Century of Lies May 23, 2010

The failure of Drug War is glaringly obvious to judges, cops, wardens, prosecutors and millions more. Now calling for decriminalization, legalization, the end of prohibition. Let us investigate the Century of Lies.
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Hello, my friends. Welcome to this edition of Century of Lies. Should have a great show today. We’re going to be speaking with Ms. Loretta Nall. She ran for Governor in the State of Alabama. I think she’s still President of the U.S. Marijuana Party. She use to work for Mr. Marc Emery. Which we’ll get into a discussion about his situation a bit later.

Hope you enjoy the caliber of the guests we bring you. Including just recently, Professor William Martin from the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. We’ve had wardens and prosecutors and judges and local DA, local Sheriff. We’ve had all kinds of high caliber guests, if you will, coming on the air and talking about, ‘Yes, there is a need for change.’ One person, who I know, knows there’s a need for change is our guest, Ms. Loretta Nall. Hello, Loretta.

Ms. Loretta Nall: Hi, Dean. Thanks for having me on again.

Dean Becker: Oh, thank you. Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes they say, ’Don’t laugh at people when they’re down.’ {laughter} ‘Don’t point fingers.’ But today, we just have to I think. Because there’s just so much… I look at it this way Loretta. If we could in one day, publish the thousands of arrests each year, (it’s too bad they don’t happen in one day) of politicians and cops and prison guards and customs agents and border patrol and army and ice and thousands of corrupted, bribed and outright *colluders with the barbarous cartels. It would end the drug war that day. It’s just a shame it spread out over the year, isn’t it?

Ms. Loretta Nall: It really is. It really is, Dean. I know that Drug War creates an incentive for corruption. It’s an environment for corruption and people are weak. So, you got a drug war. You got corruption. You’ve got people taking bribes. You’ve got horrible murders going on and… Well, I’m preaching to the choir. You know what happens.

Dean Becker: Well, I do and so does a lot of my listeners. But I think what we all fail to do, is to sum-total what is going on…

Ms. Loretta Nall: True.

Dean Becker: …to realize the magnitude of all of this. They say that it was Anthony Placido, assistant head of the DEA. I heard him last fall, out in El Paso, say that, ’The worldwide commerce in these illegal drugs is three hundred eighty-five billion dollars a year. Now that buys a lot of bribes; buys a lot of cooperation.

Ms. Loretta Nall: Woo -wee. {laughter} It’s hard for me and probably for most people to imagine, just what that kind of money can buy you.

Dean Becker: It’ll fill a lot of railroad cars with hundred dollar bills, I’ll tell you that.

Ms. Loretta Nall. Yes, it would. Yes, it would.

Dean Becker: Now Loretta, I was just sitting down today trying to think of some of the things that had happened here over the last few years. Our last district attorney, Chuck Rosenthal, resigned over his drug use. We had an HPD officer, busted in his control car - in uniform, delivering marijuana and cocaine. {chuckling}

Ms. Loretta Nall: {softly spoken} Wow!

Dean Becker: We had a DPS Drug Analyst, busted for stealing a total of about twenty-six kilograms of cocaine.

Ms. Loretta Nall: Gee’s Louise…

Dean Becker: {still chuckling} We’ve had guards and wardens at local prisons, busted over their smuggling in tobacco, marijuana and other drugs. {serious now} You know, it’s petty though, compared to this story that’s breaking. You’ve got a couple others I want to talk about. The one you were alerting me to today, please present that story to our listeners.

Ms. Loretta Nall: OK. It’s kind of convoluted and I’ll do the best I can to try to make it something people can understand. Back in 1995 in Coosa County, which is the county right next me - very rural, sparsely populated, it’s owned by one particular family called the Teels. But back in 1995 out on the Coosa River, three men were tied up, doused with kerosene and set on fire. One man survived, the other two died. At this location where they were found, there’s like a hunting cabin on a hundred sixty-five acres of land that they were leasing, were thirteen hundred marijuana plants.

So just recently, the people who committed the murders were indicted. This has been less than a year ago. We got a new sheriff in Coosa County and he opened up some cold cases and believed that he had solved this one. Then last week it came out that the Assistant District Attorney of Coosa County and an attorney from Gadsden, where these other gentlemen who were murdered and assaulted were from, had gone to…

There was a civil lawsuit. The surviving victim was suing a gentleman named Carl Weaver, who owns a wastewater treatment place in Gadsden. He suppose have a lot of money. They say he’s connected to the grow-op. So the survivor of the brutal… I just don’t even have a word for setting somebody of fire, while they were alive. I just can’t even imagine what kind of a monster you’d have to be.

