Transcript

Cultural Baggage / April 03, 2011

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Broadcasting on the Drug Truth Network, this is Cultural Baggage.

“It’s not only inhumane, it is really fundamentally Un-American.”

“No more! Drug War!” “No more! Drug War!”
“No more! Drug War!” “No more! Drug War!”

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My Name is Dean Becker. I don’t condone or encourage the use of any drugs, legal or illegal. I report the unvarnished truth about the pharmaceutical, banking, prison and judicial nightmare that feeds on Eternal Drug War.

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Hello and welcome to this edition of Cultural Baggage. I am Dean Becker and here in just a moment were going to bring in two guests to talk during this half hour. We’ll be hearing from Margaret Dooley-Sammuli. She’s with the Drug Policy Alliance and from Nastassia Walsh. She’s with the Justice Department Policy Institute and they both recently had some very major reports, I think, dealing with drug courts here in these Untied States.

We’re going to talk to them individually, just briefly, let them introduce themselves and let you get used to their voices. Let’s just go ahead and bring in Margaret Dooley-Sammuli. Hello, Margaret.

Margaret Dooley-Sammuli: Hi, thanks for having me.

Dean Becker: Margaret, thank you so much for with us. Now Margaret, as I told the listeners, you and Nastassia each produced some reports that, I don’t know if they are shaking the nation but they certainly drew a lot of attention. If you will, tell us about your report and your association with the Drug Policy Alliance.

Margaret Dooley-Sammuli: Well, I’d be happy to. I work in California with the Drug Policy Alliance. The Drug Policy Alliance, is so your listeners know, a national organization working to end the war on drugs and out in its place a public health approach to drug use.

We took on the question of drug courts which has been this political compromise. That the Left has been happy with the Right has been happy with. It just sounds so touching. It sounds great. We’re going to use the criminal justice system to get rid of drug addiction. It sounds different but in fact it’s very much of the same family as other Drug War policies that we’ve had for the last forty years. So, we are asking two major questions in our report. What impact has drug courts had on the problems they were created to address? Drug arrests, incarceration rates and costs? How do drug courts compare with other policy approaches to drug use, particularly those outside of the criminal justice system?

These are questions that most research into the drug courts do not ask. Most research into drug courts simply asks, is drug court asks is drug treatment and probation, basically, better than prison or jail? It’s a very narrow question to ask. It’s often an inappropriate question. So, we ask the bigger policy question.

Are, basically, are drug courts getting us what we wanted out of them and are they a solution to these problems created by Drug War policies? What we have found in our report, Drug Courts Are Not The Answer, is just that, that drug courts are not providing what they say they are, what their proponents say they are, in fact, success stories that come out of drug courts but what we don’t hear are the voices of the people who are worse off for having participated in a drug court than they would have been if they had been if conventionally sentenced. People are often, people in drug courts, were often not facing multiple years of prison instead. They were looking at some time in jail or sometime on probation instead. A lot of the benefits that are seen in drug courts are the benefits of treatment, not the benefit of judicial oversight.

Moreover and this is very problematic, we see that a lot of people in drug courts don’t have a drug problem. So, drug courts are a very complicating thing but are, most importantly, they are not being discussed. The policy and the discussion around drug courts has really come down to this political compromise and we have to complicate that conversation a little bit and really ask ourselves what are we getting from drug courts? What can we get? And, you know, to understand that drug courts are not a public health approach to drug use, so what are our other options? We go into that in the report, as well.

Dean Becker: Once again that was Margaret Dooley-Sammuli of the Drug Policy Alliance. Next we’re going to hear from Nastassia Walsh of the Justice Department Policy Institute. Her report was titled, Addicted To Courts, How A Growing Dependence On Drug Courts Impacts People And Communities. Welcome Nastassia.

Nastassia Walsh: Hi Dean, thank you so much for having me.

Dean Becker: Thank you and if you will, kind of tell us a bit about your report and what you learned in producing this.

Nastassia Walsh: Well, Yeah, Absolutely. To begin, so the Justice Department Policy Institute is a national non-profit organization. We work to change the conversation around justice reform and invent polices that promote wellbeing and justice for all people and all communities. We are really concerned about the overuse of the criminal justice system and incarceration in general on people and on communities. So, when we started looking at sort of the drug court system and the different ways that it impacted people, we wanted to take a critical eye to something that seems to be very politically popular right now, but the research isn’t necessarily conclusive that it is really the best option for people so what we do with our research is, you know, we did a review with some of the existing literature that exists on and found some sort of main points there.

