Cynthia McKinney Anti War on Drugs Presidential Candidate

We want an end to unequal justice in this country! We want an end to toxic spraying and military deployments in other countries. We want an end to the assault on our civil liberties. We want an end to the lies of the U.S. government around its own participation in the spread of drugs into poor communities in this country. We want an explanation of why a CIA rendition aircraft crashed in Yucatan with 3.2 tons of cocaine on board. After the crack cocaine epidemic and what we now know of U.S. government complicity therewith, we want to know if the U.S. government is fighting or fueling the use of drugs in its so-called War on Drugs.

We believe that the war on drugs provides cover for U.S. military intervention in foreign countries, particularly to our south, and that this increased militarization is used to put down all social protest movements in countries like Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and elsewhere. We believe that unequal justice is epitomized in the U.S. prosecution of the so-called War on Drugs. We believe that the United States has the most expensive, most repressive, least effective drug policy in the industrialized world. And it is this drug war that has helped the United States incarcerate a higher percentage of its own people than any other country in the world. We believe that the War on Drugs is waged largely against the poor and the resultant massive incarceration serves the profitmotive of prisons whose stocks are traded on Wall Street. The War on Drugs has become a war on truth, taxpayers, civil liberties, and higher education for the poor and middle class, and sadly, it has also become a war on treatment, addicts, and reason.

We need an end to mandatory minimum drug sentences. We need a budget focused on prevention and treatment. The law should include legal regulation of drugs. We need legalization of industrial hemp as a cash crop. We need drug laws based on the truth. According to the drug policy reform group Efficacy, from 1984 to 1996, California built 21 new prisons, and 1 new university. California state government expenditures on prisons increased 30% from 1987 to 1995, while spending on higher education decreased by 18%. This trend is echoed in every state of the nation. Clearly, we need a drug policy that is based on truth, compassion, prevention, and treatment. We need laws that franchise citizens of the United States without regard to incarceration status. No non-violent drug offender should suffer permanent or temporary disfranchisement of voting and other citizenship rights due to entanglement in the current system of criminal injustice.

We need to end the funding of Plan Colombia and Plan Mexico and other militarized “plans” enacted that fund and support a failed drug policy at home and abroad.

7. We Want to End Prisons for Profit Now!

We want an end to privatization of prisons and prison health services. We want an end to the racism that serves as an engine of growth for a profitdriven prison system. We want an end to prison labor schemes that are little more than corporate subsidies that provide little training or rehabilitation for inmates. We want reconciliation, transformation, preparation, rather than incarceration based on retribution and vengeance. We do not want race and class to serve as the primary determinants of punishment. And we want an end to the death penalty.

We believe that the prison-industrial, criminal injustice complex of today still operates in many respects as a vestige of slavery. And just as punishment was meted out disparately for Blacks and whites during slavery, these conditions persist today. For example, in the state of Virginia, a white person could only be sentenced to death for murder, but slaves could be sentenced to death for 71 offenses. Today, according to “Minding the Gap,” despite higher drug use by White Illinois teens, African American youth who make up 15.3% of Illinois’s youth population, are 59% of youth arrested for drug crimes, 85.5% of youth automatically transferred to adult court, 88% of youth imprisoned for drug crimes, and 91% of youth admitted to state prison. Disparities permeate the system from the laws enacted, to those who enact the laws, to those who enforce and interpret them.

Paul Street reports in Black Agenda Report, “one in three Black males will be sent to state or federal prison at some point in their lives compared to one in six Latino males and one in seventeen white males.” Writer Tim Wise writes, “According to FBI data, the percentage of crimes committed by African Americans has remained steady over the past 18 years, while the number of Blacks in prison has tripled and their rates of incarceration have skyrocketed.”