Century of Lies, February 14, 2010

The failure of Drug War is glaringly obvious to judges, cops, wardens, prosecutors and millions more, now calling for decriminalization, legalization, the end of prohibition. Let us investigate the Century of Lies.

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Dean Becker: Welcome to this edition of Century of Lies. You know I live in Houston the gulag filling station of planet earth. And last week I went before the city council and mayor and tried to address the problem of our thousands of drug arrests each year for possession of marijuana. They didn’t say a damned word.

So I’m always thrilled as hell when I hear that cities like Seattle are actually taking an open eyed and honest look at this situation. The following comes to us from a television program up in Seattle, the Seattle Channel, The City Inside Out. I’ll let the host introduce the members of the panel.

One thing before we begin, there’s some discussion in the panel about marijuana being a cancer causing agent but Dr. Donald Tashkin of the National Institute on Drug Abuse set out to prove just how dangerous marijuana was and he found that it did not produce cancer cells and in fact may help to prevent certain types of cancer. Here we go.

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City Inside Out: Coming up on City Inside Out, marijuana laws. Are voters ready to make pot legal in Washington state?

Man: Well the time for reform is now.

Woman: It’s not a good idea.

City Inside Out: As a citizen initiative gathers steam, we take a look at whether public opinion on marijuana is shifting.

Man: There’s no easy answer here but I just want to make sure we have the right discussion.

City Inside Out: Also today, medical marijuana. It’s been twelve years since voters made it legal. How is it going?

Woman: It’s just stupid to make someone like me a criminal.

City Inside Out: And our studio round table.

Allison Holcom: Where we thing we have to get to eventually is a fully legal and regulated system.

Man: I can’t tell somebody to go smoke something that has carcinogens in it.

City Inside Out: Including new Seattle city attorney Pete Holmes.

Pete Holmes: The war on drugs so called especially for marijuana is creating the black market.

City Inside Out: Is it time to stop prosecuting pot?

Woman: Drug laws need to be changed, definitely.

City Inside Out: Next on City Inside Out.

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City Inside Out: Cannabis, ganja, weed, it’s a plant that goes by many names. For over a decade it’s been legal for medicinal purposes here in Washington. But is it time to marijuana more accessible? Even the new Seattle mayor says yes. Today we take up this debate. But first two patients who say Washington’s medical marijuana law isn’t working.

Joanna McKey: I was hit by a hit and run driver. And I was in a coma for six and half days. I had a closed head injury and I had spinal cord injuries.

City Inside Out: Joanna McKey lives in constant pain.

Joanna McKey: The only thing that keeps me functional is the medical marijuana they use.

City Inside Out: What about regular pain medication?

Joanna McKey: I have prescriptions for regular pain medication but in order to give me the amount of pain, amount of medicine to get rid of the pain, I would be a zombie for the rest of my life.

City Inside Out: What is your daily life like?

Joanna McKey: Hell.

City Inside Out: Because?

Joanna McKey: Nausea, nausea is the first thing that hits me when I wake up. Then getting out of bed is pain.

City Inside Out: Rick Smith has lived with AIDS since 1986. By the mid nineties he was admitted to a hospice with just days to live.

City Inside Out: You weren’t supposed to make it this long. Is marijuana what allowed you to?

Rick Smith: That was it. The skies didn’t part and angels didn’t sing or anything. It just made me hungry. And then when I ate that allowed me to build up some tolerance. So then they gave me steroids so that I could tolerate the new protease inhibitors that they are coming out with. And it worked.

City Inside Out: For Joanna and Rick medical marijuana has been a crucial way to keep on living.

Joanna McKey: If it weren’t for marijuana I would have ended my pain a long time ago.

City Inside Out: Committed suicide?

Joanna McKey: O yes.

City Inside Out: Under Washington state law, Joanna and Rick are allowed to use marijuana for their medical conditions but the challenge is how to get a hold of it.

Dan Satherberg: The way that the law is written is really quite difficult for a legitimate patient, someone who really wants to find a pot, it’s very difficult for them to actually obtain it. There’s no there’s no legal scheme for that to happen.

City Inside Out: Dan Satherberg is King County’s prosecuting attorney.

Dan Satherberg: At some point in the chain of distribution, somebody has to commit that felony of delivering marijuana.

City Inside Out: Today patients aren’t allowed to buy marijuana; they’re only allowed to grow up to fifteen plants on their own. But that doesn’t work for everyone including Joanna who has mobility problems.

Joanna McKey: There are so many people out there that are physically in the same situation or worse – quads, paraplegics, quadriplegics. They can’t go out and grow for themselves.

City Inside Out: Where are you getting the marijuana now and how tough is it?

Rick Smith: I grew two plants of my own this summer on the balcony in violation of the law because the public could see it. And I have a proprietor that sometimes gives it to me.

City Inside Out: It’s illegal actually to grow…

Rick Smith: You can grow it but you can’t let anybody, the public see it.

City Inside Out: So growing on your balcony is illegal?

Rick Smith: Yes.

Joanna McKey: I hope that non profit organizations can be established so that patients who are too sick to be able to grow for themselves can go out and get still get their medicine.

Douglas Hyatt: I have spent years defending patients and trying to keep them out of trouble and it’s impossible.

City Inside Out: Douglas Hyatt, a local criminal defense attorney specializes in medical marijuana cases.

Douglas Hyatt: For me it’s just total frustration.

City Inside Out: And he’s taking action. Hyatt is the sponsor of a statewide initiative now gathering signatures to legalize marijuana.

Douglas Hyatt: This out right legalization is the only way you’re going to effectively get medical marijuana to medical marijuana patients. And you’re going to get doctors and patients off the hook in terms of being discriminated against and stuff like that. It’s the only way.

Pam Roach: It’s the wrong message to decriminalize the use of marijuana.

City Inside Out: Pam Roach is a republican state senator from Auburn. She strongly objects to any move to make marijuana more accessible, including a recent push to make small scale pot possession a civil infraction.

Pam Roach: This is forty gram and this is the forty grams we are talking about. That’s a hundred joints.

Douglas Hyatt: Look this is a safe substance. You can’t OD on it, it doesn’t have a lethal dose.

City Inside Out: Is marijuana a gateway drug?

Pam Roach: It’s unarguable, that’s just the way it is. We can say some don’t progress to use other drugs which would be true, but people who end up with oxyconton, cocaine, heroin have usually started with marijuana.

Douglas Hyatt: It’s not a solution to say o we’re going to have two people develop problems with marijuana therefore we’re you know not going to let anybody have marijuana. It’s ridiculous.

City Inside Out: Is it time to legalize it?

Douglas Hyatt: Well it’s time to have a different discussion. It’s important when we talk about drug law reform that we pull the marijuana discussion away from the harder drugs because those discussions are very different.

That doesn’t mean I think that marijuana is a harmless drug, it isn’t. If you make it legal I think you have to accept the fact that more people are going to use it. There’s no easy answer here but I juts want to make sure we have the right discussion.

Pam Roach: It’s not a good idea.

Douglas Hyatt: The time for reform is now.

City Inside Out: Back now the studio to further discuss marijuana laws here in Washington, four people join us with different viewpoints on the subject. I begin with you Gary [ ]. You are chemical dependency counselor. When you look at these two patients using medical marijuana what do you think?

Gary: Well I think they’re in a tough situation. But you know it, I can’t ethically prescribe somebody a cancer causing agent. I can’t tell somebody to go smoke something that has carcinogens in it.

City Inside Out: But if they say as the woman did that she’d be a zombie with any other medication that would be required to to cut the pain and the gentleman talks about, it’s the only thing that gave my appetite back. What would you do for them?

Gary: I would prescribe Marinol. That’s a derivative, a cannainoid derivative. So that has the THC properties that they’re looking for.

City Inside Out: And it’s just a pill form?

Gary: It’s just a pill form. We don’t prescribe the opium plant for people that have issues with pain. We give them a synthetic form of the opium.

City Inside Out: Allison Holcom joins us with the ACLU of Washington. What about Marinol? What about the other things that these patients could take?

Allison Holcom: The problem with Marinol for a lot of patients is they can’t keep it down. It’s a drug that you have to swallow and if you’re someone who is struggling like these patients are with severe nausea, you’re not going to be able to keep the pill down. Also because it is a concentrated synthetic form of THC it’s very powerful.