One, what we are particularly concerned about is that drug courts seem to widen the net of criminal justice control. More people are being – maybe being brought into the criminal justice system, simply because there is a drug court available because there is a means for treatment through the criminal justice system.

Now, we know and I am sure people with the Drug Policy Alliance and a lot of your listeners realize that addiction is a public health problem. It’s not a criminal justice problem, it traditionally hasn’t been treated that way but we, for some reason, have started crating these courts to address social problems, like drug courts, where people are getting treatment through the criminal justice system rather that in the public health system and that is generally a place where we are really concerned is the criminal justice price tag associated with participation in a drug court, whether you succeed in a drug court or whether you get kicked out of drug court and end up traditionally sentenced.

So, that’s one thing that we were really concerned about and one of the big things that we look at in all of our research is what actually is effective at improving public safety and saving money? What we found in our report is that treatment through the justice system is not more effective than treatment though the community.

Research through federal SAMHSA [Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration] and through meta analyses show that treatment in the community can be just as effective, if not more effective and in a lot of studies, it’s more cost effective to use treatment in the community rather than in drug court.

The other thing we were concerned about as far as the research goes is that drug courts tout, you know, really a great success rate but when you look at the research and the methodology used, there’s some serious flaws in the research and the way that they— it seems to me that the people who succeed in drug court, tend to succeed elsewhere. The pole who will fail in drug court, don’t really get a voice. There is not a lot of research about what happens to them and the impact of this on them. So, we looked at that we looked at the cost benefits.

Some of the research shows that treatment in the community can be ten times as cost effective as drug courts, which directly is not what the drug court spokesmen are saying. The research mainly looked through those and looked at the impact on people individually who do not do as well in drug court and see them as more collateral consequences in pursuing a traditional sentence.

We came up with some additional recommendations about examining drug courts, more effectively doing better research on drug courts and on influencing sort of real diversion tactics for people who are in the criminal justice system as a result of addiction.

Dean Becker: Okay. Once again folks that was Nastassia Walsh of the Justice Department Policy Institute. The other voice we heard was Margaret Dooley-Sammuli of Drug Policy Alliance.

Now, I can only talk from personal experience. I spent some time in the court rooms here in Houston and seeing the parade of people handcuffed together in their orange jumpsuits. One after another—nine out of ten dealt with some minor drug violation and the drug court was recommend for a few of them.

What I did learn after that day was that many of these folks still have problems. They still are living with or are associated with friends that do drugs and too often they wind up smoking a joint, falling a urine test and actually spending more time behind bars for failing the drug court judge, I guess, than they would have if they had done the days served and taken another five days behind bars. It can really be costly, in that regard. Your response first, Margaret Dooley-Sammuli.

Margaret Dooley-Sammuli: Well, that’s definitely a concern that we find is – does exist in the research around drug courts that because drug courts rely so heavily on jail to punish whether it’s relapse or minor program violation or positive drug test that they – that for many people spending time in drug court means that all of those weekends or weeks added up, mean that you can actually serve more time behind bars than if you opted out of drug court in the beginning and that if you fail a drug court, then on top of those days that you have already spent in jail, you may be sent to start day one of your sentence. So, there are – this idea that drug courts, by definition, reduce incarceration, it’s just not that simple at all.

Dean Becker: Okay and before I get a response from you Natasha , I want to add a little bit that I think Margaret was bringing up there and that is that people are winding up paying their fees. They’ve got deadlines to meet. They miss work. They have to pay for their urine test and on down the line. It does complicate one’s life, does it not?

Nastassia Walsh: Absolutely.

Dean Becker: I was wondering if you might respond to the impact that I was referencing with Margaret that it is more a burden. It’s more of a burden of the convicted than it would be if they had they just served their jail time.

Nastassia Walsh: Yeah, drug courts can be really extensive it can be a lot of work and there’s a lot of requirements and what we have found in our research is that there are certain people that may not do as well in drug courts because of their situation.

