11/25/16 John Urquhart

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Cultural Baggage Radio Show

Seattle Sheriff John Urquhart eviscerates drug war logic + Dr. Robert Melameade on forward/backward people

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CULTURAL BAGGAGE

NOVEMBER 25, 20106

TRANSCRIPT

DEAN BECKER: This is Dean Becker, thank you for being with us on this edition of Cultural Baggage. This week we have a special reprise of two of the best interviews ever on this program. A bit later we'll hear from Doctor Robert Melamede about the relative harms of marijuana, but first, we're privileged to have the sheriff of King County, Washington, Seattle, Sheriff John Urquhart, join us.

[I]t's tough trying to get people wearing the badge to even talk about the subject of drug prohibition, and I'm glad that you're one of those who's willing to do so.

JOHN URQUHART: Well, thank you.

DEAN BECKER: Yes, sir. You know, there's so many things happening, you know, Cory Booker's trying to change the focus in the Senate, the House is doing much the same thing, and during this past week, there was a group that met in Chicago, the Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, and you were listed as, if not one of the attendees, certainly one of the supporters of that effort, correct, sir?

JOHN URQUHART: That's correct. I'm on the steering committee. It's 130 police chiefs, sheriffs, attorneys general, and prosecutors from across the country, all 50 states, that have signed up on this committee, and there's some very big names on there: Bill Bratton from New York, the police chief from, Gary, Gary -- I forget his last name -- from Chicago, and Washington, DC, and Los Angeles. The police chief here in Seattle, Cathy O'Toole, myself. And we all are concerned about the mass incarceration that has occurred in the United States, and to a large extent because of our drug laws.

DEAN BECKER: Yes, sir. It's been a major contributing factor. I think folks are becoming more aware of that of late, for some reason, I'm not sure why this recognition of the problem's coming to fruition, but I'm glad. Your thoughts, sir.

JOHN URQUHART: Well, one of the reasons is just the cost. You know, we spent $80 billion -- this country spends $80 billion a year on incarceration. We have five percent of the world's population and twenty five percent of their prisoners, and we need to look at what's going on here and see if we can't reduce incarceration, reduce the number of people in jail, but at the same time not increase the crime rate. And that's going to be a challenge, obviously.

DEAN BECKER: Yes, sir. As I mentioned, last week, I had Chief McClelland from Houston as my guest, and he made quite a, I won't say firestorm, but quite an impact about a year ago, when he stated, the drug war is a miserable failure. The local Fox, NBC, the Chronicle's carried six stories quoting him from that interview. But at this conference, he was quoted as saying, it's a tremendous failure. Now which is it, sir?

JOHN URQUHART: Well, I've said for years that the war on drugs has been an abject failure. So whatever words you want to use. You've got to remember that I spent a good portion of my career as a narcotic investigator here in the greater Seattle area, so I know a little bit about putting people in jail, I know about street drugs, and I know that we haven't reduced demand and we haven't reduced supply, all we've done is locked up people, and we haven't fixed the problem. And now we need to look at a different way of going about the war on drugs, and, because the way we've been doing it hasn't worked.

And, I think there are very few police chiefs or sheriffs that will come out and say that -- two things, number one, that it's been a success, because it hasn't been, but they are reluctant to talk about it, because we've invested so much money, so much materiel, men and materiel, and we've failed. But, you can't put your head in the sand and ignore that. We have to be honest with ourselves.

DEAN BECKER: Yes sir, and I take a more hardline stance on that, I guess. I've used the phrase that, many of these politicians, official people in positions of power, have quote "made their bones" through believing or insisting, demanding this policy, and it's a little hard for some of them to back down now. Your thoughts, sir.

JOHN URQUHART: Oh, I agree with you one hundred percent, I mean, just because you're a police chief or sheriff or an elected - otherwise elected, you're still human, and nobody likes to admit that they were wrong. No one likes to admit that they're, the policy that they may have promoted, in some cases their entire career, has not worked. That's a tough, a tough sell sometimes. I don't happen to think that way, and apparently the chief in Houston doesn't either, but, you know, it's just the way it is, and I think we need to be honest with ourselves and especially we need to be honest with the public.

DEAN BECKER: All right, folks, once again we're speaking with Sheriff John Urquhart of King County, Washington, Seattle. John, I looked at our transcript from last year, and, you know, you were talking about your dabbling in helping make change in Oregon, and how the police officers down -- the police chiefs down there didn't much appreciate it. Now you have another neighbor, now, Canada, they're, just elected this Justin Trudeau, who has vowed to legalize marijuana, and what you're advice for them, for Premier Trudeau?