For a lot of patients, they can self [ ] what they would vaporize. And we recommend vaporization instead of smoking because we don’t want to put carcinogens in our lungs. Nobody thinks that’s a good idea. But there are other forms of taking it in its vapor form. You can take in less and get a more effective response and not be doped out like Marinol does to a lot of patients.

City Inside Out: How do you vaporize it?

Allison Holcom: There is a vaporizer is essentially a machine that heats the plant substance to a lower temperature than fire does. And so it doesn’t combust and create the carcinogens. There’s actually been FDA supported research done of patients using the vaporization method down in San Francisco.

City Inside Out: Kelly [ ], you join us also. You’re a chemical dependency counselor. When you hear vaporization, what do you think?

Kelly: I am worried that even with vaporization you can still become addicted to the substance. And you have people like the people we saw that necessary – they need this or they claim that they need it to function but I am very concerned about the youth and the things that can happen to them when we’re saying yes, this is something that’s OK to use.

City Inside Out: We will get into full legalization with our final guest here, Pete Holmes. You are the new Seattle city attorney. You made headlines on day one when you said Seattle will no longer prosecute pot possession cases. Have you effectively made small time possession here in Seattle legal?

Pete Holmes: No and that’s a very important point. See it’s really important for everyone to remember that marijuana possession remains illegal. What I simply stated was a policy decision as a prosecutor in the city that we would no longer prosecute simple marijuana possession cases. And we’ve learned that there are a number of other really serious threats to public safety that have been left unprosecuted as a result of the time and expense that…

City Inside Out: It’s a resource decision for you.

Pete Holmes: Totally.

City Inside Out: Well if you aren’t doing it then isn’t it effectively legalized?

Pete Holmes: No. you could still be arrested in the city of Seattle by federal officers. You could be arrested at the UW campus by UW police. You could be arrested on a metro bus by a metro transit cops.

City Inside Out: OK Allison, what do you think of full legalization – let this drug be used by anyone effectively any time.

Allison Holcom: Well let me back up and say I don’t think we are talking about letting anybody use this drug at any time. What the ACLU supports and where we think we have to get to eventually is a fully legal and regulated system. We need to regulate who can produce marijuana, who can distribute marijuana, how can they advertise marijuana, who has access to that marijuana, how old do you have to be, that sort of thing.

We need to be talking about bringing what is currently in the hands of Mexican cartels under our own government control so that we can be making smart choices about our public health and our public safety. As long as this market where over a hundred million Americans have used marijuana, I mean it’s not going away. The demand is there. And as long we continue to treat it as a prohibited substance, all we’re doing is letting the criminal element run everything.

City Inside Out: Gary?

Gary: Well when you talk about bringing it in to government control, the government’s already in the alcohol business. And basically that’s saying that the government should get in to the marijuana business.

And some of the positions that have been held that we can sell it at the liquor stores, it boggles me that somebody could walk in to a liquor store and buy a fifth of vodka and buy an eighth of marijuana and when they leave that store and they use that, both substances, the polysubstance interactions that go on actually exponentiate the effects that are going to be you know that the people are going to experience so very, very risky.

City Inside Out: Kelly, is this an addictive drug?

Kelly: Yes it is an addictive drug. You know there is a cannabis dependence diagnosis that you know marijuana meets the criteria. It can meet the criteria for all of the things that you can be addicted to. So it is an addictive drug.

City Inside Out: Allison?

Kelly: Roughly nine percent of marijuana users will go on to develop dependence compared to fifteen percent of alcohol users. We can’t ignore the fact that making marijuana more available is likely to have more people trying it and there probably will be people that get dependant on marijuana. There’s a couple of things we need to be thinking about.

First of all, is treating marijuana use as a crime an effective way to address that public, that very valid public health concern. So far it hasn’t worked. We still have people that have unlimited access to cannabis and are getting in trouble and spending all of our resources arresting, prosecuting and jailing them when we could instead be doing what for example senate bill 5615 suggests is if you’re going to impose a penalty for it, funnel those funds to our criminal justice treatment account where we can be funding treatment and services.

