The Election III: DRCNet Interview: Independent Presidential
Candidate Ralph Nader
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/...ctionIII.shtml
As part of a package of articles this week covering drug policy in
the presidential election campaign, we present an interview with
Ralph Nader (
http://www.votenader.org), the controversial
independent progressive candidate. (He has also won the
nomination of the Reform Party, enabling him to get on the ballot
in seven states.) Nader has a lengthy history as a consumer
advocate, bursting onto the national scene with the 1963
publication of "Unsafe At Any Speed," a devastating account of
safety problems with the Chevrolet Corvair. Since then, he has
spawned numerous consumer advocacy organizations and authored
numerous books, most recently "Crashing the Party," about the
Green Party and electoral reform.
Nader also ran as the Green Party presidential candidate in 1996
and 2000, garnering 1% of the popular vote in 1996 and 2.75% in
the hotly disputed 2000 contest between Democratic Al Gore and
Republican George W. Bush. While the Greens did not offer Nader
the nomination this year, his independent candidacy is
consistently polling at between 1% and 2%, and he is on the ballot
in at least 30 states at this writing, including some key
battleground states.
Nader's candidacy is highly controversial among progressives,
including a broad swathe of drug reformers, who fear that a vote
for Nader is a vote for George Bush. We asked him about that; see
below. This interview was conducted by e-mail over a period of
weeks. We received final responses Monday.
Drug War Chronicle: In your issue statement on the war on drugs,
you say "it is time to bring some illegal drugs within the law by
regulating, taxing, and controlling them." Are you referring
specifically to marijuana, or do you have other drugs in mind?
Ralph Nader: Marijuana is the drug that should most clearly be
brought into a system of regulation and taxation. It is less
dangerous than drugs like alcohol and tobacco as far as addiction
and death. Regulation and taxation would provide greater control
over purity, potency labeling, health warnings and age
restrictions then the ineffective current 'war on marijuana'
approach. In addition, experience with allowing retail sales of
marijuana in Holland have shown effectiveness -- significantly
less marijuana use in all age categories, especially by youth,
twice as many US youth use marijuana on a per capita basis than
Dutch youth.
Regarding other drugs, there has not been enough research done to
show whether regulation and taxation approaches would work.
Research being done in Switzerland on heroin assisted treatment --
where heroin users go to a government controlled clinic, purchase
their heroin and use it at the clinic under the eyes of a health
care worker -- show promise in that they have reduced crime,
disease, death and dysfunction without increasing drug use, indeed
leading to reduced drug use.
Chronicle: You have long been a critic of corporate power. How
would you prevent a legal marijuana market from being dominated by
large corporations? If you are talking about legalizing or
regulating marijuana, how would that work?
Nader: We do not want the forbidden fruit enticement of
marijuana's illegality to be replaced with glamorization by
Madison Avenue advertising. Preventing national advertising that
would create national brand name recognition would help keep large
corporations out. This does not mean all advertising should be
banned -- just national advertising to develop national brand
recognition. Control of large corporations is a broader question
that relates to this issue. The US needs to do more to control
corporations through their corporate charters, taxation, and
enforcement against corporate crime, fraud and abuse and the
ending of corporate welfare.
Chronicle: What about medical marijuana?
Nader: The criminal prosecution of patients for medical marijuana
must end immediately, and marijuana must be treated as a medicine
for the seriously ill. 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.
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. The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 defines marijuana as
a Schedule One narcotic, making it very difficult for American
researchers to perform rigorous double-blind scientific studies on
marijuana. Even without these difficulties, research has shown
marijuana to be a safe and effective medicine for controlling
nausea associated with cancer therapy, reducing the eye pressure
for patients with glaucoma, and reducing muscle spasms caused by
multiple sclerosis, para- and quadriplegia.
