Century of Lies, November 22, 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. This is Dean Becker. Welcome to this edition of Century of Lies. I promise, next week we’ll get back to some live interviews but, this week we’re going to present a conference that was held at the James Baker III Institute for Policy Studies at Rice University, just a couple of days ago and the conference was titled: “Cannabis, Cartels and Crime - Would Legalization Help?”

We’ll hear first from the honorable Edward P. Djerejian. He’s the founding director of the Baker Institute for Policy Studies. We’ll hear from Professor Bill Martin. He’s a Senior Fellow at the Baker Institute. We’ll also hear from Gary J. Hale, Chief of Intelligence - Houston Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration and we’ll hear from Professor Ethan Nadelmann, founder and Executive Director of the Drug Policy Alliance.

Another participant was Mark Kleinman, Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Public Policy Analysis program at the UCLA School of Public Affairs. We’ll have an interview with him next week, live. If all goes well. But first up, Ambassador Djerejian.

Ambassador Djerejian: I suspect no one here disagrees with the proposition that drugs can cause enormous harm, ruin the lives of those that use them and those who’s lives they affect. Undoubtedly, drugs are also implicated in the wide range of crimes and are associated with activities that enrich criminals, endanger innocent citizens and threaten or seriously undercut the development and practice of democracy. There is, however, considerable disagreement over the nature and extent of that harm.

The factors that contribute to it’s many faucets and the best ways to go about addressing the numerous issues that cluster together under the umbrella of the drug problem. These issues are of concern to several programs at the Baker Institute. On Tuesday evening, under the aegis of our program on Homeland Security and Terrorism, lead by Joan Neuhaus Schaan. The noted author Gretchen Peters, spoke on Seeds of Terror - How the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are morphing into the Worlds New Narco Mafia, was a fascinating presentation.

Our program tonight, “Cannabis, Cartels and Crime - Would Legalization Help?”, is a co-operative effort between our Latin American initiative, lead by Erica DeLaGarza, and our program on drug policy, lead by Dr. Bill Martin. So we can see that here, at the Baker Institute, we are addressing this major issue through different vantage points.

I know you are all painfully aware of the devastating carnage that has affected Mexico, in the recent years and El Paso’s twin sister city, Ciudad Juarez. Nearly four thousand people, four thousand people, have been killed in drug related violence, since January 2008.

The United States, which is concerned for the wellbeing of a major trading partner, with whom it shares a two thousand mile border, has increased anti-drug forces along the border. It has also begun to send hundreds of millions of dollars to Mexico, to help bolster the Mexican governments efforts to control and perhaps to feed the increasingly violent drug cartels.

In addition, the two countries are working with mutual apprehensions to increase collaboration amongst their several anti-drug agencies. The outcome remains in doubt. On the US side, a key factor’s an importantly insatiable demand for these drugs, combined with the long standing legal policy of prohibiting their use. This combination drives the retail prices of the drugs to levels far beyond the cost of production, generating enormous profits for criminals and those who have fed their activities.

The great bulk of that money comes from buyers in the United States. This has long been obvious, but only recently have Mexicans, and other Latin Americans, begun to insist that the United States acknowledge this fact and take sweeping steps to deal with it’s implications. In the process, they have begun to urge the United States to reconsider it’s adamant insistence on prohibition of the drugs in question. It’s a very sensitive issue.

President Calderon, bristling at the suggestion that Mexico was on the verge of becoming a failed state, has challenged the United States to take stalk of it’s own failings. Especially with regard to drug consumption and laws that facilitate trafficking in guns, and other weapons, that have strengthened the cartels in it’s struggle with the federal police and the army.

Even more significantly, the former presidents’ of Mexico - Ernesto Zedillo, Columbia - César Gaviria, and Brazil - Fernando Henrique Cardoso, co-chaired a Blue Ribbon Latin American commission, who’s 2009 report ’Drugs and Democracy’, thought a paradigm shift explicitly called on the United States to acknowledge that it’s decades long war on drugs had failed. The commission urged the US government to give serious consideration to diverse alternatives to the prohibitive strategy that are being tested in different countries, focusing on the reduction of individual and social harm.

