CULTURAL BAGGAGE

JUNE 28, 2018

TRANSCRIPT

DEAN BECKER: Hi folks, welcome to Cultural Baggage. I am the Reverend Dean Becker. We've got a quick message for you from Merle Haggard.

MERLE HAGGARD [MUSIC: "Okie from Muskogee"]
We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee
We don't take our trips on LSD
We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street
We like livin' right, and bein' free

DEAN BECKER: Today's show will feature the thoughts of former Chicago prosecutor James Gierach as well as that of Lisa Raville, who heads up the Harm Reduction Action Center in beautiful Denver, and a quick message from US Congressman hoping to be Senator Beto O'Rourke.

Okeh, I'm a former resident of the city of Tulsa. I like Oklahoma. I like those dry breezes sometimes in the summer time, but there's a bigger breeze that swept through Oklahoma, and here to tell us about it is Norma Sapp. Norma, what just happened in Oklahoma?

NORMA SAPP: Well, we made it, even though the opposition was pulling every dirty trick they could pull. For the last two weeks, they've been running -- well, they spent one and a half million dollars on running ads, it seemed like every three minutes, with this crazy crap that wasn't even true. I think it drove people to our side, they could see that it was just hilarious, the things they were saying, like, oh now everybody's going to be lighting up in the movie theater, in the restaurants, and, oh, a veterinarian is going to write you a prescription for pot for a hangnail, and just ridiculous crap.

DEAN BECKER: But, at its heart, what has happened is you guys legalized medical marijuana. Correct?

NORMA SAPP: We did. It's hard to believe, isn't it?

DEAN BECKER: Well, I live in Texas, and it -- yeah, you guys have a lot the same perspective, attitudes, I think we do here, but you did it, and I am quite proud of you.

But, give us some of the details. How constricting and how liberal is this?

NORMA SAPP: Well, okeh, so, 788 was written with the patients in mind. It's pretty simple. It's five pages, and now we have -- the legislature is going to come back into special session and codify it. Because it was done as a statute petition, they have to codify it.

The Health Department is what 788 directed to handle the issuing of licenses and patient cards, and they have written their own proposed rules. Well, we don't really care for them, so we're going to meet on Thursday night and come up with our own proposed rules and hand it to the legislature, and they should come back into special session about the middle of July.

DEAN BECKER: Now, as I understand it, your governor is two-term limited, but she's wanting to tinker with this and maybe do some things you guys wouldn't appreciate. Correct?

NORMA SAPP: She probably would, and I don't know what the backroom deals might be, but, you know, there might be threats of I'll help you with your campaign in November if you'll do this when they meet at the special session. I have no idea what's being talked about over breakfast today.

But I know what the people want, and we are going to occupy the capitol until we get our proposed rules in place.

DEAN BECKER: Well, yeah, it was a pretty good majority, what was it, 57-43?

NORMA SAPP: It was. I think it would have been like 70 percent if all the things that happened yesterday didn't happen. Do you know there were counties, or precincts, that were withholding the ballot. It was a separate ballot for 788, and they told people that they didn't get it in that county.

DEAN BECKER: Well, you know, back when Harry J. Anslinger said that marijuana leads to insanity, criminality, and death, but I think the laws lead to some sort of insanity, to try to thwart the people's vote.

NORMA SAPP: Oh yes, certainly. It did lead to that.

DEAN BECKER: All these restrictions are just based in nebulous BS, and they have no connection with science or actual medical benefit. It's just -- just delay and stall.

NORMA SAPP: I know. Well, we've got to remember that we've been educating ourselves for decades, and they are just now starting to see that news.

DEAN BECKER: And again, hats off to you guys. I hope it works out real well and real smooth.

NORMA SAPP: Yeah, me too. Thank you for calling.

DEAN BECKER: All right. Thank you, Norma. Bye bye.

NORMA SAPP: Boomer Sooner.

DEAN BECKER: Ah yes. Boomer Sooner, I hope those guys have a great success, and we can prove to these Texas legislators that they have their heads so far up their posteriors, and they need to pull it out and look around at all the progress, all the money being made.

Well let's get to our next track, there.

All right, folks. We're speaking with Mister Jim Gierach. He's a former prosecutor in the city of Chicago, was on the board of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, but, he's finding information and sharing it with all of us that I think should give us some concern. The United Nations Office on Drug Control has just issued a report. How are you doing, Jim?

JAMES GIERACH: Well, very good, Dean, how have you been?

DEAN BECKER: I'm well, I'm excited. Oklahoma just went and legalized medical marijuana. [unintelligible] are being directed, or primaried, around the country. There is some hope on the horizon that we're going to recognize the futility of this drug war some day soon, am I right?

JAMES GIERACH: Well, for sure. Even Canada is coming home to roost. There are signs of hope around the world that this insane drug war will eventually end.

DEAN BECKER: The UNODC report does give it some hope, does it not? If you could summarize what you found there.

JAMES GIERACH: The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime annually puts out a report that's called the World Drug Report. Actually, I can't really say there's too much good news coming from the United Nations, the United Nations is the fountainhead for drug prohibition for the world, and it's the nations of the world, which then have passed national laws that criminalize the recreational use of drugs, and so the United Nations in this report has noted that there's now over 200 million people a year using illicit drugs, and yet it insists on continuing to criminalize them.

Here's the, I pulled up my website, 275 million people using drugs, and there are only ten million people locked up in the world, and these UN drug treaties, and the United Nations on Drugs and Crime, continues to insist that we criminalize these people that use drugs for recreational purpose.

The report's not good news. The report shows that women are targeted by UN drug policies so that we have thirty five percent of the offenders in prison who are women are there for drug offenses, and 19 percent of men who are in prison are there for drug offenses, so, women get a raw deal in international drug law as a consequences of the UN drug treaties.

DEAN BECKER: Well, Jim --

JAMES GIERACH: The -- well, let me point out just one interesting thing that this report says, is that, each year when I would go to the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, which is headquartered in Vienna, Austria, and the first year I went was 2012, and then I went each year through 2015, and every year when I would go, the International Narcotic Control Board would report increasingly new developed psychoactive substances.

And then, in this report of the United Nations that just came out yesterday, they showed that in 2012, there were 269 new psychoactive substances, whereas in 2016, the most recent year statistics are available, it nearly doubled to 479 new synthetic substances.

So, the drug health of the world has gotten worse, as these drug cartels continue to invent new drugs to try to avoid the penalties that are imposed by the United Nations [sic] and United States prohibition drug laws.

DEAN BECKER: I did see some numbers that I thought indicated a better perspective, and as you mention, about 200 million using these quote illicit drugs.

JAMES GIERACH: 275 million, it's about three and a half to five percent of the people of the world ages 14 to like 65 [sic: "5.6 per cent of the global population aged 15–64 years (range: 4.2 to 7.1 per cent)"].

DEAN BECKER: Yeah, hell, I'm over 65 and I'm still using, but, okeh. And there is no benefit, there is no rational reasons to go down the same path, yet, here we go. What the hell?

JAMES GIERACH: You look to see how many people were involved in the production of this. There's huge amounts of money that go to the people who are the quote unquote experts, who are feeding off this drug war gravy train, just as law enforcement in the United States feeds off the war on drugs as a way to get overtime, more jobs, more promotions, more money for equipment, the militarization of our police departments.

The 2018 report on world drug use and drug production says that we've got the highest rates of cocaine and opiate production in the history of the world.

DEAN BECKER: Yeah?

JAMES GIERACH: So, they've been -- the treaty, the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs went into place in 1961, so, what's that, 40, 58 years of continually more and more trouble, incarceration, racial discrimination, police abuses, the corruption of police.

Yesterday's newspaper here in Chicago, the Chicago Sun-Times, reports a six billion dollar settlement in police wrongdoing. They've got two stories in here on cops that are being incarcerated because of stealing drugs from gangs. There's another story in the same paper that a police dog finds ten million dollars worth of weed in a traffic stop on the south side of the city of Chicago.

We've got so many killings and so much violence and so many shootings that -- that a popular reverend of a Catholic parish, it's a black parish with a white priest, who's planning on closing the Dan Ryan Expressway, which is the interstate that travels through the city of Chicago, on July Seventh to bring attention to the fact that the violence is so epidemic here in Chicago.

DEAN BECKER: I am really puzzled by the lack of focus on why all these immigrants are coming northward, why their, you know, where their children are taken from them. Too few people realize that this is because of prohibition, a large part of the reason why these people are coming northward is fleeing cartel and gang violence in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Mexico, where villages and towns are overrun, are controlled, by these barbarous actors. Your thought there, Jim Gierach.

JAMES GIERACH: Well, Central America is just such a hot spot, because Central America's between South America, Colombia, cocaine producing countries, and the United States. Opiate products that are, they're coming from Afghanistan, will travel through South and Central America, Colombia, and other places. It makes life so, so miserable, so intolerable, that they flee, that, you know, if somebody's threatening to kill you, or somebody shoots you, or somebody kills your relative or cuts off -- there's a story yesterday, some woman had like four fingers cut off, as a threat, because she wouldn't pay the cartel.

When these horrible stories happen, people try to get away from the pain, to get away from the danger, and that has them migrating to the border between Mexico and the United States. Then we have a president who says we're going to put up a wall, well, walls aren't going to help one iota.

The problem is the United States has supported a drug prohibition system, and implemented it through the United Nations by threatening other nations not to get foreign aid unless you cooperate with the United States drug program, which is prohibition, which started with this guy Anslinger, who in chasing this dream, had some horrible experience as a kid, and he used that experience to warp his thinking and to demonize drugs and to really create a world war on drugs, which is now packaged and codified into three United Nations drug treaties: the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, another UN treaty on drug trafficking, another one on psychoactive substances.

But we can't solve these problems of the world, whether it's the migration, whether it's the killing or the violence or the addiction or the overdose from opiates and fentanyl being mixed, without ending the drug war. And the fountainhead for this world wide drug prohibition is the United Nations, and the United Nations operative arm is the UNODC, that put out this report, and the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, but, the real -- the, really the one that spends the most money of any United Nations agency is the UNODC, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

So, if you want money in some country, you cooperate with the UNODC, and what is it they want? They want prohibition. It's a failed policy and the world will not get better until it ends this prohibition system, and the United Nations is key.

DEAN BECKER: Once again, that was James Gierach, a former prosecutor in the city of Chicago, and I would urge you to please visit LEAP.cc.

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The challenger to Ted Cruz's Senate seat, US Congressman Beto O'Rourke.

