columbia police!search warrant! kick it open! get to the door! go, go, go!get to the door! police department!don't move! o.s. bang move past us! move past! come on, guys, you're fine.you're fine. don't move!do you understand? put your hands behindyour back! do it now!
behind your back! just shoot me! did you shoot my dog? did you shootmy fucking dog? oh my god! what the fuck did youdo that for? if you cannot affordto hire a lawyer, one will be appointed to represent you and answerany questions you wish
you can decide at anytimeto exercise these rights, not to answer any questionsor make any statements do you understand? do you understand? we'll take that as a yes. ♪ we can't live in a society which is both free and drug-free. you can't have 'em both. the whole process of moving from one state of mind being persuaded to another by seeing the truth
is one of actually feeling an identification that resonates and has a feeling of wholeness and coherence to it. it makes chaos orderly it's the mindset that got us here and the journey that we've taken. fifty years of criminalization. it came out of the whole idea that we don't have to care for each other anymore it's every man for himself. we weren't always like that! the question is, can we go back
to caring about each other? what are the nuances that define a culture? is it the way we police ourselves? the way we take care of our sick? how we govern? the way we share information? 77 years ago, marijuana becameprohibited in the united states by 1961, its criminalization reached global status. today, we find the topic of marijuana's legality
penetrating all forms of media and every level of politics. it is now the polarizing topic in an endless display of public debates. the goal? to answer the question that refuses to die: should marijuana be legalized? but, ever so slowly, a second question is starting to appear a question that seeks an answer to whether marijuana prohibition itself has gained characteristics that reveal a greater truth about ourselves
and the way our society operates. is this a bad idea? is this a downward spiral of our culture? a new study revealsthat smoking marijuana could increase your risk for testicular cancer so the research doesn't bother you that smoking pot cancause man boobs? pot just makes you dumb what's to keep somebody fromgettin' all potted-up on weed and then gittin' behind the wheel?
"marijuana leads to breast development in males," like all of these myths,front page story! those things have been comingalong one, after another. i should be impotent when i smoke marijuana. well i'm not! the thought process behind demonizing something like marijuana is completely out of ignorance. where's the bodies? where's the numbers? is there one? because i have heard fromexperts whose judgment
i respect that they don'tknow of any. the only way marijuana can kill you is if you take 25lbs of it and you throwit out of a cia drug plane and it hits you in the fuckin' head. that's how you die from marijuana. there's that famous 911 call where those cops stolepot from some kids, and then turned it intopot brownies, and then ate the brownies
and freaked the fuck out andcalled the cops on themselves. it's beautiful 'cause theythought they were dying, time is going by really slow,and then it ends: they're fine. but everyone can agree anti-marijuana ads in this country have gotten fuckin'ridiculous. like a girl will be melted on the couch with no bones and she's like, 'i smoked pot and now i don't have bones.' i associated a lot of thesepeople that were smokin' pot with poorly motivated people who were failures.
i had a prejudiced perception of what marijuana actually did to a human being. (v.o.) among the perceived harms of marijuana, two seem to arise on a daily basis more than any others. two seem to be the main reasons given for why marijuana must be kept from the public. the first: there's the famous 'just onespliff and you will go mental.' (doorbell) (tag line) the more you mess with cannabis,
the more it can mess with your mind. my first seven years as aresearcher were devoted to schizophrenia. i can tellyou, that is ridiculous. we looked at the evidence-i think we must have gone through about 2,000 papers and it doesn't causeschizophrenia. maybe there are some individuals with schizophrenia in which the illness is brought on perhaps a little earlier because they smoked cannabis.
there often is what's called a precipitating event. a precipitating event is something like an important loss of a person,a severe car accident... it certainly can be exacerbatedby a number of drugs. a bad alcohol trip can serveas a precipitating event, too. the fact is schizophreniahas a prevalence of about 1%... the world around. cannabis use... let's start withthe 60s, its gone up like that. so! you've introducedthis new thing:
if it's schizophrenogenic we should see a significantuptick in schizophrenia. we should see more peoplewith schizophrenia. schizophrenia has stayedjust like that. in all of the epidemiologicstudies that i'm aware of, there is no uptick. so if marijuana causesschizophrenia it was introduced now we should havemore schizophrenia. we don't see that.
we would certainly seesome little rise in that given the numbers of people who use this. you really do need to stripthis back and address this from a neutral platformto understand that anything to do with mental health is such a tenuous issue built upon different contributing factors and by applying it all to cannabis you are possiblydoing more harm because you are negatingall these other factors
that certainlyplay a part. for a lot of people, the impact of life itself is overwhelming so they'll seek outsomething to distract them whether it's drinkin'cough syrup or takin' naps or jerking off or gambling there's a lot ofthings that people do to distract them fromthe angst of being alive. it might not be for you, itmight make you paranoid; you might have smoked some bad weed once
and thought you were having a heart attack. cannabis is notfor everybody. nobody should beforced to use it. there's a lot of reasons whymarijuana might not be for you. but you shouldn't tell methat it's not right for me. (v.o.) the most frequently-cited perceived harm associated with marijuana today is addiction. i mean, you do know it's addictive -highly addictive-right?
because i believe it's addictive and it leads to moreserious drugs... but in order to understand addiction in relation to marijuana one must first have anunderstanding of the psychology behind addiction in the first place. it's interesting to see, or toask, 'who becomes addicted?' people can have sex without being addicted to it, they can go shopping, but some people become severely addicted to all these pursuits.
is a pack of cards addictive? well, no. or yes. depending onthe individual. so, it's the same process nomatter what the addiction is. the only difference is really is that the substance addict is getting the dopamine from an outside substance, where the behaviour addict is having it triggered from the particular behaviour. if i speak to a group of 100people or 1000 people and i ask how many of you have addictionissues to any substance?
a number of people puttheir hands up, and i say 'what did it do for you?not 'what was bad about it' we already know that, butwhat did it do for you? what was positive in your experience with it? well, 'it gave me a sense ofpeace; it gave me pain relief it made me feelmore connected... it made me more confident i could speak now and interact with people. in other words, the addict is just after wanting to be
a normal human being and the real question is, what keeps them from having those qualities in their lives and what happened to them? and so the addiction shouldbe seen, not as the problem although it is a problem,but it's not the problem. it's the addict's attempt to solve the problem in the first place. the adverse childhood experiences studies done in california...
looked at conditions such asphysical, sexual, emotional abuse in the child's life the loss of a parent to death or a rancorous divorce or a parent being jailed or a mental illness in the parent or an addiction of the parent, or violence in the family and for each of these adversechildhood experiences, the risk of addiction goes up exponentially. by the time a male child had 6 of these adverse experiences his risk of having become a substance-dependent
injection-using addict is 4600% greater than that of a male child with no such experiences. why is that? its because that trauma shapestheir brain in such ways as to make the addictive substances more appealing to the individual. that trauma also gives that person the pain that they will try to then escape from or soothe through the addictive behaviors.
it's the social and emotional environment that shapes the actual biology of the brain so if you want to understand someone's addiction, you have to look at what's created pain in their lives. the person who occasionally has a beer, occasionally smokes marijuana, but generally has no negative consequences; it does not impair their health, it does not endanger their lives,
it does not impair their personal relationships- you can't call those people addicts, and you can't call those behaviors addictive. so we have to make a real distinction between the use of substances and the addiction to substances. which then leads us to the "war on drugs:" basically the war on drugs is being waged against people that were abused and traumatized as children and have mental health problems.
there's enough punishment in there- in the negative consequencesof the addiction that we don't have to add punishment on to that. the number of deaths around the world from cigarette consumption is five-and-a-half million according to latest estimates. annually, cigarettes kill as many people as were killed in the germans' anti-jewish genocidal campaign. so we have a holocaustannually, owing to cigarettes.
if you smoke more than two packs a day, the risk for developing lung cancer was twenty-fold that's 2000%. based on the largestcase-controlled study ever done, there was no evidence thatmarijuana increased the risk of lung cancer. you've gotta have some consistency: there's a million different drugs that are sanctioned by the society that don't have that happy ending-
-that you take too muchand you're fucked. i've got a friend whoseauntie had to go to rehab for buying two boxes of krispykremes every day and eating them in thewoods so nobody found her. based on that anecdote, let's make krispy kremes illegal. i will fight any man, by theway who suggests that. it's just like eating a pound of salt and dying. yeah, ya didn't use salt rightdude. you fucked up with salt if you just threw some salton popcorn
it's actually quite yummy, butwhat'd you do, you stupid fuck? you ate a pound of salt and you died. doesn't mean we should outlaw salt. our society doesn't object topeople jumping out of airplanes at fifteen thousand feet with parachutes occasionally those parachutes break; people die. our society doesn't objectto people climbing mountains occasionally people fall off mountains and do harm to themselves, but it's notillegal to climb a mountain.
if i had to comparemarijuana to alcohol from the medical point of view, if i asked the question, 'which of these has more potentially debilitating and harmful life threatening, health-eroding effects?' there's no comparison, there's no contest; alcohol wins, hands down. the tune of 50 000 plus per yeardie from alcohol poisoning. they literally drink themselvesto death. pot: zero. do we have a war on alcoholand tobacco when alcohol
is the drug that's involvedwith more murders than any other drug onplanet earth? how do we view theeffect of beer? holy shit! we are so dependent on it if you have a social gatheringand there isn't booze there, people lose their minds! celebrating: let's go to the pub when we talk aboutcommiserating:
let's go to the pub. i'm happy let's go to the pub!my dog died let's go to the pub. it's wines-day wednesday. best day of the week! great job getting us drunk! we could all use a stiff drink fantastic! margarita day if you're not gonna drink it,pass it around how are you spending new year's eve? i'm gonna get real drunk!
many years ago, we did a poll in parliament and we asked them, 'is alcohol a drug?' and the majority of politicianssaid alcohol was not a drug. and they say well, it's not a drug because it's not illegal. and that gets to this peculiar, dangerous concept that once something's illegal,it must be dangerous, and when something's not illegal, it must be safe. so it's interesting if we lookat the whole issue of illegal drugs in oursociety you'll find that
when the word 'drug' is used to refer to those substances, another word is almost always attached to it and that is, 'abuse.' "drug abuse." what happens is that all illicitdrugs get lumped together. caffeine is a drug, alcohol is a drug. tylenol is a drug,sudafed is a drug. viagra is a drug. people, when they think of drugs, ...they think only of illicit drugs.
