Public Enemy Number One (2018) - full transcript
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[man] We are sending a
bad message with the
Medical Marijuana Laws
and the federal
government really needs
to speak out against it
and show some leadership there.
There is a powerful lobby
arguing for the
legalization of drugs
and that claims that
drugs, particularly
marijuana and hashish
are not harmful
to young people.
[judge] We have these
drugs in our society.
They're going to be
here like it or not.
We have a choice, we can
either have drugs in our
society with drug lords,
or without drug lords.
We know that when drugs
are legal, they're cheaper,
they're more available
than they're promoted
as we've seen for alcohol.
So, I think alcohol would
be the last model we want
to look at for marijuana.
I know annually we have
well over a thousand young
people dying in this country
because they're caught up
in the illegal drug market.
Focus on the real bottom line.
I want to reduce both
the harms of drugs
and I want to reduce the
harms of our failed policies.
[echoing] Policies...
I mean the easiest way
for most people in this country
and really throughout much
of the world to understand
the absurdity of the war on
drugs is to focus on marijuana.
[Dan] The drug war that I think
we are experiencing today
has its roots in Richard
Nixon's 1968 campaign
because of the
unrest of the 60's,
the student demonstrations
against the Vietnam War.
[reporter] Thousands
of demonstrators opposed
to the Vietnam War
assembled in the nation's
capital for a mass protest.
Military police
contained the crowd, but
clashes soon break out.
The two-day protest ends
with over 600 arrested
and the widespread opinion
that the demonstration
made everyone a loser.
[Dan] The long, hot
summer riots in such places
as Detroit and Newark...
[reporter] With the coming
of the long, hot summers,
for three years
has had to face the
tragic consequences of riots.
Negroes claim they have waited
long enough for equal rights.
[Dan] The public was in a panic.
Middle America was
in kind of a panic.
Every night on the evening
news it just looked like the
country was coming unglued
and Richard Nixon ran in '68
on a law-and-order platform.
"I am going to restore law and
order to the United States."
[Nixon] It is time for an
honest look at the problem
of order in the United States.
So, I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States.
Well, he gets elected
and then he discovers federal
government has very little role
under the Constitution,
in law and order.
Law and order is a
local and state matter.
And in John Mitchell's office
and several people who were
there told me about this meeting
in which Mitchell is saying,
"Come on people, we got
to come up with a way
to project the federal
government into law and order."
And they kick around some
ideas and finally somebody
says, "Well, there's drugs."
Do you want to join me
here? Won't you be seated
please, ladies and gentlemen.
Come on Dr. Jaffe, yeah.
Mr. Krogh, Mister...
-Yes, Sir. Yes, Sir.
-Fine. All right.
Ladies and gentlemen, I would
like to summarize for you the
meeting that I have just had
with the bipartisan leaders
which began at 8 o'clock and
was completed two hours later.
I began the meeting by making
this statement which I think
needs to be made to the nation.
America's public enemy
number one in the United
States is drug abuse.
In order to fight and defeat
this enemy, it is necessary to
wage a new all-out offensive.
I have asked the
Congress to provide
the legislative authority
and the funds to fuel
this kind of an offensive.
Nixon creates the Drug
Enforcement Administration
and this is half law enforcement
and half Hollywood.
They go out and start Eliot
Nessing around the country
and making sure that
the cameras are there.
In 1993, I had an interview
with John Ehrlichman
and this was the interview
that got me started on
this in an earnest way.
I was in the habit, every
time I talked to Richard
Nixon, or he talked to me
of taking very careful
notes because, usually,
it involved assignments
that I had to carry out,
one kind or another.
And I started asking him
these wonky questions
about drug policy
and he held up
a hand and he said,
"Can we cut the bullshit?
Can I-- can I just tell you
what this was all about?"
And he said, "The '68
campaign and the Nixon
White House thereafter
had two enemies: black
people and the anti-war Left.
And we needed a way
to mess them up.
We needed a way
to arrest their leaders,
to break up their meetings,
to delegitimize their gatherings
and most of all to vilify
them on the evening
news night after night.
And it was easy to associate
blacks with heroin and the
anti-war Left with marijuana."
At the time of Richard
Nixon, you were either, you
know, part of his generation
and appalled by drug use,
saw it as a moral issue,
or you were part
of the counterculture.
It was us versus them.
Everyone here seems
to emphasize the kids.
How can you communicate
with them when they
got flowers in their ears
where they can't hear and hair
down to their hip pockets?
Many of us are concerned
that a large percentage
of our young people
are breaking the law
by smoking marijuana.
I know you thought
about this problem
and I wonder if you could give
us some of your thoughts on it.
Well, to make a point, as
you know there is a commission
that is supposed to
make recommendations
to me about this subject.
Richard Nixon convenes
a Presidential Commission
on marijuana,
which, basically, says
marijuana is almost harmless and
should not be criminalized.
The recommendation of the
Commission in its first report
is that we do not feel
that private use or private
possession in one's own home
should have the stigma
of criminalization.
That people who experiment
should not be criminalized
for that particular behavior.
Richard Nixon very publicly
rejects the findings of
his own Commission
and that's the last time
a president convenes a
commission on marijuana.
I shall continue to oppose
efforts to legalize marijuana.
I became the White House
Drug Czar in July 1st of 1973.
Nixon's advisor, who I was
working with, said to me,
"The president is going to make
the decisions about marijuana.
You can make the
decisions about heroin,
but if you say anything good
about decriminalization of
marijuana, you're out of here.
He was elected president
and not you." And that was it.
I do think that it was a--
it was a moment when
the world changed.
I shall soon propose
a revision of the entire
Federal Criminal Code
which will give us tougher
penalties against drugs
and against crime.
A war on drugs is basically
the assumption or presumption
that anybody who has anything
to do with certain drugs
needs to be treated like a
criminal, needs to be punished,
viewed as somebody who can
have their freedom taken away,
their property, their
home taken away.
Somebody who is regarded
as immoral and for whom
it makes sense for the state
to spend oodles of
money, basically trying
to find these people,
arrest and prosecute
them, and convict them
and incarcerate them.
[cell door closes]
I actually started my
undercover work at the
beginning of the war on drugs.
When I joined the State Police
in 1964, we had 1700 troopers
and we had a
seven-man narcotic unit.
In 1970, in one step
overnight grew to a
76-person Narcotics Bureau,
all paid for by the
federal government.
That was when Nixon got
Congress to pass funding bills
that would give massive
amounts of money
to any Police Department that
was willing to hire officers
to fight his war on drugs.
As I talked to the people
from New York State
I realized the need for money
to deal with this problem.
I am glad that in this
administration we have
increased the amount of money
for handling the problem of
dangerous drugs, sevenfold.
It will be six hundred
million dollars this year.
To the extent money
can help in meeting the
problem of dangerous drugs,
it will be available.
This is one area where
we cannot have budget cuts
because we must wage
what I have called total war
against public enemy number
one in the United States:
the problem of dangerous drugs.
[Cole] It was all
a numbers game.
The whole idea was to get as
many arrested as possible.
We used to joke that if we
arrested the devil himself,
we'd let him go if he gave
up three of these demons.
And the reporters would
go away and they would
write horror stories.
And the next morning,
the public would
pick up those papers
and read them and
shake their head and say,
"Give it to him.
Give it to him."
And we'd get the money
and then we'd go out and do
even worse the next time around.
I was working undercover
for the state police, in the
suburbs of New Jersey.
Since we didn't have real
drug dealers out there,
the administration targeted
me on small friendship
groups of young people.
And when I infiltrated one
of these friendship groups
and became their friend,
come Friday night
somebody might say, "Hey,
you want to get high?"
Someone might say, "Yeah,
while you're in the city, pick
me up a couple of joints."
We're talking about five
dollars worth of drugs.
We'd have a big raid and we'd
swoop into their neighborhoods
five o'clock in the morning
with hundreds of police.
Kick down their doors and
drag them out in chains.
And when we got them all
lined up against that back wall,
my boss would come out
and he would say, "You see that?
There's a hundred major
drug dealers we took out
of your community."
[policeman] Everybody remain
seated where you are.
[Cole] Back then in 1970,
we didn't have a whole
bunch of laws about drugs.
We only had one law. That law
said it's illegal to distribute
a controlled
dangerous substance.
One joint was the same as a
hundred pounds of marijuana.
Since we only had one law there
was only one punishment,
seven years in state prison.
[reporter] Don Crow was
convicted of selling marijuana
to an undercover agent.
There seemed reason for hope.
It was his first
offense after all
and the amount had been
small, less than one ounce,
but the jury saw its duty,
sentence 50 years in prison.
For Crow, 25 years old,
newly returned from
Vietnam, it was a bitter pill.
I had the feeling that I was
fighting for my country
and for my fellow man.
And it is kind of depressing
to know that I should come
back and be given 50 years
for allegedly selling some--
a little marijuana.
[mother] This is a Purple Heart
that he received the first
time that he was wounded.
[reporter] There is a mother's
pride as Mrs. Crow recounts
Don's military record,
but it is hard for her, too.
He loved his country, she says.
He was a good boy.
It all starts off with
no hope, lack of education,
not being able to actually
enter the system.
I can't enter the system.
I can't get in.
I can't make a living wage,
but over here is a way.
And now, you try to do that
and you end up in prison,
or you end up with your life,
you know, devastated.
We snatched them off the streets
in the prime of their life
when they were trying
to get their education.
"How are they going to get a
job? They're drug dealers."
That's what we labeled them.
That's what everybody thinks.
Nobody wanted to hire them.
So, what do they do?
Well, they turn right back
to the drug culture,
the very group we say we're
trying to save them from,
only now they become
real drug dealers.
And that is how
this became the
self-perpetuating, constantly
expanding, policy disaster.
An interesting thing emerges
as the drug war heats up.
As it becomes more
and more serious.
As the kicking in more doors
and taking away more people
and giving people longer and
longer sentences for trivial
amounts of marijuana.
What emerges is an
organized, well-funded
opposition to the drug war.
Organizations like NORML,
the National Organization for
the Reform of Marijuana Laws
that mount an
organized response.
It's not just the stoned
hippies in the back of a van.
These are lawyers. These
are people with money.
These are people with
some influence and power
and access to the media.
[man] Last year in this country
there were two hundred
and twenty-six thousand
marijuana-related arrests.
And although the police
sometimes tell us
that they're only
interested in the pusher
or the seller as they say,
the fact is that only 7%
of those arrests were
against the seller.
93% of those arrests were
for possession and use.
Now what that means is that
there were about 200,000 young
people in this country last year
who were given an unnecessary
criminal record and all
that and all that involved
for the rest of their
life simply because
they smoked grass,
something which is a
relatively harmless thing to do.
So we're not trying to encourage
the use of the drug,
in fact, we're trying to
discourage it, but we're trying
to get the country to understand
that there are other means
to discourage the use of drugs
other than the criminal law.
And, in this case, the use
of the criminal law causes
more harm than the drug itself.
I give NORML, you
know, a lot of credit.
The role that they played
in the 70s and Keith
Stroup's pioneering role.
I mean, they really helped
to break open this issue.
In 1970 I founded NORML,
the National Organization for
the Reform of Marijuana Laws,
as a marijuana
smokers lobby.
We took the Marijuana
Commission report in
any state in America
where we could identify,
usually a young
progressive legislator
willing to introduce a Marijuana
Decriminalization Bill.
We not only provided
support for the legislator,
we brought out expert
witnesses at our expense
to testify that states should
do what the Marijuana
Commission recommended.
And as a result, between 1973,
when Oregon was the first state
to adopt a modified version of
marijuana decriminalization...
In Oregon, possession of
up to an ounce of marijuana
no longer is a felony punishable
by up to five years in prison.
Now marijuana smoking
is punishable only by
a fine like a traffic fine,
maximum penalty $100.
To 1978, we had a total of 11
states that stopped arresting
minor marijuana offenders
and we thought we were
on our way to victory.
In fact, we figured within
five years we would be finished.
We would have marijuana
smokers decriminalized
all across the country.
[cheering]
The portfolio legalizing
marijuana probably hit close
to 30 percent in the late 70's,
kind of at the era of that
decade of live-and-let-live.
It was fairly open in
the culture at that point,
mostly the youth culture.
[rock music]
[Anthony] Hey, you want
to get high, man?
Does Howdy Doody
got wooden balls, man?
I've got a joint here,
man, I've been saving
for a special occasion.
Is that a joint, man? I can
probably smoke this whole joint,
man and still walk away, man.
Wouldn't be no
problem at all, man.
[Pedro] Dog, talk it out, man.
Kinda grabs you by
the booboo, don't it?
The FBI claims that a huge
shipment of grass which
they are calling "killer dope"
has been smuggled
into New York City.
The bureau urges users
not to smoke the weed which
is greenish brown in color,
not particularly seedy
and contains mostly
cannabis buds.
Warning symptoms are
a mild euphoria, a slight
rise in the pulse rate,
some hallucination and
death by laughter within 15
minutes of ingestion.