REPRESENTATIVE BETO O'ROURKE: After more than 45 years of the failed war on drugs, where the profits are still going to criminals, the cartels, and the kingpins, finally the people of this country are taking the right steps for a more rational, humane, compassionate policy when it comes to drugs.

It's part of the urgency behind this Senate race, by getting in touch with your member of Congress, your US Senator, to let them know that you want them to end this war on drugs once and for all.

DEAN BECKER: That was my good friend Beto O'Rourke, a current US Congressman running for Ted Cruz's Senate seat. I hope the vote comes out well. Hope Ted answers my emails, maybe comes on this show sometime soon. We've got one more track for you.

LISA RAVILLE: My name is Lisa Raville, I'm the executive director of the Harm Reduction Action Center. We're Colorado's largest public health agency that works specifically with people who inject drugs. We're located in Denver, right across the street from the Colorado State Capitol.

DEAN BECKER: And, Lisa, you know, you guys are trying to legitimize, or somehow get certified, safe injection facilities up there, am I correct?

LISA RAVILLE: Correct.

DEAN BECKER: And, you know, I think it's Syracuse, and New York City, and San Francisco, and Spokane [sic: Seattle/King County], and even my city of Houston, there are rumblings and mumblings about doing the same thing, and I was going to say this, last week I had the police chief of Houston, Art Acevedo came on my show, and I asked him what was his thought in regards to, should Houston consider safe injection facilities, and he seemed to be all in, indicating his willingness to at least explore the option.

And that's starting to, similar perspectives are starting to develop around the country, people are seeing that it's okeh to speak out loud about that possibility. Right?

LISA RAVILLE: Absolutely. Yeah, it's a very exciting time in the United States. Now, these have been happening outside of the country for over 20 years, in ten countries, 63 cities, and a 102 total sites, and so we've been very excited to have these conversations in the Colorado and especially Denver community, and where we've found a lot of folks really being supportive is in the business community, safe community, treatment providers, recovery community, drug users, moms, so there's been a lot of great conversations happening in our community about pushing forward for a healthier and safer Denver.

Law enforcement has been neutral on this in the Colorado community, which has been really great for us, and as we have these conversations one by one people are starting to realize it's, you know, we need this in our community to keep people alive, to take injecting out of the public sphere and to put it into a controlled environment, to reduce the acquisition of HIV and hepatitis C, to reduce skin tissue infections, and to promote proper syringe disposal. So I think this is going to be the syringe access programs of twenty years ago.

DEAN BECKER: You know, I think about the, I don't know, the failings of the drug war, how, we have these drugs circulating now, made by untrained chemists in jungle labs, then it's cut with all kinds of stuff along the way before it's sold on the streets, and I guess what I'm leading to here, Lisa, is that we couldn't do this any worse if we tried. Every aspect of prohibition sets us up for failure, death, disease, and all of these things you're fighting against. Right?

LISA RAVILLE: Absolutely. And I think for far too long we've relied on stigma, shame, and incarceration, and we know that doesn't work. We know that too many people have died of overdose, we know that too many people have been incarcerated, and then are felons, and then it's very difficult to get housing or a job or to be able to flourish after that as well.

And so, I think there is a national shift of talking about what this looks like when we don't involve the war on drug users and we start pushing forward for healthier and safer communities.

DEAN BECKER: Right, and, you know, I just wrote a piece that basically deals with the reason why we have so many people coming north from Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico itself, is the violence, the violence that these drug laws create, the drugs themselves do not hold the gun, and I guess I'm a LEAP speaker and to me that's really at the heart of all this, is that we're empowering criminals worldwide by believing in this prohibition. Am I right?

LISA RAVILLE: Yes. Yeah, and I think, you know, drugs sell themselves, and people have been using drugs for years and years and years, and what does legalization look like in different communities, and I think those conversations are really starting to happen now when people, used to be incarceration or bust, you know, and now people are able to have those conversations on what that looks like for our communities, and we've already tried the old way, that certainly hasn't worked. It's never worked, for over 40 years.

And so, you know, having these conversations now, to push forward for a healthier and safer community, is absolutely key.

DEAN BECKER: Lisa, tell me how to pronounce your last name?

LISA RAVILLE: "Ray-ville".

DEAN BECKER: Once again, we're speaking with Lisa Raville, she's with the Harm Reduction Action Center up there in Denver, Colorado, and Lisa, I was going to ask you, you know, you guys are the pioneers.

It's not exactly your forte, but, medical -- excuse me, marijuana has been legal there for a few years now. It has not created the blowback, the complications, the horror that was predicted by the other side, and I guess what I'm leading to here is that it shows that we can change these drug laws without the world ending. It's an example of how we, by that I mean drug reformers, were right. Your response there, please.

LISA RAVILLE: Yes, I mean, you know, they went for a long time not being able to do anything with pot, and then all of a sudden there was this national shift, and I think those are conversations, and I feel like as part of our messaging, it was very much like, talking one on one with folks and educating them. And so, you know, we've learned a lot from the marijuana movement in Colorado and drug policy reform in general.

But we want to, you know, have these conversations and be able to break down those barriers, and, you know, reduce stigma.

DEAN BECKER: Sure. Now, Lisa, you know, we, earlier we were talking about the safe injection facilities, and, that's a good idea for any city in America, and there are many states where that is permitted. In Texas, we had a law that allowed it in one city but then the mayor said hell no, and it just never has happened. We do have a few underground, I guess you say, needle exchange programs in some of the major cities, but you have -- you guys have a working, legitimate facilities for needle exchange. Correct?