theres a mass of disinformation and that misinformation and disinformation confusesthe shit out of people when they're trying to formtheir version of what's good and what's badin the world. if it's absurd to throw someone in prison for drinking coffee or for drinking wine, then it's equally absurd and wrong to throw someone in prison forsmoking cannabis. nobody has ever overdosed oncannabis. d'you know that? so what? they can't performdaily functions;
they're going to be on my tax bill! the idea that one is ok and oneisn't just seemed to require something resembling evidence before you could make that statement definitively. one of the things i think is important about marijuana use or alcohol use or anything isthat you're responsible with it and you could be irresponsible with anything and you should weigh the risks and the rewards there's no moral middle ground.indifference is not an option.
we want you to help us createan outspoken intolerance for drug use. is the rationale of protecting people from themselves valid? the only people who are responsible for protecting us from ourselves are ourselves. if our society denies us the opportunity to make mistakes, it's denying us a very fundamental human right because mistakes are part of theteaching process in this life. tell another grown human being ah, ah, ah! nope!
nope! nope! not allowed that.a grown man! no, not you! but i'm a grown up; i'm an evolved human being. no! just .put. that. down! if there's real harm in adrug and your real objective is to persuade people thatthey shouldn't harm themselves in that way, you don't need laws that send them to prison- what you need is good infor- mation that they'll believe just disseminate that infor- mation and free independent sovereign adults will maketheir own choices about
that information: either tocontinue with that drug or not to continue with it,but they have the facts. if a professional like youcannot answer clearly that meth is more dangerousthan marijuana- which every kid on the streetknows, which every parent knows if you can't answer that,maybe that's why we're failing to educate peopleabout the dangers i don't want kidssmoking marijuana. i agree with the chairman
but if the deputy directorof the office of drug policy can't answer that question,how do you expect high school kids to take you seriously? i empathize with parents ofteenaged kids; they can get lost a kid sitting in school stoned-you can't accept accept a position that says,'oh, that's fine, no problem.' yeah, that's a problem,but the question is whether it's a criminal problem. the question is whether it's a 'growing up' kind of a problem.
i want reasons more than 'you need to be afraid of some cop catching you, and locking you up forever in a prison' to talk to my children abouthow they relate to various temptationsin life. this country is held up as amodel around the world of dealing with cigarettesmoking: we brought it down (way down!) why? by educating people. it doesn't make sense to punish people if what you're mainly worriedabout is their welfare
name something that getspassed around. chris? a joint! a joint? (laughter and applause) (laughing) its the only thingthat came to mind... the moral question of drug use, you can set aside, because the drug use andthe drug abuse is here. we have a real fundamentalenjoyment of
changing the way that thisthing operates and, for as long as that is true, you have demand. you don't have to be a capitalist, you don't have to to be economist, but we all know: where there is demand, there is supply. a plant that's very easy to grow suddenly becomes something that's worth thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars a pound
because you're compensating the producers and the transporters for the risk of going to jail or being arrested or being shot or other things that happen to people involved in criminal activity. (v.o.) and with that profit comes opportunity sometimes to the most unlikely of people. i went to oxford tostudy nuclear physics and some post-graduate historyand philosophy of science, but forsook the halls ofacademia to become a dopesmuggler.
quite early on, i started smuggling cannabis from europe to america. in thosedays, in the very early 70's- there'd be a markup of about 300%. british bands were beginning to get very popular and they were visiting the states with an awful lot of equipment, so we used tohide hashish in various speakers and amplifiers et cetera. pink floyd, emerson, lake & palmer, eric clapton, genesis. the bands didn't know; it was just an arrangement
i made with the road managers. organizations i was involved with; the mafia, the yakuza the i.r.a. and a few cowboys from the c.i.a., but it wasn't under c.i.a.auspices: just a few cowboys who were doing things behindthe rest of the c.i.a's back. consignments i did into jfk in new york were with the gambino family: the deal was structured in such a way that one couldn't cheat them even if one was daft enoughto try.
the average load would be about a ton. i had a huge number of aliases during my smuggling career; at least 43 aliases, but itwas so much easier in those days to get a false passport. i remember, on oneoccasion, applying to the driving licensecenter for a license in the name of elvis presleyof whom i'm a big fan and they actually issued itbecause computers didn't scream in the 50's!oh, elvis presley? fine!
the biggest shipment everthat i did was 30 tons. the dea say it was 50 tons, buti know it was only 30 tons! the british had more or lessgiven up: no you can't catch him the spanish had given up,no, you can't catch him... americans said, oh, we'll catchhim - and they were right! it was a combined effort of 14 different countries' law enforcement spearheaded by the dea actually. cannabis was the only drug i smuggled. i think largely because i wasn't really tempted
to do anything else; the demandfor cannabis wasn't met. if cannabis had been legal, i would have carried on being an academic of some sort. i do miss smuggling; you could never get that thrill that i had from crossing borders from writing!you can't... i suppose if i thought i couldget away with it, i'd crank it up today and go back to doing it! i mean i loved it. it's interesting when you look at the amount of money
that these drugs are generating. where does that money go?and who's handling it? (v.o.) with the vast amounts of money to be made, the potential for a dark side of the underground market begins to grow with enough time and enough money, it can rise to inconceivable levels, and often, right under our nose. what the drug war has done to mexico is horrific .
the death toll alone in the mexican drug war under the calderon administration: it's more than the number ofamericans that were lost invietnam. now we're up to 70,000 dead. seventy thousand! the bloodshed follows a mass killing in the mexican border city of nuevo laredo last week where nine bodies were left for the public to see and fourteen other bodies were found mutilated. and this is happening on our southern border
and yet very little attention is paid to it. it is the united states thatsends the guns across the borders to mexico it is the united states that,then in return for the guns imports the drugs. a lot of people think that thoseseventy thousand dead are all gangsters shootin' it out with each other not true. they're police officers, they're children they're families, they're mothers and fathers.
you're raising your kids with an education and your kids go off to a nightclub some night and they never come home. why? because kids have been kidnappedat random and mutilated. beyond the horrific death toll, and the horrific acts of violence,and decapitations and bodies hanging from bridges,the drug war has really led to a deterioration in theinfrastructures of society which means that virtually every municipal police force
in much of mexico is corrupted by one cartel or another. what does that mean? that means if you're a lower-middleclass mexican and your house gets broken into,who do you call? you have nobody to go to, andif you do call the police, they're just as likelyto tell the cartel hey this person's ratting onyou as they are to help you and take a report, andbring somebody to jail. so, if you murder somebody in mexico, you have less than
a 5% chance of ever spending a day in jail for that and that is almostentirely a product of what the drug war has done to law enforcement, the judiciary and the corrections systems in mexico. the last thing a mexican drug- trafficking cartel would want would be for drugs to be legalized in the united states because that would take awaytheir primary source of income. how do you kill a cartel and a street gangorganization in drugs?
you take their source of nutrition away. their source of nutrition is - money; drug money.you dry 'em up. the idea that you're gonnasomehow or another be able to be able to make marijuanaillegal and it's not going to have some of impacton organized crime is so fuckin' dumbit's childish! this prohibition allows them to flourish i mean it did with alcohol.
when prohibition was going onand the mafia and al capone and all them motherfuckers was in control, they ran that shit! the american people soon came to understand that prohibition of alcohol brought greater harm than the abuse of alcohol. declaring prohibition on themarijuana laws makes everything more dangerous 370 billion dollars a year gointo the underworld's pockets
and bad people with that kind of money can do horrendous things... (v.o.) if marijuana prohibition isn't achieving the goals we think it should, what has caused it to be pursued the way it has? what are the elements that keep it propped up... and where did it all start? while most fingers might point to the year 1937 when marijuana was firstoutlawed by a tax stamp required for hemp, let's fast-forward 34 years to 1971.
that was the year the public first heard this: ladies and gentlemen, i wouldlike to summarize for you the meeting that i have justhad with bipartisan leaders america's public enemy numberone, in the united states, is drug abuse. attorney general kliendienstfor nixon was quoted thereafter and he was sorrowful that hehad been involved in this he said thatthey knew- in the nixon administration-
that drug treatment works and incarceration does not, but the enormous politicalbenefit by declaring a war on drugs, that can't really fight back. he said they chose the incarceration route for political reasons and then were absolutely overwhelmed at positive political benefits they received for doing that. there's actualdocumentation that shows the united states governmentunder nixon was actively writing to universities and saying 'pull your information of cannabis,
hemp and marijuana out of your libraries.' literally: purge it. so it took them from 1972,'71... '72, to the late 1970's to create this myth that marijuana would lead to using harder substances. once that myth was established then the numbers exploded and you could go to congress and get money. i am glad that, in thisadministration we have increased
the amount of money for handling the problem of dangerous drugsseven-fold. it will be 600 million dollarsthis year. this is one area where we cannot have budget cuts because we must wage what ihave called total war against public enemy numberone in the united states: the problem ofdangerous drugs. most law enforcement agencies,before the 1970s, had very small narcotic units because
narcotics wasn't seen as a big problem. by the end of the decade, the narcotic units had exploded; federal money came in... and then...ronald reagan came. tonight i can report to youthat we've made much progress. 37 federal agenciesare working together in a vigorous national effortand, by next year, our spending for drug law enforcement will have more than tripled from it's 1981 levels
whenever we hear the word 'war' on anything, i think it should alert our antenna that a mind-management gameis going on. what is meant by the waron drugs? that's a verygood question how can you have a war on a noun? it's a bit like... again, the war on terror: it's a war on a concept. we humans are verymotivated by war. we are extremely motivated by a metaphor of violent confrontation.
