TRANSCRIPT

CENTURY OF LIES

JUNE 5, 2019

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.

DOUG MCVAY: Hello, and welcome to Century of Lies. I'm your host Doug McVay, editor of DrugWarFacts.org.

This week, part two of my conversation with Keith Brown, Director of Health and Harm Reduction at the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice.

But first: The state of Illinois is at the time of this recording on the verge of becoming the eleventh state in the US to legalize the adult social use of marijuana, and the tenth state to also legally regulate sale of marijuana. Illinois House Bill 1438 was finally passed on May 31 and sent to the governor’s desk.

Governor Pritzker has indicated he plans to sign the bill. Assuming he actually does, then people in Illinois will be able to purchase marijuana from licensed sellers as of January First 2020. The state already has medical cannabis dispensaries, those will be the sole legal sellers until the state licenses retail establishments, which will probably later that year.

The Illinois legalization plan has a strong equity component, which is great, as long as it’s rolled out fairly and it actually helps affected communities as intended. So there’s a need for oversight.

There’s also room for improvement. The plan does not allow for home cultivation, other than very limited amounts and only by people who are registered medical cannabis patients. Still, progress in Illinois.

It’s a different story up in the northeastern US. The New Hampshire legislature has been considering legalization this session. House Bill 481 passed the state House and moved to the Senate, where it stalled. To find out more, I spoke recently with Matt Simon from the Marijuana Policy Project, he’s their New England Political Director. We started off by talking about New Hampshire.

MATT SIMON: Well, it's certainly been a tough climb. We've got Governor Chris Sununu, who made it clear early on that he is completely opposed to any form of legalization. So, we have more than two thirds support from the general population and trying to translate that into legislation was quite an uphill climb but we did get it through the House, through two House committees and then it passed the House, went to the Senate.

And in the Senate, we hit a roadblock. Our opponents flew in prohibitionists from all over the country and they dominated the public hearing, and it really put things on ice for a while. So the Senate's just voted to re-refer the bill, which means that it will essentially be on pause until later this year. It will give them some more time to go over the details and then they'll take action in January.

DOUG MCVAY: So it’s postponed, but it’s still alive.

MATT SIMON: Exactly. Down but not out, and, you know, the sense of inevitability is still very strong here. New Hampshire's an island of prohibition now, with all three neighboring states and Canada to the north having legalized for adult use, and we're the Live Free Or Die State.

So it just seems insane to most people that prohibition will continue for yet another year, but, at the same time, the writing appears to be on the wall and it's a matter of time before we overcome those institutional hurdles, I think.

DOUG MCVAY: You’re MPP’s New England Political Director, so a quick question if I could about Vermont. That state's unique because it's the only legal state that has not opted to legalize commerce. Well, DC hasn’t either yet, but it’s not a state, it’s a colony, but back to Vermont. Is there any chance that Vermont might be looking at regulating actual commerce, or is it planning to stay with just legal adult possession and cultivation?

MATT SIMON: I think we're certainly moving in the right direction in Vermont as well. There was a bill to regulate and tax the market, and it passed the Senate 23 to 5 this year, so, a clear veto override proof majority.

The House is tougher in Vermont. We did finally get the bill through the a House committee for the first time this year, and it was being considered by two of the money committees, Ways and Means and Appropriations, which were looking at it, and time ran out on the session last week.

So the word from the House Majority Leader is that we're absolutely going to pass this in January. There's still some question about whether Governor Phil Scott will sign it or not, he's - he went along with the limited home cultivation only legalization, but he's not supported a taxed and regulated market just yet.

There are signs he may evolve and do that. If he doesn't, the Legislature - the Senate would certainly override, and the House would have a pretty good chance, I think.

Really, a lot of our opponents in Vermont became not so much opponents anymore after legalization passed. You know, it becomes a situation of, oh, it's legal now, why in the hell wouldn't we want to regulate it a little bit? You know, there's been a lot of gray market activity that's caught people's attention, so I think that will push things in the direction of having regulated stores sooner than later.

DOUG MCVAY: Right on. I mean, on the one hand, I understand, you know, the - with regulation and all that, the traditional market can feel threatened, on the other hand, people who don't have the wherewithal for whatever reason to be able to grow at home -

MATT SIMON: Right.

DOUG MCVAY: - they're stuck, you know, they're stuck continuing to support an illegal market otherwise, and that's not really tenable.

MATT SIMON: Absolutely. And now they can drive, depending on where they live in Vermont, Massachusetts borders Vermont and there are stores a short drive from southern Vermont, so, that adds to the sense of inevitability, knowing that people from all over the northeast are driving to the now, I think it's twenty stores that are open in Massachusetts, and there will probably be a hundred plus this time next year.

So, why have the money go to the illicit market, or to Massachusetts, when it could be going to businesses in New Hampshire, in Vermont, and Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and be creating jobs and having the money stay in state?

DOUG MCVAY: Any closing thoughts for the listeners? And of course please give us your website and social media.

MATT SIMON: Oh, sure. Well, the MPP, Marijuana Policy Project Facebook and Twitter accounts are very active, and the website's MPP.org. It's really easy to sign up for emails for the states that you're interested in following.

We're trying to be as active as we can in as many state legislatures as we can, and hopefully get some good news from some states and continue this great momentum we have, trying to turn public opinion into real change.