LISA RAVILLE: Correct, yes. So, we're the state's largest syringe access provider. We have over 7,800 folks signed up with us. We see between 140 and 160 people per morning, where they have the opportunity to dispose properly used syringes, get access to sterile syringes to prevent and eliminate the transmission of HIV and hepatitis C in our community, offered referrals, they get access to naloxone to save someone's life in the event of an opioid or heroin overdose, health education classes, street outreach, and then we do that advocacy.

So we've passed seven pieces of statewide legislation in the last nine years. Four to reduce the harms associated with overdose, and three to reduce the harms associated with syringe criminalization, which is why we continue to put forward that the street should influence the policies at the state level, and which is why we're pushing forward with the supervised consumption site here in Denver.

DEAN BECKER: And, you -- sorry. Yeah, you know, my goal is to educate the county commissioners, the city council members, you know, to speak with law enforcement officials, judges, to get people whose stature is respected, to speak up for the need, because we're going to have to work through the legislature here.

LISA RAVILLE: Right.

DEAN BECKER: And, I was going to ask you how did you guys legitimize, or certify, needle exchange programs, because I guess that will be our first step.

LISA RAVILLE: Yes. So, it became the perfect storm. So in 2009, our then-governor, towards the end of the year and beginning of 2010, said he wasn't going to run for re-election. So we were able to push forward and in 2010, 81 of the 100 state legislators voted in support of syringe access programs.

And it was very helpful because, you know, the -- non-elected drug users come out and speak on behalf in trying to push forward, but also physicians, and, you know, the larger community coming out and saying we need to be able to try this. It's not revolutionary, it's just good public health.

And so, I thought when a bill becomes a law, a bill becomes a law, and you move on with your life. Problem was, the -- we pass the legislation, and was signed May 26, 2010, however it took 21 months to be able to begin. So it was actually very frustrating, too, so step one is passing, you know, the legislation. Step two through ten are all about implementation.

So, that can be where people start dragging their feet, once it's actually passed, as well. So some people in the community think I'm an advocate, others think I'm a nag, but it's important that, you know, like, we've passed the legislation, and then push forward to be able to implement that legislation.

DEAN BECKER: Well, I'm proud, or, I don't know, hopeful, I guess, is that, you know, that the district attorney, the sheriff, the police chief, listen to me, and we came up with a law a little over, well it's a year and a half old now, Misdemeanor Marijuana Diversion Program, where they no longer arrest people. Stupid kids, mostly, out there on the street, for four ounces or less of marijuana.

And I guess what I'm hoping is that I can stair step from that to show that, hey, I was right then, at least think about, consider, you know, needle exchange and or a safe injection facility. Get the ministers and the cops and, you know, the muckety-mucks to go along with the idea, because, as you guys have indicated and as these safe -- and as these safe injection facilities around the world show us, it saves lives, it saves futures. It saves money. It saves law enforcement. Right?

LISA RAVILLE: Yes, absolutely. And I think when you, you know, when you have those conversations, you know, we work within the harm reduction movement, so sometimes you have to meet these decision makers where they're at on the spectrum of change, right?

And continue to have those educational opportunities, and people do shift, and do want to do the right thing, and so I think, you know, continuing to have those conversations is key, and it will continue to save lives in all of our communities.

DEAN BECKER: All right, friends, once again we've been speaking with Lisa Raville, she's with the Harm Reduction Action Center up there in Denver, Colorado, doing great stuff. Lisa, I hope that we can continue this, that we can, I don't know, combine forces with folks in Spokane [sic], New York City, Seattle, to learn from and help promote each other's efforts over the coming months and years.

LISA RAVILLE: I would love that. Thanks so much, Dean, for having me.

DEAN BECKER: All right. Their website, please visit HarmReductionCenter.org

All right, folks, thank you for being with us on this edition of Cultural Baggage. I want to thank Jim Gierach and Lisa and Congressman O'Rourke. I want to thank you for listening especially because you can help swing this cat, you can help make the change, so I would urge you to pick up phone, call your representatives, visit our website, DrugTruth.net. There's nearly seven thousand of my radio programs available there for your listening.

Again, I would just hope you would do your part. Stand up. Speak up. Make the change happen, because otherwise they're going to devour all your rights and just rob us of a future. And I remind you, because of prohibition you don't know what's in that bag. Please, be careful.

To the Drug Truth Network listeners around the world, this is Dean Becker for Cultural Baggage and the unvarnished truth. Cultural Baggage is a production of the Pacifica Radio Network. Archives are permanently stored at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. And we are all still tap dancing on the edge of an abyss.

CULTURAL BAGGAGE

JUNE 14, 2018

TRANSCRIPT

DEAN BECKER: I am Dean Becker, your host. Our goal for this program is to expose the fraud, misdirection, and the liars whose support for drug war empowers our terrorist enemies, enriches barbarous cartels, and gives reason for existence to tens of thousands of violent US gangs who profit by selling contaminated drugs to our children. This is Cultural Baggage.

This is the Reverend Dean Becker, I want to thank you for being with us on today's edition of Cultural Baggage. A bit later, we'll hear from Mister Michael Krawitz, who just returned from Geneva, working with the UN, but first up, well, over the years, I've probably spoken to well over a hundred, perhaps over 200 members, speakers, of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, now Law Enforcement Action Partnership.