[crowd laughs]
In an effort to aid the FBI
in its investigation,
Weekend Update is undertaking
its own analysis of marijuana
sent to us anonymously by any
viewers who may be worried.
Simply place a small
sample of the suspected
cannabis in an envelope
and send it immediately to Chevy
Chase, Apartment 12, 827 West
81st street, New York City...
When Nixon left and Gerald
Ford was the president,
I was the White House Drug Czar.
I was a hero with NORML and
High Times as a guy who was
interested in decriminalization.
And I liked that idea.
I supported that idea as
the White House Drug Czar.
[Baum] Jimmy Carter at that
time was-- I think he was
a pragmatic individual.
You know he had that
really classic and crucial line,
"The harms of drug laws
should not do more
harm to people than
the drugs themselves."
I support a change in law
to end federal and
criminal penalties
for possession of up to
one ounce of marijuana.
Leaving the states free to
adopt whatever laws they
wish concerning marijuana.
I think Jimmy Carter was
influenced initially by his
drug adviser, Dr. Peter Bourne,
and he was telling him
it made no sense
to treat marijuana
smokers like criminals.
I was Director of the Office
of Drug Abuse Policy.
And our policy was if people
are suffering adverse effects
from any of these drugs,
we should set up programs
to treat them, as we had
begun to do with alcohol
after countless decades
of, you know,
condemning alcoholics.
We'd have yet to find a
serious medical consequence
related to marijuana...
[man] Let me-- just
one more question...
Somewhat to my surprise, we have
not found serious health conse--
consequences in approximately
20 million dollars of research
in the last five years.
But the thing that we do
know, though, is that we will be
saving the lives and careers
of a lot of young people that
would otherwise be destroyed
by maintaining criminal
penalties and putting people
in jail for possession.
Dr. Peter Bourne
was someone I knew.
I would see him several
times a month in a
professional situation
and we considered
ourselves political allies,
no doubt about that.
I didn't disagree with him
particularly in terms of
his position on marijuana.
He and I really had a falling
out over the paraquat issue.
I had been advised at some
point that the government was
beginning to spray paraquat
and paraquat was an incredibly
dangerous herbicide
that if you took a teaspoon
in your mouth, it'll kill you.
It's that deadly.
They were spraying it on
marijuana crops in Mexico
in order to cut down on the
Mexican marijuana that
was coming into the U.S.
And so, we really thought
that they were-- they were
poisoning marijuana smokers.
He became seamless
on paraquat and I mean,
it was all blatant nonsense.
Once Peter and I began to
fight over the paraquat issue
it made it difficult for us
to work on other issues where
we did have common values.
Here's the bottom line:
the health concern
that we felt at the time
turned out to be overblown.
At the end of that dispute,
unfortunately, was also the
end of Dr. Bourne's tenure
as Drug Czar and
within a few months the
end of my first tenure
as executive director of NORML.
I don't doubt for a moment that
some of the confidence we had
to fight to the death
on the paraquat issue
may well have been impacted
by my own drug use
and drug use of other people
I was working with at the time.
The activists in the 70's
who played such a pioneering
role in helping to open this up
at the same time sort of became
undisciplined in their rhetoric.
Important thing is that make
sure your congressman knows
that 10 grams of marijuana
is not enough,
10 grams won't do it!
And then, basically, what
happens is things turn around.
I think, you know, as
marijuana is used more
extensively in society
and as you see a problem
emerging among high school
kids who are waking and baking,
I think, you know,
there's-- there's real
serious concerns there.
Well, as a kid, you say well,
he does this or he does that
and the lines are very clear
what you expect, right?
Or what he feels he has to do.
But now we're in
a kind of gray area,
17, and I'm saying to myself,
"Oh, what do I expect?
What can I expect?
What should he be doing?"
We had a big discussion
in my U.S. history class
and Mr. Sean talked about pot
in the United States, you know.
[friend] With Sean?
[kid] Yeah, he was like
comparing it was
prohibition, you know.
That's why I stayed
out of school today.
There was a changed in the
world that was very profound
and it started in 1977.
A mother in Atlanta, Keith
Schuchard wrote a letter
to the esteemed director
of the National Institute on
Drug Abuse, that's me.
And she said,
"You are the problem."
I mean, not that I
got a lot of letters, but
that got my attention.
What in the world
is she talking about?
She said, "You are fighting
the battle about marijuana
and you're missing what the
point is. The point is kids.
You're mixing up kids and
adults as if it's one problem.
The issue is kids smoking pot."
In this country and all
of the Western countries,
a very powerful drug culture,
a drug legalization lobby,
and they have managed to get
a message out quite strongly
that many drugs are harmless,
particularly,
marijuana and hashish.
So that the tremendous
epidemic of marijuana smoking
that went on in the 1970s
was based on ignorance
about the health effects.
We gave a seventh-grade
birthday party in our backyard
and were quite surprised
to find out that kids
were smoking marijuana
and it revealed to us
a culture that we had no
idea that was out there.
That was already absorbing and
recruiting young kids as young
as twelve-thirteen years old.
We called all the parents of
the kids who were at the party
and asked them to come over and
let them know what had going on.
It didn't matter if we liked
them, if we were the
same politics and religion,
but we all had kids
who knew each other
and so, we better get
to know each other, too.
We had already been
worried about our daughter,
her personality changes,
lack of interest in school,
a whole sense of drift
among her friends, etc.
It was about a week after the
party that we asked people
to come to our home then
and it was quite
awkward and difficult.
Some of the parents were quite
hostile and very serious denial,
but, eventually, a father
stood up and said,
"I know this is going to be
hurtful and it's going to be
difficult for you to hear,
but this is what I've learned
about what's going on."
One of the things that was
happening in that period of time
where marijuana was
coming into use,
parents didn't have
any idea what it was.
They were being told that it
was just a harmless giggle,
or the Academy of Pediatrics
thought it was just
a phase that young
people would go through.
It was really being ignored,
the dangers and risks
and, obviously, that helped
increase it greatly.
The parents and the
families across our nation
must understand
the danger involved
from the biological standpoint
and then from the social
aspect of the child's world;
what is being created
in the child's world that's
encouraging the drug use.
We noticed that parents
had doubts about marijuana.
They were hearing and reading
from magazines and seeing
on TV, and funny movies
like Cheech & Chong
and so forth, "Well,
maybe it's not so bad,
or what are we supposed
to do? Are we supposed
to tell our kids not to do it?"
[reporter] This is the
American child's favorite
illegal chemical, marijuana.
[reporter] Today, more high school kids have tried it than haven't and except for alcohol,
more kids smoke pot every day
than all other drugs combined.
The kids like it because
it feels good and what's
more, it's harmless,
or at least that's
what the kids tell me.
It's not bad for you. Nobody
ever said it's bad for you.
It might give you cancer
or something, but so
does everything else.
They don't have any proof
that pot hurts your body
as it is, you know,
not that, uh,
I've heard that no scientist
has proven, you know,
that pot hurts your body
in any kind of way.
Between 1975 and 1978,
youth marijuana use in
this country exploded.
And I watched, year after
year, those numbers rise.
By 1978, one in nine high
school seniors in this country
were smoking marijuana
every day.
As it picked up more and more
at-- and as it became more of
an issue in media coverage,
Dr. DuPont, the
government getting
involved, it really took off.
These were amateurs
and grassroots people
doing it on their own,
wanting help and support
and if we didn't get it,
we were gonna do it anyway.
I didn't have much problem
with her taking a position
that more attention should
be played to marijuana use,
particularly in the
suburbs by white kids
because I was too busy
dealing with inner-city
heroin addiction.
I didn't personally think
that marijuana should
be much of a priority.
The total focus had shifted
from the damage we're doing to
otherwise law-abiding citizens
by treating them like criminals
because they smoke,
had all of a sudden shifted
to these parents groups.
At the time, we didn't
take it very seriously.
We thought it was a distraction.
We thought that "Yes, we have
to respond to those questions."
But we couldn't imagine that
a majority of the country would
adopt that particular focus.
But we were wrong.
[Schuchard] Our interest
was in prevention--
from keeping it from starting
from the very beginning.
The first thing was, you
wanted the children to
be honest with you.
Listen, let's just get
this all out in front.
Look, you know, in front-- on
the table, what's going on?
Main thing we said,
we're going to keep a
sense of humor about this.
It's not going to be all
grim and miserable.
We're going to keep
a sense of humor.
We confessed to them
we were naiïve, out of
it, didn't have a clue.
Could they help us not
make fools of ourselves?
And that did strike
with some of the kids.
They didn't want their parents
going out and saying
things that were absurd
without knowing what they
were doing, if we were gonna go
talk to PTA or anything else.
The main thing is the absolute
lack of information on the
effects of drugs on kids.
The fact that there was almost
nothing out there about-
these are very complicated
chemicals, you know.
The chemicals are
strong enough to stop
seizures in epilepsy.
These are not, you know,
mild benign things going into
young kids' brains and bodies.
We began looking
around us and found out
that our local village,
our shopping malls, were full
of kiddy drug paraphernalia.
Comic books, Quaalude
candies, root beer-flavored
rolling papers,
space gun marijuana shooters,
a very attractive, fun and
witty commercialized culture
really targeted at that age
group because at that
time all over the country,
12 was the average age of
having their first experience
with marijuana.
This is designed to put
some pot in and then you
smoke the pot out of here.
Now, you can toss a smoke
to a friend if you want to.
There are things like
bongs that's B-O-N-G.
You put the pot in here,
light it, the smoke travels
down here, collects,
and then you get a
concentrated volume of
smoke by sucking in like this.
And I think the label is
instructive, "Bong, the
only thing wasted is you."
They're smoking at during their
most important development years
where the brain is developing,
the emotions are developing.
It numbs you to all of
those feelings that you are
learning how to handle
and that's what makes
marijuana so dangerous.
That is what we're destroying
with our children.
[Gleaton] Dr. DuPont and Keith
sat down and had a talk.
Bob said, "This is a
wonderful thing you're
doing in your community,
wonder if we can duplicate it."
So, he asked Keith
to write a book.
So, she did. She wrote one
called, Parents Peers and Pot.
And with that book the National
Institute on Drug Abuse, NIDA,
was able to distribute
more than a million copies.
I think when they had a million
copies requested they stopped
printing it because they said,
"We have too many requests.
We can't keep printing it."
I was stunned by that.
I had no idea, but it shows
how widespread the problem was.
It worked best
from the bottom up
and especially, if you're
talking about parents and kids,
you're dealing with the
strongest instinct in nature,
which is protect your kids.
They did a remarkable job
in such a tiny amount of
time of getting the attention
of federal leaders, national
leaders, and making this a
national movement of parents
wanting to push all drugs
out of their community.
It wasn't just marijuana, it
was alcohol, it was tobacco,
it was other illegal drugs
and they did a very
good job of doing that.
The regular marijuana use
and regular drug use fell
in almost two-thirds in the
period that they were active.
There were probably a lot
of other factors, but I can't
help to think that the parent
movement and this idea
of changing the culture,
which they did so effectively,
wasn't one of those factors.
By the time that
Carter left, the scene
had completely changed.
Even in the Congress, not--
not just Reagan himself,
but the whole attitude was
we've been too soft on drugs.
When I first came to
Washington, I was Drug
Czar under President Reagan.
It was a difficult entry
in a number of ways.
One, because I'd never had
a job with that much power
and oversight and budget,
but also because I was
a pediatrician doing a job
that the psychiatrist knew
belonged only to them.
I was there mainly
because people in the
White House were worried
that the people in the fields
were not paying any
attention to marijuana
and they wanted somebody
in there who saw it their
way, so that was me.
The power of a First Lady
to reach a national audience
is always tremendous.
She took on the drug issue
and developed a slogan
that was just a directive.
What will you do when
someone offers you drugs?
[crowd] Just say no!
She didn't invent that slogan.
An elementary school
in Oakland, California,
had a contest
and the kids came up with
the contest "Just say no."
And they won the contest
and Nancy Reagan went out
to give them a little award
and the media picked it up
that this is the entire national
and international drug policy
is, "Just say no."
♪ And the only thing that we're Here to say that the drugs
Are fewer every day ♪
♪ Cocaine and crack
It's all got to go ♪
♪ We got to learn
To just say no ♪
Just say no.
♪ Just say no
♪ Just say no, just say no
♪ No, just say no
♪ Learning when to say no
Hey, no.
♪ That's what you need to do
♪ Don't need it
♪ Say, no
Don't need it ♪
♪ Say, no
♪ Just say no
To drugs to beat it ♪
♪ Don't let a friend push
You in to taking drugs ♪
♪ You got a right to say no
♪ No
♪ Right to say no
If you just say no, you'll be
saying yes to a whole lot more.
What can be a better little
slogan for elementary school?
"Just say no." Why not?
No.
No thanks.
No way!
No.
No.
No.
[man] Help them to just say no.