Dean Becker: The Mexican’s have actually invented a new word. I saw it on an email today. I’m sorry, I didn’t bring it. But there’s a brand new word in Spanish, for those set on fire and found burning in car trunks, actually. But, go ahead.

Ms. Loretta Nall: Oh, Lord! You’re going to have to send that to me. Anyway, the assistant DA and the attorney, who were handling the civil case against Mr. Weaver, decided that for five million dollars, they would get the Capital Murder indictment that Mr. Weaver is facing in connection with those slayings in 1995, they would make it disappear.

So they go to Gadsden last week and they meet with the attorney that’s representing the victim and they take a one million dollar check… a check! An Assistant District Attorney is dumb enough… What the hell? Is he going to cash it at Payday Cash Advance? Deposit it in the Watford First Savings and Loan Bank? What are you going to do with a million dollar check?

So this case is really… What’s really funny about Coosa County, is it’s not a democracy there, it’s more like a monarchy. Because there was a family called the Teels. The ’old man’ Teel was the
State Representative for awhile. He had three sons. Robert, Carlton and Frank.

Robert was the Judge in Coosa County for many years and I have a horror story. About once when I went before him, he put me in jail for not being able to pay a car insurance fine. I’ll get into that later, or maybe not. His brother Carlton, when Robert was a Judge, Carlton was a Defense Attorney and Frank, who’s the one that’s involved in the extortion fraud that’s just been arrested, was the Assistant District Attorney.

So at one time in Coosa County, you could hire a Teel to defend you against a Teel prosecuting you, before a Judge Teel. {laughter by Dean} It’s the God’s honest truth. I don’t know how it was legal, but they’ve been doing it for years and years. Now the ‘old man’ Judge Teel is retired and ran off into deep seclusion in the woods. I hear he doesn’t even have a phone or TV. You know if I had oppressed and upset as many people and mistreat them over the years as he had, I would probably go into deep, deep hiding as well… {laughter} … when I retired. But yes, we have an Assistant DA.

The funny thing is, I’ve talked to some of my legal friends in Alabama, some of the lawyer that I know and they say, ’You know, there’s no way that an Assistant DA has the power to make a Capitol Murder charge disappear, without the explicit knowledge and help of the District Attorney.’ Now the District Attorney is somebody that I know personally. His boss, Judge Rochester, is somebody that I know personally from Clay County, where I grew up.

So we kind of come up with, ’They’re going to split the five million dollars. With a million dollars going to each of the lawyers, a million to the DA, a million to Judge and a million to the Sheriff of Coosa County.’ That’s just speculation. We kind of figured that’s how it was going to go down, before they get busted.

Dean Becker: Last night I was watching part of that movie, Training Day. Where the local officials and the judge and the Police Chief, all decided that it was time to ’take down the drug dealer’ and they killed him and took his four million dollars out of his kitchen floor. It’s a movie. It’s conjecture. But the truth of the matter is that, I think your story’s even stranger.

Ms. Loretta Nall: A couple weird things about this story is 1) no media outlet so far that has reported on it has said, ’Who owned the land where the thirteen hundred marijuana plants were found, at the time of these murders and attempted murder? Another thing is, since 1973 Alabama has had some aircraft or another, in the air looking for marijuana plants and the Coosa River - anywhere near there, would be a prime place to grow. You want a waterway.

So in this day and time and in 1995, I know there were helicopter fly over’s and there’s no way, there’s absolutely no way they would miss thirteen hundred plants. Somebody had to pay them off. The marijuana’s kind of taken a secondary role in this. Nobody’s really mentioning it. But I said to begin with, ’Look, here’s what happened. These guys were running a grow for somebody. Either somebody came to rip the grow and killed them. Or the person they were running it for decided to take them out, because they knew too much. Or whatever.

But that’s what it’s going to come back to and if we didn’t have prohibition, than we wouldn’t have the two victims and one survivor of an incredibly brutal attack. I believe it’s going to come back to the marijuana. But nobody’s really saying it. Nobody’s says who was the land owner and nobody asks why thirteen hundred plants were overlooked at that time.

Dean Becker: Yeah. As you say, the prohibition makes it all even go further underground. No one wants to admit anything. Nobody’s going to step forward and speak the truth, for fear of going to prison. Which…

Ms. Loretta Nall: Exactly.