Today, we're going to speak with the chairman of the board of LEAP, retired Lieutenant Diane Goldstein. Hello, Diane.

DIANE GOLDSTEIN: Thank you very much, Dean, like always it's such a pleasure being on with you.

DEAN BECKER: Well, Diane, you know, I'm proud of the fact that I am a LEAP speaker and that we are recognized and, you know, certified, if you will, by a lot of politicians around the country who use our words, our thoughts, our writings, informing their opinions in making adjustments to our drug laws, that's, it's a real benefit, it feels good, does it not?

DIANE GOLDSTEIN: It does, and you know, we continue to make some really interesting progress, even in this administration. I think so much of the work of grassroots activists, members of LEAP, Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Drug Policy Alliance and the other organizations that have really made the critical difference that we're able to meet where we all agree, to push smart on crime policy forward.

DEAN BECKER: I had Mister Jason Reed, heads up the LEAP UK, on a couple of weeks back. He was talking about their being recognized by the British Medical Journal, for the thoughts and the presentations they have given to them. If only we could get the US Senate, or the House, to invite us to come speak. Right? It would be something.

DIANE GOLDSTEIN: You know, and I don't know if you're aware, but I'm also on the board of directors for LEAP United Kingdom, and because it, with all our international chapters as well, we have a representative from kind of the main board, so to speak. And the progress that LEAP United Kingdom is doing is absolutely amazing.

So two years ago, in 2016, we launched in the House of Commons in Parliament, and we're going to relaunch LEAP UK as Law Enforcement Action Partnership United Kingdom sometime this fall, and myself and Neill and maybe a couple of other people will be over in England to do so.

DEAN BECKER: Well, Diane, the thought that things are changing, are being respected internationally, certainly, is a move in our favor.

DIANE GOLDSTEIN: Well, you know what, you're right, but you know, I think what's very interesting is how quickly we're seeing movement internationally, and I haven't read the World Health Organization report that I think just recently came out on cannabis, and it talked about how much safer cannabis was than other illicit drugs.

You know, I only caught one little brief news release, so when you have health organizations like WHO, or like the British Journal of Medicine [sic], and then you have countries that are willing to take the risk like Uruguay and Canada, Mexico's talking, you know, it's, I think we're going to see that the UN treaties evaporate eventually, because the countries are going to just continue to ignore it, and I think that the United States, our legalization of cannabis, starting with Colorado and Washington, had so much to do to push that envelope.

DEAN BECKER: The drug war is really reefer madness at its heart. It is this old fashioned, primitive belief system that drugs are so bad, in order to keep you from destroying your future we're going to destroy your future by throwing you in a cage, and that's just -- that's just got to go, it's got to be uncovered or exposed and, you know, I spend my life trying to find anybody, you know, in a position of authority who's willing to come on this show and defend the drug war, to tell us the benefit that offsets the horror we inflict on ourselves by continuing to believe it to be valid. Your thought there, Diane Goldstein.

DIANE GOLDSTEIN: Well, you know what, it's so true, and I think what you're going to continue to see is you're going to have a small group of hardcore prohibitionists, you know, the Walters, the Sabets, the Duponts, and some really, really conservative politicians that are in many aspects, you know, breathing the last gasp of prohibition. They're like the dinosaurs stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits, and they just didn't know that their ideology's dying.

You know, the dinosaurs didn't recognize that death was close, and I really truly believe that about drug prohibition. And, you know, the issue of the opioid epidemic is one of those that's been very interesting. You're starting to see movement from criminal justice organizations, understanding that this is a public health issue, yet many law enforcement organizations are clinging to, okeh, we're not going to punish the user, but if you're a seller we're going to do whatever we can to imprison you for the rest of your life, so that's the battle that we have to continue to push.

This isn't just about people who are suffering from chronic substance use, it's about getting the bad actors out of the illicit drug market, but it's also recognizing that even low level drug dealers are only doing it for sustenance level, and if we impose a heroin assisted treatment program, or other public health strategies, then maybe that wouldn't occur.

DEAN BECKER: And it really boils down to we have cities like New York, San Francisco, Seattle even, a little bit my city of Houston, looking into safe injection facilities, place where people can go, have a doctor on hand, they can do their drugs under a medical supervision, if they happen to OD they can be brought back to life, that they can have access to clean needles, clean water instead of alley water, they can, you know, have another day, have another chance at treatment or understanding the nature of their addiction.

It just really boils down to every aspect of prohibition really complicates it, really makes it that much worse, that the drugs that are being sold? Well, nobody knows if they're counterfeit, if they're -- got rat poison in them for that matter. It leads itself to failure and futility, does it not?

DIANE GOLDSTEIN: Of course. I mean, we've been in this battle for over a hundred years. If you simply look back to the Harrison Tax Act in 1914, or we can go back into the -- in California, the late 1800s, with the issue of opium. And, you know, what we have to continue to do is educate the criminal justice profession very specifically that, you know, if you thought outside the box, you know, and created a new paradigm, we would lessen the impact on public safety resources if we funded communities instead of public safety.

So, you know, public safety is only one small component of community health, safety, and wellbeing. And so we have to start putting money into vocational job training, infrastructure, drug treatment on demand, safe consumption sites, needle exchange programs, you know, harm reduction testing. Education that's based on evidence and not on just say no, I mean, there's so many things that we could be investing in that would lessen the impact on public safety.