DOUG MCVAY: That was my interview with Matt Simon, New England Political Director for the Marijuana Policy Project. We were talking about progress in New Hampshire and Vermont.

You’re listening to Century of Lies. I’m your host Doug McVay, editor of DrugWarFacts.org.

My guest last week was Keith Brown, MPH, Director of Health and Harm Reduction at the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice. Here’s more of our conversation.

Talk to me about some of the work you're doing in Connecticut, I know that in New York a lot of work around bail reform and around Rockefeller, it's the tenth anniversary, I guess?

KEITH BROWN, MPH: Yeah, ten years.

DOUG MCVAY: Actually, forget about Connecticut, first let's talk about, I mean, I know so little - the one thing I know about Connecticut is it's like the biggest - one of the biggest suburbs of New York, I think it's - they even made it its own state or something.

But, I don't know enough about it, really. I know that you're doing some work there, Ren's from there and all that.

KEITH BROWN, MPH: Yep.

DOUG MCVAY: Now, let's talk about New York for a minute just because, I know the marijuana stuff has really taken a lot of the headlines and a lot of the interest, but you folks have been working on a lot - there's a lot more going on in New York than just marijuana, right?

KEITH BROWN, MPH: Yeah, I mean, we've had a package of criminal justice reforms pass this year. They won't be implemented until next year, but they're unprecedented. They're some of the most transformative laws that have happened anywhere.

And so, you know, that goes from bail reform, where, I've just been at a couple of recent meetings because a lot of my work puts me in contact - I work with law enforcement quite a bit, and it's this interesting thing where on one hand I work with them on trying to develop things like pre-arrest diversion that, you know, that they like in many cases, even if they - even if it takes them a while to learn that they like it.

And then on the other hand, you know, we're doing work like bail, speedy trial, discovery, where they're not - you know, they're not all that happy, and multiple times over the past few weeks I've had law enforcement say to me, you know, they're specifically referring to some of the pre-trial reforms like bail, where they're saying, you know, what's the point anymore, we're going to have to - everyone's going to get a desk appearance ticket. There's no point in arresting people for half of this stuff anymore or something.

And there's like a moment of silence, and I have to look over at them and say, like, are you expecting me to be on your side here? You're telling me that you're not going to be able to arrest people for what amounts to, like, minor stuff anymore, and I think that's a great thing. We've been steadily decarcerating in this country, and in New York state, for a while now, and crime is actually still down. It's been going down.

We know that you can decarcerate and also, you know, advance public safety. When you ask about New York, I mean, we had Rockefeller reform ten years ago, which was a big deal, but steadily since then, many groups like ours have been trying to do things like close Riker's and reform cash bail.

The whole idea of bail, you know, in and of itself, is this process where, when you look at somewhere like the jails in non - you know, downstate New York, so upstate and the rest of New York, the jails are full of folks who are there on misdemeanor stuff, and a lot of people are there because they've been accused, and it's just because they haven't been able to make bail that they're there.

In this country we have the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and yet that's not how it operates. In most cases, it literally has to do with your ability to afford bail. You can get accused of a crime, and as long as there's enough suspicion that you did it, or any suspicion that you did it, or in many cases no suspicion that you did it, you're going to jail. And that's it, because you can't afford bail.

Everybody's familiar with the story of Kalief Browder, but, you know, that's a case of somebody who spent months and months on Riker's Island because he was accused of stealing a backpack, and they kept pushing his court dates off and all sorts of stuff [sic: Kalief Browder ended up spending three years in New York City's Riker's Island jail without having gone to trial, two of them in solitary].

He was horribly traumatized, he came out and ended his life after the time he spent in there. And it was all just because - and by the way, it was dismissed. So, you know, all this time, people are spending in these horribly traumatic environments, and the general public is like, well, you did something wrong and that's why you're there. No. You were accused of doing something and that's why you're there.

And so for me, this package of stuff that we just did in New York is remarkable. And then discovery is another one, you know, it has transformed the rules about district attorneys having to disclose all of the information that they have that they're going to be used to prosecute you. Because in many cases, up until this reform, they weren't required to hand it over until right before you go into court.

And so what that means is, you know, maybe if you have a - if you're able to pay for an attorney, that attorney might go into that court and say, listen, we just got this information, we're not prepared for this, and let's get another court date, and you might be out on bail already.

But if you have a public defender and that public defender's office, you know, that public defender has a hundred other clients, they're not - you know, they're going in front of there and they're going to ask for a plea, or whatever is going to happen.

So anyway, that's a really long way of saying, you know, we've had a lot of transformative things happen in New York state, and we're pushing for more. On the harm reduction side, we're pushing for syringe decriminalization, to get that stuff out of the criminal code.

We're pushing for overdose prevention centers, we're pushing for statewide expansion of medication treatment in all jail and corrections, because right now it's up to the county jails, which means it's run by sheriffs. It's up to each sheriff to determine whether they want to do that in their jail or not.

And then what happens is, even if you're a sheriff who wants to do that, if somebody's getting transferred from your facility to a state facility you have to taper them, and get them off of whatever they're on before they go into corrections, so, a lot of them are, you know, a lot of sheriffs have actually been speaking out against that practice because they don't like it.

