Century of Lies June 7, 2009

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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Hello, my friends. Welcome to this edition of Century of Lies. It promises to be a great show. We’re going to be bringing in our main guest for discussion today, Mr. Eugene Oscapella. He’s a Barrister up in Canada and the drug war’s not just in America. It’s trying to run it’s course up there as well and with that, let’s go ahead and bring in Mr. Eugene Oscapella. Hello, Sir.

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: Hello, Dean. How are you?

Dean Becker: Good to have you with us, Eugene. It’s been too long.

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: I’m delighted to be speaking to you again, Dean.

Dean Becker: Introduce yourself. Tell us about the work you do.

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: I’m a lawyer in Ottawa, Canada, the capitol of Canada and I’ve worked for over twenty years on Drug Policy Reform issues. That’s of course, over the years, where I’ve encountered you so many times, Dean.

I teach drug policy at the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa here, as well and I’ve been pressing for a long time for a move away from using the Criminal Justice System to deal with drugs, to treat it more as a health and a social issue. So, I think it’s very much in line with what many of your listeners are thinking as well.

Dean Becker: Yes, Sir. Now, Canada is trying to follow, it seems like, in the footsteps of the US ‘Draconian’ drug war. Your thoughts? Are they going to get there?

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: Well, It’s a very scary time right now. Because, as you know Dean, a bill was introduced in Canada’s Parliament a few months ago, that was going to introduce mandatory minimum penalties, just at a time when the Rockefeller Drug Laws are being abandoned or greatly changed and moving away from mandatory minimum penalties, in many American jurisdictions. The Canadian government is moving towards mandatory minimum penalties for drug offences here, and in Canada the legal system’s a little bit different here.

Our drug law’s are all federal, so we have one federal drug law. So, if the federal government introduces mandatory minimum penalties, it applies right across the country. So there’s no escaping it. We’re just very afraid that we’re going to go in the direction. We’ve watched, in the United States, how badly mandatory minimum penalties have failed and yet, for some reason, Canada wants to do the same thing and the one political party that could put a stop to this, is sort of cowering in the corner, afraid of arousing any public angst about it. They’re so concerned about getting re-elected that they don’t want to do anything that could receive any sort of criticism.

Dean Becker: That’s kind of the way it works everywhere though.

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: Yes, yes. Politician’s cower in the corner. They’re suppose to lead, not cower. But, unfortunately, they cower more often than they lead sometimes.

Dean Becker: Yes, yes, they do. Now, we have a situation here where, you talk about the Rockefeller Drug Laws and we have US Senator Jim Webb…

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: Yes.

Dean Becker: …calling for a new look at this; to revamp our whole prison ‘industrial machine’ and yet Canada’s backsliding into our abyss. That’s scary.

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: Yeah. Well, we seem to make the same mistakes, only we do them about five years later so, there’s just a bit of a time lag and so, that’s the scary thing right now. There’s a chance that some of these laws will be declared unconstitutional, but only a chance. That’s the problem.

Dean Becker: My friends, we’re speaking with Mr. Eugene Oscapella. He’s director of the Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy. Eugene, there’s been an experiment up in Vancouver and I think… Was it Montreal, the Naomi…?

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: Yes.

Dean Becker: …experiment, where it was possible for addicts to come in, get a clean syringe and clean equipment, have a nurse available should they have problems, etc. Is that still ongoing?

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: That project is over. That was a heroin maintenance project. What it was, it involved about two hundred-fifty people in Vancouver and Montreal, two of our largest cities, and they had a very good success with it. They found, and it’s no surprise to drug policy reformers, but they found if you give people, with long term heroin dependencies, a clean safe access to heroin, they can function quite normally in society if they don‘t have some other underlying, perhaps a mental illness or something like that. But, unfortunately, that program ended.

But, fortunately, an agency of the government of Canada, the same government that is introducing mandatory minimum penalties and talking about more prison space and getting tougher on drugs. An agency of the government of Canada, that has a fairly independent mandate, has agreed to fund another Heroin Maintenance Project in Vancouver and Montreal.

So these projects, it’s the type of project is going to continue. We know that these have been used in Europe for many, many years and I’m very pleased to see that this project is going to go ahead here. It’s quite a surprise actually, that it is, but this agency that’s funding it, although it receives the money from the government of Canada, seems to have a bit of independence in terms of the type of research it funds.

Dean Becker: The Naomi Project, they were not actually dispensing the heroin, but this new project is going to acquire actual heroin and make it available to these addicts now. Is that right?