Heroin assisted treatment programs. You know, medication assisted treatment, although it's so interesting, you know, you start talking about language, is, one of my favorite journalists, Maia [Szalavitz], she just talked about, you know, we don't refer diabetics as needing insulin assisted treatment, you know, so we need to also start messaging the language relative to, it's not just medication assisted treatment.

Because, it's medication, and we should be providing people on demand suboxone or methadone, or other medications that prevents death, disease, and addiction.

DEAN BECKER: Friends, once again we're speaking with Diane Goldstein, she's the chairman [sic] of the board for Law Enforcement Action Partnership. She's a former policewoman with the Redondo Police Department, she rose through the ranks, became a sergeant, served as a division commander, and retired as a lieutenant.

Diane, I, you know, you were talking earlier about the 1914 Harrison Act, but right before that was the act that I want us to go back to, the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, which required sellers to have, if they're selling drugs, that it should have a label on it labeling exactly the contents of that bag because that's the problem we're having now.

I think of two millionaires that I respect, Prince and Tom Petty, both thought they were buying real Oxy pills out on the black market, turns out even the pills were counterfeit, and both of those men died, and, you know, to me, that's one of the horrors of this, that we have no more respect for our fellow citizens than to force them into a situation where even millionaires can make mistakes and kill themselves. Your response, Diane.

DIANE GOLDSTEIN: You know what, and, I think that, for me, is the most frustrating part about drug prohibition, is this clinging to an ideology without recognizing the harms of prohibition on everybody. You know, and I know we've talked about this before, and I think that's the thing that LEAP speakers bring to the table, is we can link every bad thing in our society to drug prohibition.

When I was doing my master's degree, I talked about a paper that linked college attainment with the drug war. You know, in California, we are funding more prisons than we are colleges, and because of that, we see the diversity level in California colleges go down, because we're also, you know, in a disparate fashion, going after communities of color.

And so, there's so many different links, you know. You have health links. You have job links. You have federal aid to student loans, you have families being torn apart, you have -- I mean, everything starts with drug prohibition at the root, really, of kind of all evil.

DEAN BECKER: You know, we've often talked about it, it denies you credit, housing, on down the line, so many ramifications that many states have to cripple a young person's opportunities to prevent their advancement in life. It's --

DIANE GOLDSTEIN: Yep.

DEAN BECKER: It's horrible. I guess what I want to bring to the fore is why we do what we do. You know, you've devoted well over a decade of your life, I've devoted near twenty of mine, to trying to expose the fraud and misdirection of this drug war. But we can't do it by ourselves. You know, I don't have the leverage to get those top dog politicians in here to -- to interview them.

And I guess what I'm trying to say is we need our listeners. We need the people who read our writings, who view our webpage, to understand that change is possible. God damn it, it's necessary, if we're going to have a true and just society. Your closing thoughts there, Diane.

DIANE GOLDSTEIN: You know, absolutely, and I think what I would also suggest, especially in light of the recent pardon of Alice Johnson by the president. We, as, you know, political opponents, maybe on opposite sides of many issues, but we need to meet people where we agree, and when that happens, you get progress and you get movement.

You know, it's -- I know you know Amy Pofahl, from CANDO Clemency, is, she did tons and tons of back work on the back side, relative to the issue of Kim Kardashian, and when Kim Kardashian walked into the White House, it wasn't just about Alice Johnson. There was a list of 50 people that was presented to the president at the same time.

And so, you know, I think as our listeners, we may disagree with the Kardashians, or with the president, or with, you know, other legislators relative to this issue, but where we can agree, we need to meet them at that place and work together to end injustice.

DEAN BECKER: All right, folks, there you have it, from the chairman [sic] of the board of LEAP. They're on the web at LEAP.cc. Please check it out.

Program note: one of the guests scheduled for next week's Cultural Baggage will be Amy Pofahl of CANDOClemency.org. I spoke with Amy briefly this week, here's a bit of what she had to say.

AMY POFAHL: Everybody thinks, you know, they know best, and that Trump would never be interested, so when the press criticizes Kim Kardashian, well thank god she's not in criminal justice reform, thank god she wasn't an expert, because all the experts were telling me, oh no, there's no way. So, there you go.

DEAN BECKER: Darth Drug Czar, you're a coward,
A liar, demon, and thief.
Seems you can't face the truth
For just one hour.
Too busy looking at [unintelligible].
Dean Becker, DrugTruth.net.

It's time to play Name That Drug By Its Side Effects! Frequent prolonged or bothersome erections, birth defects, enlarge genitals, premature pubic hair, increased libido, aggressive behavior, male pattern baldness, increased acne, prostate cancer, and time's up! The answer, from Cerner Multum Incorporated [sic: Eli Lilly]: Axiron, for muscle gain and boners.

MIKE KRAWITZ: I'm Mike Krawitz, I'm executive director of Veterans for Medical Cannabis Access, and over at the World Health Organization I'm working with an organization called FAAAT, Foundation for Alternative Approaches to Addiction.

DEAN BECKER: Well, Michael, you just returned recently from, was it Vienna, some UN proceedings, correct?

MIKE KRAWITZ: Geneva. World Health Organization.

DEAN BECKER: Okeh, I'm sorry. And, tell us about that gathering.