They're saying, you know, the person's stabilized in their facility, why should you have to take them off of medications that they're doing well on before they have to go into corrections?

And so, and then the other thing we're working on in New York state right, and this is one that Katal, my organization is working really hard on right now, is the Less Is More parole revocation and reform bill, and what that would do is take people on parole supervision, and it would reform the way technical violations are being dealt with within that scope.

So right now, the way it works is, there's conditions of your parole, very few of which are related to whatever the thing was that you were originally convicted of. They are things like curfew, not absconding, not using drugs, not using alcohol, not associating with other known, you know, people also on parole.

And so what happens right now is that those conditions are put on people and they make it very difficult for people to live their lives, and what it ultimately ends up doing is driving mass incarceration because a lot of people are violated on what amounts to nonsense.

You know, curfew for someone who's on parole, you know, what happens if you have a job and you're trying to have a life and then you have a curfew, right? Or what happens if you have a drink, or if you - if New York State legalizes, well, it doesn't really even matter, even if we don't legalize cannabis, you know, like, what does it matter that you smoked weed, if your original charge was, I don't know, burglary or something, right?

What does the fact that you're smoking weed have anything to do with that, and why are we going to send you back to jail for that, when we know the thing that's going to have the most impact on public safety is you being in your community with your supports, with your families, having a job, you know, having a place to live, and when we violate people, it disrupts all of that stuff.

And for people who are using drugs, and if you're doing so problematically, getting care in the criminal justice system is not anywhere close to ideal or even possible, so, the idea that you would violate someone for a health issue like that seems really absurd to me, and so we're trying to change all that.

That would be, for me, you know, if we could get those things passed in New York state, in addition to the package of things that have already happened, bail, speedy trial, discovery, I feel like we would really be leading the nation in criminal justice reform in meaningful ways.

If we can add the marijuana bill that we were all - that we're all still trying to do a last minute push for, which has a very, very clear social justice component to it, and restorative justice component to it, I mean, I'm a proud, lifelong New Yorker, it would just make me even more proud to say, like, hey, we're leading the nation in this stuff.

And we're proving that you don't need to - that the way to advance public safety is not by locking a lot of people up, it's by investing in people and keeping them in their communities and providing them with the support they need and divesting from mass incarceration, investing in healthcare, in housing, in education, in families, you know, in all the things that we know actually keeps communities safe.

We're getting there, and so to your question about Connecticut, you know, we're trying to advance a lot of the same things in Connecticut. We have an organizer - we have two organizers on the ground there that are doing work with directly impacted people around all of these issues.

We're doing the same work, we're up at the capitol, we're doing, for people who might be listening that live in Connecticut, you can get in touch with me. We have monthly Healthy and Just Connecticut meetings, and we have a monthly phone call around criminal justice efforts in Connecticut.

We have a day coming up, May 29, we're going to be at the capitol doing a bunch of work there. We also have a bunch of things coming up in New York. We have an event in June at the capitol specific to our Less Is More bill, so, you know, if people are listening from New York or Connecticut and you want to get involved, you can email me or go to our website and sign up, because, we need directly impacted people and allies to really be coming out about this stuff.

The other thing I just wanted to - a thing I'm really proud of with our Less Is More bill is that people on the inside drove that process and helped write that bill. So, you know, for us, it's one thing when somebody with policy knowledge or policy experience is the one crafting certain legislation, I think that's - I think that can get you some of the way, but when you have directly impacted people saying, you know, this is what we think is fair. This is what we think is reasonable.

That's where I think you can really enact the greatest change, because people are the experts in their own lives. They know what they need to be healthy, they know what they need to be safe, and we need to trust that. And that's why I'm really - that's why, like I said, I'm really proud of the way that our organization centers the experiences of directly impacted people, as opposed to some type of top down approach.

You know, you've worked with Lorenzo [Jones], right, so you know Lorenzo was one of the main organizers around getting - eliminating or reducing the crack and powder cocaine sentencing disparities in Connecticut, and Connecticut led the way in that. It was one of the pioneers in getting those sentences much more in line, and it was because directly impacted people organized around that and started showing up and making noise, and you know, demanding change.

So, for me, I think that's at the heart of everything we talked about. It's at the heart of reducing or eliminating stigma, it's around the heart of actual change, it's around the heart of sensible policies, and it's at the heart of divesting from the things that we know don't work and investing in the things that do work.

And, you know, the other thing I'll just say about the role of law enforcement, that ties back to one of the previous questions, is, you know, not to totally let law enforcement off the hook in a lot of ways, but, if we really back up a little bit and really take a forensic analysis of what's happened in this country, we gutted the social safety nets that used to exist for people in communities and in neighborhoods, and what we did is we then looked to law enforcement and demanded that law enforcement fix, you know, complex issues like mental health, substance use, and poverty.

There were never any other tools besides arrest with which to do that, and so, you know, this is a structural failure, in many ways, that, you know, if you talk to most law enforcement personnel, to your point where, you know, you look at their faces as they're dealing with this guy who's experiencing homelessness, I mean, you can just see it, where they're like, what are we doing here?

What am I, you know, what am I going to do to fix this situation? I can't give this guy housing. Right? And so, if you can really take a bigger, you know, more kind of higher up view of this stuff, you start to be able to, like, acknowledge that there's a mutual frustration with the way we're dealing with a lot of this stuff.