The other thing we all need to keep in mind is that addiction is a very complicated process. It’s not just the drug that makes you addicted. There’s a lot that goes on in the life of a person who becomes dependant on a substance and we need to be looking at the whole picture and not be accusing marijuana of making dependence happen all by itself.

City Inside Out: Pete, is it just a money saver for you? I mean why don’t you want legalization?

Pete Holmes: It’s more than that and legalization I would say prefer the term regulation because I think that we need to address education, treatment and all of the other issues that the other panelists have brought up. But for me it goes beyond simply money.

Number one when I took office on January first, I discovered that we had a backlog of literally hundreds of cases including domestic violence, DUI cases dating from 2008, serious threats to public safety that were not being addresses that were not being addressed simply because we had limited resources.

Second there were twenty-two possession only cases pending in my office when I took again when I took office. Sixty percent of those were against African American males. This is one that the citizens of Seattle already decided back in 2003 by a vote considerably higher than I was elected to office that this was to be lowest law enforcement priority. I am simply trying to carry out the will of the voters.

City Inside Out: Gary if we acknowledge that that maybe it is addictive and I think Allison even says, what nine percent do go on to form an addiction. Is that good enough to actually then ban it. I mean obviously we allow alcohol, that’s an addictive substance. We allow nicotine, that’s an addictive substance. I mean why should marijuana just because it might be addictive for some be therefore banned for all.

Gary: Well I think as you bring up alcohol and nicotine. Those are both the number one and number two leading causes of preventable death in the United States of America. So it sounds like that we just want to add a third one to the ranks, right.

Now in terms of the crime factor or the resources factor I’m sure that you everybody’s heard of the broken window theory right. So cleaning up low level crime actually ends up impacting higher level crimes, right. New York City was able to implement that in a very effective manner, right.

So we’re when we say that we’re not going to address these low level crimes such as marijuana possession we’re giving people the intention or we’re giving them the ability to go out there and say hey I am going to smoke some weed. The police aren’t going to do anything about it. So what’s next? Right. Those are the issues and those are the concerns that I have not only for our youth right but for the current adults that are out there.

City Inside Out: And you know it’s not just the gateway to other drugs, it’s a gateway to crime.

Gary: When you look at British Colombia, they’ve had sixty homicides this year alone, excuse me last year and then the year before, right. This is directly related to their low level policing and low level policies on marijuana and other drugs. And that’s the backlash we’re seeing.

Allison Holcom: Well actually what’s been happening with the violence that’s been introduced in to the marijuana trade and we can look at this especially down in Mexico. I mean that’s the most brutal example of what’s happening with the trade is that our federal supply interdiction efforts have gone in and shut down some of the big cartels that used to be in this trade and just shifted it elsewhere.

And so now the cartel violence in Mexico has just escalated and the federal government is telling us that the overwhelming, well the majority at least fifty to sixty-two percent of the Mexican cartels profits is directly related to US domestic marijuana sales. That’s about prohibition. As long as you make it a crime, just like Al Capone, you are making a very lucrative market for criminals.

City Inside Out: There’s some problem with marijuana. You know our society is loaded with problems. We’re doing nothing but trying to solve problems at the social level. Why add another problem that we’ve got to deal with if you if you allow marijuana?

Allison Holcom: The problem is already here. The question is what’s the appropriate strategy for dealing with it and nicotine is a great example. Tobacco use rates have declined significantly over the past decades not because we’ve arrested anybody, not because we’ve put them in jail but because we have spent money on public education efforts.

And especially since the tobacco litigation settlement when we funneled money in to the truth.com advertising campaign, we have seen youth initiation rates of smoking plummet. There are more effective, less expensive opportunities for us to be addressing this issue.

Drug overdose deaths, we were talking earlier about polysubstance abuse. Drug overdose death is now the number one accidental injury death here in Washington. It’s ahead of…

City Inside Out: But won’t this exacerbate it?

Allison Holcom: No absolutely not. What has to happen is that you have to have education. You have to tell kids that oxyconton might be a prescription medication that mom or dad might use for their surgery recovery but it can kill you especially when you mix it with alcohol. We don’t provide that kind of information.

City Inside Out: Kelly is it gateway drug?