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: Well, no. Naomi dispense that it made the heroin available. This is going to provide a space for people to use it, as well. As you know Dean, we have a safe injector; a supervised injection facility in Vancouver. This is going to allow people not only to obtain clean, safer heroin, but give them an opportunity, a place to use it.

Dean Becker: A week or two ago I had David Rosenbloom, the new head of CASA - the Council on Alcoholism and Substance Abuse and I tried to ask him if they ever considered ’the cut’; the contaminates the are put into these ‘street’ recreational drugs. You know, the Levamisole - which is a de-wormer for animals, that is used in about one third of the cocaine here in the US, and it actually destroys a persons immune system. I asked him, ‘Did they ever take into consideration the contaminates that are put into these so-called recreational drugs?’ and he said, “Oh, it doesn’t matter either way. They’re both bad for you.”

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: I think I would disagree very, very strongly with him. Some of your listeners will remember, I think it was the 1970’s, the US government was helping to spray Paraquat on Mexican cannabis fields and that ended up causing tremendous harm to people who bought the cannabis. Because, of course, the people who were selling it didn’t care and Paraquat is a very dangerous substance when it’s ingested.

The contaminates that are associated with these drugs are terrible. Look at all the quality control’s we have on other normal consumer products in society. We have them, because we know the dangers of getting adulterated products. Why is there no concern about adulterated drugs?

Essentially what it is, that to me, is an attitude that says that, ‘Look, they’re drug users. We don’t really care what happens to them,’ and there’s this mythology around the notion that the drug itself is so terrible. In fact it’s quite often, as you point out, the contaminates that cause much of the harm and ,of course, you don’t know the potency of the dosage you’re getting in a situation like that. So, the total absence of quality control is extremely dangerous.

Dean Becker: A word I use about that stance taken to drug users is that, they’re unconditionally exterminable,…

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: Yes.

Dean Becker: …because well, if he died in a ditch, he’s better off than using. You know, that kind of thing.

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: They’re expendable people. They don’t figure as members of society. That is the attitude of too many people who look at drug users and that’s an attitude that we’ve been trying to change for decades now. Because these people are human beings and some of them have problems with drug dependencies, there’s no doubt about that. It’s pretty hard to find a human being who doesn’t have a problem of some kind and I think we need to exercise the same sort of compassion about people who have drug problems as we do for compassion as we do people who have other sorts of problems in their lives.

Dean Becker: Sure, sure, and there’s much discussion on the reform lists now, about doctor’s being held responsible for recommending marijuana and will they need insurance and that kind of thing? When the truth be told, you might get a panic attack, about the worse that can happen to you.

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: Yeah.

Dean Becker: Drink some orange juice and go sit down a few minutes, you’ll be fine.

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: But that’s part of the fear mongering that goes along with attempts to stop the legitimate, sort of medicinal uses of some substances too.

Dean Becker: Now, let’s talk about marijuana. There is such an attempt, at least, to accept the legitimacy of medical marijuana, in Canada. You’ve still got your ‘nay-sayers’ and people fighting it, but the fact is that, Canada grows it. Canada sells it; the Government sells it to their medical patients. It’s quite a difference from the US, right?

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: Yes. Well, there are complaints about the quality of the stuff that the Government sells, but that’s typical of complaints about many government programs, I’m sure… {chuckling} …and there’s no doubt that the current government is not being helpful at all, in the process, but we have Constitutional decisions that are really forcing it’s hand, that it can’t ignore it’s Constitutional obligations.

So, we do have medicinal cannabis programs in Canada and they’re far from perfect, but they’ve been established with government involvement; begrudging government involvement, I guess.

Dean Becker: It’s been now, I imagine four years ago, the temporary drug czar Andrea Barthwell, said that, ‘The DEA is the only government agency that basically pays for itself,’ and how do they pay for themselves? Through forfeiture. Through taking of money and drugs and property and cars and what? You name it and that they almost pay for themselves, through that forfeiture and Canada‘s now leaning in that direction as well. But there was a recent ruling about the fact that they weren’t going to be allowed to take peoples’ property for growing marijuana. You want to talk about that?

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: Yes. Well, there was a recent Supreme Court of Canada decision that said that they could not go ahead and seize the property of a woman, I believe is a real-estate broker, who had a grow operation on her property. But, they weren’t allowing them to seize it. That was a bit of a surprise. Because certainly, several of the provinces’ have forfeiture laws, that are much like the American ones except that, as of right now, I don’t think there’s any of the laws in Canada that actually allow the funds that are forfeited to be given directly back to the police.