it goes all the way back to the very first foremothers of all life on earth: bacteria 3.85 billion years ago. bacteria are incrediblysocial - they live in armies- they live in armies of seven trillion and they are constantly communicating with each other, they are constantly exchanging data; it's a little informationprocessing network, but what happens... when two, three, four or seven colonies
of bacteria discover all the same food source? they make "war." what motivates ants? they goabout doing their daily business all of the time, but when an alarm pheromone hits that indicates there's been an invasion from outside the colony wham-o! everybody drops whatthey're doing; everybody rushes to the site ofthe breach where the odor (the alarm pheromone) is coming from.
i mean, we humans, we're thechildren of bacteria; we humans, we're the cousins of ants: just tell us there's an outsider at the gates! you use the metaphor of war for just about anything and it gets us roused, but especially use it about our group versusanother group, our subculture versus another subculture, and you can really get us going. it's clear inneurolinguistic programming.
because if you associatewar, you associate it with a nation having topull together to fighta baddy out there. now, some folks'll tell youthat i'm dealing in poison, but hey, do i look likethe kinda guy that would do that do akid like you? yes! it's a rhetorical frame inwhich the sacrifice of individual "liberty" seems... necessary. this is what's needed to win the war. last year alone, over 10,000drug criminals were convicted
and nearly 250 million dollarsof their assets were seized by the dea-the drug enforcement administration. these are a measure of our commitment and emerging signs that we can defeat this enemy. the astounding thing aboutthe war on drugs, is how long it's gone on and howlittle progress has been made. when i was working for mi-5,i had my first, sort of... inkling that allwas not good because i was working on the irish terrorist logistics desk
which is the movement of people and weapons into and out of the uk-and,of course, doing that, i had to work very closely withcustoms, which is there to try and stop the drugs coming into the uk. they just, knew it was like looking for the needle in a haystack just to try and stop these drugs flooding into the uk. i had record-breaking arrests, record-breaking interdiction of supply, but it didn'tmake one iota of difference. you don't see us knocking off the big guys
so often that, you know, there's scarcity of drugs. when was the last time you couldn't cop marijuana in this country?i mean, there's panic in needle park:there's no marijuana out there! oh my god, what am i gonna do? i don't think you could go into any high school in the country, i don't think you could go into any small town in this country, i don't think you could go into any prison in this country and not find marijuana
if you were looking for it. so the argument thatmarijuana prohibition has had any impact on the availabilityon the drug, i think, really doesn't hold water what we see are a regular meal of arrests and how many bales of this or kilos of that. the show-and-tell is the glamorous side of it look at this: all of this pot found inside one semi-truck. 20 000 lbs. worth. border patrol calling it
the biggest bust inour state's history. you wheel out your 60, 70, 80 kilos of marijuana, your two assault rifles. the thing of it is, if you took the averageshow-and- tell... from the average arrest... you'd have some little kid- i mean he might be 15, 17, 18, 20 years old- and you wouldproudly display... a small bag of marijuanaon your table
and say, we got him! we got him. came from ontario, oregon intoidaho with some mushrooms and some weed, and i gotcaught with an exhaust so he pulled me over, he puthis head in the window and said he smelled it (hedidn't need a dog), so i just handed it to him just to getit over with. it's such a joke to say that they're going afterhardcore criminals. about one-and-a-half millionarrests on drug-related offenses
in the year 2011-about 50% were for marijuana use. it's practically legal!i get that all the time... especially herein california and what i say tothose people is, 'it's absolutely not practically legal.' it's very, very federally illegal. it's just an ongoing story that at this point really it seems little more than thepremise for television shows. synthetic marijuana:dangerous, deadly, illegal.
tonight, the county'stop cop says much of this stuff was beingmade in the back of that plaza. they got away with itfor a little bit, but at the end of the day, they're not going to getaway with it for very long. there's another aspect to this game: that is the economic side of it. there's a deal between the feds and the state and that's asset seizures
they call it an "equitablesharing program" where they encourage local lawenforcement to seize items that maybe involved in criminal activity. they do an 80/20 split. without even getting a conviction and then they keep the bulk of the money or the assets seized. maybe ya just wanna see the kind of stuff the government seizes from criminals right now you can actuallycheck out a number of
forfeited vehicles going up for auction tomorrow at the apple towing in guadalupe. these are awesome cars! thisone caught my eye of course first it's a 1968chevy camaro... the guy with the nice ride: i'll lock him up. i'll seize his car. i'll hit a house, i'll seize bank accounts, i'll seize land - all because i'm producing for the state. there's an incentive forthe state to say, 'do it,'
but the law is such that theonus to get back your property is on you! not on the police department; you have to fight toget back something -through the court system- that they took away that they had no righttaking in the first place. (v.o.) between 1989 and 2010, an estimated 12.6 billion dollars was seized by u.s. attorneys in asset forfeiture cases the growth rate of seizures during that time
was nearly a 20% increase every single year. in the country where i grew up-america-where, you know everybody is so proud of having guns and proud of their freedom.'no, i'm not afraid!' really? go plant some cannabis in your front yard and tell me how fast it takes for the man to come and take everything you own! every year the dea tells you how many seizures they've made all that tells you is: is that we have failed again.
what's your budget? well, currently...um approximately... uh, two million... two million ? two-i'm sorry-two billion dollars... yeah... you can look into anyfederal agency you want to... literally in their budgetyou will see
the extra tens of millions of dollars are earmarked expressly to fight "the war on drugs." when you get to the top of both towers, the interests are the same. the major drug dealer wantsto continue selling drugs... law enforcement wants tocontinue trying to prosecute people who are using the drugs and there's a harmony there. if you've ever seen the filmof the head of the dea- lionhart i believe is her name-when they asked her
is marijuana worse than heroin? and she sat there and stuttered around; she wouldn't answer the question. uh, is crack worse for aperson than marijuana? i believe all illegal drugsare bad is methamphetamine worse for somebody's health than marijuana? i don't thinkany illegal drug... is heroin worse for someone'shealth than marijuana? again...
i mean, either yes, no, or i don't know! i mean, if you don't know,you can look this up; you should know this as the chief administrator for the drugenforcement agency i'm asking you a very straightforward question. she couldn't answer the question because she's a dyed-in-the-woolprohibitionist and her industry her life, is dependent upon us continuing to put 43 millionpeople in jail.
about 85% of everybody in our country that uses any form of illicit substance whatsoever uses only marijuana and so if you were to remove those people from the criminal justice system the sheer number of everyone else in the country using every other illegal drugcombined would not justify this colossal bureaucracy wehave to fight the war on drugs. it would fall apart. if you lose marijuana prohibition, you lose drug prohibition and the government knows it;
they don't want to give that up because of the sheer money involved, going down the path tolegalization in this country is reckless and irresponsible.it scares us; the treatment people are afraid, the education people are afraid.law enforcement is, is, isworried... what is gonna happen? people say, 'well, the vicecops who work on on marijuana prohibition wouldbe out of work,
the people who workfor the dea, some of them wouldbe out of jobs,' the white house drug czaroffice and so on and so forth. i mean, that's just the mostlunatic defense ofprohibition. by that logic, we shouldprohibit everything! because then we'd need to cops to enforce food prohibition and housing prohibition and medicine prohibition. beginning in the 1980s, the police departments became
a number-driven group. one arrest is one arrest soif i spend a year and a half taking down a violent drugorganization that's killed maybe 15-20 people andi lock up six guys i get six ones. if i went out on the corner tomorrow, i can get fifteen "ones"and they all count the same. there's no weighing forlike, 'this is the murderer: we give him fifteen points. this guy's the marijuana guy: we give him .2 points.'
no, no,it's all the same. one thing about a cannabis arrest is it's easy, it's not dangerous, and it turnsinto a solved crime very quickly with very littlepaperwork. the whole thing is numbers because numbers generate revenue. that revenue keepscongress giving you money that money, then, you can turn around part of it and keep pressure on congress. you don't come with thosenumbers-they retaliate
by giving you badevaluations. that's basically whatthey did to me. this is a business: we havealmost a five billion dollar budget a year so werun it like a business and it's fair to ask the employeeshere to do their fair share. it's not easy to geta trafficker. it's not like walking upto the corner or shaking the lockers of a high school. you reach a point, especially as an executive or a supervisor
where you are now part of administering the policies and you start to ask the hard questions. is it really worth a police officer's time to bust somebody for a marijuana cigarette, take them off the street, putthem in jail, book the evidence write the report and then be able to go back out on the street and attend to public safety after you've been gone for 3 hoursfor one marijuana arrest? i used to go to meetings ofchief police officers in the uk
after the formal conferencewas over around the bar and around the dinner table, they were all agreeingthat there was no point in keepingcannabis illegal and yet what they said when the cameras were rolling, when the microphones were in front of them, was completely different. in the 15 years i'vebeen in policy, i'm a little disillusioned byhow much we were
able to achieve and very disillusioned on the ability of leaders tostill pretend we are achieving. you know we need police forces if i was in charge of society,of course i'd have a police force, buti'd make sure there were sensible laws for them to enforce. and there are plenty ofpolice who feel like that too. there's immense pressure on theinside of these sort of professions to toe the lineand just keep quiet.
the culture will eat you upif in fact you come out whileyou're a police leader. if they were to come out and say that they were in favor of taxation,regulation of marijuana they wouldn't get their promotions, they wouldn't be able to move through the ranks; they'll be labeled and i've seen thattake place. there's alot of work being done on what creates respectfor laws;
to what extent do people feel that laws are legitimate. if they feel that laws are legitimate, they're likely to comply with them without needing to be coerced into them and punished. and the research is suggestingthat people want fairness. in a sense, what createsrespect for law is justice. seeing it done. that elicits great respect when you actually see itbeing done. there's another kind of respect though, which is
respect for the stick-it's like the force of authority pretty much, marijuana works with the stick. one of the consequences of the war on drugs is people have stopped looking at the police as their protectors and more see them, right, as their potentialpersecutors. the police department basically becomes the 'other' to the community, and once you have that breakdown,
then information stops flowing. so you don't learn about crimesand then the only crime you really become interested in is the one ou can solve which islocking people up on the cornerfor using drugs. and, you know, a great metric of that is murder clearance rates. so, a murder is cleared when an arrest is made and somebody goes to jail and in 1965, we were clearing-police were clearing-
about 90% of the murders thatwere committed in this country. that means, for 90% of the murders in this country there was an arrest and a charge and today that's under 65%. that's after all the tremendous technological advances in policing: you know, dna evidence all sorts of forensics and, you know, expanding police budgets and that sort of thing. i think if we were to look at one cause for that drop in murder clearance rates it's the breakdown inthe relationship between
society at largeand the police and, you know, that byextension, is a consequence almost entirely ofthe war on drugs. by having to uphold theseoutdated and failed policies, it ruins our reputation and it damages the community relations between the police and the policed, as well. whole generations havegrown up distrusting their local policerather than seeing them
as a potentialprotective layer of society. when you do this, youchange the whole nature of the game, andfrom 1980 on the police become more andmore militarized. the initiation of the drug warwas the initiation of a general loosening of const-raint on search and seizure it became just part of police practice to be breaking down the door. we see it now as a staple of cops;that's now our reality.