This message has been received. In her first visit to Mexico as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton acknowledged that the United States’ insatiable demand for illegal drugs, fuels the drug trade. Similarly, the newly appointed director of the US Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske, announced that he no longer wants to be know as the Drug Czar and he’s abandoning the rhetoric of a ’war on drugs’, in favor of great emphases on prevention and treatment.

By the way, I just received word, this evening, that he has accepted our invitation to speak here, at the Baker Institute, in March. So we’re working out the dates of that.

In addition, authorities at the local, state and national levels, for example - El Paso City council member - Beto O’Rourke; Arizona Attorney General - Terry Goddard; California Governor - Arnold Schwarzenegger and US Senator Jim Webb are echoing the recommendation of the Latin American Drugs and Democracy Commission and are calling for a comprehensive and open minded examination of alternatives to drug policy notable for repeated failure.

So our program this evening, is part of that critical examination. As you well know, there’re very strong views on all sides. I hope that our deliberations will enhance the prospects of public policy formulation by all, and I want to emphasize, all parties to address this issue in a comprehensive and effective matter.

So it’s now my great pleasure to turn this podium over to Bill Martin.
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Bill Martin: There are signs that the climate may be changing. That people who are deeply concerned to reduce the negative effects of both drugs and the efforts to control them, are taking a second look at some of the ways we have approached these matters. As an example, it’s just one aspect of the problem which we won’t be primarily discussing tonight.

Numerous significant figures, including former drug czar General Barry McCaffrey, have observed that it may be shortsighted to think that we can imprison our way out of the drug problem. In April, of this year, New York Governor David Patterson signed legislation enacting real reform of the Draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws which mandated extremely harsh mandatory minimum penalties for possession or sale of relatively small amounts of drugs.

President Bush , the last one, who like the presidents immediately before and after him, admitted to having used marijuana and he has acknowledged, of course, his difficulties with alcohol and has had drug problems in the larger family. He wisely observed that a lot of people are coming to the realization that maybe long-term minimum sentences for first time users, may not be the best way to occupy jail space and/or heal people from their disease.

Last January, Harris County District Judges, sixteen of them, led by Judge Michael McSpadden, petitioned Governor Perry and the Texas Legislature to reduce the penalties for possession of controlled substances, which they contended would be fair and just and have an immediate, positive affect on our overtaxed criminal justice system.

Judge McSpadden told me that, on average, the twenty-six - I think, district courts in Harris County, thirty percent of the agenda; of the docket, everyday, is taken up with cases involving the possession of less than one gram of controlled substance. What goes in an equal package and as Ambassador Djerejian has noted, key political figures - domestic and international, are calling for serious examination of a wide range of issues.
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Dean Becker: You are listening to Century of Lies on the Drug Truth Network, Pacifica radio and seventy-one affiliates in the US, Canada, one in Australia. We’re tuning into a recent conference held at the James A. Baker III Institute for Policy Studies.

The title for the conference: “Cannabis, Cartels and Crime - Would Legalization Help?” We’re listening to Professor Bill Martin of the James A. Baker III Institute.
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Professor Bill Martin: Gary Hale as a representative, though not the author of government policy, will speak first.
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Gary Hale: It’s quite a pleasure represent the Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA, here at this forum today. DEA is a component of the Department of Justice, along with the FBI, the Marshal service, the Bureau prisons, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and various other divisions of the Department of Justice, proper.

The biggest difference between DEA and any of those other component agencies over the Department of Justice, is that we are a single mission agency and also that we have the largest overseas presence of any federal law enforcement agency, in the government. Domestically, the Houston field division, which I represent, is among the four largest divisions in the United States, in terms of personnel and geography.

DEA, our organization, gets it’s authority from Title 21 US Code and it’s also commonly known as the Controlled Substances Act. Our agency is an investigative industry, not an interdiction agency, which means we investigate people that violate the Controlled Substances Act, or violate the drug laws, and we don’t run around chasing people that are transporting the drugs. That’s the interdiction side. Most commonly Coast Guard, Border Patrol, Custom Service are the interdiction agencies.

In my position as a DEA Chief of Intelligence for the Houston division, I’m part of a team that is the instrument, the team is the instrument, that carries out the policies and/or laws dictated by our legislature.
We, in DEA, that are in the executive branch, and we are akin to soldiers fighting the war in Afghanistan. We’re the soldiers in the drug war. I heard that term mentioned and I’ll mention it again for some context.

