Greens worldwide against Drug War. News, platforms, charts. Stopping the racist, corporatist prison state. Some historical info. Green Party drug reform candidates, positions, etc. worldwide. Cannabis, marijuana, drugs, harm reduction. Ralph Nader "called for the legalization of marijuana as part of an overhaul of the nation's 'self-defeating and antiquated drug laws.' ... Legalizing marijuana, Nader said, would allow the government to regulate and potentially tax its use like tobacco products." -Albuquerque Journal, September 8, 2000.

Mirrors 1. 2.

Change mirror pages if problems.

*11-2000. EarthFilms.org - Striptease To Save The Trees!

*10-2000. About 13,500 supporters pack a sold-out Madison Square Garden at a rally for Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader

*10-2000. Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader, left, and Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, right, laugh as they listen to Phil Donahue speak at a press conference before a rally at Madison Square Garden

Drugs

The cost of imprisoning one person each year totals $23,000, whereas the cost for treatment in a methadone rehabilitation clinic totals only $4000. Yet, most alarming is the percentage of minorities in prison. The US is comprised of 75% Caucasian, nearly 75% of the prison population may be categorized as minority. Mr. Nader, our goal is to help facilitate people with drug abuse problems to take control become a positive part of the community. Funding must be reallocated to rehabilitation centers across the country. Our first solution is to recall the laws governing mandatory minimum drug sentencing that wastes monetary resources and destroys communities. How do you feel about this, Mr. Nader?

Nader: Agreed. You have to treat individual's injustices as individuals. Our second solution is to decrease prison funding and increase funding for drug rehabilitation. You don't treat nicotine addicts as criminals; you don't treat alcoholics in this country as criminals. Why are you treating drug addicts as criminals instead of treating them as patients bringing all the problems up to the surface so we can treat them? Instead, we are criminalizing the problem, we are militarizing the problem and we are wasting tens of billions of dollars on policies that are failing. The war on drugs has got no standard of failure attached to it. There is no way of telling that their policies are failing. And by the way, always distinguish between pharmaceutical drugs and street drugs. There are a lot of young people in this country that are over medicated and over drugged. [end of drugs section excerpt]

"At home our criminal justice system, being increasingly driven by the corporate prison industry that wants ever more customers, grossly discriminates against minorities and is greatly distorted by the extremely expensive and failed war on drugs." ...

"In Hawaii, we visited one of the only two plots in the United States (the other is on the Pine Ridge Reservation) legally permitted to grow industrial hemp, that 5000 year old, versatile plant with thousands of uses, including textiles, fuel, food and paper. A fraction of an acre was surrounded by barbed wire fence, saturation night lights inside a larger fenced area. This medieval experience brought home once again that for the sake of farmers, the environment, consumers and energy independence, it is necessary to free industrial hemp from the proscribed list of U.S. Drug and Enforcement Agency."

Total taxes. By nation. International comparisons. Americans pay more per person for healthcare and taxes than people in many other nations. The USA prefers to imprison its population rather than provide universal healthcare and a safety net.
https://www.angelfire.com/rnb/y/taxes.htm and
http://corporatism.tripod.com/taxes.htm

*Nader Calls for Single-Payer Health Care System. July 29, 2000. "Ralph Nader today called for a universal health care system in the U. S. which would be similar to the single-payer system in Canada. Nader noted that in the U. S. 24 cents of every dollar spent on health care goes to administrative costs compared to 11 cents in Canada. He said the difference could go a long way in covering the 47 million Americans who now have no health insurance."
http://www.votenader.org/press/000729SinglePay.html and
http://www.votenader.org/press/000827healthcare.html

In the USA: Centrist, leftist, Green, European, and other harm reduction voices for drug reform are mostly kept out of the censored U.S. news.

Discussion of drug policy in the US mainstream corporate media has been (until recently) dominated for the most part by fanatical Republicans. Rabidly-rightist Republicans (supported by the far-right National Rifle Association), "law-and-order," drug warriors want ever-longer prison sentences. 

Harm reduction drug reform is a cheaper 'third way" alternative that is working now. Republicans fanatically opposes such compromise, gradualism, harm reduction based on universal healthcare, the safety net, etc.. 

Major stockholders of most big mainstream news corporations are rich. Therefore most of them are Republican or on the far-right.

Statement of Ralph Nader on media concentraion and bias.
http://dc.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=4206

The government wastes an incredible amount money. Agreed. It wastes it in the areas Republicans approve of. 
What is important are spending priorities, and keeping total taxes as a percent of the economy lower than it is now. Priorities such as the safety net and universal healthcare-based harm reduction drug reform.

The USA spends one-half of all the world's military spending. NATO nations other than the USA should be taking on much more of the West's share of military spending.
Charity will never cover the needs of the safety net and universal healthcare-based harm reduction drug reform. So this is an obvious area where government needs to do what people can't do for themselves. This happens to be the exact logic used by Republican ideologues for military and police spending. They are areas where doing it via the private sector just wouldn't be practical or feasible.

Police and court and prison money have become the new safety net. "3 hots and a cot" in a prison cell. With free (unwanted) sex via regular prison rape.
Universal healthcare is cheaper than healthcare for the few. Amazing but true. A real safety net is cheaper than prisons and courts and police. Amazing but true.
Green Harm reduction drug reform is cheaper than prisons and courts and police. Amazing but true.

To explore working alternatives to this rightist drug policy insanity in the USA media, see: