Transcript

Century of Lies / August 11, 2013

-----------------------

DEAN BECKER: 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.

-----------------------

DEAN BECKER: Hi, this is Dean Becker. Welcome to this edition of Century of Lies. You know the morals of these officials in power are offended by people who smoke marijuana. So offended are they they’re willing to lock these people up forever to destroy their families, their futures, their lives. Morals can be very dangerous and deadly constructs.

-----------------------

SPEAKER: The secretive unit of the Drug Enforcement Administration is training its agents to cover up how it gets information used to launch investigations of Americans. The technique for concealment is called parallel construction. Here’s how it sometimes works.

A drug dealer wants to move narcotics, weapons or cash into the United States and informants or perhaps an undercover agent learns of the plans and alerts the secretive DEA unit called the Special Operations Division. The intelligence could also come from a NSA wiretap or electronic intercept.

The Special Operations Division tells local or state police that they need to stop a certain truck at a certain place or time. Local police do that in a way that looks like a routine traffic stop but a drug sniffing dog is brought to the scene.

If police find drugs they arrest the driver. If the case goes to trial cops know they can never say where the intel came from. They are under direct orders to not disclose. Instead they might say the investigation came from the routine traffic stop – a plausible story that creates a new investigative story that won’t lead back to the secret source. That’s the parallel construction.

What concerns some former prosecutors and judges is that by hiding the origin of the investigation the DEA could be hiding evidence from the people arrested. This might jeopardize their constitutional right of fair trial.

-----------------------

DEAN BECKER: Taken from YouTube these are thoughts of Anna Casporia.

-----------------------

ANNA CAPORIA: So the U.S. government has been arguing for a while that it collects all this information on us without a warrant in some cases and without probable cause in most cases because they are trying to protect Americans. This is all in an effort to strike the national security but any critical thinker would really question that and would be skeptical of that because often times the information that is collected on us isn’t really used to stop terrorists and isn’t really used to protect our national security. A lot of times it’s used to prosecute people for drug use and drug trafficking.

That was something I was definitely expecting and now a Reuters’ article confirms it. Reuters has now confirmed that the DEA has been getting information from such government agencies including the FBI, CIA and NSA to basically prosecute people who could be involved in drug trafficking and drug use.

And then these authorities have to lie about where they got their evidence from. In fact, according to Reuters, the updated documents show that agents are trained to re-create the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated – a practice that some say violates a defendants constitutional rights to a fair trial.

If defendants don’t know how an investigation began they cannot know how to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence which is information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or bias witnesses.

So, basically, we’re destroying someone’s right to a fair trial. We’re collecting information on people with no probable cause and we’re basically destroying the constitution and our civil liberties.

At the same time we have president in office that used to be a constitutional law professor but allows this kind of bullshit to happen on his watch.

Edward Snowden is not only an American hero, not only courageous but he revealed the tip of the iceberg. All those people out there who want to argue how he is a wimp and how he is a pussy because he left the United States and went to Russia those people have absolutely no legitimate argument to make because the reality is you are trying to deflect from a real problem that we have in the country and you are trying to do character assassination to basically distract us from what the real issues are in this country.

This story really upsets me because not only are people intimidated by what the government is doing (and I’ll get to that intimidation in a second) but we are going to be prosecuted for things that we shouldn’t be prosecuted for and we’re going to be unable to defend ourselves because we are not going to know where the evidence originated from.

If that evidence was obtained in an unlawful way we are not even going to be able to fight that. We are not going to be able to argue against that. That’s a huge problem.

All of us, no matter who you are, have something in our past or something in our email accounts that we might be a little embarrassed about. We know for a fact that if we stir the pot and we become politically active and we fight back against authority the government can easily obtain that information and reveal that information.

We’ll be embarrassed. We’ll be demonized and we’ll face the same character assassination that Edward Snowden has faced.

So what is it, Americans, are we going to sit back and allow the government to do whatever they want and it will go unchecked or are we going to fight back?

-----------------------

DEAN BECKER: The following segment courtesy of CNN – Pierce Morgan. It features Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

-----------------------

PIERCE MORGAN: As CNN’s chief correspondent Sanjay Gupta joins me. Now, Sanjay, welcome to you.