Now, we may disagree about how to get out of that, and, you know, I also talk to cops who will say, like, well, you know the problem is we started getting soft on crime and this is where we got. And, you know, that's not, in my opinion or that's not what the evidence shows, that the answer is to get out of these issues or to try to address these issues.

But, that's the lens with which they look through things, and so unless we can create pathways for change and ways to take - to go toward that, we're going to be stuck right where we are, and that's why with something like pre-arrest diversion, I would say, you know, I can't make a blanket statement that LEAD is good. I can't make that statement.

I can tell you that in Albany, New York, it's good, because it's advancing actual change and it's working the - almost entirely the way we expected it to. We're trying to look right now at what the racial disparities look like in diversion and some other things, but it's working as intended.

It's using a harm reduction approach. The police are now making almost as many referrals to the harm reduction program without a diversion as they are with a diversion, which is exactly what I want to see and what many of us want to see.

So, you know, it sets the stage for us getting methadone and buprenorphine in our county jail. Right? It sets the stage for us to look at, you know, homelessness in a different way. It just sets the stage to start looking at things differently, and if we can do that, then, you know, I feel like we're farther down the road here.

DOUG MCVAY: You’re listening to Century of Lies, I’m your host Doug McVay, and this is an interview with Keith Brown, MPH, Director of Health and Harm Reduction at the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice.

Solutions instead of - oh, that reminds me, thank for - it's the frustration that I have, that I frequently, when I talk to people about LEAD, that they either remember that it's a pre-arrest program or they say pre-booking, and it's the - that's not a minor distinction, that's the whole point is trying to get people away from arresting and then dealing with it, and -

KEITH BROWN, MPH: You are absolutely right. Yep, you're absolutely right, and, you know, pre-arrest is a very important distinction, because by doing - I mean, let me just talk about the Albany program for a second, right?

The way it works, in sum, is an officer calls in a harm reduction case manager, who does a warm hand-off, responds to the scene, as long as it's safe and appropriate to do so, and it's pre-arrest, and the only thing that person is required to do to have that charge not get filed is meet with the case manager and complete an assessment. That's it.

Now, if you think about what that really means in comparison to what a pre-booking program would look like, or a post-arrest, you know, pre-appearance, or whatever, the farther down the line you get from just a direct hand-off and get out of the way, it complicates things.

It involves judges, it involves district attorneys, it involves other - it involves other hands, you know, where the thing can go south. And what I want to see happen and the programs that I'm interested in building are programs where frankly it's the next level, where law enforcement's just saying, okeh, look, for the vast majority of use and possession, like, let's just call a harm reductionist. That's it.

Let's just call the harm reductionist and say, and if the person says I don't want to talk to anybody, then just let them go. Just be done with it. Just say, all right, maybe next time. Here's the number, you know, maybe you'll be ready to talk to them at some point or whatever. And that's it.

But, at, you know, on our way to that, we can do pre-arrest, low threshold, harm reduction diversion. And what that looks like in operation is very different than pre-booking, using an abstinence focused treatment model, you know, where you have to achieve X, Y, Z in order to be successful in the program.

I mean, the more strings you put on these things, the more people you're going to select out of it. And drug court? Listen, I mean, drug court at the time that it was implemented, you know, was a progressive measure. Right? It was something that was different than people going to jail, and so, that's fine.

But, frankly, like, if I had my way, you know, what amounts to, I don't know, like, what works in those models, you know, we need to have a real talk about whether those are still reform measures or not.

You know, is drug court even necessary in its current format? Or can we now look at the drug court model for things like felonies, you know, much more serious felony offenses, and can we take the misdemeanors and low level possession felonies out of that altogether and put it into either just harm reduction referral or pre-arrest diversion?

That for me feels like we're getting closer to what we're looking for, but if we're still doing this thing where, you know, if the cop likes you you get diverted, if the cop doesn't like you you're going to drug court, well we're not really doing much here. You know? We're still self-selecting this stuff.

Like I said, if I had my way, drug court would be up the chain for the more serious things, and we would just be more and more steadily keeping more and more people out of the criminal justice system, until ideally we don't need it.

DOUG MCVAY: That was my interview with Keith Brown, he's the Director of Health and Harm Reduction at the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice. Remember to find out more about Katal Center and the work they're doing, find them on the web at WWW.KatalCenter.org, that's KatalCenter.org

And that's it for this week. I want to thank you for joining us. You have been listening to Century of Lies. We're a production of the Drug Truth Network for the Pacifica Foundation Radio Network, on the web at DrugTruth.net. I’m your host Doug McVay, editor of DrugWarFacts.org.

The executive producer of the Drug Truth Network is Dean Becker. Drug Truth Network programs, including this show, Century of Lies, as well as the flagship show of the Drug Truth Network, Cultural Baggage, and of course our daily 420 Drug War News segments, are all available by podcast. The URLs to subscribe are on the network home page at DrugTruth.net.

The Drug Truth Network has a Facebook page, please give it a like. Drug War Facts is on Facebook too, give its page a like and share it with friends. Remember: Knowledge is power.

You can follow me on Twitter, I'm @DougMcVay and of course also @DrugPolicyFacts.

