In an e mail to supporters on Friday, former presidential candidate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (I) stated that the U.S. authorities ought to begin prosecuting extra white-collar crimes and enterprise offenses fairly than hashish crimes, Common Dreams reported. Within the e mail, the Unbiased from Vermont wrote that as a substitute of disproportionately arresting poor folks and other people of coloration for hashish use, the Justice Division ought to “begin prosecuting the crooks on Wall Road for laundering cash from drug cartels, suspected terrorists, and corrupt international officers.”
“We have now a legal justice system right this moment that’s not solely damaged – it’s racist and it’s unjust,” Sanders wrote.
He additionally known as on Congress to legalize hashish on the Federal stage.
“We should reform our damaged and racist legal justice system, and one of many methods we are able to do that’s by lastly legalizing marijuana on the federal stage. It begins with altering the Federal Managed Substances Act which, should you can imagine it, at the moment places marijuana in the identical class as heroin. That’s absurd and defies all scientific judgment.” – Sanders, in an e mail, through Widespread Goals
The e-mail included a hyperlink to a petition calling on Congress to move a legalization measure.
Sanders’s remarks come at a time when a Syracuse College’s Transactional Data Entry Clearinghouse research discovered white-collar prosecutions are down 24.4% from 5 years in the past. Moreover, a Public Citizen investigation discovered solely 90 companies pleaded responsible or had been discovered responsible of a federal crime final yr, a report low, based on the report.
These numbers are in stark distinction to the 350,150 Individuals arrested for hashish in 2020 — down from 545,602 in 2019 — and 92% of these had been for easy possession, based on Widespread Goals.
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