SANJAY GUPTA: Thank you.

PIERCE MORGAN: You’ve been with us for a year. I want to remind you that in 2009 you wrote a Time Magazine article titled, “Why I would vote no on pot.” You’ve changed your mind.

SANJAY GUPTA: I have. As part of my thinking I have apologized for some of the earlier reporting because I think we have been terribly and systematically mislead in this country for some time and I did part of that misleading.

If you look at all the papers that are written in the United States the vast majority of them are about the harm. We fund studies on harm. We don’t fund studies on benefit nearly as much so it gives a distorted picture.

I didn’t look far enough. I didn’t look deep enough. I didn’t look at labs in other countries who are doing incredible research. I didn’t listen to the chorus of patients who said, “Not only does marijuana work for me but it’s the only thing that works for me.”

I took the DEA at their word when they said that marijuana is a Schedule I substance which has no medical applications. There was no scientific basis for them to say that.

PIERCE MORGAN: So when New York Mayor Bloomberg was quoted to say, “Medical marijuana is the greatest hoax of all time” what do you say to that?

SANJAY GUPTA: I’m surprised. I followed a lot of the mayor’s comments. I listen to those comments as well. As part of those comments he was saying the potency of marijuana has gone up. That is true. It has gone up probably over the last several years.

I urge him to look at the scientific papers. I was just looking at them again in preparation for your show. The science is there. This isn’t anecdotal. This isn’t in the realm of conjecture anymore.

For a long time we’ve just ignored these papers but this was drug that was used for thousands of years.

PIERCE MORGAN: But in your documentary you get into the effects of medical marijuana which sometimes can be quite instant, quite dramatic.

SANJAY GUPTA: It really can. It works and it can work quite quickly. In fact, let me just show you.

[video]

REPORTER: Meet Chaz Moore. He uses many different strains of marijuana. Many of them high in CBD to treat his rare disorder of the diaphragm.

CHAZ MOORE: My abs will lock up.

REPORTER: That’s why he is talking this way – almost speaking in hiccups, like he can’t catch his breath. It’s called Myoclonus Diaphragmatic Flutter.

This fluttering here is annoying but it becomes painful pretty quickly.

CHAZ MOORE: Yeah, after 15/20 minutes I can start to really feel it.

REPORTER: He is about to show me how the marijuana works. He’s been convulsing now for 7 minutes.

How quickly do you expect this to work?

CHAZ MOORE: Within the first 5 minutes.

REPORTER: It was actually less than one minute.

PIERCE MORGAN: That is pretty extraordinary.

SANJAY GUPTA: He was on so many different meds. It was table full of meds the doctors had prescribed for him including Oxycontin, Valium – any of those medications in too high a dose could have been problematic and they didn’t work.

The proof is becoming increasingly clear if you look for it.

-----------------------

DEAN BECKER: The following segment courtesy NPR.

-----------------------

REPORTER: Non-violent criminals could serve less prison time thanks to new approaches in the works both in congress and at the justice department. Law makers from both departments are considering giving judges more power to shorten sentences and do away with some mandatory-minimum terms altogether plus Attorney General Eric Holder is preparing to unveil his own criminal justice reforms as NPR’s Carrie Justin reports.

CARRIE JOHNSON: Sit down with the Attorney General to ask him about his priorities as NPR did earlier this year and he’ll talk about voting rights and national security but if you listen a bit longer Eric Holder gets to this.

ERIC HOLDER: Too many people in jail for too long and for not necessarily good reasons.

CARRIE JOHNSON: This is the nation’s top law enforcement officer calling for a sea change in the criminal justice system.

ERIC HOLDER: The War on Drugs is now 30/40-years-old. There have been a lot of unintended consequences. There’s been kind of a dissemination of certain communities – particularly communities of color.

CARRIE JOHNSON: The Justice Department has had a group of lawyers working behind the scenes for months on proposals the Attorney General could present as early as next week to the American Bar Association.

Some of the items are changes Holder could make on his own like directing U.S. attorneys not to prosecute certain kinds of low-level drug crimes or spending money to spend more defendants into treatment instead of prison.