We'll be back in a week with thirty more minutes of news and information about drug policy reform and the failed war on drugs. For now, for the Drug Truth Network, this is Doug McVay saying so long. So long!

For the Drug Truth Network, this is Doug McVay asking you to examine our policy of drug prohibition: the century of lies. Drug Truth Network programs archived at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.

TRANSCRIPT

CENTURY OF LIES

MAY 29, 2019

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.

DOUG MCVAY: Hello, and welcome to Century of Lies. I'm your host Doug McVay, editor of DrugWarFacts.org.

This week, my guest is Keith Brown. Keith is the Director of Health and Harm Reduction at the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice.

I’ve got so many questions I want to ask you. You’ve done work in the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, you were project director of an initiative in Albany, and of course LEAD is something we've talked about quite a lot on this show. It's, where I live here in the Portland, Oregon, area, there are LEAD programs operating in Portland, they're trying to do something out here where I live in Clackamas County.

But, the reason I asked you on is this article you wrote recently at Filter Magazine, FilterMag.org: Three Recent Stories Illustrate The Media's Ongoing Drug War Propaganda. Tell me about your story.

KEITH BROWN: Well, as you said, you know, this has been going on during the whole duration of what we call the war on drugs, and when we, historically, or even currently, think about where those fronts are, I guess if we use the war analogy and build it out, we think of law enforcement and in many cases where you would think of the military, especially in our geopolitical involvement in the war on drugs.

But, there's a lot of other actors that I think we don't pay attention to enough. I think the media is one of those - is a primary one, which was really the focus of this piece I wrote. And, you know, we also need to think more about what's the role of elected officials, we obviously know what that looks like.

But then, also, what is the role of the nonprofit industrial complex in the war on drugs? And what is the role of the child welfare system, and all these other actors there?

And so, that's sort of a discussion for another time, but when we specifically think about the media, I wrote this piece because I think I have really sort of had enough of a specific cycle of these stories. Several of them were centered around this myth of law enforcement, overdosing on fentanyl when they respond to overdose scenes, or when they're doing traffic stops, or other things.

And then, this phenomenon happened when this story hit New York state, and then really went national, about marijuana that was seized that field tested positive for fentanyl. And I sort of knew, or at least suspected, how this story was going to play out, and so for me it was very difficult because as soon as this story hit, people were blowing up my phone and my email and sharing it with me on facebook and twitter, all the different platforms, saying, you know, what's the deal with this, Keith? Is this true?

And, you know, that was half of the responses, and the other half was people being really glib, saying, see, this is happening and you've been telling us this isn't, you know, this isn't really true, and I had to sort of bide my time. I did something that's very difficult for me, which was nothing for a little while, and waited until the responses actually started to come in, once this stuff played out.

Usually what happens is, when something occurs like that, this is not news to you, but, something gets seized and it field tests positive for fentanyl, and it's going to proceed in certain ways. That has to go to the lab for confirmatory testing.

And what then happened was, my email and my text messages started coming in again, and they were from people who I know in various capacities, sources if you will, that were saying to me, hey, FYI, the lab results came back and this weed tested negative for fentanyl.

So, I immediately said, well, I have to start telling people this and we have to figure out a way of communicating this, because there's not a chance that the media is going to come out and correct this, or retract it, or otherwise do anything about it.

And, sure enough, I have yet to see a single story from any news outlets, really, I think besides maybe the article that I wrote, that actually says that the follow up on this said that yeah, in fact, it tested negative for fentanyl.

And then, you know, the same thing keeps happening with these law enforcement contact stories. It's the same story every time, an officer develops symptoms and has to either be Narcaned or just barely gets themselves to the hospital, all these stories, and then, when the blood work comes back on the officer, you know, typically the department or the sheriff's department where it happens says, you know, well we can't release that information, which we know it showed that there was no fentanyl likely in the officer's blood.

But also that, in many cases, the actual drugs that they sent for confirmatory testing turned out testing negative for fentanyl and other analogs. So, this was the thing for me that was the impetus of this article. We have to hold the media accountable to, you know, for their role in perpetuating myths about drugs, stigma around people who use drugs, pro-law enforcement angles on these things, because it's - they are an arm of the war on drugs that we need to reckon with.

DOUG MCVAY: Now, of course, in your article you also point out this is not new, I mean, I'm talking about the 1980s when I introduced you, and, you know, it obviously went on well before then, I mean, there's not a marijuana activist in the country, or practically in the world, who couldn't tell you about the Hearst newspapers and the, the propaganda campaign that was waged by Harry Anslinger.

And I guess you could even go back further, right, because you've got Doctor Hamilton Wright, I think was his name, the, the Opium Commissioner who helped to start the, the panic about opioids in the beginning of the nineteenth - sorry, beginning of the twentieth century in, in the US.

But, people would rather hear you talk about this. Tell me about the history of this - this has gone on for a long time.

KEITH BROWN: Yeah, since the beginning of our drug laws. You don't get these policies, and you don't get these laws and major enforcement efforts, without the narrative being driven to the general public to generate support for it.

So, when you look at, like you said, I mean, from the beginning of these laws, back to opium and Chinese laborers out west, and then you can literally draw a line through all of these narratives.

And then you talk about black men working as porters and cocaine, and, you know, cannabis with jazz musicians, and crack with superpredators. Here's a prime example. Let's talk about crack babies for a second.

