Crime & the Drug War

• Support placing a moratorium on the use of the death penalty in California.
• Support programs to provide prison inmates with vocational and job-related skills and job-placement assistance when released.
• Implement penalties other than incarceration for certain non-violent offenders.
• Support funding for alternative sentencing programs for juvenile offenders.
• Require that crimes based on gender, sexual orientation, or disability be prosecuted as hate crimes.
• Ban the use of racial profiling by law enforcement officers.
• Increase state funding for community centers and other social agencies in areas with at-risk youth.
• Increase state funding for additional security of critical infrastructure against terrorist attacks.
• Amend the "three-strikes" law so that it is applied only when the third offense is a serious or violent felony.

3 Strikes

"We're against (the three strikes law). You know, there are people doing 25 to life for stealing $150 worth of videos? . . . Why are there no three strikes for corporations?"
—Peter Camejo

Treat Drug Addiction

Camejo will treat drug addiction as a disease, saving our state billions of dollars by avoiding the need to imprison thousands of non-violent people. Tobacco kills over 1,000 people a day in the USA, and should not receive government subsidies. Camejo will work to de-criminalize marijuana, and to improve the availability of drug treatment programs. End addiction by focusing on demand.

The war on drugs is a failure. How much more good could be done with all that wasted money if it were applied to treatment, if it were applied to creating opportunities which could mitigate the feeling of hopelessness that often leads to addiction! If marijuana were legal and regulated for safety, we could tax it. We could collect income tax on the profits of the growers and excise taxes on the sales of it, just as we do on the sales of two other, more addictive, drugs - cigarettes and alcohol. We need a rational drug policy, not one built on emotion.