We are the soldiers in the drug war that are executing the policies established by our leadership in Washington and those policies change depending on administrations that you have seen throughout history.

So, I always make this point. If you, just to illustrate, if you do not support the war, whether it’s in Afghanistan or Iraq or wherever it may be, but you still honor the soldier, then consider the DEA agents as being the same as those soldiers. Overall, in general terms, with regards to our organization, our primary focus is the targets or the drug traffickers that are either cultivating the drug, transporting the drug or distributing the drugs in the United States.

As Chief of Intelligence for the DEA, my job is to serve as the principle advisor to the person in charge and other executive and policy makers in Washington. I also manage an operational intelligence program that is the largest in DEA. I have direct authority over all of the intelligence components in the division. They have fourteen offices. About eighty people involved in intelligence activities. Half of those are Texas National Guard military folks, that are imbedded in DEA.

Then I have indirect authority from San Diego to Brownsville and inside Mexico for intelligence collection activities of DEA.

I’m not here to criticize, condemn or convince you about anyone position with regard to the drug issues. I’m here to partake in an educated discussion that may affect policy in one way or another and we mentioned the drug war as a rhetorical statement and from my point of view, being on the pointy end of the stick as one of the soldiers in the drug war, to me it is a drug war, it’s a conflict that is mourned by death and certainly threats to our national security.

A significant number of terrorists organizations partially fund their activities with drug proceeds. Take the FARC, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia. In Columbia, for example, they tax marijuana and coca growers to cultivate their drug crops and they use those monies to further their activities as a counter-revolutionary organization in Columbia.

Based on our intelligence, DEA has conservatively linked nineteen of forty-three officially designated foreign terrorists’ organizations to drug trafficking activities at various levels. Our latest activity, with regards to nexus between drugs and terrorism, is in Afghanistan. We’re growing our presence in Afghanistan. We’ll soon have seventy-five people, agents and intelligence analysts, permanently assigned to Afghanistan, in five offices.

You may be familiar with the fact that just two weeks ago three DEA agents were killed in Afghanistan in a helicopter crash, while operating on a drug related mission.

In the 1980’s, marijuana was the biggest problem facing our country and Columbia was the primary source of supply for that drug. Mexico now serves as the most significant source country for a lot of the drugs that are coming into the United States.

As a side note, most of the drugs coming into the United States right now are coming in through the United States/Mexico border and the number in the high ninety’s and that’s marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin and those are just the drugs that are cultivated or processed or manufactured in Mexico. There’s other drugs like cocaine, primarily coming from South America, that come through Mexico, on the way into the United States.

Given that they’re the most significant source country, the cartels are warring for ownership of the corridors that they use to move the drugs into the United States. The number of people dying for the “right” to bring drugs into the United States is staggering, as the Ambassador mentioned.

Give you another quick example, is Laredo. I’ll call our office in Laredo today and our office on McAllen, which are on the border. In Laredo, as of today, we have... In Laredo alone, seventy-five thousand pounds, that’s 37.5 tons of marijuana in our warehouses. Marijuana has been seized by border patrol, primarily at the border patrol check points or along the riverbanks.

So in Laredo we have thirty-seven and a half tons of marijuana in our warehouses and that does not include the other drugs. If you picture a Volkswagen car in volume, size, shape, amount of space, weight, that’s about a ton. As you take thirty-seven Volkswagen’s and stack them up, put them in a warehouse, that’s how much marijuana we have in our warehouse in Laredo, right now. In McAllen, just this week, we destroyed another thirty-seven and a half tons, that was in our warehouses in marijuana and that marijuana had been seized from August to October of this year.

When I first started with DEA in 1979, marijuana was the big deal. The Columbian’s were a big deal. I was stationed in New Orleans for my first office. I went from being a police officer… I went from the intelligence community, to being a police officer, to working for DEA and quickly learned that the problem, at the time, was marijuana coming from Columbia. We worked marijuana mother-ship cases that averaged about forty tons per shipment. It was staggering; amazing.

We had a saying, in those days it was, ’So many Columbians, so little time” and I think we could say, “So much marijuana, so little time” actually and that brings us to the topic of our discussion tonight: Should Marijuana Be Legalized?

Some of you received a CD that we handed out. It has DEA’s policies on there about the legalization question, whether we should or shouldn’t and so forth and so on. Remember, we are the instruments of the policy. We don’t pass… The DEA does not pass the laws. We’re not in the legislative branch, we’re the executive branch. We’re the ones that enforce those laws. So, in that CD we have a lot of information as to what’s the government and the political and the medical and the health and all of the various issues that the United States Government points to as reasons not to legalize marijuana.

In law enforcement, we not only enforce the laws, we’re also known as public safety officials. So the question about marijuana, whether it should or should not be legalized - if we’re just going to focus on marijuana for the moment, is a public safety issue. There is a medicinal marijuana that can be ingested as a pill, that serves the same purpose, that folks are saying they need the marijuana to smoke to help their health issues, whatever they may be, whether it’s cancer or some other issue.
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Dean Becker: You are listening to the Century of Lies program on the Drug Truth Network. We’re tuning into a recent panel at the James A. Backer III Institute for Policy Studies. The topic of discussion: “Cannabis, Cartels and Crime - Would Legalization Help?” We just heard from Gary J. Hale. He’s Chief of Intelligence for the Houston division of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

I got a chance to speak with Mr. Hale after the conference. He seemed to be playing ’rope-a-dope’. He’s just taking the king’s coin, so he’s doing the king’s bidding. He had no opinions about the veracity of what they do.

Next up, we hear from Mr. Ethan Nadelmann, the Director of the Drug Policy Alliance.
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Mr. Ethan Nadelmann: Let me start out by saying this, that I personally regard the war on drugs as essentially a fundamental evil in our society, in a global society. I think the notion of taking certain psychoactive substances, certain plants and chemicals and treating those as criminal and treating anyone who touches them, uses them, consumes and sells and buys and grows and whatever as criminal, is basically wrong. It’s wrong and especially for people who’s only offense is to take those things into their body.

I think that that policy, which evolved over the last hundred years or so around the world, with the US government as the principle proselytizer and enforcer of the global drug prohibition regime, has generated immense harm, immense death and suffering and crime and organized crime and violence all around the world.

When I hear Gary laying out how many terrorists’ organizations are making their money from drugs and how much has been seized and this and that. I just listen to that and say, “That’s the evidence that I’m talking about.” We’re talking about a global black market in drugs worth two to three hundred billion dollars a year, that is the most extraordinary reservoir of revenue for organized and unorganized criminals for political terrorist and criminal organizations of every political stride. So, this war on drugs; this prohibitionist policy, I believe, has generated enormous harm all around the world.

Now, I want to focus first on the United States. You know, part of what motivates me, is my shame as a proud American, in living in a country which possesses less than five percent of the worlds population, but almost twenty-five percent of the worlds incarcerated population. We rank first in the world in the per capita incarceration of our fellow citizens. We lock up people at two, five, eight, ten times the rate of most other countries around the world. The Russians are in second place, they’re huffin’ and puffin’ to catch up, they can’t do it, we are number one, when it comes to locking up our fellow citizens.

When it comes to parole and probations, it’s not just that two and a quarter million people behind bars for various offences in federal and state prison’s and local jails, it’s also another five million plus under parole and probation, there too, I believe that we lead the world. Now, what’s driving this more than anything else? It, to some very good extent, is the war on drugs.

We’ve increased the number of people locked up for a drug violation from roughly fifty thousand in 1980, to about half a million people today and that doesn’t count the unknown hundreds of thousands of others who are locked up for other parole and probation violations involving a dirty urine because they’re in some diversion program.

It doesn’t count the people who come in, acts of prostitution or petty theft, to support their habits because their habits are more expensive, because they’re illegal. It doesn’t count, the people getting involved in violence among drug dealers, trying to… because when a drug dealer has a fight, you don’t have the option of saying, “I’m going to take you to court.” Right? I mean, all of this stems from a failed prohibitionist policy. It’s probably safe to say that a third of all the people behind bars tonight are there in one way or another, because of a drug prohibition related violation.

In terms of, who’s locked up? I think most of us know. It is overwhelmingly and disproportionately young people and especially young men, of color. {right} I mean at extraordinary numbers. The numbers of people being locked up in America of close to having half or forty percent of the population being African American. Young African American’s having a better chance of going to jail or prison, than getting a higher education. This too, is an element that I think is fundamentally immoral.