I mean, you and I have been around long enough, and I've been doing this work long enough, to remember that the narrative around crack was that we were going to have a generation of people that were going to be lost, and that they were not going to amount to anything, and that they were going to be system-involved and on welfare, and in jails and prisons, and also using drugs themselves.

It was, you know, incredibly misogynistic in how it impacted women who use drugs, and you saw all this footage on TV of babies that were these little skinny things in incubators, and it was all untrue.

And yet, if you ask rooms full of people, I've just been doing a series of trainings and I asked people about what they know about crack babies and everybody says the same thing if you're old enough to remember, this is what crack babies are, this is what the situation is with them.

And then I say, has anyone seen a story about crack babies or any of the research on those people now? And nobody has. Nobody has.

Everybody saw it, everybody knows what the term means and what it's referring to, and nobody knows that the research actually shows that if you adjust for poverty, those people that were born, right, to mothers who were using crack had no worse outcomes when compared with people in a similar socioeconomic bracket.

Again, adjusting for poverty, which says, literally the issue is poverty, not drug use. And yet we're still driving this narrative that it must have - in some way have to do with drugs.

So, this is - you have to know the history on this, and you also, to be really blunt about it, once you become aware of how things are being communicated, you can sort of see the future on this already, and I can tell you, the future in terms of whatever kinder, gentler war on drugs we're having right now, doesn't look good and it's happening right now around fentanyl.

The narrative around fentanyl is, we're creating the boogeyman around fentanyl like we did with crack cocaine, and we're carving it out of this separate thing from other opioids. Fentanyl is showing up in the vast majority of heroin supply in this country, I mean, the last I've heard it's hard to find a bag of heroin anywhere, especially in the east coast, that doesn't have fentanyl in it. And that's just from what I know from people that, you know, people that I talk to.

And so, when you now are doing this thing by saying, it's dangerous to law enforcement, a couple of grains will kill you, you know, the media portrays this is as, show a vial of carfentanyl and say, this is enough to kill everybody in Cleveland or something. It's like, we have to understand what's happening here.

What's happening here is, law enforcement and the media are driving a narrative around fentanyl. They're trying to now schedule it in some places, and increase penalties on it, and we know where this is leading. It's going to be crack versus powder cocaine all over again, and it's going to be selectively enforced, and it's going to disproportionately impact people living in poverty and communities of color.

And when you can see it happening, and it's happening in real time, that was really one of the reasons that spurred my writing of this piece. And one of the things I want to do next is write the follow up piece, which is, what are they setting up here? What is happening here? What do we need to be aware of, because it's going on as we speak.

DOUG MCVAY: This is an interview with Keith Brown, Director of Health and Harm Reduction at the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Social Justice. We’ll hear more in a moment. You’re listening to Century of Lies, I’m your host Doug McVay, editor of DrugWarFacts.org. Npw let’s get back to that interview.

For myself, I'm just - what can I be doing? I've got this radio show, goes out every week, I do some other radio work. I talk about drug policy reform and the war on drugs. Right? And, now, on the one hand, there is a real concern about fentanyl, as you were saying, it's in the heroin supply through the east coast and quite a bit of the rest of the country.

But, you know, the approach should be drug safety testing, the approach should be supervised consumption facilities, and in fact you could have the drug safety testing going on at those facilities. That would, you know, that would save lives.

So, how can I reach a balance of communicating the facts and giving, you know, I mean, I think I'm trying for it by giving people an idea of what they can do. You know, not just focusing on the dangers but also focusing on the kind of positive, and, you know, sort of intelligent reforms that could actually address this. What can media do generally?

KEITH BROWN: I think media should be talking about real solutions. I think this is one of the areas where people get fatigued, and I'm seeing it now in practice, where the narrative around how bad the overdose crisis is, right, and it's being told in all of these angles, and people know. People are aware that we're in the midst of something here, people, you know, if you go in a room full of people, especially younger folks, and say, who knows somebody who has died of an overdose, nearly the entire room will raise their hands.

So the impact of this is felt. That said, you know, you still have people in the media describing this as an opioid crisis, and it's not an opioid crisis, we're in an overdose crisis. The opioids are one factor there, fentanyl's one factor there, prescription opioids is one factor there, but, you know, we need to be talking about benzos, and we need to be talking about gabapentin, we need to be talking about chronic pain patients who are being force tapered and cut off and sent into the illicit market.

It's those folks are overdosing, and those folks are committing suicide. You know, stimulants have never gone away, they're in - they're still here, they've never gone away, people are having adverse impacts from stimulants that are leading to drug related deaths.

So, I think number one, we need to frame this as what it is, and it is really a crisis of what CDC is calling "deaths of despair," which you can tie back to social and economic decline in most places, and the fact that you can't work a minimum wage job and afford a one-bedroom apartment in all or almost all, you know, major cities and urban areas in this country.

That's the narrative. That's what we should be talking about. But, back to your point about the specifics around the drug war stuff. We can be talking about solutions, and we can be really amplifying solutions.

You know, when we look at things like what happened in France in the Nineties when they had the HIV and overdose crisis, they made buprenorphine available to anybody who wanted it. That was it. It was a very clear, very rational, commonsense, health based approach to what was a health based issue.