Dean Becker: No recourse to the law. That’s what we’ve said over the years, here on the Drug Truth Network. Alright. We are speaking with Ms. Loretta Nall. She’s a former Gubernatorial Candidate in the State of Alabama and she’s President of the U.S. Marijuana Party. Loretta, just a week ago, or within the past week, a good friend of ours had his Liberty taken from him up there in Canada. You want to talk about Marc Emery?

Ms. Loretta Nall: Yeah, I want to talk about Marc for a minute. I, like everybody else, was really surprised that Nicolson, in the end, signed the extradition order. I think that’s going to come back to bite the Conservatives in the ass. Which it really should in Canada, as the majority of the population there is for legalization. As the Canadian Government took the tax money from Marc over the years, six or seven hundred thousand dollars and even directed Medical Marijuana patients in Canada to get their seeds from him. It doesn’t make any sense.

We thought it was clear when Karen Tandy was head of the DEA and she released that statement when Marc was arrested. That it was political. She even said so. ’It’s one less pot of money for the marijuana activists in the U.S. and Canada.’ It’s this. It’s that. ‘We’re taking out the head of the dragon.’

It never should have happened and I hope it really tick’s off Canadians. I really hope it tick’s off enough Americans. I know that I am very unhappy. Marc was my ’savior’, I guess you could say, in a way. I mean Marc discovered me and taught me a lot of what I know about how to be an activist and how to stand up to power and corruption, and to not back down. You know, you just keep going. You don’t stop, because we have to end the drug war.

He got me through many a tight spot, when I first stated out. To take somebody like Marc and put him in a prison cell is… I don’t even have words to describe it. I hate government assistance and so I don’t do food stamps and I don’t do Medicaid for my kids and any of that. We just get by however we can and my daughter was about six years old and she had ear problems. You know, lots of little kids get ear infections and hers were chronic.

I didn’t have the money for the surgery, I didn’t have insurance and Marc said, “You got Canadian health insurance,” and he sent six thousand dollars, for my daughter to have an ear operation so that she can hear. So he’s not a bad man. He’s not somebody to fear.

If this were really about marijuana seed sellers shipping their seeds across the border, then there’s probably fifteen or twenty marijuana seed sellers on the same block as Marc in Vancouver. That do the same thing that have not been touched. Not that I want them to be. I don’t think anybody should be jail for anything to do with marijuana or any other drugs, as long as they’re not hurting anyone.

But all those things taken together, the statement from Tandy, the fact that them other marijuana seed sellers are still openly operating and have not been targeted, just proves without a doubt, that we have a Political Prisoner in the USA This is the USA and that’s not suppose to happen here.

I wanted to everybody real quickly, if you haven’t been on the Cannabis Culture website recently, Marc has posted his first communications from Sea-Tac Federal Prison in Seattle/Tacoma, Washington. There’s a thing call Corrlinks, where you can sign up and put down Marc prison number and he’ll be able to exchange emails with you, daily. If you want to check that out, go to the Cannabis Culture website and look at the posting from Jodie on the right hand side and she’ll get you set up.

Dean Becker: OK. Well, real good. Loretta, I tell you what. I you will, I want to share something with you. A little bit of an interview I did with Mr. Paul Armentano, of NORML. It kind of deals with the topic we started out with here, Hypocrisy. We’ll be back in just a couple minutes.
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Paul Armentano, Deputy Director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

Dean Becker: Paul, there’s been a recent story breaking abut incapacity in those that use marijuana, being just totally disingenuous. Your thoughts on it?

Mr. Paul Armentano: This raises an interesting point. There was a study that was published in the March issue of the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, that was looking at the impact of marijuana use on driving performance and naturally, this is a controversial subject. You’ve got, on the one hand, the Obama Administration.

In their most recent Drug Strategy Report (they’re) pushing for an extension of very strict inflexible Drug Drive Laws. That in some cases, could actually go so far as to punish drivers who are not impaired, simply because of the content of their urine.

On the other side of the spectrum however, we do have some evidence that certainly, in someone who’s acutely under the influence of marijuana - who may have just recently consumed marijuana, does seem to have an elevated risk of accident compared to somebody who’s totally sober.

So given these two different tracks, there was a team of researchers at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut and also at the Carver College of Medicine in Iowa, that tried to assess what exactly is the impact of marijuana smoking on motor performance.

So what they did was, they took eighty-five subjects. They sat them down. They ran them through a battery of driving tests, on a driving simulator. Then they gave these same subjects either a marijuana cigarette or a placebo marijuana cigarette and they ran them through the same battery of tests again, thirty minutes later.

Much to the investigators surprise, what they found was that the subject’s performed pretty much exactly the same way after using marijuana, than they had prior to using marijuana. So in fact, the impact of performance from marijuana, at least on these battery of driving tests, was minimal.