that wasn't the realitybefore... the drug war. (gunshots, which continue) search warrant!search warrant! don't move! don't move! don't move! search warrant! search warrant!don't move! that's on him. yeah. the moneyand the dope.
now you see police and most often they look like soldiers: they're dressed in black, they have jackboots high-caliber arms and they don't walk the street and get to know the community, right? they drive around in cruisers that look they belong on the battle field day and night: that's the difference between the greenville police department's new swat truck compared to the old one.
the truck has a lot of bells and whistles: from the simple storage compartments, to the gunports on the side. they're actually proud to say they did not use any taxpayer money. we paid for it with seized funds it came out of money we hadseized from drug dealers... that's where respect is lost. the officers on the street have lost it; the institutionitself has lost it. you're not being seen as anything but the other-
people warring on us. (v.o.) the war on drugs has had a puzzling effect on how society seeks to police itself. with hundreds of thousands of marijuana arrests annually, a new issue emerges: once you start gathering a large group of prisoners, where do you put them all? well, private prison is as scary as all shit and they're scary as hell for a very simple reason: they make it highly profitableto incarcerate people.
we've lost track of how ridiculous some of thethings we do are. so we're gonna give peoplea profit motive in putting more people in jail? gee, i wonder what's gonna happen... corrections corporation of america is the hilton of the private prison industry: a multi-billion dollar business that's getting rich off punishment.
the more people locked up behind bars and the longer they stay there the more money cca makes. last year the company banked a reported 1.7 billion dollars. when you have a privatizedprison, there's a contract between the state and the prison that the state has to maintain a certain occupancy rate in the prison. meaning that the state guarantees
that the prison will stayanywhere from 80 to 100% full crime could go down, it doesn't matter. the taxpayers are still on the hook and the governmentis still on the hook for filling up your prisons. well, where do you get these numbers from? the easiest way to make surethat the quotas are full in these private prisons is toget the low hanging fruit which is just the drug useras a criminal
rather than someone who mightneed a bit of medical help. and that means that every fourth person in the world in jail is a citizen of the"land of the free." you just become a commodity,rather than a human being, churned through the system to make money for these big corporations. if we go on down this path, we'll see more and more laws being invented and created to justify the
imprisonment of more andmore people. public money will ironically be plunged into pursuading us that that is right . each state is constantly arguing about the fact that they don't have enough money for for their public education, but then at the same time,they'll take state funds-or in a lot of cases, federal money- and put it into the prison system.
this is carl holton schooland it's been closed for some time now andin it's place will rise a hospital prison with over 1700 beds. california, since 1980, we've built 23 prisons, we've hired 14,000 prison guards and we've fired 5000 teachers. west virginia is strappedfor money, but we're building another prison here.got to! a lot of people getting arrested here.
most states are just likemine of california: the largest, strongest political lobby group in our state is - theprison guards' union. you have unions that are lobbying to make sure that certain drugs stay illegalregardless of of how safe they are, to makesure that prisons are filled because prisons extract money from the system. it's insanity! it's not rational orlogical; it's... financial.
money is the backdrop to everything. you can't even run from it; i try tosee other things or put other perspectives on it, but it always boils down to money. we've even seen, in places like pennsylvania, where judges have gone and faced high federal sentences for actually streamlining children into these private facilities. a former juvenile court judgein pennsylvania could face
more than 10 years in prisonafter being convicted in a kids for cash scheme.prosecutors say he used children as pawns-lockingthem up unjustly in a plot to get rich. (woman's voice) remember my son? an all-star wrestler! he's gone, he shot himself in the heart! you scumbag, you ruined my fucking life! and what could be more harmful to one's self than
being sent to prison? no effect of the drugcan be possibly as harmful as doing jail time for consuming it. and they end up with a criminal record what does that do to them? they could lose their job; in some parts of the world,they will lose their housing. they will lose theright to education this is a fucking kid who just got arrested recently for having marijuana on him. they put him in jail
and he had an extreme food allergy. he asked them if there was any milk in any of their products, they wouldn't answer him, theygave him food, he ate it and he fucking died in jail. how... criminal is that? what they've made illegalisn't the problem, alright? the problem is the policy itself this business about drug offenses; i mean it's time we stopped locking up peoplefor possession of marijuana.
it selects people that it puts in jail, so we see widely disparate penaltiesamong socioeconomic groups among racial groups. white people and black peoplein this country do drugs at the same rate so they should be arrested at the same rate, but the reality is, of course that's not remotely true. across the nation, blacks are arrested at fourtimes the rate of whites. now, in some placeslike minneapolis,
washington, d.c., iowa, it's eight times the rate. so, why in the world wouldyou be arresting black americans at eight times the rate-or even nation-wide at four times rate-of whites? they're using it at the samerate! you have no excuse! if you are a young black man walking around the streets of london today, you are nine times more likely to be stopped and searched on suspicion of carrying drugs.
i have risen through classes,so i know -you know what i mean-the difference. growin' up in pittsburgh, just being on the streets, if i got caught with some weed, they're gonna look at me me as i'm selling someweed or i'm trying to get some weed to one of their kidsi look like a threat but when i started rapping andstarted associating myself with other people, startedgetting money: they'll be like, 'oh he's notdangerous, he can smoke.'
the war on drugs is one ofthose issues that highlights very clearly that there is onelaw for the rich and powerful and one law forthe rest of us. hsbc is a giant bank that actually laundered money for the mexican drug cartels.billions of dollars! nobody went to jail. naturally, if there is abig bank that is laundering money for drugcartels, they should face a federal prosecution and criminal charges but that's
not what happened. they got afine of 1.9 billion dollars! well, what's a fine tohsbc? it's pocket change; it's one of the costs of doing business. and nobody goes to jail and a mother of four is arrested for $30 worth of pot and she's put in jail for ten years. there's a simple difference:the people at hscbc are in the elite, the woman withthe $30 worth of pot is not. every animal that's ever had a hierarchical social structure
going all the way back to lizards, lobsters and puppy dogs-has built that structure on prohibition and there's always been a chicken at the bottom the pecking orderand the one on the bottom of the pecking order ends upin a miserable god awful, picked-on, pecked-on state and that isn't mankind'ssocial invention that is mother nature's socialinvention. does that mean mean it's good? hell no. andit's our job to reverse it,
natural or not. empathy is all it really takes to open up the avenues of outrage and realize howappalling this is let's remember something boys and girls: jails are there for people who hit us over the head when we're walking downthe street, jails are there for people who break into ourhomes and loot the place. jails are there for peoplewho do genuine harm
so i have no rightto put them in jail for having a different lifestylethan mine. in fact, if i were to do that, itwould be criminal. (v.o.) and yet, the war on marijuana continues on. only now with new medical discoveries. you might ask yourself, 'what possible health benefits could an illegal plant have?' the answer is starting to become more clear. it begins with something that each and every
one of us has: it's something called the endocannabinoid system. we think of marijuana as this violent, unnatural intrusion on human biology. it's not. we are built with all kindsof receptors for cannabis. cannabis mimics endogenouschemicals that we already produce in the body calledendocannabinoids. that's why we have receptors that pretty well fit cannabis.
cannabinoids are these twenty-carbon molecules that we produce, the plant produces there's over a hundred of them in the plant and these two systems worktogether to regulate cell, cluster cell, and intracellular functions. all the cannabinoids do is help cells function. they don't care what the cell does they don't care if its contracting, secreting thyroid synthesizing this, remodeling bone, doesn't matter.
just, they're doing something and they do it a little more effectively. western medicine has neverseen a substance like this we like single drug/ single function, and you come along with a molecule that mayhave an interface inside of every cell and help it function more effectively and, really, it's a hard one to imagine. i can't find any real legitimate doctor that thinks smoking marijuana is good foranybody. sure it may
relieve pain temporarily,but a fifth of jack daniels might do the same thing,and nobody's calling that medicine right? people who say there is no established medical use of marijuana simply don'tknow what they're talkin' about. it's so versatile. it seems every day when i open up the news, there's another report on cannabinoids having some type of medical utility.
control of muscle spasticity,multiple sclerosis, glaucoma, colitis nausea, pain migraine headaches. there are hundreds of reasons that people find marijuana useful. that's why i look so good after 41 years in the game. it is the most non-toxicmedicine i have everencountered. once it's free of the prohibition tariff,
it's gonna be much less expensive than the pharmaceutical products which it will replace. think of a strain as a little chemistry lab an organic chemistry lab because what's happening is mother nature is creatingher own cannabinoid profile. for instance you could smoke a variety or use a variety that would help you with your headache or i could use a variety that might help me with my back pain. if an aids patient comes inand they're having problems
eating, or they can'tsleep-okay, you can't eat, you can't sleep, you knowfor sure the indica is gonna put you down, it'sgonna relax you 100%, it's gonna give you appetiteand you don't wanna give him a sativa; becauseyou give him a sativa, he's gonna be up thinkingall night so it's about genes;it is about this kind of character of plant can do this, and this kind of plant can do that.