They didn't try to arrest their way out of the issue, right, they didn't try to coerce people into anything. They just said, we have a tool available, we know it can help based on the research, and we're just going to make it available.

And now, I get, you know, France has a different healthcare infrastructure than we do, with socialized healthcare, and all of that is real, but that still doesn't preclude the US from doing very simple things, like, we could have removed the X Waiver requirement for buprenorphine years ago. As soon as we realized that it was one of the best tools we had around people with opioid use disorder, it should have been thing one. Remove the X Waiver, remove the prescriber limits on that, get rid of them altogether.

We should have immediately decriminalized possession of buprenorphine at the street level, right off the bat. We should have done that without even thinking about it. We should have created places like safer consumption spaces and drop-in sites immediately, knowing the intersections of the overdose crisis with the rise in homelessness in many places. We should have seen that link coming a long time ago.

So, you know, solutions. We should really be amplifying criminal justice reform. If people are still entering the criminal justice system, then we should be using harm reduction based mitigation responses to that, like instituting robust medication therapy programs in those facilities using all three, you know, methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone in facilities. We know that stuff works.

So, I think, it's a long answer to your question of what should the media be doing, but I think the media should really stop talking about what the scope of the problem is, without the context of what tools do we have available? What does the research show works?

And that's how we need to start framing interventions like decriminalization, safer consumption spaces, ideas that for some people are, you know, might seem different or might seem radical. It think we have to frame those not as radical ideas, but actually very pragmatic approaches to the issues we have in front of us.

You know, if you're having an issue in a community around public consumption of drugs, the answer to that is to provide people who have no place to use those substances with a place to do so.

Like, I enjoy beer. Right? I'm a beer drinker. Well, I have a place to live, which means I can consume that substance in a way that doesn't put me in contact with law enforcement, whereas if I'm - if I'm homeless or I'm living in a shelter or an SRO or supportive living environment that doesn't allow me to legally consume a product on premises, then I then have to go to the street to do that, which then means I'm going to be in contact with law enforcement.

So, I think we - if we start framing these things as reasonable, pragmatic approaches, it could change a lot about the way we do this.

The last thing I'll say about that is, the media is very - the mainstream media, I would say, is very, very caught up on doing this both sides-ism thing, and while I think I understand the motivation for it, which is to be able to portray different voices or all voices here, I've got to tell you, for some things, we might not need to be doing that.

I mean, I think when you look at something like vaccinations, or something, where it's like you go out of your way to find somebody who's going to be the fringe, or the opposing viewpoint, sometimes that comes across - you know, it mainstreams ideas that frankly are just not rooted in any type of reality.

When you walk that through with the overdose crisis, or with the war on drugs, sometimes that voice is law enforcement, or the DA, or somebody else, where you might talk to ten people and nine of those people say, like, yeah, we think this idea sounds good, it makes sense, or they might be public health professionals and say, yeah, we've looked at the research, we've done this, we visited other programs, this makes perfect sense.

And then they talk to, you know, the DA, or the chief of police, and they say I don't like the idea, I think it's just encouraging drug use, and then now that's the narrative that goes out, not all of the data, not all of the reason it makes pragmatic sense, and all that stuff.

The other thing, and I know I said that was the last thing, but the real thing that the media needs to stop doing is listening to law enforcement as experts on drugs. And, this is one where - this isn't me saying this, this is feedback I've gotten from reporters and other people that I've worked with.

They've told me, this is a blind spot. When the police do a press release on something like, you know, an officer overdoses on fentanyl at a scene, or marijuana is laced with fentanyl, or whatever, they take that press release and they run it. They don't talk to toxicologists, they don't talk to drug policy people, they don't talk to health department people, they don't talk to behavioral health professionals, they don't talk to addiction medicine docs.

They just take the story and because it comes from law enforcement, they take that immediately to mean that that's a trusted, expert voice, and they just roll with it. And so that's how the narrative gets out there.

DOUG MCVAY: It's incredibly frustrating. I mean, law enforcement shouldn't even be considered experts on criminal justice and law enforcement, for crying out loud, they're certainly not good - not knowledgeable about drugs or drug use.

I hear you about the beer thing, too, because it's, you know, on my way to the marijuana shop which is just a block away, I walk through the parking lot and out back of the, there's a little convenience store that mostly sells beer, and there are a couple of folks who hang in that parking lot.

And they're not - they're not people who are unhoused, they're people who live along one of the, possibly in a mobile home, possibly in sheltered housing that's in the neighborhood but they're not allowed to have beer on premises, and bars don't really, you know, they charge too much, so pick up a few from the six pack store and hang out in the parking lot.

It's, you know, it's - and in our state of Oregon, we're not allowed to - we're not allowed to use marijuana in public, and we're working to get consumption spaces, legal consumption spaces, but if you have your own home you're fine.

I'm sorry, if you own your own home, you're fine. If you're a renter, like I am, then there will probably be a provision in the lease saying no marijuana use, no marijuana production, no marijuana growing, no anything regarding weed. It, which we did, we had to sign that to get here.

And, yeah, it's - you'll eventually, in New York, you'll eventually get that too, but - probably. Probably.

KEITH BROWN: Oh, I'm certain of it. Well, you know, here, we - even the bill that was proposed, the governor tried to pull the home grow provision out of it, so ....