When Nancy Reagan
said, "Just say no,"
I think that was maybe
the highest moment of the
drug war, perhaps to this day.
We laugh at Nancy Reagan
for saying, "Just say no."
But "Just say no" was
a pretty good message.
"Just say no" doesn't
put anybody in prison.
"Just say no" doesn't
get anybody killed.
"Just say no"
I think was humane.
Enjoy life to the fullest
and to make it count.
Say, yes to your life and
when it comes to drugs
and alcohol, just say no.
And in there were the
roots of a new drug policy.
Just say no so loud that
everyone around you can hear
and if you do that drugs
won't stand a chance.
Mrs. Reagan just
took it on instinctively.
She had seen enough drug
problems in kids and she
just took it on as a mother.
It was interesting because
when I first met her,
I said, "Mrs. Reagan, I have
to confess, I'm a Democrat
and I'm even an L word."
She said, "An L word?"
I said, "A Liberal."
She said, "That's fine.
This is bipartisan
as I understand."
And I said, "Yes, indeed."
And she said, "Well, we're
gonna keep it that way."
She took it on as a mother,
not as a First Lady.
In fact, her staff didn't want
her to take it on and when
she came up with the idea,
let's invite the First Ladies
of the world to come,
many people
thought she was nuts,
but that was an incredibly
impressive and effective thing.
And as we have found out,
you know, moms are something
to be reckoned with
all over the world.
Ronald Reagan, you know,
he could see the political
utility of the drug war
and he's- and he's
certainly profited.
Leading medical researchers
are coming to the conclusion
that marijuana, pot, grass,
whatever you want to call it,
is probably the most
dangerous drug
in the United States
and we haven't begun to find out
all of the ill effects, but they
are permanent ill effects.
My position was always that
the best way to handle a
drug problem is to prevent it,
or to offer counseling
and cures,
whereas for many other people
they thought the best way
was to stop it, to war it.
There is only one way
to stop an epidemic
and that is to isolate the virus
that causes it and destroy it.
[MacDonald] The administration
did go in a different direction.
They believed it was a balanced
approach. In my view, it was
balanced on the wrong side.
The American people want
their government to get tough
and to go on the offensive
and that's exactly
what we intend.
You had Reagan come in
and say this is all nonsense.
It's all evil people,
doing evil things.
It doesn't matter what
drug they're using.
We need to worry about
putting in prison these
malevolent people
who are doing these
bad things and that
will stop drug use.
Drugs are menacing our society.
They're threatening our
values and undercutting
our institutions.
They're killing our children.
Reagan was more of a
moralist than Richard Nixon.
Richard Nixon
was not a moralist.
Reagan-- Reagan's
presidency coincides with the-
with the rise of the
evangelical churches...
Hallelujah! You cannot
drug the Holy Ghost!
You can't do it, drug addict!
The Holy Ghost will follow
you to hell and back to
bring you to Jesus Christ!
He can set you free from drugs
and put something in your life
that will make
life worth living!
Conservatives in
general took the view,
people commit crimes
and people use drugs
because they're bad people.
And the appropriate
response is to punish them.
And they say this
with some justification.
They would say the liberal idea
that root causes are
behind things like
crime and drug abuse,
is to say that everybody
who is poor,
and everybody who is black
is potentially a criminal.
And I'm a liberal, but I
can see where that is a--
that is an unpleasant
place to go.
We're fighting the crusade
for a drug-free America
on many fronts.
We've substantially increased
the number of federal
prosecutors and agents.
When I first started working
undercover,
we had a very, very,
small statewide drug unit.
There were five people
on my team, which had
all of Southern Maryland.
Almost like overnight,
we went from a little
small unit to a bureau.
We ended up adding
another Bureau to the
Maryland State Police.
So, now you're talking
about hundreds of
undercover operatives
throughout the state of
Maryland in just a few years.
And as we go into Regan
and that federal
money starts pouring in,
our pay increased dramatically
during that period.
And that's why so many
cops liked Ronald Reagan,
because we got raises.
The federal government
gives grants to every state,
county, and municipal
police department
every year based on one thing:
how many drug arrests did you
make the year before? The more
drug arrests, the more money.
Where do you think police
administrators are going to
focus their police officers now?
They don't get paid for
arresting people for murder,
they don't get paid for
arresting rapists, they get paid
for arresting drug violators.
It's the only crime
in the United States
where police officers
get paid extra money
for making arrests.
And the easier the
arrest is the more likely
they are to make it.
So, we have what is called
low-hanging fruit and that's
where we make our arrest.
[Franklin] Most of our
efforts by large are for
marijuana enforcement.
And I think this is one of the
reasons why at the management
level you tend to see
a lot of
resistance to the change in
marijuana laws,
moving it from a place
of illegality to legality.
I had seen too many of my
colleagues so wound up in
the idea of a war on drugs
that they had decided that in
this particular situation, the
means are justified by the ends.
So, anything they could
possibly do to get a drug
dealer off the street was okay.
Some of them were
lying on the stand.
Some of the guys felt like,
"If I see this dealer out there.
I know he's been
dealing every day
and I grab him at the one time
he doesn't have drugs on him,
well, maybe I'll just
put some on him.
He'll go to prison. I've done
my job." We even had a name for
it. It was called salting them.
It distracts us from what we
should be doing, finding
the murderers, the rapists.
When you arrest a rapist,
he's been terrorizing a
community or a neighborhood.
You know what?
The rape stops.
You arrest the drug dealer
who's hanging out on the corner,
the drug selling
doesn't stop, folks.
If at anything, we the
police, just cause the
temporary void in the market
that other crews and gangs
are going to fight for.
And they're gonna have
shootouts in an attempt
to fill that market.
And then when you
have their shootout,
then you have months
and months of retaliation
resulting from that.
We call it clearing corners
and we create more violence
in our neighborhoods and
communities when we do this.
[reporter] Ten years ago the
efforts of Mrs. Dawson to stop
the drug-dealing backfired.
Their home at 1401 East Preston Street was set on fire.
Five children and Carnell
and Angela Dawson couldn't
escape a Molotov cocktail.
When people say, "How did
the drug war get so violent?"
It's like asking, how
did alcohol prohibition
get so violent?
Drug markets had always had
an element of violence to them,
but tied together with
other things going on in
our culture in the late 80's,
early 90's met with--
then we had this
explosion of violence
in American cities and
sometimes beyond the cities.
[Reagan] We've also
strengthened the laws,
so that we can now dispose
of property that was
bought with drug money.
We don't have to give it back.
The results:
last year federal drug
agents confiscated over
half a billion dollars
worth of drug-related assets.
That's when civil forfeiture
policies came to life.
Initially designed to go
after drug kingpins
and all their proceeds
from their illegal
businesses, that's what civil
forfeiture policies were for.
But then, there came a time
when we busted up most
of the major drug operations.
We turned five major
organizations into five hundred
street corner operations.
So, as the drug kingpins within
our communities went away
and now everybody's out
there for themselves with
their own little operations,
we didn't stop our
civil forfeiture policies,
we just took those
civil forfeiture policies
and aimed them
to every John Doe
citizen that's out there.
You don't even have to
arrest somebody, you know.
When you stop a car,
if you find that there's
a lot of money in that car
then you can seize the money.
And you don't even have
to arrest the person.
And it quite literally
is a license to steal.
The reason these forfeiture
dollars are so important
to police leaders
is that they have discretion
to spend them any kind
of way that they choose fit.
And whenever you give
a pile of money to a law
enforcement official
with uncontrolled
spending limits that's a very,
very, bad place to be.
How do you decide
forfeiture funds?
There's some limitations
on it, you know.
It's actually-- there's not
really on the forfeiture stuff.
We just usually base it
on something that
would be nice to have.
That we-- we can't get in
the budget, for instance.
So, you know, we try not
to use it for things that
we need to depend on,
you know, because we
need to go ahead and
have those purchased
but it's kind of like pennies
from heaven, you know.
It gets you a toy or something
that you need.
This is the way we
typically look at it.
Sometimes when you look
at the progress or lack of
progress on drug law or reform,
you- you have to acknowledge
that it has a lot to do
with whether there's been
a high-profile victim.
And probably the best example
of that in my lifetime
was a wonderful all-American
basketball player,
drafted number one that year
by the Boston Celtics, Len Bias.
He graduated from the
University of Maryland.
He was the highest ranked
player in the entire country.
[commentator] Notice how
he gets it under control
and then he goes up strong.
He likes to see your big guys
do that. That's a big basket.
[Baum] Congress is
very basketball crazy.
Congress-- it's kind of
a basketball culture.
And Len Bias for basketball
watching America, he was
America's sweetheart.
The Boston Celtics
select Len Bias of the
University of Maryland.
[Bias] I knew what was going
to happen when the guy came over
to me when I was sitting down
and said, "Are you
packed to go to Boston?
And I said, "Uh, yes. I am."
So, I'm happy to be picked by
Boston and I'm going to go out
there and play the best I can.
June 19th, 1986, that
was the day that changed
the way we think about drugs,
it changed
all kinds of policies.
When Len Bias death
occurred, there was
enormous national media-
international media
attention about it.
Mr. Bias died of cocaine
intoxication,
which interrupted
the normal electrical
activity of his brain.
Up to Len Bias' death crack
cocaine had been on the streets
and thousands of kids had died.
And a thousand people have
been incarcerated behind it,
but because someone so famous
and someone so prominent died,
all of a sudden it became
a national epidemic.
It was a tragedy for him, it was
a tragedy for his family, but it
should not have been the basis
to formulate national drug
policy, but it was for
a number of years.
I call him the Archduke
Ferdinand of the
war on drugs because
his death is perfect
for the drug war.
Tip O'Neill is Speaker of
the House. He's a Democrat
and he is screaming
at his staff, "Write me
some goddamn legislation.
We need to get out
in front of this." "We"
meaning the Democrats.
There weren't any
in-depth studies,
they weren't fact-based.
They weren't evidence-based.
[Baum] And what the
Democrats come up with...
[man] The yea's are
97, the nays are 2.
...is mandatory
minimum sentences.
This is something that
had to be dealt with and
of course, you know,
election year fever did
take hold of some people.
[Baum] This idea is
manufactured that lenient
judges are letting drug users
and drug dealers off too
easily and we are going
to tie the hands of judges.
It is the most wildly
anti-democratic step
you can take.
It was McCarthyism on steroids.
It was McCarthyism with all
the hysteria and the paranoia
both externally and internally,
but with this
extraordinary budget,
and throwing not just a
handful of people behind
bars, but millions, millions.
During the mid-1980's into the
later 1980's, it just got crazy.
Mandatory minimum sentencing,
tougher drug sentencing laws,
and it was a complete disaster.
If you look at this moment
in time on a graph of
incarceration for this country
that's literally the beginning
of our prison population
boom in this country,
going from, you know,
roughly around 500,000
people in prison in this country
to where we are
today at 2.3 million.
The gravest domestic
threat facing our
nation today is drugs.
We need more prisons,
more jails, more courts,
more prosecutors.
We are determined
to enforce the law.
Punishment that
is swift and certain.
You will be caught
and when you're caught,
you will be prosecuted
and once you're convicted,
you will do time.
Caught, prosecuted, punished.
While I was a judge,
it was a learning
experience because
I'm a former drug warrior
who used to prosecute
those drug cases,
but I'd see us churning
low-level drug offenders
through the system
in my own courtroom
for no good purpose.
So, I did something
extremely unusual for
a sitting trial court judge
and on April the 8, 1992,
held a press conference telling
the world as much as I could
that our system of drug
policy was not working,
drug prohibition did not work,
and we'd have to come
to our senses because
there were alternatives.
The tougher we get with regard
to marijuana prosecution,
literally, from my
experience as a judge
and I have seen this on
in Orange County forever,
the softer we get with the
prosecution of everything else,
and that is something that
we simply have so many resources
and if we're spending them
in prosecutions of marijuana,
we are not spending them
for prosecutions
of rape, homicide, etc.
I have seen numbers of federal
judges appointed by people like
Nixon and Reagan, for example.
I mean they're really
conservative people
on the bench in tears
because the law forced
them to have to sentence
this person standing
in front of them to 20
to 30 years in prison.
And they apologize.
What they say, "I have to do
this. I have to follow the law."
It's great politics but
it's rotten government.
Just wipe me out, straight
off the mouth for nothing.
Put yourself here for such
a small wrong, you know.
You know what I'm saying?
I want to know why
I'm being treated
like I murdered
somebody, you know.
Politicians want to get
reelected, plain and simple.
And one of the issues is that
they suck from the same trough
that they see others
making headway with.
In 25 years, crime has
been a hot political issue,
used too often to divide us
while the system makes
excuses for not punishing
criminals in doing the job.
Under Clinton, Clinton
sort of said, "Well, you
want a war on drugs?
I'll hire this general
and run it."
And so, he used very
much the military model
to deal with the drug problem.
I mean I-- I know well
and like Barry McCaffrey,
but he came with
zero knowledge or
experience with drug abuse.