it's very important to keep these gene marks- these originalones-it could be the medicine that we need. what is a land race? a landrace is basically a species of marijuana that'sindigenous to an area and has been growing there for hundreds of years in a certain area. cannabis is from all overthe world, so we have afghan varieties, indian varieties
in colombia you have thefamous santa marta punta roja in central africa, you'll havethe malawi gold. when i started this whole new series on strain hunting it was to show the world how much people depend on marijuana around the world. we estimate that probably around two to three hundred million people's families are depending on this crop. it's still a drug in most countries so
the police takes it, or it's expensive, so robbers will steal it and these are areas where the un or other big international ngo's like unesco never will come. in these very remote areasthere are a lot of very nice land races and wewould like to preserve these land races for the future so we try to obtain them and find them and bring them back. we have new varieties that we can play with to see
if they will have any benefit for the future- medicinal or recreational. it's like getting a new athlete on your team that you can cross-breed and create a new variety of marijuana. in recent years, understanding of medical marijuana's diversity has become universally widespread news. with a greater knowledge of strains has come new new discoveries. these discoveries are leading us to
medical benefits we never could have imagined. jayden is seven years old now jayden was born perfectly healthy. at four months old, jayden had his first seizure. it was just a downhill road from there for the next few years. he was having 500 twitching, myoclonic seizures a day; he'd have grand mals for an hour, hour and a half. i remember he was crying from 1 o'clock at night
till 9 in the morning-screaming and crying in pain. he was seeing things, he was hallucinating from the medications. at four and a half, jaydenwas taking 22 pills a day he was at 25,000 pills he had taken by the time he was 5 years old. jayden had tried twelve different medications, we had 40 ambulance bills, we were fighting with the insurance company all the time. we lost our house,
we lost our cars, we lostour business we lost our family. i went to ucsf, i said,'look, i don't think jayden's gonna make it another week. what do you suggest?' they're all, 'i don't know, imean, i would try anything.' i go, 'what do you thinkabout medical marijuana?' they're all, 'well, like we said, we think we're in a life and death situation- you should try anything.' so i said alright, i went and picked up something
i saw in a dispensary, andcame home, i gave it to jayden- after four and a halfyears of having myoclonic seizures (500 a day), andtwitching and head drops and seizing-the first day i gave it to him was- thank god one million times-was the first day he's ever went seizure free in his life. then after that: secondday, third day, fourth day, the seizures were down dramatically; i could see his eyes lighting up.
it was summertime- it was june 1st the firstday i gave it to him 2011. he started swimming; jayden's never been able to swim before-the sudden temperature change of water would give him a seizure i put him in the front yardand my neighbor's like, oh my gosh, we've never seenhim in the front yard.' they were so excited they were cheering him on... i started weaning him off the medications after
one month i was on the cbd. every time i took him off, he'd suffer for two weeks and boom: he'd become more human. then take off another pill, suffer for two weeks, boom: become more human. jayden started chewing. jayden was only eating gerber food... always till he was five yearsold. he started chewing. with taking 25,000 pills, it really wears on your body
and brain, so it was kinda recovering more from the medication than from the epilepsy. and we decided to wean off the hardest one: benzodiazepines. he was having tremors, nightmares, brain zaps; i've contacted 30 different benzo withdrawal clinics, they go, 'how oldis the person that you want to bringinto our clinic?' i tell them, 'sevenyears old' and they scream
at the top of their lungs -every single one vividly say the same exact thing: 'you have a sevenyear old on benzos? 'cause we have people herethat are football players, we have people here that arebig, tough guys that are dying,literally dying, from benzos and you have aseven year old on it? i said, 'seven year old?i go, 'my son's been addicted to itsince he was 16 months old.'
so now we have to figure out a way to wean him off by ourselves because the benzo detox clinics are not are not willing to take in a seven year old. since we've been using thecbd's, he's been doing amazing. it has under 1% thc,so it doesn't give you that euphoria. second thing: it's abstracted, it's organic, we know the dosage in milligrams. we're on the forefront of something huge:
it's either you're gonna give up, and just and let your son, your child, be a vegetable and die or you're gonna sit there and fight. i still haven't met jayden yet. i know jayden and 22 pills,but i'm down to jayden and two pills-that's whoi know right now. i don't know jayden but on medication. christmas before jayden was born-that was my christmas gift: that jayden was gonna be born.
my ex-wife had given me a box and i opened it and i remember... this is ahard one... i remember openingthe box and seeing a pregnancy test sayingpositive with two baby shoes and having so much expectation,you know? having so much expectationthat you're gonna have a son. as a parent, you're expecting your child to play football, you're expecting your child to talk you know?
i mean, right now, mynumber one goal right now is to have myson say i love you. i mean people take that for granted. people take that for grantedthat their kids can talk and say i love you. that's all i want to hear my son say, but i mean if i can hear him say that, i'll be more than happy. he said it one time on cnn: i la loo. he was really close! i gotta hear it. if he says that,
i've already conquered the world. seeing your child suffer: there's nothing worse than that; there's no tortureworse than that. especially every day. now is not the time to senda message to our young people that marijuana is medicine. it is not. it is a dangerous,illegal drug. is it legitimate for anyhuman on the face of
planet earth to deny anotherhuman the thing that will remove him from that infinite torture chamber? no. it is not acceptable. it is utterly and completely im-moral. i'm not allowed to do this because someone says i can't. and that person never met me, they're never likely to meet me... they're never likely to meet someone with ms,
parkinson's, cancer-and yet they can have total rule over that entity's life. this is pretty muchthe only time that i'm gonna be lostfor words. i just - the justifications still notbeen explained to me. should marijuana be legalized for medical use? aren't there issues ofsignificance that you'd like to talk about? the economy,the economy, the economy, the growth of jobs, the needto put people back to work
the challenges of iran?we've got enormous issues that we face. but you wanna talk-go ahead-you wanna talk about medical marijuana i think marijuana should notbe legal in this country i believe it's a gateway drug... marijuana is still aschedule i drug meaning legally that it has no medicalusefulness whatsoever and benzodiazepines like valium and xanax and klonopin
are are actually schedule iv drugs even though they put put significantly more people in the emergency room every year and causeeven more deaths than many schedule i drugs. many attempts have been madeto move cannabis out of of schedule iand ...they always fail. how can the united statesgovernment claim that there's no medical usefulness tocannabis while then patenting the medical usefulness of cannabis?
it was a shocking idea thatthe federal government- the department of healthand human services had a patent on cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants, heart disease and diabetes, alzheimer's and huntington's, and includes cataracts and down's syndrome as well asneoplasia. it really speaks to the depth of the problem in terms of who's making these decisions and who are they benefitting? we need to get to the truth which is that
prescription drugs kill vast numbers of people. prescription drugs have ahigher rate of overdose than even things we think of as being horrific like methamphetamine, heroin... the number of people who are killed by heroin and cocaine is tiny, tiny, justminiscule, microscopic by comparison with the number of people who are killed every year by prescriptiondrugs. let's look at the facts; let's not listento the bullshit anymore.
suspected drug overdoses are rising at an alarming rate in haywood county. and it's not illegal drugsofficials are worried about but prescription drugs. it's being described as anepidemic. authorities say too many young people aredying accidental deaths. the fifth or sixth top selling drugs in north america are antipsychotics which we're giving out like candy now to people,including children.
at vancouver's children's hospital they've had to establish a special clinic just to deal with the effects of antipsychotics in kids. i recently lost my father two years ago and we were really close and so it was like having the rug pulled out from underneath me and i started to see a therapist and a psychiatrist because i was experiencing these panic attacks and at leastfifteen medications i was written, you know,
within two minutes of meeting,one of the psychiatrists she called me bipolar ii andwrote a diagnosis of it without even knowing me,you know? what i really needed was a fuckin' hug. in 2010, doctors prescribedenough painkillers to give 45 milligram percocetsand 24 5-milligram vicodins to every personin the united states. it's a huge industry creating pills for us to take. most of the time, they're not really anything that's
curing you, they're justsuppressing whatever your ailment is and in some cases making it worse. in depressed patients, worsening of depression including risk of suicide may occur. sometimes fatal events including infections tuberculosis, lymphoma, other cancers blisters, peeling rashes, hives or mouth sores nervous system and blood disorders and allergic reactions have occurred.
the makers of oxycontin have marketed it as a non- or less-addictiveopiate, knowing already that this wasn't true. theysimply suppressed that research. hundreds of overdose deaths. they plea-bargained and they agreed to pay fines. well, they could pay that out of their left hippocket. nobody went to jail, nobody suffered any criminal consequences. if you read the small print,you'll find that there's side-effects to certain drugs but you've got to really
get your microscope out. i see this all the time withfriends-even with peers- where they carry a diagnosisand they can't pronounce it. they don't know what the disease they have is called. they take drugs and they don't know what the medication is or what it could potentially do to their body. all kinda pills andmedicine and bullshit that they can't pronounce; makin' money off your ass. fuckin' you up with more medicine than you need.
there's people strung out on those pills, man. chief medical examiner glenn wagner says he's noticed a big rise in the quantity of different drugs people are taking. this shopping bag represents one individual and the number of drugs that that person had onboard. there are 19 separate lineson this one and it goes for several pages. people don't look at them as drugs anymore when
they're legal-when they're over the counter. they just look at it as somethin' you can buy from the store and put in your body, butit's still a drug. unintentional deaths fromprescription drugs: one dies -one american dies-every 19 minutes. nothing comparable in marijuana. is that correct? correct. well, when you've got adrug that costs a billion dollars to bring to market, your investment is so
huge that you have to do everything in your power to make sure that drug succeeds and sometimes the things that you do are troubling. there are some pharmaceuticalproducts today that are in short demand because theprofit margin isn't big enough just how tough is it tofind the flu shot, jocelyn? sonia, darren, you'll have tomake a couple of calls, and those that do have itonly have a limited supply. i mean, this happens every yearwhen there's a bad flu
and there's shortages of vaccines, right, because there's not really a big profit motive tied to flu vaccines it's a single dose and you move on. unlike something like viagra or especially things like cholesterol medication, heart medication -maintenance medications that people who are ill have to stay on in order to live normal lives. if you don't need thatmedication, you don't need them they take a dent in thepockets, you know what i mean;
those are very deep pockets andthey don't want 'em dented. so every night on tv you seea weird-ass drug commercial tryin' to get you hookedon some legal shit and they just keep namingsymptoms till they get one that you've fucking got! got athlete's foot? are ya hot? are ya cold? whatcha got? you want this pill huh, motherfucker? ya gotto take this pill! prescription drugs being advertised and marketed on television is certainly something that's happened
in my lifetimeas a physician. they're saying things like'ask your doctor if this drug is right for you.' ask your doctor if humira can work for you... ask your doctor if lunesta is right for you. ask your doctor about cymbalta. do you get a weird pain inyour bowel? well then you need to go to a doctor andyou need to tell him that this is the drug you need. so hurry up! there's your
check, there's my prescription, it's a transaction. i'm not a drug addict! howdare you? i'm a patient. in every other industrializedwestern country, you don't see ads for drugs. you go to your doctor, you tell your doctor what you're dealing with, they're well- informed about the drugs that are on the market and they make a recommendation for you. i remember these commercials and they looked so happy and i remember thinking, oh my god, there's a pill that
you can take to make yourself happy? like how fucking awesomewould that be? if you got somebody makin' a commercial sayin', oh, do you have these problems, do you have these problems? you're gonna relate to itlike, oh yeah, that is me! maybe i do need that. it's really frustrating to methat as a society we don't know better at this point.they're telling you
that you can take this medicine, but risk literally killing yourself to do it! for me, it reinforces ourcultural belief that if you go to a doctor, if you don't get a prescription, you haven't really had a valid encounter. one study by a british medical journal found that for every dollar that pharmaceutical companies spent on r and d -research & development- they spend 19 dollars on promotion and marketing of their drugs.
