Ben Carson presidential campaign, 2016/Civil liberties

	; ; Presidential candidate; Ben Carson
	Profession: ; Retired Pediatric Neurosurgeon;
	Carson on the issues:
	Taxes • Banking policy • Government regulations • Budgets • Agricultural subsidies • Federal assistance programs • Foreign affairs • Federalism • Natural resources • Healthcare • Immigration • Education • Abortion • Gay rights
	Republican candidate:
	Donald Trump
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Ben Carson announced his presidential run on May 3, 2015.^[1]

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This page was current as of the 2016 election.

Ben Carson said November 2, 2015, at an event in Tallahassee to promote his book that he does not support the legalization of marijuana for recreational use. He explained, “Many studies have demonstrated that persistent regular use of marijuana by the developing brain can result in significant decreases in IQ. We already have enough people with low IQs, we don’t need to be generating more.^[2]

Carson said he would ramp up the war on drugs if elected president. In an in interview with Glenn Beck, October 21, 2015, Carson said he would "intensify" the war on drives and believes marijuana is a "gateway drug."^[3]

On October 21, 2015, Ben Carson said voter identification laws were not racist. “There’s not one single country anywhere -- first world, second world, it doesn’t matter -- that doesn’t have official requirements for voting. My question to those people who say we’re racist because we apply those standards: Are all the other countries of the world racist? I don’t think so. Voting is an important thing. Obviously, you want to make sure that it’s done by the appropriate people,” he said.^[4]

In an op-ed for USA Today on August 24, 2015, Carson argued the Black Lives Matter movement was wrong in its focus on Bernie Sanders. ”My mother knew what the problems were and she shielded me and my brother from them. I can tell you she wasn't worried about Socialist senators from tiny rural states. 'BlackLivesMatter' could learn from her to focus on the real sources of our hopelessness,” Carson wrote, before listing failing schools, violence in entertainment and federal assistance programs as the "real" problems.^[5]

During the first Republican debate on August 6, 2015, Carson said, "You know, we have the purveyors of hatred who take every single incident between people of two races and try to make a race war out of it, and drive wedges into people. And this does not need to be done. What we need to think about instead — you know, I was asked by an NPR reporter once, why don’t I talk about race that often. I said it’s because I’m a neurosurgeon. And she thought that was a strange response. And you say — I said, you see, when I take someone to the operating room, I’m actually operating on the thing that makes them who they are. The skin doesn’t make them who they are. The hair doesn’t make them who they are. And it’s time for us to move beyond that.”^[6]

In an August 2, 2015, interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Carson called the rhetoric around the “Black Lives Matter” movement “political correctness going amuck.” When host Chuck Todd suggested the movement springs from blacks being disproportionately targeted and abused by police, Caron said, “I think we need to look at the whole picture. One of the things that I always like to point out to people is how about we just remove the police for 24 hours. Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue? And the vast majority of police are very good people. Are there bad apples? Of course.”^[7]^[8]

On July 23, 2015, Carson wrote an op-ed in The Washington Times comparing busing programs to the Obama administration’s new initiative to promote more racially integrated neighborhoods through Department of Housing and Urban Development funding. Carson said, “These government-engineered attempts to legislate racial equality create consequences that often make matters worse. There are reasonable ways to use housing policy to enhance the opportunities available to lower-income citizens, but based on the history of failed socialist experiments in this country, entrusting the government to get it right can prove downright dangerous.”^[9]

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