Kelly: Well…

City Inside Out: I mean that’s the claim is that OK marijuana may be fine but as Pam Roach says and the argument goes it’s just a gateway to other harder substances that cause more problems.

Kelly: Yeah I would actually argue, I agree with a lot you said Allison and I would love , I would love to see us putting our efforts towards prevention of marijuana and all drugs. I would say nicotine is a gateway drug. Often times people start with nicotine, they move to alcohol, marijuana. That’s often the trend that we see.

City Inside Out: Well then why treat marijuana differently? Why prescribe, why prohibit it?

Kelly: Mhmm.

City Inside Out: If it’s no more of a gateway than nicotine?

Kelly: Well I kind of see that we’re doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. Now we’re pushing all our efforts to make marijuana legal. I would like to see us pushing our efforts towards prevention. And instead of just saying here’s another drug that we’re going to legalize because we can’t handle the problems with it.

City Inside Out: We know that thirteen states here in the US have decriminalized marijuana. Now that’s not legalization but it’s basically making it a civil infraction like a parking ticket. I mean less penalty if you will. What do we know about those thirteen states? I mean did you skyrocket which is what I hear you know opponents of legalization say.

Gary: When you look at the thirteen states, eleven of them have actually increased right in terms of…

City Inside Out: Use has increased?

Gary: Right, I mean there…

City Inside Out: And penalties have gone down.

Gary: Right. Because you’re demystifying right. You’re you’re putting out there that it’s OK to use this substance. That it’s not being something that we’re going to focus on. It’s not something that we’re going to spend our resources on.

When you look at treatment rates in King County sixty percent of youth that are entering treatment have a diagnosis of cannabis dependence or cannabis abuse right. Over the last ten years marijuana dependence and marijuana abuse diagnosis has gone up five hundred percent, while fifty percent all other drug categories have dropped by fifty percent. So it’s definitely as as as we have decriminalized or as we’ve looked at the medical marijuana it’s increased the likelihood of it occurring.

City Inside Out: Even Dan Satherberg says use will go up. He’s your colleague.

Pete Holmes: Dan did point out one of the fundamental problems is that it, decriminalization is kind of half a solution in that you know while the possession would not be a criminal offense, someone has to commit a felony for you to come in to possession of that drug. And I think that’s kind of what we’re toying with. You know the stats that you have quoted for instance all occurred while marijuana has remained illegal. It is not decriminalized in this state. It is not decriminalized in King county. And yet those statistics have risen.

Allison Holcom: Well I’ll just jump in and say I don’t know what statistics that Gary is looking at because the studies that are out there that actually looked at the states that decriminalized in the seventies and these are studies that compared those states that decriminalized with those states that didn’t show absolutely no increase in use rate, absolutely no change in attitudes in neither adults or youth as to the relative dangers of marijuana. Use rates of marijuana have remained consistently flat in the US for as far back as the national studies have…

City Inside Out: No matter what states…

Allison Holcom: No matter what state, no matter what the penalties are and in fact as marijuana enforcement has escalated and marijuana arrests now make up fully fifty percent of all drug arrests nationwide and of those arrests ninety percent are for possession only. That’s happened over the last couple of decades and we’ve seen no impact on use at all.

Allison Holcom: What’s wrong with the criminalization? Why do you want to push full legalization?

We’re pushing right now for decriminalization, we’re not pushing for full legalization. We agree with Kelly and Gary that we all need to sit down at the table and talk about if we get to legalization, if we get to regulation, what’s that going to look like? How are we going to do a better job of addressing the public health and safety questions we all have.

City Inside Out: And Pete, if you did legalization, what what’s your favored regulation method? Would it be kind of like liquor stores? How old should you be and how much should the quantity be allowed all that…

City Inside Out: I you know I agree with Mr. Sather berg that this is a discussion that we need to have and flesh out how you would, how you would regulate possibly tax this substance. The point is that we’re ignoring that the war on drugs so called especially for marijuana is creating the black market that is creating much of the crime that we’re fighting.

And to simply decriminalize without having addressed the full regime of manufacture, distribution and the like is only half a solution. It’s one that at best an uneasy coexistence with federal law that is really what’s driving this whole conversation.