General McCaffrey has faced
down many threats to America's
security from guerilla warfare
in the jungles of Vietnam to the
unprecedented ground war
in the sands of Desert Storm.
Now, he faces a more insidious,
but no less formidable
enemy in illegal drugs.
As much as I admired President
Clinton, I thought his criminal
justice policies were misguided.
Those who commit crimes
should be punished.
And those who commit repeated
violent crimes should be told.
When you commit a third
violent crime, you will be put
away and put away for good.
Three strikes and you are out.
I think he knew better
and I think he would
acknowledge that now.
I signed a bill that made
the problem worse
and I want to admit it.
In that bill there were
longer sentences
and most of these people are
in prison under state law, but
the federal law set a trend.
And that was overdone.
We were wrong about that.
A law-abiding person, it might
sound like it makes sense.
You're gonna go commit
three felonies, obviously,
you're a habitual criminal
and you're not gonna go back.
But you don't understand, you
know, I've had guys that went to
jail for fighting with a girl,
okay? That's the felony
and then inside prison,
catch two more.
You can strike out in jail.
People don't know that.
So, you could be a square
guy to go to jail for
DUI, end up going to jail.
End up somebody
tries to rape you.
You catch a felony in there
and he you're on your way
to the three-strikes.
I definitely know
it was a foul law.
I know that it-- it's--
it's got a lot of
people stuck for life
that don't deserve
being in there for life.
There was a U.S. senator from
Virginia named Jim Webb who
was looking at these statistics.
We have 5% of the world's
population, 25% of the world's
known prison population
and at the same time, we
have about 7 million people
who have been involved
in the criminal justice system
in one way or another.
Many of them who were
marked for life with the stigma
of having been in prison.
Either we are the most
criminally minded
people in the world,
or we're doing something
wrong. Which do you think?
A shocking new study by the
American Civil Liberties Union
has found that more than
3200 people nationwide
are serving life terms without
parole for nonviolent offenses.
The crimes that led to life
sentences include stealing
gas from a truck, shoplifting,
possessing a crack pipe,
facilitating a ten-dollar
sale of marijuana,
and attempting to
cash a stolen check.
Of those prisoners 80%
are behind bars for
drug-related crimes.
65% are African-American, 18%
are white and 16% are Latino.
Evidence of what
the ACLU calls extreme
racial disparities.
You know, one of the issues
that's tremendously sad
is what's happened
to the black community,
where so many fathers
are separated now
from their families.
And that's been a real concern
of ours is this racial bias,
not only in penalties, but
also in reporting and things.
If you were to randomly
stop a hundred black kids
and a hundred white kids
in any neighborhood
in America, roughly
the same percent
would have a little bit
of weed in their pocket,
but in virtually every
city in America, the
black kid is three,
five to ten times more likely
to be stopped and arrested
and given a criminal record
than the white kid.
And most people, including
white people who are
kind of indifferent to
the issues around race,
kind of get that
that's not fair.
[Cole] In the most racist,
political regime
in modern history,
that would be the apartheid
government of South Africa,
in 1993, the year
before that fell,
they imprisoned black
men at the rate of 851
per hundred thousand.
But you know, in the United
States by 2008, under our
prohibition government,
we imprisoned black men
eight or nine times the rate
we imprison white people.
Anybody who looks at that
one statistic and doesn't
see institutionalized racism
must have a sheet
over their head.
The war on drugs is
like the new Jim Crow.
It is aimed at controlling
black folks and making
money off folk.
Think of the money that's
being made off of all
these black folks in prison.
The people at the bottom,
let's keep them at the bottom.
And this is an easy
way to do it.
Incarcerate them,
decimate their families,
destroy their chances of
making it into the world.
Once they go to prison,
they'll never get a chance to-
even if they now want
to be legit, move up.
It's a fucked up paradox
that gets you stuck.
The people who are suffering
the most are the citizens.
These are the people
who every day deal with
the increased murder rate,
whether it's Chicago, whether
it's Baltimore, whether
it's Newark, New Jersey,
whether it's Washington, DC.
It's the citizens that live
in these communities
where these gangs and
crews are fighting each other
every day over corners.
I think most people fail
to realize, even cops.
They are also victims
of the war on drugs.
They are serious victims
of the war on drugs.
All you have to do is turn on
any TV and look at the news, or
turn on YouTube and see the-
the dissension, the hate
and the problems that we
have between police and-
and mainly our poor,
black, and brown
communities because of this.
When I started working on
the drug war in the early 90's
to me what was most offensive
was the clamping down of debate
to question the drug war was
tantamount to forbidden speech.
We were really specifically
enjoined from debating our way
toward a rational management
of drug abuse in this country.
If you want to put the
drug dealer out of business
overnight is legalize drugs.
There's no drug dealer.
[arguing]
It's slime like you in the
White House, I'd puke on you!
[crowd cheer]
I they think there is a sense
in which the fanaticism
and the willful propaganda...
One of the DEA judge said they
compared intoxicity to aspirin.
Marijuana is
overwhelmingly safer.
He says that marijuana--
he said that marijuana is
perhaps one of the most-
safest psychoactive substances
ever known to man.
[crowd laughs]
Very simply--
everybody please...
Mayor Koch talks about
throwing youthers into jail.
[arguing]
I actually think that they
helped to delegitimize the
anti-marijuana movement.
Its extremism is part
of what brings it down.
If you quit drugs, you
join the fight against
terrorism in America.
The early days of the war
on terror were scary and
I-- it just seemed to me
that the public was in no
mood for patent political
nonsense surrounding it.
It seems to me that
in the United States,
we've always had a demon.
That something in American
political culture requires
us to have a demon.
You know, go back to Salem.
Alcohol was a demon.
I say alcohol must go!
[Baum] Communism was
a demon for a long time.
[man] In recognizing
a communist, physical
appearance counts for nothing.
If he openly declares himself
to be a communist,
we take his word for it.
[Baum] And all kinds of things
were justified in the name
of fighting communism.
It seemed very clear to me
at the end of the-- of the
80's, in the early 90's
that we were just pivoting
to this new demon and now
we have a war on terror.
Our war on terror begins
with al-Qaeda, but it
does not end there.
It will not end until every
terrorist group of global reach
has been found,
stopped and defeated.
[Baum] We have torqued our
Constitution into a pretzel in
the name of the war on terror,
the way we did with drugs,
a generation before that.
This is what we do.
When 9/11 happened, I remember
that morning thinking, "And
here we go again," you know.
"It is happening again."
The drug war then felt the way
the war on terror feels now.
It's very hard to question the
premises of the war on terror.
You got to be very careful.
Maybe in 25 years, we'll
be able to talk about the
war on terror more openly
and more casually
than we do now.
We are free now
to rationally debate
different ways of managing
the problem of drug
abuse in this country
and I celebrate that.
The fact of the matter is
psychoactive drugs have existed
in most societies
throughout the world.
There's almost never
been a human society
that did not use
one psychoactive
drug or another, right?
We know that these drugs can
be used for good, as medicines,
for spiritual benefits,
for relaxation, and we
also know that these
drugs can be used for bad.
It can be used in ways
that cause horrible
devastation to human bodies
and human lives and
human community.
[man] Gone are the pleasurable
sensations of the drug.
Now, to feel normal, he
must have his narcotic.
[Nadlemann] We're not
gonna get rid of drugs.
We can't build a moat between
those drugs and our communities,
between those drugs and
our schools, and our children.
Therefore, the only real
choice is not to ask how
do we get rid of drugs?
The only real choice is
to ask, how do we learn
to live with these drugs?
How do we learn to
live with the reality of
psychoactive substances
in our midst in such a
way that they cause
the least possible harm
and, in some cases, the
greatest possible benefit?
'96 we got medical
marijuana in California.
It changed the world.
It was a political success and
now it's sweeping the country.
[reporter] Ten states have
passed laws permitting the
use of medical marijuana.
Polling has shown that a
large majority of Americans
consistently support the
use of medical marijuana.
I can vouch for the fact that
some very sick people are
benefitted from marijuana.
Sick people that have
AIDS and cancer can use
marijuana and benefit by...
People are actually
moving to Colorado
to gain access to a special
kind of medical marijuana.
Arizona's first legal
medical marijuana...
[reporter] Boston's very first a
medical marijuana dispensary.
Sixty-five medical marijuana
dispensaries...
[reporter] Heading
today patients can
legally buy medical...
[reporter] Marijuana
laws now in effect...
Trying to legalize
marijuana from...
...South Carolina to the...
Marijuana will soon
be available at New
York state sanction.
Medical marijuana
is officially legal by law.
It is open for business.
No more!
Drug war!
No more!
Drug war!
When you look at what
the Obama administration
decided in the summer of 2013,
when, you know,
Attorney General Holder in
the White House, essentially,
gave Colorado and Washington
a qualified green light
to proceed with implementing
their new legalization laws.
What's remarkable is to
see the increase from barely
a quarter of the country
favoring the legalization
of marijuana in the mid-80's
to close to 60% today.
So, I think as with alcohol
policy, where basically we
have an extraordinary diversity
of policies between different
localities in different states
I think that we will have
and we need to have
a diversity of policies
both with local norms
and preferences, and
also with good evidence.
Drug war is ending.
Marijuana is legal in multiple
jurisdictions in the United
States and around the world.
The states of Colorado
and California and
Oregon and the others,
they have decided
we are going to give up
our power to arrest and harass
vast numbers of people.
That's huge.
I did not think I would live
long enough to see this.
Um, the cat is out of the bag.
The toothpaste
is out of the tube.
You can put it any way
you want. It's happening.
I try to be careful even
in my enthusiasm with all
the progress we've made
in the last several years
towards full legalization.
I still try to remind myself to
be cautious and not assume that
our total victory is inevitable
because I learned in the
70's that public opinion
sometimes can shift
and can shift fairly quickly.
This drug is dangerous.
You cannot play with it.
It's not funny. It's not
something to laugh about.
Good people don't
smoke marijuana.
It's a lot of money
to me being spent
to not solve the problem.
It didn't solve the problem.
I don't think the war on
drugs stopped drugs ever.
I don't think anyone's
ever said I can't get high.
What I would hope is, is
that we're less focused
on warehousing people
as opposed to
rehabilitating people.
The bottom line is, is
that you can push people into
the criminal justice system.
You can fill up the jails and
the prison, but if you aren't
doing something to change
that person's mindset
while they're in that
system, or more importantly,
change their support system when
they come out on the back end,
it becomes a vicious cycle.
By far the greatest value
would be to educate,
to prevent, to early treat-
that's not the way
the budget works out.
I am not a fan of
long sentences.
I don't think that's a great
idea for anybody, really.
It's expensive and I
think to me what's
important in corrections
is community corrections,
helping people.
But you've got to be tough
enough to say, "If a guy's
not going to support this,
they can go with the
program, or you have
to be able to go to jail."
I am very interested in
using the criminal justice
to promote public health.
We do need criminal justice
and we do need treatment and
we want them to work together
a lot better than they are.
Now that's not popular.
You got to make a
choice, Dr. DuPont.
Do you believe in prison,
or do you believe in treatment?
Oh, I believe in both.
Oh, well, you're a
criminal justice guy.
No that's not true.
And I think every
effort it should be made
in the prison population
to have real job
training programs and
rehabilitation programs
because so many
of those people
who get involved when they're
teenagers are very young.
They aren't making
real choices to do this.
They're caught up in something.
Being around weed my whole life,
and being around Cypress Hill,
being around Snoop Dogg,
being around my buddy Shiny
Shine and Beatmaster V who
smoked one continuous joint
all day long, you
know, I never found
a problem with weed.
I never smoked weed.
I sold weed, but I never
smoked it because I just was-
just always trying
to be hustling on all
cylinders at all times,
you know what I'm saying?
You know weed always
made me feel like
I gotta go to the gym
in an hour, you know.
We can fight about adults
about marijuana use, but we
don't have a fight about kids.
NORML doesn't
want the kids to do it.
The tobacco industry,
the alcohol industry,
at least officially,
don't want to do that.
We can cut together
on that issue.
When people start using
these drugs at later ages,
they're much less likely
to get strung out on them.
They're much less likely to
have them ruin their lives.
They got more at stake to lose.
That doesn't mean they
have no problem, but
it comes down with age.
The vulnerability is prior
to 21 or even 25 when
the brain is still developing.
I would argue that we need to
abandon our drug war mentality
and our war on drug mentality
not because these drugs aren't
dangerous, but because they are.
Now, let's turn it around and go
back with some of these people
in prison need to be set free.
They need to just let them go.
And they can do it,
they could free the beds.
They-- I mean, it's-- it's not
impossible to say, "Oh, you're
in here on a marijuana charge
where you've just been
expunged. And just go home."
And let them go home.
You know I'm saying? If
you're in here for marijuana,
plus you killed four people,
you guys stay.
You ain't getting out.
But if you're just here for
marijuana, go on home.
You know I'm saying? Go
home, figure it out, you know.
Why not?