You know, if you ask about the origins of this stuff and if you ask the question, “Why is it?” “Why is it that we treat alcohol and cigarettes as legal and these other drugs, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, whatever, as illegal?” One might think that someplace in our history, some early version of the National Academy of Science, the Institute of Medicine got together and they held us a… lifted all the evidence. They concluded that alcohol and cigarettes were somehow less dangerous than marijuana, cocaine and the opiates, heroin, have you?

I don’t know if anyone believes that. That somehow, this is how it happened. That this is how we got the first drug laws. In fact, when you read the transcripts of congress in 1914 - criminalizing the opiates, when you read the transcripts of state legislatures - criminalizing marijuana and other drugs, it reads a lot more like a Monte Python we see, than it does like any type of independent scientific analysis.

If you ask, “Why then? Why these drugs and not those drugs?” Well, the number one answer, there are many answers, but the number one answer, had to do with who used those drugs and who was perceived to use those drugs. So long as the principle consumers of opiate drugs in American in the 1870’s and 80’s were middle aged white women dealing with menopause and when there was no aspirin and Motrin or anything like that around, nobody thought to criminalize those drugs. Nobody wanted to put Grandma or their Aunt behind bars.

But when the Chinese start coming over, working on the railroads, working in the mines, you know, going back at the end of a hard days work, smoking up that opium pipe, just like they did in the old country, just like many other people would have a drink at the end of the day, that’s when you saw the first drug prohibition laws, in Nevada and California, directed at Chinese minorities. With all the fears about, ’What will the Chinaman do luring our white women into Opium Dens and seducing and addicting them.

The first anti-cocaine laws were in the South, in Louisiana in the first part of the century, directed at black men, at negro’s, who was afraid would take this white powder up their black noses and lose sight of their proper place in society.

The first anti-marijuana laws were in the teens and the twenty’s, in the Midwest and the Southwest. El Paso, Texas for example and Utah, right? Directed at Mexican-Americans and Mexican migrants coming up here taking good jobs from the good white people. Going back home. Smoking up a little of that funny smelling reefer cigarette and who knows what they would do, to our children and to our precious white women?

It’s always been, to some very good extent, about who uses those drugs and who’s perceived to do so and that, I’m not going to say the war on drugs today is racist, I don’t think it is racist. But it is racially disproportionate as impact. It’s origins are, in fact, rooted in racism. It is not a legitimate basis for continuing a public policy.

Now there’s the other negative consequences. You know, the millions of people who have died of HIV/AIDS or living with HIV/AIDS be related, not because drugs causes AIDS, not because needles cause AIDS. But because, when you share a dirty syringe, a syringe that’s been infected with somebody else, that’s how you spread this virus.

In other countries, including Margaret Thatcher’s England of 1985, right off the bat they say, “We need harm reduction policies. We need to make sterile syringes available to people who cannot or will not stop injecting drugs, today,” and they kept their HIV rates low in the Netherlands, Australia, the U.K.

But here in the United States, especially in the East coast where we failed to this, sometimes throughout the 80’s, into 90’s and quite frankly, the state of Texas, right till today. I mean, right till today, you still do not have a legal needle exchange program, in this state. Essentially consigning hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people to be needlessly infected and not just them, but their children, their babies and people who come into contact with that.

Think a country like Iran. Iran has the highest heroin addiction rate in the world, right now. Five years ago, the Iatola, who was the Minister of Justice, issued a fatwa, declaring the needle exchange program and methadone maintenance programs are now, ‘OK, under Sharia law‘. Makes you wish that our own Mullah’s in America, not the Muslim Mullah’s, but the other’s, could come to the same level of sanity in dealing with this public health crisis.
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This is Dean Becker. I hope you enjoyed this edition of Century of Lies. There was much more from Ethan Nadelmann. We didn’t get to hear from Mark Kleinman. We hope to have him come on the show in the very near future to discuss this very important topic.

You know the United States leads the world in it’s incarceration and until we get over our fear of flowers and other plant products, we will remain the laughingstock of the free world.

In closing, I remind you again. There is no truth, justice, logic, scientific fact, medical data. No reason for this drug war to exist. We have been duped. Please do your part to end the madness. 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