City Inside Out: So you’re not necessarily in love with decriminalization.

Pete Holmes: No it doesn’t solve the problem that again you could you could be in possession and yet a felony is committed for you to come in to possession. That’s a disconnect that most people I think recognize.

Gary: Right now its all over the board. Like you’re saying, we don’t know what the if we’re upholding legal mandates or what we’re doing at the city level and what’s going on at the county level. We’re all over the place right. And that’s part of the problem.

City Inside Out: Allison in terms of legalization cause the ACLU has been on board saying they do want legalization, what could a regime look like? What would it look like? Liquor store model?

Allison Holcom: It’s hard to say. Possibly you could look to Amsterdam to see one possible way that you do this. In Amsterdam they don’t have cannabis available in the same places as they have liquor available. They limit to the coffee shops as they call them there. And they don’t allow advertising.

If you want to purchase cannabis in Amsterdam you have to walk in and push a button to light up a panel that tells you what’s available. I think looking at that and what advertising of alcohol looks like in this country versus advertising of cannabis in another country. Those are some ideas we want to play around with.

City Inside Out: Just some time for final thoughts of the other three.

Gary: When we’re looking at the push again for decriminalization and then legalization it seems like it’s a it’s an attempt, a frantic attempt to generate revenues right. And I think that’s not the way that we should go at this. You know I don’t think that the full implications of the effects, the impacts on public health, on youth, on safety have been really thought out so…

City Inside Out: Kelly.

Kelly: I just want don’t want anyone to forget the youth and really the impact this is going to have. And we can we can throw a lot of statistics around and all those things but I work with youth and I know how the views of the public are changing their views. And so just don’t forget the youth.

City Inside Out: Pete Holmes, any final thoughts?

Pete Holmes: You know for me again it remains a public policy decision on how we’re going to spend our resources. It’s not a, it is a budget crisis that we’re facing right now. But that begs more the question of what are we going to spend our resources on rather than we’re going to look to for other sources of revenue. And I thin that most of the voters would say I want you to address the back log in violent cases that are in your office and let the possession cases go.

City Inside Out: Thank you all for being here.

Thank you.

Woman: Let’s be on time to legalize marijuana. The drug laws need to be changed.

Man: Would make a lot more money if we could tax it.

Woman: I think we should be tougher.

Man: Its good medicine for a lot of people.

Woman: I don’t smoke it, I don’t have anything to do with it.

Woman: The argument is it’s a gateway drug but alcohol is too. So and that’s legal.

Woman: Not good for health for the kids and the grown ups.

Woman: I think there’s many social and economic reasons for legalizing it.

Man: Can’t just be totally free about it. People can’t do stuff like just be high in public.

City Inside Out: So what do you think? Send us an email contact@seatllechannel.org

Before we close today, our City Inside Out poll. Should marijuana become legalized in Washington? Yes, no or are you unsure? You can cast your vote at our website seattlechannell.org/cityinsideout. And while you’re there you can watch our programs online anytime.

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Dean Becker: So I went to that website, voted in the poll and lo and behold the total was one hundred percent in favor of legal marijuana there in Washington state. We’ll be back next week with some live guests here on Century of Lies.

But I urge you to tune in to this week’s Cultural Baggage. One of our guests, Beto O’Rourke. He’s city council member from the city of El Paso who’s calling for a reinvestigation of our drug war policy and a means to stop the barbaric war going on in Mexico. We also hear from Mr. Michael Blunt, a board member of Students for Sensible Drug Policy.

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The drug war exists through fear
And little sister hysteria
Wrapped up tightly in the hearts of man
Big brother’s propaganda eternal issue
Lets forth a cornucopia of lies
Flowing like a river from the cartels to the cops
The poor people are so afraid to make it stop
Our fear makes Shorty Guzman a very happy man
These drugs are so dangerous
Yeehaa arriba
[gunshot]

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Dean Becker: Its time we recognize that this drug war is more serious than marijuana cocaine or heroin Please visit our website, endprohibition.org.

Prohibido istac evilesco.

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For the Drug Truth Network this is Dean Becker, asking you to examine our policy of drug prohibition.

The Century of Lies

This show produced at the Pacifica studios of KPFT, Houston