♪♪♪
[music ends]
---
[man] We are sending a
bad message with the
Medical Marijuana Laws
and the federal
government really needs
to speak out against it
and show some leadership there.
There is a powerful lobby
arguing for the
legalization of drugs
and that claims that
drugs, particularly
marijuana and hashish
are not harmful
to young people.
[judge] We have these
drugs in our society.
They're going to be
here like it or not.
We have a choice, we can
either have drugs in our
society with drug lords,
or without drug lords.
We know that when drugs
are legal, they're cheaper,
they're more available
than they're promoted
as we've seen for alcohol.
So, I think alcohol would
be the last model we want
to look at for marijuana.
I know annually we have
well over a thousand young
people dying in this country
because they're caught up
in the illegal drug market.
Focus on the real bottom line.
I want to reduce both
the harms of drugs
and I want to reduce the
harms of our failed policies.
[echoing] Policies...
I mean the easiest way
for most people in this country
and really throughout much
of the world to understand
the absurdity of the war on
drugs is to focus on marijuana.
[Dan] The drug war that I think
we are experiencing today
has its roots in Richard
Nixon's 1968 campaign
because of the
unrest of the 60's,
the student demonstrations
against the Vietnam War.
[reporter] Thousands
of demonstrators opposed
to the Vietnam War
assembled in the nation's
capital for a mass protest.
Military police
contained the crowd, but
clashes soon break out.
The two-day protest ends
with over 600 arrested
and the widespread opinion
that the demonstration
made everyone a loser.
[Dan] The long, hot
summer riots in such places
as Detroit and Newark...
[reporter] With the coming
of the long, hot summers,
for three years
has had to face the
tragic consequences of riots.
Negroes claim they have waited
long enough for equal rights.
[Dan] The public was in a panic.
Middle America was
in kind of a panic.
Every night on the evening
news it just looked like the
country was coming unglued
and Richard Nixon ran in '68
on a law-and-order platform.
"I am going to restore law and
order to the United States."
[Nixon] It is time for an
honest look at the problem
of order in the United States.
So, I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States.
Well, he gets elected
and then he discovers federal
government has very little role
under the Constitution,
in law and order.
Law and order is a
local and state matter.
And in John Mitchell's office
and several people who were
there told me about this meeting
in which Mitchell is saying,
"Come on people, we got
to come up with a way
to project the federal
government into law and order."
And they kick around some
ideas and finally somebody
says, "Well, there's drugs."
Do you want to join me
here? Won't you be seated
please, ladies and gentlemen.
Come on Dr. Jaffe, yeah.
Mr. Krogh, Mister...
-Yes, Sir. Yes, Sir.
-Fine. All right.
Ladies and gentlemen, I would
like to summarize for you the
meeting that I have just had
with the bipartisan leaders
which began at 8 o'clock and
was completed two hours later.
I began the meeting by making
this statement which I think
needs to be made to the nation.
America's public enemy
number one in the United
States is drug abuse.
In order to fight and defeat
this enemy, it is necessary to
wage a new all-out offensive.
I have asked the
Congress to provide
the legislative authority
and the funds to fuel
this kind of an offensive.
Nixon creates the Drug
Enforcement Administration
and this is half law enforcement
and half Hollywood.
They go out and start Eliot
Nessing around the country
and making sure that
the cameras are there.
In 1993, I had an interview
with John Ehrlichman
and this was the interview
that got me started on
this in an earnest way.
I was in the habit, every
time I talked to Richard
Nixon, or he talked to me
of taking very careful
notes because, usually,
it involved assignments
that I had to carry out,
one kind or another.
And I started asking him
these wonky questions
about drug policy
and he held up
a hand and he said,
"Can we cut the bullshit?
Can I-- can I just tell you
what this was all about?"
And he said, "The '68
campaign and the Nixon
White House thereafter
had two enemies: black
people and the anti-war Left.
And we needed a way
to mess them up.
We needed a way
to arrest their leaders,
to break up their meetings,
to delegitimize their gatherings
and most of all to vilify
them on the evening
news night after night.
And it was easy to associate
blacks with heroin and the
anti-war Left with marijuana."
At the time of Richard
Nixon, you were either, you
know, part of his generation
and appalled by drug use,
saw it as a moral issue,
or you were part
of the counterculture.
It was us versus them.
Everyone here seems
to emphasize the kids.
How can you communicate
with them when they
got flowers in their ears
where they can't hear and hair
down to their hip pockets?
Many of us are concerned
that a large percentage
of our young people
are breaking the law
by smoking marijuana.
I know you thought
about this problem
and I wonder if you could give
us some of your thoughts on it.
Well, to make a point, as
you know there is a commission
that is supposed to
make recommendations
to me about this subject.
Richard Nixon convenes
a Presidential Commission
on marijuana,
which, basically, says
marijuana is almost harmless and
should not be criminalized.
The recommendation of the
Commission in its first report
is that we do not feel
that private use or private
possession in one's own home
should have the stigma
of criminalization.
That people who experiment
should not be criminalized
for that particular behavior.
Richard Nixon very publicly
rejects the findings of
his own Commission
and that's the last time
a president convenes a
commission on marijuana.
I shall continue to oppose
efforts to legalize marijuana.
I became the White House
Drug Czar in July 1st of 1973.
Nixon's advisor, who I was
working with, said to me,
"The president is going to make
the decisions about marijuana.
You can make the
decisions about heroin,
but if you say anything good
about decriminalization of
marijuana, you're out of here.
He was elected president
and not you." And that was it.
I do think that it was a--
it was a moment when
the world changed.
I shall soon propose
a revision of the entire
Federal Criminal Code
which will give us tougher
penalties against drugs
and against crime.
A war on drugs is basically
the assumption or presumption
that anybody who has anything
to do with certain drugs
needs to be treated like a
criminal, needs to be punished,
viewed as somebody who can
have their freedom taken away,
their property, their
home taken away.
Somebody who is regarded
as immoral and for whom
it makes sense for the state
to spend oodles of
money, basically trying
to find these people,
arrest and prosecute
them, and convict them
and incarcerate them.
[cell door closes]
I actually started my
undercover work at the
beginning of the war on drugs.
When I joined the State Police
in 1964, we had 1700 troopers
and we had a
seven-man narcotic unit.
In 1970, in one step
overnight grew to a
76-person Narcotics Bureau,
all paid for by the
federal government.
That was when Nixon got
Congress to pass funding bills
that would give massive
amounts of money
to any Police Department that
was willing to hire officers
to fight his war on drugs.
As I talked to the people
from New York State
I realized the need for money
to deal with this problem.
I am glad that in this
administration we have
increased the amount of money
for handling the problem of
dangerous drugs, sevenfold.
It will be six hundred
million dollars this year.
To the extent money
can help in meeting the
problem of dangerous drugs,
it will be available.
This is one area where
we cannot have budget cuts
because we must wage
what I have called total war
against public enemy number
one in the United States:
the problem of dangerous drugs.
[Cole] It was all
a numbers game.
The whole idea was to get as
many arrested as possible.
We used to joke that if we
arrested the devil himself,
we'd let him go if he gave
up three of these demons.
And the reporters would
go away and they would
write horror stories.
And the next morning,
the public would
pick up those papers
and read them and
shake their head and say,
"Give it to him.
Give it to him."
And we'd get the money
and then we'd go out and do
even worse the next time around.
I was working undercover
for the state police, in the
suburbs of New Jersey.
Since we didn't have real
drug dealers out there,
the administration targeted
me on small friendship
groups of young people.
And when I infiltrated one
of these friendship groups
and became their friend,
come Friday night
somebody might say, "Hey,
you want to get high?"
Someone might say, "Yeah,
while you're in the city, pick
me up a couple of joints."
We're talking about five
dollars worth of drugs.
We'd have a big raid and we'd
swoop into their neighborhoods
five o'clock in the morning
with hundreds of police.
Kick down their doors and
drag them out in chains.
And when we got them all
lined up against that back wall,
my boss would come out
and he would say, "You see that?
There's a hundred major
drug dealers we took out
of your community."
[policeman] Everybody remain
seated where you are.
[Cole] Back then in 1970,
we didn't have a whole
bunch of laws about drugs.
We only had one law. That law
said it's illegal to distribute
a controlled
dangerous substance.
One joint was the same as a
hundred pounds of marijuana.
Since we only had one law there
was only one punishment,
seven years in state prison.
[reporter] Don Crow was
convicted of selling marijuana
to an undercover agent.
There seemed reason for hope.
It was his first
offense after all
and the amount had been
small, less than one ounce,
but the jury saw its duty,
sentence 50 years in prison.
For Crow, 25 years old,
newly returned from
Vietnam, it was a bitter pill.
I had the feeling that I was
fighting for my country
and for my fellow man.
And it is kind of depressing
to know that I should come
back and be given 50 years
for allegedly selling some--
a little marijuana.
[mother] This is a Purple Heart
that he received the first
time that he was wounded.
[reporter] There is a mother's
pride as Mrs. Crow recounts
Don's military record,
but it is hard for her, too.
He loved his country, she says.
He was a good boy.
It all starts off with
no hope, lack of education,
not being able to actually
enter the system.
I can't enter the system.
I can't get in.
I can't make a living wage,
but over here is a way.
And now, you try to do that
and you end up in prison,
or you end up with your life,
you know, devastated.
We snatched them off the streets
in the prime of their life
when they were trying
to get their education.
"How are they going to get a
job? They're drug dealers."
That's what we labeled them.
That's what everybody thinks.
Nobody wanted to hire them.
So, what do they do?
Well, they turn right back
to the drug culture,
the very group we say we're
trying to save them from,
only now they become
real drug dealers.
And that is how
this became the
self-perpetuating, constantly
expanding, policy disaster.
An interesting thing emerges
as the drug war heats up.
As it becomes more
and more serious.
As the kicking in more doors
and taking away more people
and giving people longer and
longer sentences for trivial
amounts of marijuana.
What emerges is an
organized, well-funded
opposition to the drug war.
Organizations like NORML,
the National Organization for
the Reform of Marijuana Laws
that mount an
organized response.
It's not just the stoned
hippies in the back of a van.
These are lawyers. These
are people with money.
These are people with
some influence and power
and access to the media.
[man] Last year in this country
there were two hundred
and twenty-six thousand
marijuana-related arrests.
And although the police
sometimes tell us
that they're only
interested in the pusher
or the seller as they say,
the fact is that only 7%
of those arrests were
against the seller.
93% of those arrests were
for possession and use.
Now what that means is that
there were about 200,000 young
people in this country last year
who were given an unnecessary
criminal record and all
that and all that involved
for the rest of their
life simply because
they smoked grass,
something which is a
relatively harmless thing to do.
So we're not trying to encourage
the use of the drug,
in fact, we're trying to
discourage it, but we're trying
to get the country to understand
that there are other means
to discourage the use of drugs
other than the criminal law.
And, in this case, the use
of the criminal law causes
more harm than the drug itself.
I give NORML, you
know, a lot of credit.
The role that they played
in the 70s and Keith
Stroup's pioneering role.
I mean, they really helped
to break open this issue.
In 1970 I founded NORML,
the National Organization for
the Reform of Marijuana Laws,
as a marijuana
smokers lobby.
We took the Marijuana
Commission report in
any state in America
where we could identify,
usually a young
progressive legislator
willing to introduce a Marijuana
Decriminalization Bill.
We not only provided
support for the legislator,
we brought out expert
witnesses at our expense
to testify that states should
do what the Marijuana
Commission recommended.
And as a result, between 1973,
when Oregon was the first state
to adopt a modified version of
marijuana decriminalization...
In Oregon, possession of
up to an ounce of marijuana
no longer is a felony punishable
by up to five years in prison.
Now marijuana smoking
is punishable only by
a fine like a traffic fine,
maximum penalty $100.
To 1978, we had a total of 11
states that stopped arresting
minor marijuana offenders
and we thought we were
on our way to victory.
In fact, we figured within
five years we would be finished.
We would have marijuana
smokers decriminalized
all across the country.
[cheering]
The portfolio legalizing
marijuana probably hit close
to 30 percent in the late 70's,
kind of at the era of that
decade of live-and-let-live.
It was fairly open in
the culture at that point,
mostly the youth culture.
[rock music]
[Anthony] Hey, you want
to get high, man?
Does Howdy Doody
got wooden balls, man?
I've got a joint here,
man, I've been saving
for a special occasion.
Is that a joint, man? I can
probably smoke this whole joint,
man and still walk away, man.
Wouldn't be no
problem at all, man.
[Pedro] Dog, talk it out, man.
Kinda grabs you by
the booboo, don't it?
The FBI claims that a huge
shipment of grass which
they are calling "killer dope"
has been smuggled
into New York City.
The bureau urges users
not to smoke the weed which
is greenish brown in color,
not particularly seedy
and contains mostly
cannabis buds.
Warning symptoms are
a mild euphoria, a slight
rise in the pulse rate,
some hallucination and
death by laughter within 15
minutes of ingestion.