Drug courts can have an impact. You know, they interrupt people’s lives and terms of having to go to court once a week, which can impact your job of if you are getting an education it can impact your classes. It takes away time from your family. It’s expensive It’s very time consuming are the research shows that people with less income, people from lower socioeconomic status do not do as well in drug courts as people who maybe have more resources at their disposal.

This also can have an impact on communities of color and people of color especially, who may have not the same resources, say, as the other folks. So, it can have a really direct impact on people. Like Margaret said, if you don’t do well in drug court and you get kicked out and get traditionally sentenced to a longer prison sentence than you would have before.

I mean, a lot of people who go into to drug court weren’t actually going to receive a prison sentence to begin with, maybe a short stint in jail or more likely than that, more often probation but because they were not able to successfully complete drug court, they now may be receiving a prison sentence on top of the time that they have already spent trying to succeed in drug court.

Dean Becker: Now I want to ask bit if you, if either of your know speak up but last week Martin Sheen was due to speak, crediting drug courts saving his son Charlie Sheen’s life. Any response from either of you?

Nastassia Walsh: Well, I was at the hearing and actually Mister Sheen didn’t say anything about his son at all. It seems like he had some prepared remarks that he read for the audience that spoke basically some really great talking points from the National Association of Drug Court Professionals website.

He gave a very powerful speech. He’s a great speaker. He didn’t talk about the personal story and I actually feel that it’s hard to talk about that when it’s so personal but I think it might have had a bigger impact if we had tried to talk to someone who this actually, directly affected.

Dean Becker: Okay.

Margaret Dooley-Sammuli: Well.

Dean Becker: Go ahead.

Margaret Dooley-Sammuli: Well, I think I would add too that he did talk about – I wasn’t there, so correct me if I am wrong, Nastassia. He did go into his own personal experience in recovery from alcohol or alcoholism and problematic alcohol use through the court system. I thought that was a really helpful example for him to provide, in part because of what he left out and that was how many people, we know who have has alcohol problems who do not ever go through the criminal justice system but do find ways to recover from their alcohol use and the very different way that we treat problematic alcohol use, I think, does provide a very good example of how we could be addressing problematic use of other substances.

Dean Becker: Now, it’s been a couple of weeks back, I guess, on NPR’s This American Life did a story in this regard dealing with— the title of it was Very Tough Love, dealing with drug courts and it talked about a judge who, I think, stepped way over the line. Your response from you on that, Nastassia?

Nastassia Walsh: I did listen to that piece and I did find the piece to be rather disturbing. I think that there are, I think that shows a different side to some of the drug court arguments. I think that here are some drug courts that are great drug courts that are doing great things, you know, we sort of looked at New Jersey and they seem to have a good program set up in New Jersey but there is also some of these courses that are not doing very well and those are the kind of courts that we are specifically concerned about is that they are bringing people on who shouldn’t be involved in the criminal justice system.

For me, listening to that report for me listening to that report the horrific impact that it had on those folks was really discerning.

Dean Becker: Yeah and there was a couple of judges that got caught taking bribes from treatment groups and sending teenagers away for a long time for minor amounts of drugs. Your response that that Margaret Dooley-Sammuli?

Margaret Dooley-Sammuli: Well, what we learned from any story of corruption and recent story of a very, very – what sounds like an unstable judge in Georgia is that the authority that drug courts have over the pole in them, meaning particularly the judges that you wave basically all of your rights to get into a drug court and you may, as was referenced earlier, stipulate to a longer sentence than you would have normally gotten to enter a drug court.

All of this is being required in order to provide you with drug treatment. How unconscionable that we would demand that you relinquish your rights, have a long prison sentence hanging over your head, all before we will grant you access to drug treatment. What we’ve heard from the National Association of Drug Court Professionals is this one court that Georgia is completely unique. Nobody else is like that.

Even the This American Life piece calls around to some other drug courts in Georgia and finds that actually some of those practices are actually common in Georgia. So, what we don’t know is how are these drug courts actually operating?

They have a lobby group, basically, in DC that whose major function is public relations and fundraising and it’s in their interest to present a very rosy picture of what happens in drug courts. When in fact, they know and admit that they have no authority over how drug courts operate and unfortunately they don’t provide on their website any information how there drug courts operate and unfortunately they don’t provide on their website any information about how these drug courts operate. Even they know that many of these drug courts – many of them, they are aware, many of them are not operating according to even that association’s best practices.