MIKE KRAWITZ: So, it was -- well this is a UN thing, the United Nations has requested the World Health Organization to do a review of cannabis. This is kind of a routine thing that's never happened, so it would be routine if they ever did it, but they never did it, so, since the beginning of the treaty, 1962, there's never been a review, official review, of cannabis, so it was just sort of arbitrarily placed without science, without evidence, you know the history of cannabis prohibition.

And, it's even thicker, it's even deeper, you know, the Anslinger kind of rift at the international level, and it's never been corrected, there's never been any correction. So, we're working with the World Health Organization. They have the job of collecting evidence and making a recommendation back to the UN, this year we'll be back at the United Nations, and we're hoping to undo some of Anslinger's legacy, frankly, to correct the treaty, update it based on evidence, hopefully maybe have cannabis at the end of this process a little bit more accurately described and a little bit more appropriately scheduled in the treaty.

This still isn't going to, you know, affect your biggest problems of prohibition, because that's a bigger treaty issue, but at least we can update the science and evidence on cannabis and maybe place it a little bit better in the schedules. And you know how in the United States a change in schedule could have a dramatic change on policy.

DEAN BECKER: Well, right, and what you brought forward there, the thought that, you know, Anslinger put forward this quote information set, this dataset, and proclaimed it to be moral and righteous and the appropriate thing to do, and very few people even challenged him, the American Medical Association did try, but they were kind of thwarted by the US Congress, and I guess what I'm saying is, is that the morals of this policy have never been really examined, brought to light, and that's what you guys are trying to do. Correct?

MIKE KRAWITZ: Absolutely. And, it's really, again, just a straightforward collection of evidence, when you're talking about a 1960 treaty, with a substance that the active, you know, quote -- quote unquote active ingredient was discovered in the late 1960s, or middle of the 1960s, and the treaty was started in the early 1960s, so, no matter how you look at it, they didn't know anything about cannabis. They didn't know what the active ingredient was, they really didn't know anything scientific about it.

All they knew was what Harry Anslinger and, like you said, you know, the Hearst paper chain, and there was another person, according to our friends at Transnational Institute and their history that they dug up, they found an Anslinger protege, a guy named Doctor Wolfe, who was working at the World Health Organization back there, it was like 1935, when they put this stuff in the record.

And there was some opposition at the international level, it wasn't the AMA, it was more like India. But it was not enough to prevent cannabis from being put into the treaty, and I was actually there in 1998 at the UN, India came forward and talked to us, they came to our table, a representative of the delegation of India, and told us that they had signed onto the treaty in 1962 with a 25 year delay, it was a reservation to delay the implementation for 25 years, and they were just implementing it then, in 1998, and guess what, Dean? They found already, in that time, just in the year or so of implementation, a decrease in cannabis use to be sure, and a matching increase rate in the rate of black tar heroin use.

DEAN BECKER: It is such a preposterous situation, these laws against cannabis. So few people that the first medical adviser to our first quote drug czar, Harry Anslinger, was Mister James C. Munch, who was a veterinarian [sic: Professor Munch's doctorate was in pharmacology]. And he said that he concocted a marijuana extract and gave it to some dogs, and it basically knocked them out, but then they came to a few hours later and seemed to be just fine.

It's just such a lie, isn't it, Michael?

MIKE KRAWITZ: Well, to be accurate, the extracts of cannabis, they didn't know what the active ingredient was, but they actually were working with the cannabis products back, you know, in 1890, 1910, 1920, they actually had their act together. They had a lot of great products on the shelf, in the pharmacy, and believe it or not, that was the standard way of testing to see if it had an active ingredient. You'd give it to a dog, and you could see the dog's reaction physically, you know that there's active ingredient.

Again, they didn't know what the active ingredient was, they had no science, so they had to use a physical test, that was a physical test for activity of the active ingredient. And this thing about black tar heroin is not a nuance, it's not a side note. We found now in the United States, in hard research, what -- it supports what we've been finding in the field, and that is that cannabis, when you use it as a medicine, you use less of the pain pills. You use less of the opiates. You die less, you have less overdoses.

And I'm talking a pretty significant reduction of overdose, and an increasing rate over the years. So, we've lost so many people since 1930 to overdose and death and mayhem of these hard drugs, and cannabis has been kind of our, you know, Dorothy's shoes, all we had to do was click it together three times and we could help ourselves get out of this mess.

DEAN BECKER: Well, friends, I have my info a little bit wrong about the marijuana extract and the dogs, but I do know that this same James C. Munch once purported in a court room that he took some marijuana, flew around the room like a bat, and then a couple of hours later he was just fine. All kinds of propaganda, right?

MIKE KRAWITZ: I -- it sounds like some stuff I'd love to get my hands on for medicine, actually, but, yeah, I'll tell you, these guys, it's amazing when you look back at the history of this. There was actually a government expert in the United States against marijuana, you're talking right at the time of, you know, she should have said no and reefer madness, and it was a government expert, they would bring him to court, and he would testify that yes indeed this marijuana is a killer, and da da da.

And you know what happened? He actually found a profession out of this. He found a little niche, and he started defending killers, and he got them off the hook for marijuana insanity defense. He tried to do it with one person that, just the marijuana in their proximity caused them to go insane and kill a bunch of people, and the judge drew the line and they threw the guy out of court, and as I understand it they stopped allowing his expert testimony. But he made a cottage industry out of this cannabis insanity defense.