Almost half of the 219,000 people currently in federal prison are serving time on drug charges.

ERIC HOLDER: We can certainly change our enforcement priorities so we have some control in that way - how we deploy our agents, how we tell our prosecutors to charge – but I do think this would be best done is the executive branch and the legislative branch work together to look at this whole issue to come up with changes that would be acceptable to both.

CARRIE JOHNSON: Late last week 2 senators – Illinois Democratic Dick Durbin and Utah Republican Mike Leah – moved in that direction. Their bill would give judges more discretion to sentence non-violent criminals below the so-called mandatory-minimums. It would also lower mandatory-minimums for several drug crimes.

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy, says he’ll hold a hearing on mandatory-minimums next month.

PATRICK LEAHY: They all sounded like a great ‘solve crime’ when they passed. Most of them sound better on paper than in practice.

CARRIE JOHNSON: That’s Leahy talking on CSPAN last weekend. His partner in the effort is Republican Rand Paul, a Tea Party favorite from Kentucky. They’ve introduced their own legislation to give judges more power to impose lower sentences and not just in drug crimes.

PATRICK LEAHY: Doing away with mandatory-minimums is going to be more discretion to judges. That shouldn’t be Republican or Democrat – just basically good sense.

CARRIE JOHNSON: The idea has already taken off in nearly 2 dozen states including Texas where it won support from prominent conservatives including Grover Norquest speaking here for the group Right on Crime.

GROVER NORQUEST: It’s easier to say let’s spend a few dollars a day managing you at your home where you can spend time with your family, where you can work instead of hundreds of dollars a day keeping you in a cell.

CARRIE JOHNSON: Ohio State University law professor Douglas Burman has been following the justice system for years. With violent crime near record lows and federal prisons eating up one-quarter of the justice department budget Burman says now may be time for change.

DOUGLAS BURMAN: There’s the opportunity for action not only on the Hill but also in the Obama administration particularly right now when we’re still midway away from mid-term elections and a long time away from the next presidential election cycle.

CARRIE JOHNSON: It would be the first major reform since the crack epidemic of the 1980s. Carrie Johnson, NPR News.

-----------------------

Criminals get so embolden – Rip you off thinking you’re holdin.
Can’t tell the policeman what you know – got no recourse to the law.

Bad guys duct tape and beat you – they’re just lookin for that easy score.

They will rob, rape and kill ya cuz we go no recourse to the law.

-----------------------

DEAN BECKER: The following segment is from the nation of Chile courtesy of CNN. It tells the story of a doctor, psychiatrist and minister and his travels with the use of the cannabis plant.

-----------------------

REPORTER: Spontaneous canting inside the courtroom as the sentence is read. The sentence is 541 days or 18 months for Dr. Milton Flores for growing nearly 120 plants of marijuana on his property.

The Chilean psychiatrist his right to grow a plant that is sacred has been violated.

We met Dr. Flores earlier this summer at his retreat at the foggy mountains of Central Chile.

Flores and his two assistants were conducting a spiritual session – this time without smoking marijuana. Dr. Flores known in Chile as “Dr. Marijuana” has gained notoriety here for his crusade to legalize the drug.

[interviewing Dr. Flores] Tell me what exactly is marijuana to you?

MILTON FLORES: [speaking in Spanish]

REPORTER: He describes marijuana as a tool and natural medicine that he uses to treat some of his patients.

[interviewing Dr. Flores] Do you still smoke?

MILTON FLORES: [speaking in Spanish]

REPORTER: Yes, he says, he smoked marijuana since he was 14. His main contention is that state gains nothing by criminalizing individuals who use marijuana for medicinal or spiritual purposes.

[interpreting Dr. Flores] Cannabis is neither good nor bad. It’s use can appropriate or inappropriate. It’s a tool that can have very significant effects.

Dr. Flores’s property has been raided twice by Chilean authorities. Back in March police came and confiscated several plants of marijuana. Surprisingly he has never been in jail.

Not surprisingly Dr. Flores has a significant number of fans among younger Chileans.

This college student says as long as you don’t harm others using marijuana should be a personal decision and analyst say the drug is not a public safety issue in Chile.