For example, that Georgia drug court that was pilloried in the This American Life piece is still mentioned on their website and there’s nothing anything that any Defendant considering entry into that court that in may be – that this maybe the next ten years of their life that they are giving up to this very scary drug court judge and her program.

Dean Becker: Yeah. Folks that was Margaret Dooley-Sammuli. We’re also spekaing with Nastassia Walsh. I mentioned early on that a lot of coverage, you know, the This American Life and Vancouver Sun titled, Legal System Is A lousy Alternative To Invention, US Styled Drug Courts Not Living Up To Their Billing, that again from the Vancouver Sun. Joined together, near government agency, US Addicted To Drug Court, The Santa Fe Reporter, Reconsidering Drug Courts and of course the Drug War Chronicles published by Mister Phil Smith.

Now, I guess what I want to bring focus on for a second. I looked, I briefly on the way to the studio, Robert DuPont, one of our former Drug Czars, I’m told and I couldn’t get the data and I’m wondering if one of you could vouch for this has holdings in a lot of drug treatment regiments around this country. He goes around the country speaking on drug treatment. You repose first, Natasha?

Nastassia Walsh: I think what were really, really concerned about is the fact that people are being, one, almost being forced into drug court to receive the treatment that they need to. A lot of people that we talked to could not receive any treatment without going through the drug court.

Also with this piece, the fact that there is so much money going into criminal justice related treatment and drug court that perhaps this money might be better spent in treatment in the community so people might have access to treatment before they even get arrested, before they even they become involved in the criminal justice system at all.

We’re really concerned about the resources being put in the wrong place. I think these powerful groups that have their lobbying, everyone has their lobbyists. I think if you are lobbying for things that have a negative impact on people like criminal justice involvement then I think our priorities are going a little askew.

Dean Becker: Indeed. Now, we’ve just got a couple of minutes left. I want to first turn it over to Margaret Dooley-Sammuli with Drug Policy Alliance. Please point folks towards your report and closing comments please, about a minute.

Margaret Dooley-Sammuli: Great. Well, yeah people can find our drug court report at drugpolicy.org/drugcourts. I would also encourage folks to come to our conference in Novemeber in Los Angeles where we will be talking about this and many other exciting topics. They can find out more about that conference which will be in November at informconfernerce.org and I think what is so great about this report, like the conference is that we want this to be complicated.

Drug policy is not going to be easy. There’s no one silver bullet solution and we’ve got to hold these policies open to serious harsh critique in order to get the best policies that are going to do the most good for the most people at the most affordable price.

Dean Becker: Alright, Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, thank you so much and now we got to Nastassia Walsh or Justice Department Policy Institute. Your closing remarks, please.

Nastassia Walsh: Thank you so much. You can find – the name of our report is Addicted To Courts, How A Growing Dependence On Drug Courts Impacts People And Communities and you can get them right on our website, which is www.justicpolicy.org/drugcourts for the exact link.

I think— thank you so much for having us on here. I think that what these reports have shown coming out on the last few weeks is the important conversation that maybe wasn’t being had about drug courts that now people are really talking about.

We need to be critical of something that can have a direct impact on people, some good and some very, very bad and talk about what we can do instead to make sure that we’re doing the best for the largest number of people and that we’re doing things that are cost effective and that we are doing things that have a real public safety impact. So, I’m glad that these reports have been able to start this conversation. I hope we continue to have this conversation.

Dean Becker: Well and I want to thank you both for being with us here for Cultural Baggage. I’ll be at that conference in LA and I urge folks to attend, as well. Margaret Dooley-Sammuli and Nastassia Walsh thank you so much.

Margaret Dooley-Sammuli: Thank you.

Nastassia Walsh: Thank you.

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(Game show music)

Dean Becker: It’s time to play: Name That Drug by Its Side Effects.

Responsible for countless overdose deaths, uncounted diseases, international graft, greed and corruption, stilted science and immense unchristian moral postulations of fiction as fact.

(gong)

Time’s up!

This is drug is the United States' immoral, improper, bigoted, unscientific and plain F-ing evil addiction to Drug War.

All approved by the FDA, absolved by the American Medical Association and persecuted by Congress and the cops and in abeyance to the needs of the bankers, the pharmaceutical houses and the international drug cartels.

$550 billion a year can be very addicting.