Internationally, scientists are undertaking massive studies to
determine the healing powers of cannabis. In August 2003 the
esteemed British medical journal The Lancet reported that the
world's largest study into the medical effects of cannabis have
confirmed that the drug can reduce pain and improve the lives of
people with multiple sclerosis. The three-year study was the
first proper clinical appraisal of whether cannabis-derived drugs
can help treat MS. Harvard medical doctor Lester Grinspoon has
said he would have loved to do a similar study, but has been held
back by the law. On his website (
http://www.rxmarijuana.com), and
in his book "The Forbidden Medicine," Grinspoon documents how
marijuana relieves the pain of people enduring more than 110
different medical conditions -- like AIDS, Crohn's Disease,
glaucoma, cancer, and many more. Marijuana helps increase
appetite, reduce blood pressure and intraocular pressure.
Whenever given the chance, the American public has voted to allow
seriously ill people to relieve their pain with marijuana.
Despite well-funded opposition from the federal government,
citizens in nine states have cast ballots to legalize the use of
medicinal marijuana. No state has ever rejected such a voter
initiative. Medical marijuana community health centers have
opened up in the states, like California, only to be aggressively
attacked and closed by federal law enforcement agents. Physicians
must have the right to prescribe this drug to their patients
without the fear of the federal government revoking their
licenses, and doctor-patient privacy must be protected. The Drug
Enforcement Administration should not be practicing medicine.
Chronicle: There are more than two million people behind bars in
this country, about one-quarter of them prisoners of the war on
drugs. In terms of broader criminal and social justice policies,
what would you do to reduce this number? And what about the
people who are already in prison?
Nader: Repeal mandatory sentencing and "three strikes and you're
out laws" and return power to judges to sentence people as
individuals within voluntary guidelines. Mandatory sentencing
laws coincide with the rapid rise of people incarcerated since the
mid-1980s. This is especially true for the rapid rise of
incarceration of African Americans. Handling substance abuse as a
health problem more than as a law enforcement issue will slow the
expansion of the number of drug offenders arrested and
incarcerated. Regarding people already in prison, first, reforms
in sentencing should be made retroactive. It is an injustice to
say these laws are not fair, but then keep people incarcerated
based on those unfair laws. Second, many people -- indeed
hundreds of thousands -- are being released annually. Government,
rather than providing assistance to these people to help them make
the most of their lives, has put roadblocks in front of them. We
need to remove the roadblocks, and make it easier for people to
get a good education and a good job. Along with this we need to
encourage them to rejoin the community as full citizens by
restoring their right to vote.
Chronicle: Your issue statement on reforming the criminal justice
system says you want to replace the war on drugs with "a health-
based, treatment and prevention focused approach." Now, much drug
treatment is coerced; people are given a choice between treatment
and prison. Should ordering someone into drug treatment be a
function of the criminal justice system?
Nader: The best drug treatment is treatment that the user
chooses. It is a lot less expensive, and less damaging to the
individual, to make drug treatment as available as any other
health service then it is to have the government arrest,
prosecute, incarcerate and then force someone into treatment. So,
the first choice is to make treatment as easily available as
possible. That means making it affordable and user-friendly, i.e.
located in neighborhoods where people can access it, and have
treatment available to treat individual needs. (For example, many
drug addicted women have been victims of sexual or spousal abuse
-- this needs to be incorporated into drug treatment.) Treatment
also needs to include programs that reduce the harm from drug
abuse, e.g. preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS through needle
exchange programs. And, we need to recognize that the most
effective barometer of whether someone is going to succeed in drug
treatment is whether they have a job. Thus, the US needs to be
creating jobs that can give people hope and opportunity in life.
While there are problems with coerced treatment, it is better to
give people a choice of treatment instead of incarceration as done
in many of the better drug court programs currently in existence
and as has been passed by voters in California and other states.
Chronicle: Should drug treatment be available on demand? If so,
how do you pay for it?
Nader: On our web site we have a detailed plan for making health
care available to all Americans -- this should include substance
abuse treatment and prevention. The Nader campaign supports a
single-payer health care plan that replaces for-profit, investor-
owned health care and removes the private health insurance
industry (full Medicare for all). A major problem with our health
care system is that we spend an inordinate amount of money on
unnecessary bureaucracy and duplicative overhead caused primarily
by our reliance on the private health insurance industry. Indeed,
25% of every dollar spent on health care in the US goes to
duplicative and unnecessary overhead. The United States spends
far more on health care than any other country in the world on a
per capita basis, but ranks only 37th in the overall quality of
health care it provides, according to the World Health
Organization. The US is the only industrialized country that does
not provide universal health care. Forty-five million Americans
have no health insurance, and tens of millions more are
underinsured. Providing universal health care can only be
accomplished through a single-payer system: no country ever
achieved universal coverage with private health insurance.
