader also calls for an immediate end to the criminal prosecution of patients for
medical marijuana. "The current cruel, unjust policy perpetuated and enforced by
the Bush Administration prevents Americans who suffer from debilitating illnesses
from experiencing the relief of medicinal cannabis," Nader said. "While substantial
scientific and anecdotal evidence exists to validate marijuana's usefulness in treating
disease, a deluge of rhetoric from Washington claims that marijuana has no
medicinal value."

And he supports industrial hemp. "In need of alternative crops and aware of the
growing market for industrial hemp -- particularly for bio-composite products such as
automobile parts, farmers in the United States are forced to watch from the sidelines
while Canadian, French and Chinese farmers grow the crop and American
manufacturers import it from them," Nader said.

The money saved from ending the drug war could be used to prosecute a war on
corporate crime, Nader said. "Corporate crime enforcement is widely ignored by
politicians, yet acutely felt by all Americans," he said, noting that the losses from
burglary and robbery ($3.8 billion a year) are dwarfed by a mere handful of
corporate frauds, such as those that brought down Tyco, Adelphia, Worldcom, and
Enron.

Nader ran for president under the Green Party banner in 2000, garnering 2.7% of
the popular vote and earning the undying enmity of Democratic Party loyalists who
blamed him for handing the election to Republican George Bush. In 2004, Nader ran
as an independent, garnering 0.2% of the vote. This year, he is competing with
Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr and Green Party nominee Cynthia McKinney in
the third-party sweepstakes.

(This article was published by StoptheDrugWar.org's lobbying arm, the Drug Reform
Coordination Network, which also shares the cost of maintaining this web site.
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