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(Music from Love Stinks)

Pot stinks up your car
Pot lingers, enticing NARCs
Pot stinks, a lot
It’s why you might get caught

It takes a lot of pot
It takes a lot of pot
So much pot

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Dean Becker: This week another protest of DEA tactics took place at the DEA Headquarters Houston, Texas. It was a gathering of Houston NORML and Drug Policy Forum of Texas members. They named the event, PEE on the DEA. They brought their dogs, so they could urinate on the DEA grounds. Here to talk about the reasons why is Stave Nolan of Houston NORML.

Steve Nolan: We’re here to today to say shame on the DEA for supporting military style raids on marijuana users that has killed family pets and in the name of the war on drugs. I say shame on these dog killers.

If you kill a police dog you are charged with murdering a police officer but if they kill your dog on of these storm trooper raids they say they are just protecting themselves. Shame on the DEA.

In many cases it was for minor amounts of marijuana or in the Philadelphia case, it was the wrong house altogether. In the Missouri case you have officers firing multiple gun shots in a house with a seven year old girl present. It’s a good thing that she wasn’t wearing puppy pajamas or she might have been shot because jackbooted thugs busting into a house with military weapons felt threatened.

There have too many cases of SWAT team raids in Texas, Alabama, Maryland, Missouri, Philadelphia, California and elsewhere that have killed family pets. If you support the prohibition of marijuana, you support the killing of beloved family pets.

Don’t try to offload your guilt by saying that you’re just following orders. You actively testify against marijuana laws. Don’t try to deny your guilt by saying that there is no evidence about marijuana’s benefits when you ignore your own administrative judge’s ruling as well as numerous studies including the Institute of Medicine Report.

I don’t have any human kids. So, my dog Tippy is my kid. He’s my buddy and he’s my alarm is someone is trying to break in to my house. So, if the DEA tries to shoot him, they better kill me first.

Of course, the DEA would probably say, I deserved it because I was breaking an asinine law and based on lies and half-truths. Shame on you. I am not a criminal. The DEA’s willful disregard of the facts about marijuana is a crime.

Violence begets violence. So, the laws that allow some to be imprisoned or killed for a plant are to be blame when police officers feel threatened while acting like death squads of a third world country.

In these days of budget crises, it is the DEA budget that should be cut. Don’t fund dog killers. The prohibition of marijuana is not working for the same reasons the prohibition of alcohol did not work.

The violence of prohibition is the result of bad laws, not the plant itself. We do this in the memory of the beloved pet, Peanut Butter and our kids murdered in the names of marijuana prohibition. This is Steve Nolan with Houston NORML.

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(Continuing gunfire)

That is the sound of the American
society, economy, the people
shooting themselves in the foot.

(Continuing gunfire and screams)

Continuously, twenty-four hours per day,
seven days per week, for eternity
in order to wage the war on drugs.

Please visit drugtruth.net

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(machine and rumbling sounds)

The last bastion of the drug warriors is that using marijuana requires you to smoke it. Vapormed out of Germany has now produced a machine that takes the smoking out of smoking marijuana. It’s called, the Volcano!

(eruption sound)

They say the vaporizing method involves permeating the herbs with hot air.

Their website: vapormed.com.

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Dean Becker: Alright my friends, I hope you enjoyed this edition of Cultural Baggage. Be sure to join is next week on Cultural Baggage. One of our guests will be Susan Boyd, author of Hooked.

Century of Lies will feature Pete Guither, publisher of Drug War Rant and maybe, just maybe, the former President of Mexico, Vicente Fox. I’m trying to make those arrangements as we speak.

As always, I want to invite you to join in the fray, to do your part, to stand up to speak up, to dare to challenge these bigots in office, these irrational folks in authority to do the right thing, you know to end this madness of Drug War, to stop funding the cartels and empowering the gangs. And as always, I remind you, because of prohibition, you don’t know what’s in that bag. Please be careful.

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To the Drug Truth Network listeners around the world, this is Dean Becker for Cultural Baggage and the Unvarnished Truth.

This show produced at the Pacifica studios of KPFT, Houston.

Drug Truth Network programs are stored at the James A. Baker III Institute for Policy Studies.

Transcript provided by: Ayn Morgan of www.eigengraupress.com

Tap dancing… on the edge… of an abyss.