DOUG MCVAY: Which again, is a great thing if you can take advantage of it. But it does, it has that, you know - I'm not allowed to, it's a - it's an evictable offense, so ....

KEITH BROWN: Yeah.

DOUG MCVAY: Now, I - I hope you have another couple of minutes because I want to ask you a few more things, and one of them is about, how can we - how can we counteract these negative media images?

KEITH BROWN: Yeah. I think - there was just a recent story published in, I think, Louise Beale Vincent from the National Users Union [sic: Urban Survivors Union] did it, if I'm not mistaken, but, it had to do with how people with privilege need to start coming out as drug users.

Right? That people need to be - you know, the way to reduce stigma on people who use certain drugs is for people to have a much different conversation about drug use. And so, one of the things I've started including in trainings I do is that, when I introduce myself, I will say that I'm a person who uses drugs.

And for the room, sometimes that's a - sometimes that's a, hmm, whoa, immediately people go to, well, what does he mean? And everybody sort of then says, well, I wonder what drug he uses? Oh, he seems like a coke guy, or he seems like - you know, it's like, I think that naturally starts to get people kind of thinking.

But then, when you talk about, you know, our drug laws, and how we don't criminalize substances based on pharmacology, we do it because of who uses them, why, how, right politics, power, control, white supremacy, race, class, gender, you know, patriarchy, like, all of that stuff is tied up in there.

When you start to tease out with people that caffeine is a drug, and alcohol is a drug, and - right? - prescription drugs are drugs, that we start to talk about psychoactive substances and how, as a country, we love drugs. We - like, the US, we love drugs. What we don't love is people who use drugs. And that's not - and that's to say that it's people who use specific drugs, and that's how we've gotten this far.

That's why when you go to certain other countries, and some of their public health interventions are just normalized, and they don't even use the term harm reduction in some places, they just call it health. Just health programs, you know, it's like, well, the issue of using drugs is also a health issue, and so we just tie it into our health infrastructure.

It's like, that's where we need to get to. We need to destigmatize drug use. We need to start having a real conversation about substances, and what does that mean, and the fact that the - that if you take it at its root definition of drugs that, or substances that can alter your mood or consciousness, we're, you know, most of us are on drugs all the time, whether it be caffeine or nicotine or alcohol or Xanax or, you know, not even getting into, right, people - things that we all, that a lot of people use that are not legal, or quasi-legal.

I mean, you're in a state where cannabis is legal. I'm in a state where cannabis is decriminalized, which means that, for somebody like me, who's white, and has privilege, it's been decriminalized since 1971 or something, basically, in New York state.

But it also means that black and brown communities have been disproportionately impacted during the same time period, because walk all that through, stop and frisk and all that stuff.

So, to - the answer to your question is, like, we have to have a real conversation about drugs as a culture, if we're to destigmatize drug use and then go down the line and destigmatize, you know, drugs that are currently illegal, because I believe that stuff changes all the time.

I mean, there was a time in our history when alcohol was an illegal drug. So, I think having those conversations with people, doing a bit of history with people so that they can do a little more critical thinking around it, and then normalizing people's experiences around drug use, is going to hopefully get us there, but it's going to be a lot of work.

And so, you know, the media has a lot to do with that. Even our cultural norms have a lot to do with that. I think, you know, when you have people saying things like Is it wine o'clock yet, or Is it beer thirty?

Or, you know, I've even - people have sort of been like, ah, this week has been whatever, like, I can't wait to take a Xanax and have a glass of wine. It's like, when you can actually have a conversation with people and be like, you know, how different is that really than someone who uses a substance that's illegal to do basically the same thing?

You're telling me you're self-medicating yourself. Now, you might not be self-medicating trauma, but you're self-medicating, you know, a crappy week, or stress, or whatever you're doing. As human beings, we are biologically designed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. That's, you know, that's basically what we do. And so if we can have a real conversation about that, I think we can start disentangling the stigma related to all of that.

DOUG MCVAY: That was my interview with Keith Brown, he's the Director of Health and Harm Reduction at the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice. Remember to find out more about Katal Center and the work they're doing, find them on the web at WWW.KatalCenter.org, that's KatalCenter.org

And that's it for this week. I want to thank you for joining us. You have been listening to Century of Lies. We're a production of the Drug Truth Network for the Pacifica Foundation Radio Network, on the web at DrugTruth.net. I’m your host Doug McVay, editor of DrugWarFacts.org.

The executive producer of the Drug Truth Network is Dean Becker. Drug Truth Network programs, including this show, Century of Lies, as well as the flagship show of the Drug Truth Network, Cultural Baggage, and of course our daily 420 Drug War News segments, are all available by podcast. The URLs to subscribe are on the network home page at DrugTruth.net.

The Drug Truth Network has a Facebook page, please give it a like. Drug War Facts is on Facebook too, give its page a like and share it with friends. Remember: Knowledge is power.

You can follow me on Twitter, I'm @DougMcVay and of course also @DrugPolicyFacts.

We'll be back in a week with thirty more minutes of news and information about drug policy reform and the failed war on drugs. For now, for the Drug Truth Network, this is Doug McVay saying so long. So long!

For the Drug Truth Network, this is Doug McVay asking you to examine our policy of drug prohibition: the century of lies. Drug Truth Network programs archived at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.