if i go to my doctor and i say,'i saw this ad for this drug; i really would liketo try it,' and he says, 'yeah, let's give ita shot,' is he my doctor, or is he my drug dealer? they form groups like partnership for adrug free america where they get theirfucking money from prescription drugs! i wish you didn'tsmoke weed.
you're not the same when yousmoke, and i miss my friend. i had a joke about it like:prescription drugs making commercials against weed is like hookers making commercials againststrippers, i mean that's... (it would of been better ifi didn't stumble through the word commercial),but that's what it is! guess what. all of the big drug companies have used corruption in north americafor at least 50 years. if you were a doctor, they will come to you and say,
i will pay you to participate in a conference on the phone-it will only take a half an hour of your time. well, guess what the conference is. it is a drug company salesman selling you on the latest drug to influence you to prescribe that drug the next time a patient comes into youroffice. how are you gonna feel? you feel gratitudeand your gratitude influences your decisions. nothing should influence your decision but what isbest for a patient.
there are pros to having a capitalist endeavor there may be drugs on the market that never would have been available because that profit motive wasn't pushing these pharmaceutical companies to try and develop those new drugs. the problem is that it's it's not really a freemarket: there's, like, a small percentage of pharmaceuticalcompanies that are really propped up by our congresspeople because they have huge lobbies supporting them.
i recently received a notification of the top 100 pharmaceutical drugs and how much they made a year and you see exactly what allthe frenzy is about. in 2012, the top-11 global drug companies made nearly 85 billion dollars in net profits. just an ungodly amount of money for medicines that many of which my patients have been able to stop with something that can grow in their backyard. now, look, i was in bed for fifteen years with an
extremely serious illness.i believe in the importance of the major drug companies. does that mean i believe in their right to pushresearch that they've paid for into peer-reviewed journalsand to prevent research that tends to indicate thattheir drugs don't work? there's a case to be made for these pharmaceuticals there's the appropriate use of all kinds of medications including antidepressants, including antipsychotics, but it's hard to make a rational case for the use
to the extent that they're employed in today's society. so, once more, we're faced with the arbitrariness of what we consider to be acceptable and what is unacceptable. (v.o.) this seems to be information that society could benefit from. but how has this vital knowledge managed to fly under radars for so long?
why are these issues not making their way to the forefront of concern in our news? so a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that the news stations are gonna cover things in the order of importance, but in reality they cover them in the order of ratings. so if justin bieber is gonna give you the best ratings, they're gonna go first. congressman, let me interruptyou just for a moment.
we've got some breakingnews out of miami-stand by if you will. right now, in miami, justin bieber has has been arrested on a number of charges you gotta sell whatever it isthat wants to advertise on your show and if yourshow is getting shitty ratings, they're gonna replace you with a chick with big tits hey, starting the news off tonight: a motherfucker killed three people. we got my guy hal fishman standing outsideright now. hal, what's going on?
'yeah, the niggashot three people' and blah, blah, blah.that's more attractive! yeah, i don't watch the news;the news is fuckin' depressing. they pick the worst shitto follow for a long-ass amount of time you think they give a fuck if barack obama was born in kenya? they do if it's a good story. because it means that two million people are gonna tune in instead of 600,000.
then you get peoplecoming out saying, 'well, what aboutnuclear bombs? that's a good point! we'llbe back after this.' they're gonna be able to sell advertisement for x-amount of money instead of w. that kinda shit happens everyday all day it's just a matter of whichone do they want to put the most attention on? there's skydiving cats!
♪ i believe i can fly..♪ in all that froth, i think serious debate around key policy issuesoften gets lost. that's the problem with current affairs! you forget about what's important and you allow the agenda to be decided by superficial information. everybody cares aboutthe advertisers. they care atremendous amount. if you're gonna do a storythat affects the advertisers,
you will get a call frommanagement. now, it doesn't mean you can't do the storyalthough there is heavy pressure to shift priorities within the story. it's fucking ridiculous! puttin' makeup on and pretending they're not reading off a script that's corporate approved. they have a very specific set of parameters that they're supposed to fall into. it's ok, you can admit it ifyou've bought an item or two or ten for yourself
two or maybe... ten for yourself... two or ten for yourself. originally, when tv firststarted, news was seen as something that was a public service so that you informed the american people. the deal was: you give us news and we give you the public airwaves and then at some point alongthe lines, the tv stations forgot that they weren't supposed to make money off the news and then a secondthing kicked in that's
really important: they realized whenever they did investigative reporting, they would uncover something that the government was doing wrong and it'd be a giant hassle. you're supposed to question authority as a journalist. that's the whole pointof the media. if you don't questionauthority, then what the hell is the point? cnn just got rid of its investigative team. when i was at msnbc, ilooked for an investigative
reporter to do some of the stories that i wanted to cover and they said, 'there isn't one in the building.' so i got this amazing speech from the head of the network whosaid, 'look, outsiders are really cool: they wear leather jackets and they ride motorcycles,' he said,'but, we're insiders here at nbc; we're part of theestablishment and you have to act like it.' he was telling me that he had just gone to washington and they were not happy with my tone.
do you think all these corporations and rich folks are spending money on politicsbecause it's not good for business? no! obviouslythey think it's a great investment for them. i was challenging the republicans and the democrats too much. how about if we didn't go into that dumbass war in iraq and waste a trillion dollars when we found zero weapons of mass destruction. you flushed
that down the toilet! we're talking socialsecurity not your politics! and now you're talking aboutrobbing people's socialsecurity! that isoutrageous! not your contempt foramerica, we're talking about social security.stick to the topic! contempt for america? you lost 4400 americanlives in iraq! you have contempt for america! i remember taking several guests to task
saying all of our politicians are systematically corrupt. they get legalized bribes which we call donations. we've forgot- tten that they're in essence just bribes. who's gonnagive you money for nothing? no one right? they're gonnagive you money so that you do them a favor. every time i would point that out there'd again be a callfrom management like, 'hey, we're not saying you can'tdo that. on the other hand if you'd like to keepthe six o'clock slot...'
but in that one meetingthat i had with the head of of the network,it was no longer implicit. it was explicit and he said, 'this is the realityand you either get back in line or we go in adifferent direction.' if anything, i went harder after the establishment after that. the banks: they sucked so much money out of the system that we had one ofthe largest economic crashes
of all time and they'renot even done yet! and then, a couple months later, they called me in and they're like, 'apparently you didn't get it!' so, you were at six o'clock;we're moving you from six o'clock to theweekends; we're gonna pay youa ton of money so hush up' and i said thanks but no thanks i didn't take the weekend job and i went back to do the young turks online.
we have three branches of government, and those three branches aresupposed to be part of the checks and balancesthat make the government work. the media and journalists are a huge part of that. i mean, you think americans arecomplacent now? they'll be even more complacent if they're not given the information they need to be politically active. drama works on television now, in the world ofpolitics, the soap opera is
democrats versus republicans. it's not who's right in terms of the policies or ideology. what is easy is: he said this, she said that; isn't that amazing? look at the democrats and republicans, they're always fighting...oh no, look at this:the republicans are fighting amongst themselves. catfights sell. which is why you have the red team and the blue team, you know, all over the world it's red team-blue team and they have these rigid ideologies that are
associated with these teams and they just run with it find a place where you aresurrounded by like-minded people and the best way to find those people is you should probably look at themaps on how counties voted. we think it's a bunch of ideas about how the world works and how we can make it better. sorry, that's not really what it is. ideas are a badge of identity they're a badge of identityfor a subculture. it's my group versus your group and i will make damn
sure that my representative represents my badge of identity, my group's supposed ideas, the ones that represent my group's uniform not your group's uniform. and there's a lot of seeminglyintelligent people that have ridiculous ideasthat are cleverly worded in a nice flowingand confident way that makes you think that whatthey're saying makes sense. a lot of work gets done ontobacco whereas drugs are pretty much specificallyjust to get high.
it's not, i'm enjoying- but a lot of people drinkto get high... yeah, but that's more ofa subsidiary point. people are not openly discussing anything, they're just defending pointsof view and in defending points of view, they're defending their egos. which means they're expressing the ideas that they think others want to hear. whichmeans they're not thinking! so, you can present the facts to people, but the facts
won't penetrate becauseit's not about facts, it's about opinions they haveto hold onto in order to feel okayabout themselves. potheads that i knew atthat time, when i see 'em: 'hey man, hey bro, hey what'sthat? what's going on?' every one of 'em are braindead! it's fact. everyone that i know in mylong history of life, everyone that was a pot smoker,their brains are defuncitated! fox news, as we've known for a long time,
does republican propaganda.unfortunately, msnbc has now come to largely dodemocratic propaganda. cnn does propaganda for both;they say, 'the republicans said this and the democrats said that. now, what's the truth? who cares? my job is just to tell you what the latest catfight is. it creates this partisandivision in the country where people feel like, 'ihave to root for my team regardless ofwhat they do.'