President Harry Truman proposed universal health care in 1948 but
was rebuffed by Congress. The time to act is yesterday. Let us
end our disastrous descent into the corporatization of medicine
and its callous consequences.
Chronicle: Is the drug war, and more broadly, the criminal
justice system, racist?
Nader: The drug war and criminal injustice system certainly have
a racially unfair impact. The facts on this are evident,
according to federal surveys, "most current illicit drug users are
white. There were an estimated 9.9 million whites (72 percent of
all users), 2.0 million blacks (15 percent), and 1.4 million
Hispanics (10 percent) who were current illicit drug users in
1998." Despite these facts, African Americans constitute 36.8% of
those arrested for drug violations, over 42% of those in federal
prisons for drug violations. African-Americans comprise almost
58% of those in state prisons for drug felonies; Hispanics account
for 20.7%. From racial profiling to discretionary decisions of
prosecutors and judges, African Americans and Latinos are treated
more harshly than European-Americans.
Chronicle: Your issue statements on criminal justice and the war
on drugs illustrate some of the harm done by the drug war. The
evidence of the damage is irrefutable, yet little changes. Why is
reforming our drug policies such an intractable issue?
Nader: Change is always difficult. Their are entrenched
interests that profit from the current system -- within the
government , e.g., the drug enforcement bureaucracy, and outside
the government, e.g. profit-making corporate prisons or the drug
treatment industry that relies on court-ordered clients. In
addition, many politicians who have supported the war on drugs
have a hard time publicly admitting they were wrong. They have no
standard of failure so as to change course. Yet, progress is
being made. States are voting for medical marijuana and treatment
instead of prison. The public seems to see the failure of the
drug war, now it is time for politicians who refuse to see it to
be replaced by elected officials ready to end the expensive and
failed drug war.
Chronicle: Your agricultural policy issue statement does not
mention hemp. What's up with that?
Nader: At
http://www.votenader.org/media_press/index.php?cid=29
we have a strong position supporting industrial hemp. The Nader-
Camejo Campaign supports industrial hemp as a renewable resource
with many important fuel, fiber, food, paper, energy and other
uses. Industrial hemp is a commercial crop grown for its seed and
fiber and the products made from them such as oil, seed cake, and
hurds (stalk cores). Industrial hemp is one of the longest and
strongest fibers in the plant kingdom, and it has had thousands of
uses over the centuries. 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. Federal legislators,
meanwhile, continue to ignore the issue of removing it from the
DEA list. It is time to allow hemp agriculture, production and
manufacturing in the United States.
Chronicle: Drug reform ranks include supporters from across the
political spectrum. Most will consider your drug policy positions
very favorably, but many of those who are aligned with the
political left will oppose your candidacy nevertheless, because
they fear splitting the vote and handing the election to George
Bush. Do you think they're wrong, and if so, why?
Nader: The only wasted vote is a vote for a candidate you don't
believe in. George Bush and John Kerry have strong pro-drug war
records. George Bush and John Ashcroft have a terrible record on
all the issues discussed in this survey and have been aggressive
in their prosecution of drug offenders including medical marijuana
in states like California where the voters have voted to support
medical marijuana. But, the Clinton administration was not much
better, even on medical marijuana they took steps to enforce the
marijuana laws and close community-based medical marijuana clinics
sanctioned by local governments. Senator John Kerry is a former
prosecutor who was one of the lead sponsors of Plan Colombia and
has supported crime bills that have led to the mess of our
criminal injustice system and the high levels of incarceration.
People who oppose the drug war are showing little respect for
themselves if they vote for candidates who want to incarcerate
them, their friends or their family for addictions; or who support
a policy as damaging as the war on drugs. As your question notes
"fear" is behind voting against your interest for the lesser evil.
When you operate out of fear you are likely to make mistakes.
People need to put aside fear and vote for the greater good, not
the lesser evil.