[crowd laughs]
In an effort to aid the FBI
in its investigation,
Weekend Update is undertaking
its own analysis of marijuana
sent to us anonymously by any
viewers who may be worried.
Simply place a small
sample of the suspected
cannabis in an envelope
and send it immediately to Chevy
Chase, Apartment 12, 827 West
81st street, New York City...
When Nixon left and Gerald
Ford was the president,
I was the White House Drug Czar.
I was a hero with NORML and
High Times as a guy who was
interested in decriminalization.
And I liked that idea.
I supported that idea as
the White House Drug Czar.
[Baum] Jimmy Carter at that
time was-- I think he was
a pragmatic individual.
You know he had that
really classic and crucial line,
"The harms of drug laws
should not do more
harm to people than
the drugs themselves."
I support a change in law
to end federal and
criminal penalties
for possession of up to
one ounce of marijuana.
Leaving the states free to
adopt whatever laws they
wish concerning marijuana.
I think Jimmy Carter was
influenced initially by his
drug adviser, Dr. Peter Bourne,
and he was telling him
it made no sense
to treat marijuana
smokers like criminals.
I was Director of the Office
of Drug Abuse Policy.
And our policy was if people
are suffering adverse effects
from any of these drugs,
we should set up programs
to treat them, as we had
begun to do with alcohol
after countless decades
of, you know,
condemning alcoholics.
We'd have yet to find a
serious medical consequence
related to marijuana...
[man] Let me-- just
one more question...
Somewhat to my surprise, we have
not found serious health conse--
consequences in approximately
20 million dollars of research
in the last five years.
But the thing that we do
know, though, is that we will be
saving the lives and careers
of a lot of young people that
would otherwise be destroyed
by maintaining criminal
penalties and putting people
in jail for possession.
Dr. Peter Bourne
was someone I knew.
I would see him several
times a month in a
professional situation
and we considered
ourselves political allies,
no doubt about that.
I didn't disagree with him
particularly in terms of
his position on marijuana.
He and I really had a falling
out over the paraquat issue.
I had been advised at some
point that the government was
beginning to spray paraquat
and paraquat was an incredibly
dangerous herbicide
that if you took a teaspoon
in your mouth, it'll kill you.
It's that deadly.
They were spraying it on
marijuana crops in Mexico
in order to cut down on the
Mexican marijuana that
was coming into the U.S.
And so, we really thought
that they were-- they were
poisoning marijuana smokers.
He became seamless
on paraquat and I mean,
it was all blatant nonsense.
Once Peter and I began to
fight over the paraquat issue
it made it difficult for us
to work on other issues where
we did have common values.
Here's the bottom line:
the health concern
that we felt at the time
turned out to be overblown.
At the end of that dispute,
unfortunately, was also the
end of Dr. Bourne's tenure
as Drug Czar and
within a few months the
end of my first tenure
as executive director of NORML.
I don't doubt for a moment that
some of the confidence we had
to fight to the death
on the paraquat issue
may well have been impacted
by my own drug use
and drug use of other people
I was working with at the time.
The activists in the 70's
who played such a pioneering
role in helping to open this up
at the same time sort of became
undisciplined in their rhetoric.
Important thing is that make
sure your congressman knows
that 10 grams of marijuana
is not enough,
10 grams won't do it!
And then, basically, what
happens is things turn around.
I think, you know, as
marijuana is used more
extensively in society
and as you see a problem
emerging among high school
kids who are waking and baking,
I think, you know,
there's-- there's real
serious concerns there.
Well, as a kid, you say well,
he does this or he does that
and the lines are very clear
what you expect, right?
Or what he feels he has to do.
But now we're in
a kind of gray area,
17, and I'm saying to myself,
"Oh, what do I expect?
What can I expect?
What should he be doing?"
We had a big discussion
in my U.S. history class
and Mr. Sean talked about pot
in the United States, you know.
[friend] With Sean?
[kid] Yeah, he was like
comparing it was
prohibition, you know.
That's why I stayed
out of school today.
There was a changed in the
world that was very profound
and it started in 1977.
A mother in Atlanta, Keith
Schuchard wrote a letter
to the esteemed director
of the National Institute on
Drug Abuse, that's me.
And she said,
"You are the problem."
I mean, not that I
got a lot of letters, but
that got my attention.
What in the world
is she talking about?
She said, "You are fighting
the battle about marijuana
and you're missing what the
point is. The point is kids.
You're mixing up kids and
adults as if it's one problem.
The issue is kids smoking pot."
In this country and all
of the Western countries,
a very powerful drug culture,
a drug legalization lobby,
and they have managed to get
a message out quite strongly
that many drugs are harmless,
particularly,
marijuana and hashish.
So that the tremendous
epidemic of marijuana smoking
that went on in the 1970s
was based on ignorance
about the health effects.
We gave a seventh-grade
birthday party in our backyard
and were quite surprised
to find out that kids
were smoking marijuana
and it revealed to us
a culture that we had no
idea that was out there.
That was already absorbing and
recruiting young kids as young
as twelve-thirteen years old.
We called all the parents of
the kids who were at the party
and asked them to come over and
let them know what had going on.
It didn't matter if we liked
them, if we were the
same politics and religion,
but we all had kids
who knew each other
and so, we better get
to know each other, too.
We had already been
worried about our daughter,
her personality changes,
lack of interest in school,
a whole sense of drift
among her friends, etc.
It was about a week after the
party that we asked people
to come to our home then
and it was quite
awkward and difficult.
Some of the parents were quite
hostile and very serious denial,
but, eventually, a father
stood up and said,
"I know this is going to be
hurtful and it's going to be
difficult for you to hear,
but this is what I've learned
about what's going on."
One of the things that was
happening in that period of time
where marijuana was
coming into use,
parents didn't have
any idea what it was.
They were being told that it
was just a harmless giggle,
or the Academy of Pediatrics
thought it was just
a phase that young
people would go through.
It was really being ignored,
the dangers and risks
and, obviously, that helped
increase it greatly.
The parents and the
families across our nation
must understand
the danger involved
from the biological standpoint
and then from the social
aspect of the child's world;
what is being created
in the child's world that's
encouraging the drug use.
We noticed that parents
had doubts about marijuana.
They were hearing and reading
from magazines and seeing
on TV, and funny movies
like Cheech & Chong
and so forth, "Well,
maybe it's not so bad,
or what are we supposed
to do? Are we supposed
to tell our kids not to do it?"
[reporter] This is the
American child's favorite
illegal chemical, marijuana.
[reporter] Today, more high school kids have tried it than haven't and except for alcohol,
more kids smoke pot every day
than all other drugs combined.
The kids like it because
it feels good and what's
more, it's harmless,
or at least that's
what the kids tell me.
It's not bad for you. Nobody
ever said it's bad for you.
It might give you cancer
or something, but so
does everything else.
They don't have any proof
that pot hurts your body
as it is, you know,
not that, uh,
I've heard that no scientist
has proven, you know,
that pot hurts your body
in any kind of way.
Between 1975 and 1978,
youth marijuana use in
this country exploded.
And I watched, year after
year, those numbers rise.
By 1978, one in nine high
school seniors in this country
were smoking marijuana
every day.
As it picked up more and more
at-- and as it became more of
an issue in media coverage,
Dr. DuPont, the
government getting
involved, it really took off.
These were amateurs
and grassroots people
doing it on their own,
wanting help and support
and if we didn't get it,
we were gonna do it anyway.
I didn't have much problem
with her taking a position
that more attention should
be played to marijuana use,
particularly in the
suburbs by white kids
because I was too busy
dealing with inner-city
heroin addiction.
I didn't personally think
that marijuana should
be much of a priority.
The total focus had shifted
from the damage we're doing to
otherwise law-abiding citizens
by treating them like criminals
because they smoke,
had all of a sudden shifted
to these parents groups.
At the time, we didn't
take it very seriously.
We thought it was a distraction.
We thought that "Yes, we have
to respond to those questions."
But we couldn't imagine that
a majority of the country would
adopt that particular focus.
But we were wrong.
[Schuchard] Our interest
was in prevention--
from keeping it from starting
from the very beginning.
The first thing was, you
wanted the children to
be honest with you.
Listen, let's just get
this all out in front.
Look, you know, in front-- on
the table, what's going on?
Main thing we said,
we're going to keep a
sense of humor about this.
It's not going to be all
grim and miserable.
We're going to keep
a sense of humor.
We confessed to them
we were naiïve, out of
it, didn't have a clue.
Could they help us not
make fools of ourselves?
And that did strike
with some of the kids.
They didn't want their parents
going out and saying
things that were absurd
without knowing what they
were doing, if we were gonna go
talk to PTA or anything else.
The main thing is the absolute
lack of information on the
effects of drugs on kids.
The fact that there was almost
nothing out there about-
these are very complicated
chemicals, you know.
The chemicals are
strong enough to stop
seizures in epilepsy.
These are not, you know,
mild benign things going into
young kids' brains and bodies.
We began looking
around us and found out
that our local village,
our shopping malls, were full
of kiddy drug paraphernalia.
Comic books, Quaalude
candies, root beer-flavored
rolling papers,
space gun marijuana shooters,
a very attractive, fun and
witty commercialized culture
really targeted at that age
group because at that
time all over the country,
12 was the average age of
having their first experience
with marijuana.
This is designed to put
some pot in and then you
smoke the pot out of here.
Now, you can toss a smoke
to a friend if you want to.
There are things like
bongs that's B-O-N-G.
You put the pot in here,
light it, the smoke travels
down here, collects,
and then you get a
concentrated volume of
smoke by sucking in like this.
And I think the label is
instructive, "Bong, the
only thing wasted is you."
They're smoking at during their
most important development years
where the brain is developing,
the emotions are developing.
It numbs you to all of
those feelings that you are
learning how to handle
and that's what makes
marijuana so dangerous.
That is what we're destroying
with our children.
[Gleaton] Dr. DuPont and Keith
sat down and had a talk.
Bob said, "This is a
wonderful thing you're
doing in your community,
wonder if we can duplicate it."
So, he asked Keith
to write a book.
So, she did. She wrote one
called, Parents Peers and Pot.
And with that book the National
Institute on Drug Abuse, NIDA,
was able to distribute
more than a million copies.
I think when they had a million
copies requested they stopped
printing it because they said,
"We have too many requests.
We can't keep printing it."
I was stunned by that.
I had no idea, but it shows
how widespread the problem was.
It worked best
from the bottom up
and especially, if you're
talking about parents and kids,
you're dealing with the
strongest instinct in nature,
which is protect your kids.
They did a remarkable job
in such a tiny amount of
time of getting the attention
of federal leaders, national
leaders, and making this a
national movement of parents
wanting to push all drugs
out of their community.
It wasn't just marijuana, it
was alcohol, it was tobacco,
it was other illegal drugs
and they did a very
good job of doing that.
The regular marijuana use
and regular drug use fell
in almost two-thirds in the
period that they were active.
There were probably a lot
of other factors, but I can't
help to think that the parent
movement and this idea
of changing the culture,
which they did so effectively,
wasn't one of those factors.
By the time that
Carter left, the scene
had completely changed.
Even in the Congress, not--
not just Reagan himself,
but the whole attitude was
we've been too soft on drugs.
When I first came to
Washington, I was Drug
Czar under President Reagan.
It was a difficult entry
in a number of ways.
One, because I'd never had
a job with that much power
and oversight and budget,
but also because I was
a pediatrician doing a job
that the psychiatrist knew
belonged only to them.
I was there mainly
because people in the
White House were worried
that the people in the fields
were not paying any
attention to marijuana
and they wanted somebody
in there who saw it their
way, so that was me.
The power of a First Lady
to reach a national audience
is always tremendous.
She took on the drug issue
and developed a slogan
that was just a directive.
What will you do when
someone offers you drugs?
[crowd] Just say no!
She didn't invent that slogan.
An elementary school
in Oakland, California,
had a contest
and the kids came up with
the contest "Just say no."
And they won the contest
and Nancy Reagan went out
to give them a little award
and the media picked it up
that this is the entire national
and international drug policy
is, "Just say no."
♪ And the only thing that we're Here to say that the drugs
Are fewer every day ♪
♪ Cocaine and crack
It's all got to go ♪
♪ We got to learn
To just say no ♪
Just say no.
♪ Just say no
♪ Just say no, just say no
♪ No, just say no
♪ Learning when to say no
Hey, no.
♪ That's what you need to do
♪ Don't need it
♪ Say, no
Don't need it ♪
♪ Say, no
♪ Just say no
To drugs to beat it ♪
♪ Don't let a friend push
You in to taking drugs ♪
♪ You got a right to say no
♪ No
♪ Right to say no
If you just say no, you'll be
saying yes to a whole lot more.
What can be a better little
slogan for elementary school?
"Just say no." Why not?
No.
No thanks.
No way!
No.
No.
No.
[man] Help them to just say no.
When Nancy Reagan
said, "Just say no,"
I think that was maybe
the highest moment of the
drug war, perhaps to this day.
