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