DEAN BECKER: Well, Michael, I know that you work with the -- veteran groups, you're trying to work with the government to make it more feasible, more allowable, for their doctors to prescribe medical cannabis, and the reason behind, one of the main reasons behind that is, every day here in America there are 22 veterans that kill themselves, and, you know, we have the two recent celebrity suicides that garnered way more attention than these veteran deaths ever have. Your thought there, please.

MIKE KRAWITZ: Well, I certainly appreciate your sentiment, and I certainly agree with you that it's a travesty that we don't get more attention to the many deaths we have every day, of veterans that are taking their own lives. I think we ought to have a ticker on the TV, you know, so-and-so Army veteran in Ohio, you know, Iowa, and, you know, Kansas, whatever, takes their lives today. That should be on a ticker on the bottom of the screen, then maybe we'd get some attention to these issues.

But, you know, there's two things going on here with cannabis. One is, you know, the drug action, the pharmacological action, and there's good reason to believe that as a medicine cannabis can help reduce suicides. As a medicine, cannabis can treat pain, cannabis can help do these things. But, as a replacement drug, in other words, use cannabis, use less of these pills, when it comes to suicide, we're giving veterans a pill in the VA that actually has a suicide warning label. That's the medicine that we're giving them for post-traumatic stress.

If we can reduce the amount of that medication that's being used, doesn't it make sense maybe we'll reduce the suicide rate?

DEAN BECKER: Michael, I don't know, the drug laws do not make any sense, anywhere, as far as I'm concerned. Even insofar as, you know, heroin is now not really heroin, it's fentanyl, and it's killing people by the dozens, and, we just have no concept of the repercussions of believing in this system, do we?

MIKE KRAWITZ: You know, and I think that's they key to this whole discussion, is that we actually put the blame where it belongs, and I think the, you know, the United States right now is going through a real serious issue with overdose deaths, and it's very convenient to, you know, blame the doctors, or blame the patients, well how about the policy?

How about the drug policy that was supposed to prevent children from getting hold of heroin, that kept, you know, as we're watching the legalizing countries, their use of, first use of heroin age going up and up, our first use of heroin age going down and down, as we're watching the rest of the world implement these policies like Portugal, that's taking the criminal element, you know, at least a chunk of it, and gutting it, taking away its income, that it's allowing, you know, patients to have better access, and allowing people with a drug addiction to be treated like human beings, and medical patients that they are.

And actually, finally, starting to get at the underlying problems of addiction. No, no, we have to go the other way, we have to listen to people like Kevin Sabet, we have to go and jail people and double the prison rate, because that's what -- we've got to be tough on drugs, and then no one says, hey, maybe getting tough on drugs was a mistake. Maybe listening to Kevin Sabet and Robert Dupont was a mistake.

No, no, let's go further down this rabbit hole, kill a bunch more people, and then blame me, a pain patient.

DEAN BECKER: Well, friends, we've been speaking with Mister Michael Krawitz, very much involved with veterans and medical marijuana, very much involved with the UN and their concepts and precepts about the drug laws. Michael, is there a closing thought, a website you might want to share?

MIKE KRAWITZ: Sure, absolutely. This international stuff is going to be going on for a good year now, from here, we're actually deep in the middle of it, and we can use help. So, come and take a look, take a look at the documentation, it's at FAAAT, three As, FAAAT.net, and you can put a slash cannabis if you want to go right to information about the World Health Organization, all that.

We've got enough information there and it's broken down enough that you could actually just start at the beginning, and an hour or two get a really good understanding of what's going on at the WHO, if you really want that -- that level of understanding.

And I'll tell you, this is going to have an impact on every single country that we work with, 186 countries that are signed onto these treaties. So if we can have some, you know, good results of this process, and we can use your help, definitely, in this process, I think it's going to help patients, it's going to help, you know, this reform. We still need to reform the treaties, we're going to have to get rid of this prohibition. You know that, I know that, we all know that.

But the world leaders haven't caught on yet. So go to FAAAT.net and check us out, and I really appreciate your help.

YOUNG MALE VOICE: Okay, let’s say drug prohibition does support terrorism.

DEAN BECKER: And murder.

YOUNG MALE VOICE: And murder.

DEAN BECKER: Torture.

YOUNG MALE VOICE: And torture.

DEAN BECKER: Corruption and bribery.

YOUNG MALE VOICE: And whatever.

DEAN BECKER: What’s your point?

YOUNG MALE VOICE: Change the law.

DEAN BECKER: I got you. Make it cheap, more available everywhere, like soda or cheesy puffs.

YOUNG MALE VOICE: Exactly.

DEAN BECKER: Cocaine at the playground, crack stands at the laundromat; heroin at the mini mart. Like that?

YOUNG MALE VOICE: Face it old man, that’s what we’ve got now.

DEAN BECKER: Please, visit the website of Law Enforcement Action Partnership on the web at LEAP.cc.

Folks, the drug war is ending slow, ugly, and bloody, and we could really use your help to bring it to a quicker end. Again, I must remind you that because of prohibition, you don't know what's in that bag, please, be careful.

To the Drug Truth Network listeners around the world, this is Dean Becker for Cultural Baggage and the unvarnished truth. Cultural Baggage is a production of the Pacifica Radio Network. Archives are permanently stored at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. And we are all still tap dancing on the edge of an abyss.