MILTON FLORES’ DAUGHTER: He’s opening windows and doors…

REPORTER: This psychiatrist daughter says her father’s crusade opened an important national debate on drugs.

MILTON FLORES’ DAUGHTER: I’m very proud and I think it’s something that is slowly changing the perspective of many people on different levels in this country.

REPORTER: Dr. Flores says he’s no longer growing marijuana but hopes his crusade will allow him to do so in the near future.

-----------------------

DEAN BECKER: This month, past few weeks and days in particular, have been very powerfully in favor of changing our drug laws. One of the ways that potentially it may help to change that is a ruling regarding a minister in the state of Hawaii, Mr. Roger Christie, who is trying to challenge his arrest for marijuana due to religious reasons. Here to talk about it is one of the members, a minister with the Zion Church, Reverend Carl Olsen. This is not a done deal as yet. There are still some ramifications to that ruling. Do you want to talk about that?

CARL OLSEN: It was an oral ruling made at a hearing that nobody’s seen yet. I received an email from Roger Christie that looked like it was written by his attorney describing the oral ruling.

The way I know it’s real is because the prosecutors filed a motion to either reverse the ruling or clarify the ruling. The prosecutor doesn’t want the religious defense to be allowed at trial.

On Tuesday, a couple days ago, the prosecutor filed a motion to deny the religious defense and apparently there was another motion the prosecutor filed to deny another theory on entrapment. Roger is also arguing entrapment based on the fact that he was operating out in the open for maybe a decade and they led him to believe that he was not going to be bothered by law enforcement.

DEAN BECKER: Now this kind of follows on the heels of another gentleman in Chile, of all places, who was arrested a couple of times for the growing of what he determined to be sacramental marijuana. This isn’t an issue that has traction not just in the U.S. but in Guam there was a ruling as well, right?

CARL OLSEN: That’s three of them. I can name three more. There was a case called Bower in 1996 where the 9t h circuit first recognized that the religious use of marijuana is protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

There was also a case in Oregon or Washington called Valrey where they allowed a guy to smoke marijuana while he was on parole because he was a Rastafarian. That was a district court ruling.

Just last April of 2012 the ninth circuit denied a motion to dismiss an injunction case with a native American church of Hawaii who is suing the DEA to get their sacrament back that was seized at the Post Office. The ninth circuit denied the motion to dismiss and upheld the motion to dismiss and they are going to have a trial on that.

You got about 6 hearings out there. Then the Lepp case is another one where it came up. The judge ruled that Eddie was sincere and religious and that he hadn’t explained the quantity that he had and denied the defense based on his failure to explain the amount of marijuana. It was the biggest seizure in DEA history.

You can see that circuit is bending over backwards to make this happen. The sticky point is they want a small case. They want a religion of one person. That’s what the ninth circuit is waiting for. They don’t want a case where there’s distribution. Who ever heard of a religion that didn’t have more than one member? There has to be distribution.

So that’s the insanity that’s going on.

DEAN BECKER: Carl, right there…open that bible first page – it says that God made the herbs of the field and saw that it was good. I guess the question becomes how much does it require to be bad. That’s the thought I’m left with.

CARL OLSEN: Well, I’ve made this argument many times and I’ve gotten the most insane rulings. My argument is the way it works is they have to prove you are hurting somebody or else it’s religious.

Say it’s religious and they don’t have any proof that anybody is being injured – it’s religious, period. The government doesn’t have any business interfering with your religion or asking you anything about it but nobody got hurt and there’s no evidence of any injury that’s religious that’s protected by the first amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

They’ve just turned it around and say congress says it’s dangerous so it must be dangerous. The government has no compelling interest in making marijuana illegal for anybody religious or non-religious and that’s where it all has to come down to. You have to make the argument that marijuana shouldn’t be illegal with the religious argument which, of course, Roger will do.

DEAN BECKER: Once again, we’ve been speaking with Mr. Carl Olsen of the Ethiopian Zion Church. Is there a website, some closing thoughts you’d like to share?