(v.o.) it's sometimes hard to see contradictions that find their way into politics. inconsistencies with politicians tend to get lost in a mass amount of information that now finds its way to our attention. in some cases, these contradictions sit right in front of our face. when you look at the obamawebsite where they were looking for information-whatis important to you,
what do want to see us do? i have to say that therewas one question that was voted on that ranked fairlyhigh and that was whether legalizingmarijuana would improve the economy and job creation and, uh, i don't know what this says aboutthe online audience and he goes, 'ha ha, i don'tknow what that says about this group.' what it says about this group is: they like pot! why don't you explain to me what's
wrong with the idea that people want you to make it so that someone doesn't get locked in a fucking cage for a forbidden plant? yeah, i did it, i got awaywith it, too bad you're not. so move on to the nextquestion. look at how many of us they're locking up. there's nothing funny about it now, think about how mentalthat is: the last three presidents, at least, confirmed that they in fact
did smoke marijuana. so,shouldn't they be in jail? i mean they've admitted it,right? obama apparently rather enjoyed it. it makes him the him the hippresident! 'i'm the cool president, i'm the happeningest president i say weed, i say blow, it'sall a big deal ha ha ha!' huge laugh from the collegestudents and if he had done time in prison,time in federal prison, time for his weedand a little blow,
he would not be president ofthe united states of america. this is his quote from2008: 'i'm not going to be using justice department resources to try to circumvent state laws onthis issue.' well, bullshit, that'sexactly what he's been doing. he has launched the most vicious attack on medical marijuana patients and dispensaries that pales bush by comparison. he's raided me. the deahas been in this house.
one of the reasons we are making these announcements today is to try to put torest the notion that large marijuana businesses can shelter themselves under state law andoperate without fear of federalenforcement. in a report issued in june 2013 it was found that the dea had performed 270 medical marijuana raids under barack obama in the first four and a half years of his presidency. this wasmore than all 12 years combined
before he took office. the obama administrationoutspent the bush administration by 100 million dollars in about half the time. people get freaked out when you say that. 'but obama is hope and change! he's a democrat; he's a good guy! you can'tsay that about obama! he had a choice... he coulda done as his campaign promised and said, hey, you know what? we're not gonna do the dispensary
raids anymore. if you have made medicinal marijuana in your legal state, we're gonna respect that.' that's what he said during the campaign. but when he goes to act, what did he do? he put the most right-wingerthat they had in the dea, who was left over from the bush years, as the head of the dea. now, why wouldyou do that? you could have picked anybody but youpicked the biggest right-winger in the department.
why? and this iswhat people can't understand about obama: he's a politician just like the rest of them so he thinks, 'if i can curry a little bit of favor by putting this right-winger in, well, i will seem so moderate and that will increase my chances of winning in 2012 by maybe half a percent. president george w. bush, who pretty much has acknowledged while he was young and irresponsible and a playboy, he used cocaine
and then when he was governor of texas signed legislationmandating anyone that uses cocainemust go to jail a minimum of 180 days. that's beyond hypocrisy. when asked about drugs, he said, 'i don't want to answer the marijuanaquestion. you know why? i don't want young kids doing what i did.' (chuckling)
likewise, i mean when you look at interviews that have been done with bill clinton after he left office,he openly admitted that he thinks that marijuanashould be decriminalized and it's like, oh, well if only you were in a position to do something about that! i wouldn't pretend that iknow what pulls a president's strings, but i do knowthere's a stark contrast between the way every president behaves before
they get into office and then once they get into office. the general public shouldhold politicians accountable for saying one thing when they're not in power and doing another when they come into power. there's a sort of rhetoricaltrick they quite often use to say, 'oh, this is something i did in the past, it's something i regret, i wouldn't advise anyone else to do it.' so, they somehow distance themselves from their own person.
and the public puts up with that hypocrisy they get it when you pointit out to them, but i don't know why they put up with it. so it may be that president x or president y has smoked cannabis at some point in their lives or used other illegal drugs, but when they get to the top they are going to oppressothers for using illegal drugs. that's an idea that never would have crossed the mind of any of our founding fathers. if anyone had stood up
at a constitutional convention and said hey! let's ban alcohol,' that idea wouldn't have gotten very far and itwouldn't have gotten very far not because they were abunch of drunks, but because the idea that the federal government had that degree of power over sovereign individuals was anathema to what they were trying to createin forming a new country. that's why it's essentialto make decisions in public wherever possible, based onthe actual evidence that
there is for something. how else are you going make policy? are you going to base it on some sort of faith? or a wish that something will happen just because you want it to? what are you going to do? stand and sort of scream on the spot until you get your way like a small child? and that's effectively whatsome of our politicians seem to be doing. for six months, i worked as a policy advisor at the
highest levels of the britishcivil service, working to advisethe most senior people on the issues of drugs and crime and the aim of thatwas to get an academic in there to help give them some evidence that they could base theirpolicies on, but i found that that was actually quitea difficult job to do. those civil servants told me that they had learnt that it was not helpful to use evidence which
challenges the dominant way of thinking that's already structuring most policies. it's much easier to take evidence that supports what you're already doing and use that to justify the continuation of your existing policy. one of the leading figuresin research in drugs and policy is professor david nutt. he was the government advisor for the acmd.
the acmd is the advisorycouncil on the misuse of drugs. we had created a 16-point scale of harms and then we took twenty drugs and weranked all those drugs on these sixteen different harms, and then when we put all that together intothis computer program called multi-criteria decision analysis, we discovered that the most harmful drug overall was alcohol. it showed that the drug laws, which ignore the most harmful drug (alcohol), were actually based on a wrong
understanding of harms. politicians wanted to get some kind of political advantage by being hard on cannabis and our study said, 'well hang on, cannabis is much, much less harmful than alcohol.' i thought i was going to be encouraged to tell the scientific truth and then suddenly one afternoon, i got a phone callsaying effectively, 'you've gotta resign'and i said, 'why?'
and he said, 'because you'regiving mixed messages; we've gotta havea line: cannabis is bad, alcohol is good. when wesay we want you to resign it means you're sacked' and so i was sacked. professor's nutt's dismissal came after he dared to suggest drugs like cannabis and ecstasy are less harmful than alcohol and tobacco. it was a very interesting experience because, here, you've spend ten years of your life doing what you
know is right and what you know-if that was accepted by government, by policy- makers-would be better for society and then for simple political reasons, you get humiliatedpublically. after an angry exchange on sky news yesterday, alan johnson reiterated his argument in a letter to the guardian today: 'professor nutt was not sacked for his views, which i respect but disagree with. he was asked to go
because he cannot be both a government adviser and campaigner against government policy. but it kind of backfired on thegovernment because his sacking attracted an enormous amount of media attention. suddenly the debate wasn't just about whether this expert committee had gotit right about drugs, it was a whole debateabout the role of science in policy-making. (v.o.) this brings us to an interesting question:
if evidence doesn't play the role we think it does in policy-making, then what does? turns out there's this thing called lobbying. and just what is lobbying? lobbying is supposed to be simply getting access to the politicians and making your case. so, the american peoplecan lobby just as much as aspecial interest could. it's supposed to work like that, and the politician
then ponders it and says, 'oh, well, you've both made an interesting case, but i'm going to go with this side or that side.' now, that's not whatit is at all, okay? the reality of what it has become is: two sides come in with two checks-whoever has the larger check wins. that's lobbying in a nutshell. so, if it's defense contractors,or private prisons, or whoever it might be that'sgiving money for that issue
-they're gonna win! they're not gonna win some of the time; they're gonna win all of the time. i think bill hicks said it best. bill hicks said, 'this is my impression of american politics.' he goes-it's a guy holding twopuppets-and people go, 'well the puppet on theright is more to my liking, well i feel like the puppeton the left suits my beliefs like, hey, wait a minute:it's one guy and he's holding both puppets!
once corporations were allowed to spend money in politics, theyowned politics. corporations are people, myfriend. we could raise taxes -of course they are-everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people.where do you think it goes? you give me money, i do you favors-everybody got used to it. now the mediadoesn't even blink; they think, 'well if you're goodat raising money, that must mean you're a goodpolitician.' now, what does
that have to do with servingthe people? do you know that, 95% of the time, the person with more money wins the congressional election at the national stage? it doesn't matter if you'reliberal or conservative, the main thing that matters is do you have more money? so, for the 2012 elections,they spent six billion dollars on all the national elections. they spent a billion for the obama campaign, a billion for the romney campaign
and four billion for all the senate and congressional elections. it's large donors and they're not spending six billiondollars for their health. they're spendingthe six billion dollars to get back 12 billion or 60 billion i got a campaign. i needmoney. who's got money? that woman with four kidsselling $31 worth of marijuana,
she's got no money,but that banker, that wall street guy, that corporation guy- hey, i think they have a fewbucks to spread around. it actually becomes anundercurrent to every single legislative action that wesee. everybody's concerned about re-election; everybody's concerned about how to sell themselves, not to their constituents, but to the lobbying and to the interest groups. it fucks up the framework and the groundwork for the
world that we operate in. (v.o.) so where does this leave society when those who are elected to represent the public no longer have the motivation to do so? how can balance be re-achieved? what else can alter the framework of the world around us? if you think in terms of our communication environment, the advent of the 'net represented a tremendous inflection point.
before that, thesources of information that we had werepretty much institutionally structured that very strong filter is breaking down and that's giving people around the world the chance to think for themselves i have a real bug aboutthis: nobody respects books anymore; books going outthe window and everyone's reading on these bloodyscreens. it's just so easy to
google stuff. everyone'sjust like, 'oh, let's check google' no! it's a real,like, big bug there for me; it really annoys me. where do you get most of your news from today? i think, the internetactually! suddenly, it's a different world. the folk that control big media now no longercontrol the whole of that media environment. we're not reliant, say,in england,
on the daily telegraphs and the fear that politicians have over two or three publications. blogs have become the media;there really is a public debate. this is like the public forumof athens or rome. it's the freedom to do what you want. can't nobody tell you what you can and can't do on the internet. you can do what the hell youwanna do when you wanna do it. you may connect with somebody in another country who may have some information that'd really enlighten the world.