But, there’s certainly pressure to do that, because Canadian police forces look at their American colleagues and they say that, ‘Gee, these guys can go ahead seize and keep the assets that they seize,’ and it’s a great money spender for them. It’s also very corrupting and it distorts the nature of law enforcement and the justifications for, and the reason’s why police do certain law enforcement operations. But the Supreme Court of Canada did say that they couldn’t seize the house, in this case.

There are certainly ample other laws that are allowing forfeiture on the balance of probability as opposed to the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. There’s still a thirst in Canada to get at peoples’ assets and that’s something we need to watch very carefully and I will fight very hard to prevent the police from directly being able to benefit from seizures, as they do in some US states, because we know the consequences that that has caused.

Dean Becker: Exactly. It runs rampant. As far as I know, it’s mostly in the South now, there are several little towns that blacks dare not drive through because they will take their car and whatever’s in their wallet and get them to sign a form, that they’re going to allow it, so they don’t have to go to jail.

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: What’s really scary about this is that traditionally we give to the police extraordinary powers in our society. They carry guns. They have certain powers. They’re protected from assaults and things like that. They’re given quite a privileged position in society and one of the ways we had to control the police was through the purse strings; through their budgets.

But now, as you see, we’ve got these police organizations that are becoming self-funding and that reduces the already, sort of, weak accountability that they have for their actions in most situations already. So, I’m quite concerned that we’re furthering, by allowing the police to keep the assets that they seize in various crimes, not only in drug crimes but in many crimes.

We’re reducing the level of control the state has over their behavior and that’s very frightening at a time when we’re seeing, for other reasons, governments calling for more and more powers for the police. So, it takes us more and more towards a police state.

Dean Becker: Yeah and…

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: Well, they can fund their own operations. We give them extraordinary powers and then they’re able to pay to fund their own operations. That’s a very, very scary recipe.

Dean Becker: Friends, we’re speaking with Mr. Eugene Oscapella. He’s the director, Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy. Eugene, I often hope or just wish, that we could bring your Parliamentarians to Houston and let them see what the world’s leading jailer looks like. Let them take a look though our jails. Let them visit our prisons. Let them go to the nearby states where we house the rest of our prisoners, because we don’t have enough prison beds to hold them all and let them look at the reason’s why and it’s for minor amounts of marijuana and microscopic amounts of hard drugs.

Our moral ’benchmark’ is broken. Just this past week, it was discovered by the Federal Government that our jails are unconstitutional. Depriving people of their rights, medical attention and all of these things, because we can’t keep up because we have so many thousands of people in jail and in prison, for basically nothing; for minor amounts of drugs. I only wish they can come down here and see what they’re envisioning.

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: I wish the could too, because we’ve been watching this for years, from Canada and I’m watching us go in the same direction. Unfortunately, some politicians, they’re so ideologically ’hide bound’ by their thinking that nothing is going to change the way they think. I think some of them, when they realize what’s going on, if they could see that, it might help. But there are others who it doesn’t matter.

These guys have a ‘bent’ on punishment. It’s almost what I would consider an authoritarian instinct, to punish; to control other people and the fact that people suffer because of it, is irrelevant to them. I hate to have to say this, because that’s not the sort of leaders I want in my country. That’s not the sort of democratic representatives I want, but some of these people with this very, very, I call it the weak conservative ’bent’ here meaning conservative in the sense of controlling, in the way that we would use it in this country. They frighten me, because I don’t think they can be persuaded by the facts.

I mean, we’ve just had experience with the ’bill’ that is now before our Parliament, the one that’s going to introduce mandatory minimum penalties. Virtually every witness who appeared before that bill, including people like Eric Sterling, from the United States, Debora S. from the Criminal Justice Institute, Debora Small from Break the Chains, in New York. They came up and said, “Don’t follow the American model.”

Virtually all the Canadian witnesses who appeared before the committee said, ’No, this is a disaster,’ and it’s not changing the Government’s thinking one bit. This is all about politics, it’s about self promotion, it’s about perpetuating a myth. But at some point, I hope the mythology is going to collapse on itself, because we can’t keep going on. We can’t keep spending money like this. We can’t keep opening up prisons and spending money that should be spent on education and other sorts of social goods. We can’t keep doing that in this country.