We laugh at Nancy Reagan
for saying, "Just say no."
But "Just say no" was
a pretty good message.
"Just say no" doesn't
put anybody in prison.
"Just say no" doesn't
get anybody killed.
"Just say no"
I think was humane.
Enjoy life to the fullest
and to make it count.
Say, yes to your life and
when it comes to drugs
and alcohol, just say no.
And in there were the
roots of a new drug policy.
Just say no so loud that
everyone around you can hear
and if you do that drugs
won't stand a chance.
Mrs. Reagan just
took it on instinctively.
She had seen enough drug
problems in kids and she
just took it on as a mother.
It was interesting because
when I first met her,
I said, "Mrs. Reagan, I have
to confess, I'm a Democrat
and I'm even an L word."
She said, "An L word?"
I said, "A Liberal."
She said, "That's fine.
This is bipartisan
as I understand."
And I said, "Yes, indeed."
And she said, "Well, we're
gonna keep it that way."
She took it on as a mother,
not as a First Lady.
In fact, her staff didn't want
her to take it on and when
she came up with the idea,
let's invite the First Ladies
of the world to come,
many people
thought she was nuts,
but that was an incredibly
impressive and effective thing.
And as we have found out,
you know, moms are something
to be reckoned with
all over the world.
Ronald Reagan, you know,
he could see the political
utility of the drug war
and he's- and he's
certainly profited.
Leading medical researchers
are coming to the conclusion
that marijuana, pot, grass,
whatever you want to call it,
is probably the most
dangerous drug
in the United States
and we haven't begun to find out
all of the ill effects, but they
are permanent ill effects.
My position was always that
the best way to handle a
drug problem is to prevent it,
or to offer counseling
and cures,
whereas for many other people
they thought the best way
was to stop it, to war it.
There is only one way
to stop an epidemic
and that is to isolate the virus
that causes it and destroy it.
[MacDonald] The administration
did go in a different direction.
They believed it was a balanced
approach. In my view, it was
balanced on the wrong side.
The American people want
their government to get tough
and to go on the offensive
and that's exactly
what we intend.
You had Reagan come in
and say this is all nonsense.
It's all evil people,
doing evil things.
It doesn't matter what
drug they're using.
We need to worry about
putting in prison these
malevolent people
who are doing these
bad things and that
will stop drug use.
Drugs are menacing our society.
They're threatening our
values and undercutting
our institutions.
They're killing our children.
Reagan was more of a
moralist than Richard Nixon.
Richard Nixon
was not a moralist.
Reagan-- Reagan's
presidency coincides with the-
with the rise of the
evangelical churches...
Hallelujah! You cannot
drug the Holy Ghost!
You can't do it, drug addict!
The Holy Ghost will follow
you to hell and back to
bring you to Jesus Christ!
He can set you free from drugs
and put something in your life
that will make
life worth living!
Conservatives in
general took the view,
people commit crimes
and people use drugs
because they're bad people.
And the appropriate
response is to punish them.
And they say this
with some justification.
They would say the liberal idea
that root causes are
behind things like
crime and drug abuse,
is to say that everybody
who is poor,
and everybody who is black
is potentially a criminal.
And I'm a liberal, but I
can see where that is a--
that is an unpleasant
place to go.
We're fighting the crusade
for a drug-free America
on many fronts.
We've substantially increased
the number of federal
prosecutors and agents.
When I first started working
undercover,
we had a very, very,
small statewide drug unit.
There were five people
on my team, which had
all of Southern Maryland.
Almost like overnight,
we went from a little
small unit to a bureau.
We ended up adding
another Bureau to the
Maryland State Police.
So, now you're talking
about hundreds of
undercover operatives
throughout the state of
Maryland in just a few years.
And as we go into Regan
and that federal
money starts pouring in,
our pay increased dramatically
during that period.
And that's why so many
cops liked Ronald Reagan,
because we got raises.
The federal government
gives grants to every state,
county, and municipal
police department
every year based on one thing:
how many drug arrests did you
make the year before? The more
drug arrests, the more money.
Where do you think police
administrators are going to
focus their police officers now?
They don't get paid for
arresting people for murder,
they don't get paid for
arresting rapists, they get paid
for arresting drug violators.
It's the only crime
in the United States
where police officers
get paid extra money
for making arrests.
And the easier the
arrest is the more likely
they are to make it.
So, we have what is called
low-hanging fruit and that's
where we make our arrest.
[Franklin] Most of our
efforts by large are for
marijuana enforcement.
And I think this is one of the
reasons why at the management
level you tend to see
a lot of
resistance to the change in
marijuana laws,
moving it from a place
of illegality to legality.
I had seen too many of my
colleagues so wound up in
the idea of a war on drugs
that they had decided that in
this particular situation, the
means are justified by the ends.
So, anything they could
possibly do to get a drug
dealer off the street was okay.
Some of them were
lying on the stand.
Some of the guys felt like,
"If I see this dealer out there.
I know he's been
dealing every day
and I grab him at the one time
he doesn't have drugs on him,
well, maybe I'll just
put some on him.
He'll go to prison. I've done
my job." We even had a name for
it. It was called salting them.
It distracts us from what we
should be doing, finding
the murderers, the rapists.
When you arrest a rapist,
he's been terrorizing a
community or a neighborhood.
You know what?
The rape stops.
You arrest the drug dealer
who's hanging out on the corner,
the drug selling
doesn't stop, folks.
If at anything, we the
police, just cause the
temporary void in the market
that other crews and gangs
are going to fight for.
And they're gonna have
shootouts in an attempt
to fill that market.
And then when you
have their shootout,
then you have months
and months of retaliation
resulting from that.
We call it clearing corners
and we create more violence
in our neighborhoods and
communities when we do this.
[reporter] Ten years ago the
efforts of Mrs. Dawson to stop
the drug-dealing backfired.
Their home at 1401 East Preston Street was set on fire.
Five children and Carnell
and Angela Dawson couldn't
escape a Molotov cocktail.
When people say, "How did
the drug war get so violent?"
It's like asking, how
did alcohol prohibition
get so violent?
Drug markets had always had
an element of violence to them,
but tied together with
other things going on in
our culture in the late 80's,
early 90's met with--
then we had this
explosion of violence
in American cities and
sometimes beyond the cities.
[Reagan] We've also
strengthened the laws,
so that we can now dispose
of property that was
bought with drug money.
We don't have to give it back.
The results:
last year federal drug
agents confiscated over
half a billion dollars
worth of drug-related assets.
That's when civil forfeiture
policies came to life.
Initially designed to go
after drug kingpins
and all their proceeds
from their illegal
businesses, that's what civil
forfeiture policies were for.
But then, there came a time
when we busted up most
of the major drug operations.
We turned five major
organizations into five hundred
street corner operations.
So, as the drug kingpins within
our communities went away
and now everybody's out
there for themselves with
their own little operations,
we didn't stop our
civil forfeiture policies,
we just took those
civil forfeiture policies
and aimed them
to every John Doe
citizen that's out there.
You don't even have to
arrest somebody, you know.
When you stop a car,
if you find that there's
a lot of money in that car
then you can seize the money.
And you don't even have
to arrest the person.
And it quite literally
is a license to steal.
The reason these forfeiture
dollars are so important
to police leaders
is that they have discretion
to spend them any kind
of way that they choose fit.
And whenever you give
a pile of money to a law
enforcement official
with uncontrolled
spending limits that's a very,
very, bad place to be.
How do you decide
forfeiture funds?
There's some limitations
on it, you know.
It's actually-- there's not
really on the forfeiture stuff.
We just usually base it
on something that
would be nice to have.
That we-- we can't get in
the budget, for instance.
So, you know, we try not
to use it for things that
we need to depend on,
you know, because we
need to go ahead and
have those purchased
but it's kind of like pennies
from heaven, you know.
It gets you a toy or something
that you need.
This is the way we
typically look at it.
Sometimes when you look
at the progress or lack of
progress on drug law or reform,
you- you have to acknowledge
that it has a lot to do
with whether there's been
a high-profile victim.
And probably the best example
of that in my lifetime
was a wonderful all-American
basketball player,
drafted number one that year
by the Boston Celtics, Len Bias.
He graduated from the
University of Maryland.
He was the highest ranked
player in the entire country.
[commentator] Notice how
he gets it under control
and then he goes up strong.
He likes to see your big guys
do that. That's a big basket.
[Baum] Congress is
very basketball crazy.
Congress-- it's kind of
a basketball culture.
And Len Bias for basketball
watching America, he was
America's sweetheart.
The Boston Celtics
select Len Bias of the
University of Maryland.
[Bias] I knew what was going
to happen when the guy came over
to me when I was sitting down
and said, "Are you
packed to go to Boston?
And I said, "Uh, yes. I am."
So, I'm happy to be picked by
Boston and I'm going to go out
there and play the best I can.
June 19th, 1986, that
was the day that changed
the way we think about drugs,
it changed
all kinds of policies.
When Len Bias death
occurred, there was
enormous national media-
international media
attention about it.
Mr. Bias died of cocaine
intoxication,
which interrupted
the normal electrical
activity of his brain.
Up to Len Bias' death crack
cocaine had been on the streets
and thousands of kids had died.
And a thousand people have
been incarcerated behind it,
but because someone so famous
and someone so prominent died,
all of a sudden it became
a national epidemic.
It was a tragedy for him, it was
a tragedy for his family, but it
should not have been the basis
to formulate national drug
policy, but it was for
a number of years.
I call him the Archduke
Ferdinand of the
war on drugs because
his death is perfect
for the drug war.
Tip O'Neill is Speaker of
the House. He's a Democrat
and he is screaming
at his staff, "Write me
some goddamn legislation.
We need to get out
in front of this." "We"
meaning the Democrats.
There weren't any
in-depth studies,
they weren't fact-based.
They weren't evidence-based.
[Baum] And what the
Democrats come up with...
[man] The yea's are
97, the nays are 2.
...is mandatory
minimum sentences.
This is something that
had to be dealt with and
of course, you know,
election year fever did
take hold of some people.
[Baum] This idea is
manufactured that lenient
judges are letting drug users
and drug dealers off too
easily and we are going
to tie the hands of judges.
It is the most wildly
anti-democratic step
you can take.
It was McCarthyism on steroids.
It was McCarthyism with all
the hysteria and the paranoia
both externally and internally,
but with this
extraordinary budget,
and throwing not just a
handful of people behind
bars, but millions, millions.
During the mid-1980's into the
later 1980's, it just got crazy.
Mandatory minimum sentencing,
tougher drug sentencing laws,
and it was a complete disaster.
If you look at this moment
in time on a graph of
incarceration for this country
that's literally the beginning
of our prison population
boom in this country,
going from, you know,
roughly around 500,000
people in prison in this country
to where we are
today at 2.3 million.
The gravest domestic
threat facing our
nation today is drugs.
We need more prisons,
more jails, more courts,
more prosecutors.
We are determined
to enforce the law.
Punishment that
is swift and certain.
You will be caught
and when you're caught,
you will be prosecuted
and once you're convicted,
you will do time.
Caught, prosecuted, punished.
While I was a judge,
it was a learning
experience because
I'm a former drug warrior
who used to prosecute
those drug cases,
but I'd see us churning
low-level drug offenders
through the system
in my own courtroom
for no good purpose.
So, I did something
extremely unusual for
a sitting trial court judge
and on April the 8, 1992,
held a press conference telling
the world as much as I could
that our system of drug
policy was not working,
drug prohibition did not work,
and we'd have to come
to our senses because
there were alternatives.
The tougher we get with regard
to marijuana prosecution,
literally, from my
experience as a judge
and I have seen this on
in Orange County forever,
the softer we get with the
prosecution of everything else,
and that is something that
we simply have so many resources
and if we're spending them
in prosecutions of marijuana,
we are not spending them
for prosecutions
of rape, homicide, etc.
I have seen numbers of federal
judges appointed by people like
Nixon and Reagan, for example.
I mean they're really
conservative people
on the bench in tears
because the law forced
them to have to sentence
this person standing
in front of them to 20
to 30 years in prison.
And they apologize.
What they say, "I have to do
this. I have to follow the law."
It's great politics but
it's rotten government.
Just wipe me out, straight
off the mouth for nothing.
Put yourself here for such
a small wrong, you know.
You know what I'm saying?
I want to know why
I'm being treated
like I murdered
somebody, you know.
Politicians want to get
reelected, plain and simple.
And one of the issues is that
they suck from the same trough
that they see others
making headway with.
In 25 years, crime has
been a hot political issue,
used too often to divide us
while the system makes
excuses for not punishing
criminals in doing the job.
Under Clinton, Clinton
sort of said, "Well, you
want a war on drugs?
I'll hire this general
and run it."
And so, he used very
much the military model
to deal with the drug problem.
I mean I-- I know well
and like Barry McCaffrey,
but he came with
zero knowledge or
experience with drug abuse.