Now where the politicization of the science came into play was that the researchers - keep in mind that this was a grant that they had from the National Research on Drug Abuse to perform this research - they clearly knew that they had to come up with something negative to say about marijuana and driving.

After all, they were just funded by the very administration that made it public that they want to expand more severe penalties for targeting people who drive under the influence of marijuana. So coming out with at study that says marijuana doesn’t particularly impact driving performance, wasn’t going to do the trick.

So what they did, was they focused on the performance of subjects who use marijuana. So there was one particular test, the Auditory Distraction Test. What the investigators reported was that on this one test, ‘Individuals who use marijuana, tended to drive more slowly when they were faced with a secondary auditory distraction.’

Now overall, this of course is a good thing. You would think it’s natural that when somebody is driving a motor vehicle and then they’re faced with a secondary distraction, that they would compensate for that distraction by driving more slowly.

But in the researcher’s need to find something negative about the impact of marijuana on performance, they focused on this one result. (They) said that the fact that these drivers drove more slowly, even though they had no greater elevated risk of accident, they performed the overall task no differently. They just took slightly longer to perform it.

Because they decreased their driving speed, they said that this was evidence of Marijuana Impairment. That these individuals would have not slowed down their vehicle, unless they knew they were impaired. Thus marijuana is highly impairing to driving. Which it ultimately was their overall conclusion, even though during the bulk of this study, you will note that they found that driving performance after using marijuana, was virtually no different than before using marijuana.

So this is an example, where you have science that’s really being adversely impacted by the fact that the science is being funded for the sole purpose of maintaining prohibitionist policies. When the science doesn’t support those policies, you see the researcher’s twisting the results, in a way to try to comport the research, to fit with those policies.

Dean Becker: Alright. Once again, we’re speaking with Mr. Paul Armentano. Deputy Director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Now Paul, there was a happening this past week, that one of the premiere drug warriors of all time, resigned because of a sex scandal. You thought on Congressman Mark Souder?

Mr. Paul Armentano: Well, to anybody that’s been listening to this show or anybody that’s been following this issue for some time, they’re well aware of who Mark Souder is. The former House representative was arguably the most outspoken, the most strident, the most ardent drug warrior in Congress and that really says a lot. But that’s not hyperbole.

There is no doubt that Mark Souder believed in the Drug War and believed in ramping up the Drug War to a degree arguably unparalleled by any of his colleagues. He’s probably most well known for being the ‘architect’ of the federal provision that cost individuals’ their Federal Financial Student Aid, if they have a drug conviction. Even a minor conviction, such as a marijuana possession conviction.

When you see a result like this, I’ve just got to say, it’s not surprising. It so often appears that those who use the ’bully pulpit’ and shout the loudest with the bullhorn, when it comes to arguing how ’other people’ ought to live their life. When it comes to telling other people what they should be doing in the privacy of their own home, it tends to be more-than-not that those who are shouting the loudest are also those that have the greatest mess at home, that they themselves need to be cleaning up.

It seems like someone like Mark Souder should have been taking a page from what he was ‘preaching’. But instead, we see that this is just another example of one of these Hypocrites in Congress, who wants to tell everyone else how they should live under the threat of arrest and incarceration. But chooses to live a lifestyle that is far out-of-line with the sort of ‘principles’ that he’s preaching.

Dean Becker: Alright, Paul. Once again, your website? Please.

Mr. Paul Armentano: www.norml.org
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(sung to: There Was an Old Farmer)

There was a Congressman who loved Drug War and Souder was his name-o

S - O - U {squeal} D - E - R

S - O - U {squeal} D - E - R

S - O - U {squeal} D - E - R

And Souder was his name-o

{squealing pig}
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Dean Becker: Alright. I just couldn’t help myself, Loretta. What do you think?

Ms. Loretta Nall: {amidst laughter} That’s beautiful. {Sigh} I didn’t know there was enough money and power in the world, that would make Mark Souder attractive to anyone. {laughter} I was really surprised when that guy was like, ‘Oooo’. It was gross. Nasty.

Dean Becker: I’ve actually seen the pictures of his associate - and she weren’t bad, actually. But…

Ms. Loretta Nall: I haven’t seen her. I have not dug that much into it. I was just so busy in jubilant! Celebrating his fall from his damn bully pulpit, that… Yeah, I’m in. {laughter} I’ll just be happy and I’ll look her up later.

Dean Becker: Alright.

Ms. Loretta Nall: I want to thank her, actually. Thank you.