Dean Becker: Friends, we’re speaking with Mr. Eugene Oscapella. He’s the director of the Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy. Eugene, we got about a minute left. I kind of want to turn it over to you. Just give the folks your thought; a little pep talk. As I was mentioning earlier, you and I can’t solve this. We got to have people out there in the grass roots.

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: Precisely. We need more and more people. Don’t wait till your kids get busted and then you’re going to find out how rotten the drug laws are. Don’t wait for that. Realize that this world is; at some point the laws that you may not think affect you, have a profound effect on you. Get out there and do something about it, now. I’ve been working this for twenty years. Dean, I’m sure you’ve been working on this for as long, if not longer, on these things.

We need more people. We need more people to stand up and tell their elected representative that they’re not going to put up with the mythology anymore. That they want real solutions to real problems, not pretend solutions.

Dean Becker: Exactly. Eugene, your website. Please.

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: It’s cfdp.ca

Dean Becker: Alright, my friends. We’ve been speaking with Eugene Oscapella. Thank you so much, my friend. We’ll talk with you before the year’s over.

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: Thank you, Dean, it’s a delight. All the very best.

Dean Becker: Thank you, Sir.

Mr. Eugene Oscapella: Bye, bye.
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This is Dr. Hoffman’s guide for would-be overdose victims. If you’re considering using a drug:

# 1: To change your mood;
# 2: To get high;
# 3: Because your friends are doing it;
# 4: In combination with other mind altering substances, particularly alcohol;
# 5: To cope with stress;
# 6: To escape;
# 7: In a party situation;
# 8: Alone with potential help unavailable;
# 9: For the first time and you’re unfamiliar with it;
#10: At a dose higher than you’re use to, or you don’t know how strong it is;
#11: When you have health issues that might affect your breathing or your ability to metabolize the drug;
#12: You don’t know about Naloxone for opiates and it’s not available anyway;

The possibility that you may kill yourself is very high. Proceed at your own risk and do not blame the drug. You took it, it didn’t take you. Relax. If you kill yourself, your parents will blame the drug, not you and they will think about you everyday, for the rest of their lives.

This is Dr. Joel Simon Hochman, from the National Foundation for the Treatment of Pain. Good luck and be wise.
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Dean Becker: Dr. Hochman will be our guest this week on Cultural Baggage. Next up, we hear from Winston Francis. It’s not the Official Government Truth but, it’s pretty close.
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(piano music plays in the background)

Winston Francis: If we end the drug war now, all of our efforts are for nothing. Victory cannot come from admitting defeat. Lives lost. Families ruined. Billion’s spent. All for nothing. Almost a century. Generations of fighting. All for nothing. Giving up is the only true path to failure. We must continue to fight, to spend and jail and kill, to honor the memory of those who fought before us. It is what we know. So it is what we must do. Follow the leader. Do not falter. Your path, has been chosen for you.
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(retro music plays in the background)

Even the ruling judge said, “I think that this amount of time is excessive, but it’s not up to me. So, that means it’s up to us people, you and me. We need to get all of our friends together and we need to help Eddy Lepp.

Go to eddylepp.com where you can find the latest update and donate to Eddy’s legal fund and together, we can make a difference. We need to reform the cannabis laws so that this doesn’t happen. We need to legalize the weed.

FREE EDDY, FREE EDDY, FREE EDDY LEPP. HE’S A FREEDOM FIGHTER FOR THE RIGHTS OF EVERYBODY ELSE.

FREE EDDY, FREE EDDY, FREE EDDY LEPP. HE’S A FREEDOM FIGHTER FOR THE RIGHTS OF EVERYBODY ELSE.

FREE EDDY, FREE EDDY, FREE EDDY LEPP. HE’S A FREEDOM FIGHTER FOR THE RIGHTS OF EVERYBODY ELSE.

FREE EDDY, FREE EDDY, FREE EDDY LEPP. HE’S A FREEDOM FIGHTER FOR THE RIGHTS OF EVERYBODY ELSE.

Did I mention that Eddy’s got his own style and he’s larger than life? The dude had thirty-two thousand cannabis plants growing in plain sight. That’s a lot of medicine, man. What are all the patients who needed the medicine doing now?

Go to eddylepp.com
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This is Jesse Stout. Executive Director of the Rhode Island Patient Advocacy Coalition at ripatients.org.

Dean Becker: Alright. Jesse, there are many states across the country that are taking a look at medical marijuana. What is Rhode Island up to, in this regard?