CARL OLSEN: I’m mostly working on medical use right now because the end result of my cases was the courts said they wouldn’t recognize religious use unless there was some allowed use like medical use and like home grown. That would be an allowed use that brings up an equal protection argument.

When my cases were decided it was like 1990 and we didn’t have state medical marijuana laws until 1996 so this is a new development. Society has changed its perception of marijuana. The religious argument according to the U.S. Supreme Court is going to rely on how can you discriminate on religious use if you’re allowing people to grow this stuff at home for medicine or letting caregivers grow it.

The states’ are starting to authorize a lot of marijuana use that didn’t exist when my cases were all decided. That is where I’m spending all my time.

My website is http://iowamedicalmarijuana.org.

-----------------------

DEAN BECKER: Roger Christie has been in prison for more than 3 years without bail for growing marijuana for his cannabis ministry. This is his wife, Share.

-----------------------

SHARE CHRISTIE: This is a legitimate, religious exercise. These are very good things that the reports can be appealed or overturned. It’s the first in U.S. history.

DEAN BECKER: This is an email from your husband who is now sitting in jail awaiting trial someday. Is there any indication on when that might be?

SHARE CHRISTIE: It’s supposed to be October the third.

DEAN BECKER: I spoke briefly with Mr. Carl Olsen and he seems to think the government may still have some tricks up their sleeves to prevent a religious practice defense. What’s your thoughts there?

SHARE CHRISTIE: Roger and I believe that spirit is larger than government. What happened with Dr. Sanjay Gupta already showing what we’ve been saying for 40 years and that Schedule I has been a farce, has been incorrect.

Everything is getting turned around as we speak. Things are moving very quickly which is what we thought would happen. This is all good news for the plant.

A couple days ago having things talked about changing the laws with Eric Holden – that’s going to make things change very rapidly for the good of the plant.

Roger has been on lock down for almost a month now so we’re going to our congress people today – more meetings saying they need to change these conditions at the prisons. We need to have federal representatives in Hawaii to go in and see it.

Roger constantly says that – if you really want to know how the society is going go look at their prison system.

DEAN BECKER: And your website just to wrap it up, please.

SHARE CHRISTIE: http://the-last-marijuana-trial.com

-----------------------

DEAN BECKER: To close this out a story that’s not nearly as positive as some of the others we’ve been sharing. It speaks to the morals of those in charge of this drug war – how they choose to handle things and how things turn out.

It’s from KVUE out of Texas.

-----------------------

TYLER SWARDA: A 2-year-old girl in what police describe as a horrific case of child abuse. I’m Tyler Swarda.

TERRY GRUCA: I’m Terry Gruca. The Night Beat’s Kris Vets spoke tonight with the victim’s father.

Chris, it’s her foster mother facing charges.

KRIS VETS: That’s right Terry and we do want to give fair warning that some of the images in this story may be difficult to see.

A woman trusted with taking care of a 2-year-old girl is charged with murder tonight after that child was rushed to a hospital in a helicopter on Monday and taken off of life support late last night.

This evening I spoke with the child’s father about his last moments with his little girl.

He never thought his visit with her Thursday would be his last.

JOSHUA HILL: We got to sit down at McDonalds and have lunch and play for a while. She got a little Despicable Me, Too toy in her Happy Meal and she loved it. She got in my lap and fed me french fries.

KRIS VETS: On Monday night Joshua Hill’s daughter, Alexandria (or Alex as they liked to call her), was rushed to a hospital with severe head injuries and immediately placed on life support.

Alex was placed with foster parents after CPS removed her from her parent’s home last November for neglectful supervision. Hill admits they were smoking pot when their daughter was asleep.

JOSHUA HILL: We never hurt our daughter. She was never sick. She was never in the hospital. She never had any issues until she went into state care.

KRIS VETS: Small was arrested today and her bond is set at $100,000.

-----------------------

DEAN BECKER: In the decades since marijuana was declared illegal more than 100 million American children have been brought to successful maturity by parents who smoke marijuana as that child was sleeping yet delusional authorities continue to take those children and all too often hand those children over to degenerates to protect them from their pot smoking parents.

Prohibido istac evilesco!

-----------------------

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.

Transcript provided by: Jo-D Harrison of www.DrugSense.org