Dean Becker: Yeah. Yeah. For suffering through it. Yes, yes, and again don’t kick people when they’re down. But he kicked a lot of people when they were down. He made a life’s work of it, did he not?

Ms. Loretta Nall: He made it a law, to kick people when they were down.

Dean Becker: Yeah, yeah. He’s one of those that truly ascribe to the idea that drug users are unconditionally exterminable.

Ms. Loretta Nall: Unless they’re republicans and I have another story from Alabama if we have time.

Dean Becker: Go ahead, go ahead.

Ms. Loretta Nall: OK. In Mobile, there’s a county commissioner named Steve Nodine, who was elected in 2004 and he was basically the golden-boy of Mobile politics. He was everywhere, hands in everything. The newspaper down there - very, very conservative (although I like them). The Mobile Press Register backed him every step of the way.

On May 9th, on Mother’s Day, he is the only and prime suspect in the shooting death of his mistress. He was at his mistresses home in Gulf Shores, on Mother’s Day. Neighbors heard a gunshot and saw his county truck driving away from the scene. Back in December, he took his county vehicle to the garage in Mobile to have it serviced and the mechanic found marijuana strung on the floor board. He found a bottle of hydrocodone with Mr. Nodine’s, Commissioner Nodine’s name on it. He was never charged with that.

At first, I thought it was a set-up. It was a little too convenient. I didn’t think anybody, especially a County Commissioner, would be stupid enough to leave stuff out in plain sight. So I thought, ’Well, maybe he was set up, and there just happened to be a cop at the garage at the same time and, you know the drug task force was called in and… ’ But thirty days later, he went and took a drug test and passed it. Surprise, surprise. Took a polygraph test….

Dean Becker: Thirty days later? Yeah.

Ms. Loretta Nall: Yeah. Well anybody could do it thirty days later and it was a urine test. If they really wanted to know, you do a hair test. So they were investigating that and then his mistress turns up dead and then they come out with, ’Over the last nine months, he has doctor-shopped and obtained twenty-four hundred hydrocodone pills from four doctors in nine states. He is just the cream-of-the-crop.

The other day a reporter asked his attorney, ’Does he have a drug problem?’ and he said, ’Well, you know… umm… it’s not… it’s like people don’t really mean to… It’s like Rush Limbaugh and Brett Favre, you know you… It’s not really a crime to be an addict…’

Basically what he said is, ’If you’re rich and famous and connected, it’s not a crime to be an addict. But if you’re somebody else, than you’re going to jail and you poor people suck and you should be outlawed. Only rich people can be drug addicts, and it be OK.’

So basically we have a County Commissioner who’s doctor-shopping. I hate the fact that marijuana’s involved in this because he makes it look so bad, because most people who smoke pot aren’t murderers. But he’s a real piece of work. So they’re trying to impeach him and they’re going to bring murder charges against him. That Grand Jury proceeding, I believe starts on Monday.

So we have the five million dollar extortionist DA in the county next to me and the pill popping, pot smoking, mistress killing Commissioner from Mobile. So things are always interesting in Alabama. It goes on all the time. It’s just really interesting when they get caught and it’s brought to life. You don’t really hear these things. They sweep them under the rug and so, it’s been an interesting two weeks in Alabama for me. I’ve been very busy blogging… {laughing}

Dean Becker: I’ll bet so.

Ms. Loretta Nall: …and trying to cause trouble.

Dean Becker: Well Loretta Nall, we want to thank you for being with us. Loretta, you want to point folks to your website?

Ms. Loretta Nall: Ah, yes. My website is nallforgovernor.blogspot.com and I’d also like to tell people that might not be aware. We had made history in Alabama on April 7th when we did get, for the first time in the six years we’ve been pushing it, we got our Medical Marijuana Bill out of the House Judiciary Committee and we’re ready to rock ‘n roll for the next session. So within the next year or two, Alabama will have a Medical Marijuana Law.
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(musical accompaniment)

Drug Truth Network programs are archived at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.

bakerinstitute.org/dtn
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That’s right folks. I’ve been preaching about it for weeks now. This past week, the Drug Truth Network Archives went live, at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.
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Be sure to join us next week when our guest will be A.R. Torsone. Author of, ‘Herb Trader: A Tale of Treachery and Espionage‘. As always. I remind you there is not truth, logic, no scientific fact, no reason for this drug war to exist.

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

*colluders: To cooperate with somebody secretly in order to do something illegal or undesirable

Transcript provided by: C. Assenberg of www.marijuanafactorfiction.org