Jesse Stout: Well, Dean, in 2006 Rhode Island became the eleventh medical marijuana state, but our law did not provide for patients’ safe access to medicine. Currently under Rhode Island law, a doctor may recommend medical marijuana for a patient, who may then grow it at home, him or herself, which has been too difficult for many seriously ill patients. A patient may also appoint a care-giver to grow it for them, but many people don’t know a trusted friend or family member, who knows how to grow medical marijuana.

This years bill, the 2009 Medical Marijuana Act here in Rhode Island, would allow the State Department of Health to license independent, non-profit compassion centers that would grow and distribute medical marijuana for patients.

Dean Becker: Across America you see various polls on the subject of medical marijuana. It always makes sixty, seventy, eighty, sometimes ninety percent acceptance, and the legislature there in Rhode Island just passed this bill. Tell us how that went.

Jesse Stout: According to our public opinion, here in Rhode Island, about seventy percent of Rhode Islander’s already support this ‘compassion center’ concept for safe access to medical marijuana and about eighty percent of Rhode Islander‘s already support the medical marijuana law, as it stands.

This week, in the Rhode Island House of Representatives, the Compassion Center bill passed by a vote of sixty-four to four, which is about a ninety-four percent majority of legislators.

Dean Becker: So this speaks loudly against the propaganda that’s been pouring forth from the government ‘hypocrisy machine‘. What do you think?

Jesse Stout: Well, we don’t really have any such machine here in Rhode Island anymore. I think that drug war propaganda was dismantled years ago and most Rhode Islander’s now know that marijuana is an excellent medical treatment for a wide variety of serious illnesses, as attested to by the support for medical marijuana that we’ve seen from such groups as the Rhode Island Medical Society, the Rhode Island State Nurses Association, the Rhode Island Academy for Family Physicians and the Rhode Island Psychiatric Society.

Dean Becker: Once again, repeat your website for the listener.

Jesse Stout: You can learn more about medical marijuana in Rhode Island at ripatients.org.
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Hi. This is Winston Francis of the Official Government Truth saying, ‘If you like the way the drug war works, don’t bother visiting us on the web at www.drugtruth.net.’
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This is Claudia Rubin from Drug Policy Charity Release in the UK.

Dean Becker: Claudia, there was a recent article in the Guardian Newspaper, talking about the need to re-examine how we go about this drug war; how we treat people who use drugs. Would you kind of summarize that for us, please?

Claudia Rubin: Sure. We at the release staff started the campaign this week called: Nice People Take Drugs. We’ve taken out advert’s across London buses and the slogan is, Nice People Take Drugs and really what we try to do with that is actually try to de-stigmatize what it means to be a drug user and actually try to reveal the fact that the majority of people who take drugs, actually do so leading very normal lives.

The campaign really is about opening up the debate to get the country, to get the world talking about the real issues and how we actually want to see drugs controlled in the future.

Dean Becker: Well, that’s the most ludicrous law they have here in the United States. They call it the “Controlled Substances Act”, which does absolutely nothing to control it. Is there a similar situation in Great Brittan?

Claudia Rubin: Absolutely, yes. We have a number of substances which are called ’controlled substances’ and the arguments that we would say is that, of course, there is no control at all. There’s no control over the supply, the demand, the use, the manufacture and that it’s just complete nonsense to say that government’s have control. More and more people take drugs. They’re cheaper than ever before and they’re more available than ever before.

Dean Becker: The United States in now the world’s leading jailer. I understand that even in Canada now, they’re considering setting up mandatory minimum laws to parallel what we’ve done here. It’s not a good idea, is it?

Claudia Rubin: It’s a disaster, a total disaster. In fact, the biggest harm caused by drugs, both in the UK and in countries like the US and Canada. It’s from the criminalization of individuals. Sending people to prison for using drugs makes absolutely no sense. It’s a totally unfair law which is applied in a very discriminatory way.

It’s always, more often than not, it’s working class people, it’s black people, it’s people from ethnic minorities who end up in prison or get longer sentences and it totally wrecks their lives and their chances of success, further down the line. It achieves absolutely nothing. It doesn’t act as a deterrent and it’s a huge social harm and it’s one of the major, major problems with our approach to drugs.

Dean Becker: Alright. Claudia Rubin will be our guest on this coming weeks Cultural Baggage and as always I remind you, there is no truth, justice, logic, scientific fact, medical data. In fact no reason for this drug law to exist. Please visit our website, endprohibition.org

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: C. Assenberg of www.marijuanafactorfiction.org