because we don't know it all in america: we only know half the story. i was, youknow, close-minded i was just thinking about california and the lifestyle i grew up in. in alice in wonderland, it said something like this: 'how do i know what i think until i hear what i have to say?' on the internet you can actually express yourself out loud; you can add a new dimension to thinking and for the first time,if you have an opinion,
you can go out there and express it, and if you have the ability to promote it, you can get attention for it. post it and before you know it, a million people could be following you, talkin' with you, respectin' your views. or they could betalkin' bad about your views. all of a sudden, issues that would not have been discussed before are being discussed. there's these little communities based on ideas
and thoughts that are building and those ideas turn into other ideas and other programming and it's weird if you were to look at it on achart or on a graph. in terms of the war on drugs, the internet has been phenomenal. there was a great thirstfor the truth and so anytime that truth leaked out on the internet people would just jump on it. 'oh, marijuana has medicinal benefits? oh, wow, richard nixon already had the report
that said marijuana wasn't bad for you?' they jump on it andthey think, 'thank god there's now something thatlet's me access the truth! i was online in '94. that'swhen i first got online, but it didn't really do anything it was sorta like puttin' around and no one knew what was going on. you've got mail! everyone i know is on it! email!
instant messages! there's no better way to keep in touch you've got mail. now with 56k, connections are faster than ever! it's fast! if you have a phone line,you can go online what will they thinkof next? and the mail was allbullshit, and then slowly but but surely it became this interacting monster
that it is today. anything that you need to know about marijuana, you can just go onthere and look. you can have your mindchanged instantly. in the old days, when there was twenty hippies sitting around trying to legalize marijuana with with their little flyers, there was no way to fact check any of it. it sounded like a crazy hippie. wait, you're telling me marijuana is safe and it
helps you with headaches and anxiety and all these important medical things that we're taking all these pills for? yeah right, old hippie. but nowadays, thesehippies are online and they have proofand facts and for once we're like, 'wow,that's not a crazy hippie, that's a smart hippie.' you know, i can pick thisphone up, and within 10 seconds, i can google any complex question that would've
required a serious education to answer before. it's become so commonplace,that we don't realize how fucking completely insaneit is! it's a culture- changing reality shift. people like me, who had to read about things in an encyclopedia, and actuallygo to a library, and take out books on things. i'm a fuckin' dinosaur. the young kids that are comin' up today-from the jump, have had the internet; they don't know
what the world is like without the internet. the internet is beginning toshake things up in politics but the old momentum isclinging stubbornly, irritatingly anddisturbingly. with the recent nsa leak,i think that you see a very specific example ofpoliticians trying to destroy freedom of expression and freedom of speech. collecting data on people and spying on people is a form of intimidation. if you know that the government
is watching what you're doing, and you know that the government is monitoring what you are saying and what you're advocating for, you are less likely to be politically active. you are more likely to be intimidated by power. they're usingthat as a way to tell us toshut the fuck up. the west fought for 500 years to acquire these basic rights and just to hand them away thoughtlessly means that we have to fight again for hundreds of years
just to get them back. it'svery hard to acquire basic human rights; it's very easyto give them up. the establishment is scared to death of the internet because that's the onething they can't control. so they've figured out a way tocontrol our politicians through donations, they'vefigured out how to control tv through the advertising,but the internet is the wild, wild west and they can't grab it. no matter how much they try to plug all the holes in, the truth seems
to get out one way or another anyway. it's basically the whole world sharing with one another and the one thing that we're sharing, that's really doing them damage, is the truth. the trend, if you payattention to it, clearly is the dissolving of boundariesbetween people and ideas and information and it's all going to come to a head. the first cracks in the monolith of prohibition have already happened. suddenly you have washington
and colorado actually succeeding in passing these legalization andregulation ballots and becoming the firstjurisdictions anywhere in the world to do so. what's happening in the united states is that the entire underpinnings of thewar on drugs are being pulled away by the population of the united states itself. washington state and colorado that make it legal-legal, they're like,
'look, man, it's fuckin' legal here. period. it's not "medically legal"-it's legal' and the dea is like, 'woah, you better not!' like, whaddya mean, we'd better not? come on, what is our fucking voting system for if a piece of legislation thatthe people want gets up there and you're still goingout of your way not to recognize it? how could you ask people to believe in the process
if you won't respect the vote? you can't ask people to vote-they won't want to. that's all that's gonna haveto happen to tear it all apart: is more states just saying, 'you know what? we're gonna legalize.' they become a force that can stand up to the status quo it's then you start to takewhat is yours instead of waiting for thecorporations and the government to give youwhat they think you deserve.
one by one, individual statesare defying the federal government and responding to the wishes of their their own immediate populationand changing the state law. once we see that gainingpace in the united states, it's gonna gain pace in thewhole of the rest of the world as well. the international narcoticscontrol board has made it clear that washington and colorado are in breach of the un drug conventions, they're effectively breaking
international law and that theu.s. is, by dint of what's happening in washington andcolorado, also in breach of the un conventions. given that the un drug treaties were very much driven by the u.s. in the first instance, it does put them in this rather odd situation where something that they drovethe formation of, they are now being disciplined and condemned for violating. because how can they imposethese appallingly damaging
laws and conventions across the other countries of the planet when they're legal- izing in their own backyard? i think it makes it verydifficult for the united states to try to hold othercountries in line. uruguay: they are experimenting with a completely new approach and that is for the state to be selling marijuana in marijuana shopsthroughout uruguay. all across europe, in australia,and in fact, all over the world, the whole house of cards
is already coming crumbling down. i mean even by the time youput this documentary on air, i'm sure that there are going to be more states that have voted with their feet and changed the legal status of cannabis. big step today for thosehoping to legalize recreational marijuanain alaska. the campaign to regulatemarijuana turned in more than 45 000 signaturesto the lieutenant governor.
i mean it's impossible to keepup right now when it comes to research, political development. constant stream of books and documentaries, podcasts and blog posts. theinformation's just overwhelming they just can't stop releasing shit. just like you can't stop making documentaries about it, just like i can't stop talking about it on stage or on a podcast. what's weird is: in ten yearsfrom now,
you're gonna lookat this film and be like, 'that's ridiculous. rememberwhen they had to make films about legalizing marijuana?' and it's one of the reasons why the age of information that we exist in today is so fuckin' important. it's so important because it's never been in the hands of the people before and this is what happened: in the hands of the people you've seen more progress in ten years than we have
in two fuckin' hundred years before. because it's swarming, all the greedy pigs are trying to hold on to it,but it's like standing in the middle of the river andtrying to catch all the salmon with your hands. you're notgoing to. the world is already moving; we're already on it like we want it. they doing it in seattle, washington. recreational. you know i'mon my way out there as soon as i get off this tvscreen. recreational work.
establishment figures, they're beginning to get the message; they're realizing that it isn't in their interests any longer todemonize cannabis. it does not make sense, from aprioritization point of view, for us to focus onrecreational drug users in a state that has already saidthat under state law, 'that's legal.' when you see a broad social change taking place in society and you realize that you are behind the curve
-then, you pretty soon get it that you have to catchup with the curve. it seems like they are fallingunder the weight of all this. they just go wherethe wind blows in order to stay alive. i don't think it matters why people jump ship as long as they dojump ship. in 2009, you wrote a timemagazine article entitled why i would vote no on pot.you've changed your mind.
i have and as part of mythinking recently, i've apologized for some ofthe earlier reporting because i think we've beenterribly and systematically misled in this countryfor some time and i did part ofthat misleading. there's a shift taking place in our culture. the issue is once again on the table. will the forces backing marijuana deregulation overplay their hand in some way that allows the forces of incarceration
to get a jump on them? the war on marijuana is a symptom of something that is fundamentally wrong in this country. we have to break out of the fog because the media won't do anything no president is gonna come in and change things. it comes from the bottom upnot from the top down. so, you can have minor little victories, but that's tinkering. 50 years of documentation says it's not working and what do we do tomorrow?
the same damn thing. the truth is not repeating what everybody around you automatically says. it is not repeating what everybody is gonna pat you on the head for saying. it is looking for thethings that people will not patyou on the head for saying because those are the things that people really need to know, and once you are damn convinced of something of that sort, then it's your obligation
to go out on a limb for it. that's truth. we have to figure out, a, that we are temporary and we are the people that have to pass down this fucking incredibly fuckedup mess to our children and unless we operate this worldwith the idea of sustainability for the culture, sustainability for the community, sustainability for humanity in general, you're gonna have resentment at every turn.
you have people profiting and people failing and people being victimized, but the reason whywe are so complex is also the reason that i think that we have hope. (v.o.) eight years and 2 films later, we once again arrive left with more questions than answers. where do we go from here? how do we move forward without taking two steps back? and, again, sits that ever- lingering question
that we just can't seem to shake: will marijuana everfully be legalized? um, probably yes... oh yes, oh yes. i've no doubt about it. marijuana prohibition is azombie; it is a walking corpse. it could be decades, buthistorically, it's a blip. i think marijuana will be fully legalized and taxed in my lifetime. whether we'll ever get singapore doing it, we'll see.
globally? i can see iran doing it, can't you? instead of goin' one city,one state at a time. make that shit legaleverywhere and pop the topand let's go! i think it's just aroundthe corner, but you know, i've always thought that!i've been wrong up to now, so i'm probably wrong now!i don't know. i doubt it seriously. i believethat the forces controlling the way things work in theunited states will give us
lots of process before we everget to total legalization. i can die with thesatisfaction of knowing it's inevitable now. they're never gonna get the cat back in that bag again. he's out... and what we see now is this culture struggling to make an accommodation for this new kid on the block. there'll come a point when this will probably end but if it's not today, then somebody will be locked up
today, somebody's lifewill be ruined today and that somebody is probably hundreds of people. to begin to demonstrate an understanding of humanity is so counter to our way of thinking- it's throw away the key, let's lock 'em up. and you believe it, up untilyour son or your daughter or your friends or yourself getscaught up in the same nightmare and then you're going 'ohmy god, now i understand,' but do you?
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