General McCaffrey has faced
down many threats to America's
security from guerilla warfare
in the jungles of Vietnam to the
unprecedented ground war
in the sands of Desert Storm.
Now, he faces a more insidious,
but no less formidable
enemy in illegal drugs.
As much as I admired President
Clinton, I thought his criminal
justice policies were misguided.
Those who commit crimes
should be punished.
And those who commit repeated
violent crimes should be told.
When you commit a third
violent crime, you will be put
away and put away for good.
Three strikes and you are out.
I think he knew better
and I think he would
acknowledge that now.
I signed a bill that made
the problem worse
and I want to admit it.
In that bill there were
longer sentences
and most of these people are
in prison under state law, but
the federal law set a trend.
And that was overdone.
We were wrong about that.
A law-abiding person, it might
sound like it makes sense.
You're gonna go commit
three felonies, obviously,
you're a habitual criminal
and you're not gonna go back.
But you don't understand, you
know, I've had guys that went to
jail for fighting with a girl,
okay? That's the felony
and then inside prison,
catch two more.
You can strike out in jail.
People don't know that.
So, you could be a square
guy to go to jail for
DUI, end up going to jail.
End up somebody
tries to rape you.
You catch a felony in there
and he you're on your way
to the three-strikes.
I definitely know
it was a foul law.
I know that it-- it's--
it's got a lot of
people stuck for life
that don't deserve
being in there for life.
There was a U.S. senator from
Virginia named Jim Webb who
was looking at these statistics.
We have 5% of the world's
population, 25% of the world's
known prison population
and at the same time, we
have about 7 million people
who have been involved
in the criminal justice system
in one way or another.
Many of them who were
marked for life with the stigma
of having been in prison.
Either we are the most
criminally minded
people in the world,
or we're doing something
wrong. Which do you think?
A shocking new study by the
American Civil Liberties Union
has found that more than
3200 people nationwide
are serving life terms without
parole for nonviolent offenses.
The crimes that led to life
sentences include stealing
gas from a truck, shoplifting,
possessing a crack pipe,
facilitating a ten-dollar
sale of marijuana,
and attempting to
cash a stolen check.
Of those prisoners 80%
are behind bars for
drug-related crimes.
65% are African-American, 18%
are white and 16% are Latino.
Evidence of what
the ACLU calls extreme
racial disparities.
You know, one of the issues
that's tremendously sad
is what's happened
to the black community,
where so many fathers
are separated now
from their families.
And that's been a real concern
of ours is this racial bias,
not only in penalties, but
also in reporting and things.
If you were to randomly
stop a hundred black kids
and a hundred white kids
in any neighborhood
in America, roughly
the same percent
would have a little bit
of weed in their pocket,
but in virtually every
city in America, the
black kid is three,
five to ten times more likely
to be stopped and arrested
and given a criminal record
than the white kid.
And most people, including
white people who are
kind of indifferent to
the issues around race,
kind of get that
that's not fair.
[Cole] In the most racist,
political regime
in modern history,
that would be the apartheid
government of South Africa,
in 1993, the year
before that fell,
they imprisoned black
men at the rate of 851
per hundred thousand.
But you know, in the United
States by 2008, under our
prohibition government,
we imprisoned black men
eight or nine times the rate
we imprison white people.
Anybody who looks at that
one statistic and doesn't
see institutionalized racism
must have a sheet
over their head.
The war on drugs is
like the new Jim Crow.
It is aimed at controlling
black folks and making
money off folk.
Think of the money that's
being made off of all
these black folks in prison.
The people at the bottom,
let's keep them at the bottom.
And this is an easy
way to do it.
Incarcerate them,
decimate their families,
destroy their chances of
making it into the world.
Once they go to prison,
they'll never get a chance to-
even if they now want
to be legit, move up.
It's a fucked up paradox
that gets you stuck.
The people who are suffering
the most are the citizens.
These are the people
who every day deal with
the increased murder rate,
whether it's Chicago, whether
it's Baltimore, whether
it's Newark, New Jersey,
whether it's Washington, DC.
It's the citizens that live
in these communities
where these gangs and
crews are fighting each other
every day over corners.
I think most people fail
to realize, even cops.
They are also victims
of the war on drugs.
They are serious victims
of the war on drugs.
All you have to do is turn on
any TV and look at the news, or
turn on YouTube and see the-
the dissension, the hate
and the problems that we
have between police and-
and mainly our poor,
black, and brown
communities because of this.
When I started working on
the drug war in the early 90's
to me what was most offensive
was the clamping down of debate
to question the drug war was
tantamount to forbidden speech.
We were really specifically
enjoined from debating our way
toward a rational management
of drug abuse in this country.
If you want to put the
drug dealer out of business
overnight is legalize drugs.
There's no drug dealer.
[arguing]
It's slime like you in the
White House, I'd puke on you!
[crowd cheer]
I they think there is a sense
in which the fanaticism
and the willful propaganda...
One of the DEA judge said they
compared intoxicity to aspirin.
Marijuana is
overwhelmingly safer.
He says that marijuana--
he said that marijuana is
perhaps one of the most-
safest psychoactive substances
ever known to man.
[crowd laughs]
Very simply--
everybody please...
Mayor Koch talks about
throwing youthers into jail.
[arguing]
I actually think that they
helped to delegitimize the
anti-marijuana movement.
Its extremism is part
of what brings it down.
If you quit drugs, you
join the fight against
terrorism in America.
The early days of the war
on terror were scary and
I-- it just seemed to me
that the public was in no
mood for patent political
nonsense surrounding it.
It seems to me that
in the United States,
we've always had a demon.
That something in American
political culture requires
us to have a demon.
You know, go back to Salem.
Alcohol was a demon.
I say alcohol must go!
[Baum] Communism was
a demon for a long time.
[man] In recognizing
a communist, physical
appearance counts for nothing.
If he openly declares himself
to be a communist,
we take his word for it.
[Baum] And all kinds of things
were justified in the name
of fighting communism.
It seemed very clear to me
at the end of the-- of the
80's, in the early 90's
that we were just pivoting
to this new demon and now
we have a war on terror.
Our war on terror begins
with al-Qaeda, but it
does not end there.
It will not end until every
terrorist group of global reach
has been found,
stopped and defeated.
[Baum] We have torqued our
Constitution into a pretzel in
the name of the war on terror,
the way we did with drugs,
a generation before that.
This is what we do.
When 9/11 happened, I remember
that morning thinking, "And
here we go again," you know.
"It is happening again."
The drug war then felt the way
the war on terror feels now.
It's very hard to question the
premises of the war on terror.
You got to be very careful.
Maybe in 25 years, we'll
be able to talk about the
war on terror more openly
and more casually
than we do now.
We are free now
to rationally debate
different ways of managing
the problem of drug
abuse in this country
and I celebrate that.
The fact of the matter is
psychoactive drugs have existed
in most societies
throughout the world.
There's almost never
been a human society
that did not use
one psychoactive
drug or another, right?
We know that these drugs can
be used for good, as medicines,
for spiritual benefits,
for relaxation, and we
also know that these
drugs can be used for bad.
It can be used in ways
that cause horrible
devastation to human bodies
and human lives and
human community.
[man] Gone are the pleasurable
sensations of the drug.
Now, to feel normal, he
must have his narcotic.
[Nadlemann] We're not
gonna get rid of drugs.
We can't build a moat between
those drugs and our communities,
between those drugs and
our schools, and our children.
Therefore, the only real
choice is not to ask how
do we get rid of drugs?
The only real choice is
to ask, how do we learn
to live with these drugs?
How do we learn to
live with the reality of
psychoactive substances
in our midst in such a
way that they cause
the least possible harm
and, in some cases, the
greatest possible benefit?
'96 we got medical
marijuana in California.
It changed the world.
It was a political success and
now it's sweeping the country.
[reporter] Ten states have
passed laws permitting the
use of medical marijuana.
Polling has shown that a
large majority of Americans
consistently support the
use of medical marijuana.
I can vouch for the fact that
some very sick people are
benefitted from marijuana.
Sick people that have
AIDS and cancer can use
marijuana and benefit by...
People are actually
moving to Colorado
to gain access to a special
kind of medical marijuana.
Arizona's first legal
medical marijuana...
[reporter] Boston's very first a
medical marijuana dispensary.
Sixty-five medical marijuana
dispensaries...
[reporter] Heading
today patients can
legally buy medical...
[reporter] Marijuana
laws now in effect...
Trying to legalize
marijuana from...
...South Carolina to the...
Marijuana will soon
be available at New
York state sanction.
Medical marijuana
is officially legal by law.
It is open for business.
No more!
Drug war!
No more!
Drug war!
When you look at what
the Obama administration
decided in the summer of 2013,
when, you know,
Attorney General Holder in
the White House, essentially,
gave Colorado and Washington
a qualified green light
to proceed with implementing
their new legalization laws.
What's remarkable is to
see the increase from barely
a quarter of the country
favoring the legalization
of marijuana in the mid-80's
to close to 60% today.
So, I think as with alcohol
policy, where basically we
have an extraordinary diversity
of policies between different
localities in different states
I think that we will have
and we need to have
a diversity of policies
both with local norms
and preferences, and
also with good evidence.
Drug war is ending.
Marijuana is legal in multiple
jurisdictions in the United
States and around the world.
The states of Colorado
and California and
Oregon and the others,
they have decided
we are going to give up
our power to arrest and harass
vast numbers of people.
That's huge.
I did not think I would live
long enough to see this.
Um, the cat is out of the bag.
The toothpaste
is out of the tube.
You can put it any way
you want. It's happening.
I try to be careful even
in my enthusiasm with all
the progress we've made
in the last several years
towards full legalization.
I still try to remind myself to
be cautious and not assume that
our total victory is inevitable
because I learned in the
70's that public opinion
sometimes can shift
and can shift fairly quickly.
This drug is dangerous.
You cannot play with it.
It's not funny. It's not
something to laugh about.
Good people don't
smoke marijuana.
It's a lot of money
to me being spent
to not solve the problem.
It didn't solve the problem.
I don't think the war on
drugs stopped drugs ever.
I don't think anyone's
ever said I can't get high.
What I would hope is, is
that we're less focused
on warehousing people
as opposed to
rehabilitating people.
The bottom line is, is
that you can push people into
the criminal justice system.
You can fill up the jails and
the prison, but if you aren't
doing something to change
that person's mindset
while they're in that
system, or more importantly,
change their support system when
they come out on the back end,
it becomes a vicious cycle.
By far the greatest value
would be to educate,
to prevent, to early treat-
that's not the way
the budget works out.
I am not a fan of
long sentences.
I don't think that's a great
idea for anybody, really.
It's expensive and I
think to me what's
important in corrections
is community corrections,
helping people.
But you've got to be tough
enough to say, "If a guy's
not going to support this,
they can go with the
program, or you have
to be able to go to jail."
I am very interested in
using the criminal justice
to promote public health.
We do need criminal justice
and we do need treatment and
we want them to work together
a lot better than they are.
Now that's not popular.
You got to make a
choice, Dr. DuPont.
Do you believe in prison,
or do you believe in treatment?
Oh, I believe in both.
Oh, well, you're a
criminal justice guy.
No that's not true.
And I think every
effort it should be made
in the prison population
to have real job
training programs and
rehabilitation programs
because so many
of those people
who get involved when they're
teenagers are very young.
They aren't making
real choices to do this.
They're caught up in something.
Being around weed my whole life,
and being around Cypress Hill,
being around Snoop Dogg,
being around my buddy Shiny
Shine and Beatmaster V who
smoked one continuous joint
all day long, you
know, I never found
a problem with weed.
I never smoked weed.
I sold weed, but I never
smoked it because I just was-
just always trying
to be hustling on all
cylinders at all times,
you know what I'm saying?
You know weed always
made me feel like
I gotta go to the gym
in an hour, you know.
We can fight about adults
about marijuana use, but we
don't have a fight about kids.
NORML doesn't
want the kids to do it.
The tobacco industry,
the alcohol industry,
at least officially,
don't want to do that.
We can cut together
on that issue.
When people start using
these drugs at later ages,
they're much less likely
to get strung out on them.
They're much less likely to
have them ruin their lives.
They got more at stake to lose.
That doesn't mean they
have no problem, but
it comes down with age.
The vulnerability is prior
to 21 or even 25 when
the brain is still developing.
I would argue that we need to
abandon our drug war mentality
and our war on drug mentality
not because these drugs aren't
dangerous, but because they are.
Now, let's turn it around and go
back with some of these people
in prison need to be set free.
They need to just let them go.
And they can do it,
they could free the beds.
They-- I mean, it's-- it's not
impossible to say, "Oh, you're
in here on a marijuana charge
where you've just been
expunged. And just go home."
And let them go home.
You know I'm saying? If
you're in here for marijuana,
plus you killed four people,
you guys stay.
You ain't getting out.
But if you're just here for
marijuana, go on home.
You know I'm saying? Go
home, figure it out, you know.
Why not?
♪♪♪
[music ends]