JOHN URQUHART: Well, my advice is, listen to what the public wants. Clearly in the -- at least in the state of Washington, the state of Colorado, they wanted legalized marijuana. That was in, that initiative was on the ballot in 2012 in our state, it passed state-wide at 55 percent in my county, in Seattle it passed with 63 percent, so clearly that's what people want. You know, too often, I find police officers, police departments, police chiefs, that have the attitude that, we're the cops and you're not, don't tell us how to do our job. And that is a terrible, terrible, terrible mindset. We have to listen to the public. My advice to the next Prime Minister of Canada is, just listen to what the Canadians want, and that's the best thing you can do.

DEAN BECKER: Okeh. Now, sheriff, you know, I was mentioning, there's been so much happened this past week, I'm just going to list a couple of them here. There's been a federal ruling now that protects medical marijuana dispensaries in the states where it's a legal endeavor. I think that's a great thing. And Obama has announced that he's doing a criminal justice reform tour, he's talking at the prisons, he's talking about this need that these same 130 law enforcement officials put forward, it's time to re-examine and redirect our efforts. Your thoughts on the, just the general push towards recognizing this problem.

JOHN URQUHART: Well, I think, obviously I think that it's tremendous, you know, the president was on the HBO series Vice, and it's the first time that a sitting president has ever gone to a federal prison to listen to what the prisoners have to say. I think that's really very, very cool. Also, what I appreciated is the camera crew left that prison, where they interviewed Obama, and flew to Seattle and interviewed me. And we rode around, and I gave them a tour of Seattle and I kind of riffed about the failure of the war on drugs. So, I thought I was in pretty good company, at least on that show.

And certainly, HBO's Vice has got a tremendous reputation, so you look at the fact that the president is now involved, deeply involved, and that a show like HBO, or a network like HBO can be talking about this, it's really -- we're definitely headed in the right direction. At least finely we're having that discussion. And regardless how it turns out in the long run, we're talking about it now, and there is some changes being made, and some acknowledgement that we, it cannot be business as usual. We have to look at different, different things that's going to correct this huge problem. I mean, drugs are a very, very significant problem in this country. How we fight that is really what the, fight that scourge, is what we need to be talking about.

DEAN BECKER: Yes, sir. Which brings to mind, I hear from many directions the call to end the war on drugs, without actually talking about, at the heart of that is the need to end at least the scheme of prohibition that's now in place. Your thoughts, sir.

JOHN URQUHART: Well, that's one solution, and I'm certainly not one to sit here, as a police officer or as a citizen and say that we should immediately legalize all drugs. I don't think we're ready, I don't think we're there yet, in this country we don't have a plan for that. It may end up that that's what we do, by the same token it may end up that we recriminalize marijuana. We just don't know yet.

What I object to, and what I objected to with the, my brethren in Oregon, when they criticized me, and other police leaders, is, they criticized the stance I may take, they criticize legalized marijuana, but they, none of them, ever offer another solution. They don't have any ideas, other than continuing the war on drugs, which in their heart of hearts, they know hasn't worked. I get very upset with people that continue to criticize, continue business as usual, and offer no other solutions. And I'm not saying my solution, especially when it comes to marijuana, is the correct answer. It's certainly what the citizens want, so we need to listen to them, and we need to give it a try, because it just might work, you never know.

DEAN BECKER: Well, yes sir, and as I understand it, your state is raising millions of dollars through the sales of regulated and controlled marijuana, and I don't think anybody's objecting to that, but I wonder, do you get objections still from other, from elected representatives, or even from your patrolmen's union, people that --

JOHN URQUHART: You know, I have no problem with my rank and file, I'm sure not everybody agrees with me. If you understand Washington, Washington state really is a red state and a blue state, if you will. The western side of the Cascade Mountains, where Seattle and Tacoma and Everett are, it's really pretty liberal. And it's, that's just the way it is, that's where most of the population is. You go east of the mountains, where it's much more rural, you have smaller towns, like Spokane and Walla-Walla, and Tri-Cities, and towns like that, and it's much more conservative.

There's 39 sheriffs in the state of Washington, and I think probably the majority of them do not approve of legalization of marijuana, or any other drug for that matter. They're certainly not on the same page as I am, and that's their right. It's a very conservative area. And so there is, there is, and I get some criticism from them occasionally. Most of them have started talking to me again, when we have our meetings, but it's just the difference in the demographics, I guess, of both sides of Washington. Despite the fact that it passed at 55 percent.

DEAN BECKER: Again, we're speaking with Sheriff John Urquhart of King County, Washington. Following up on that, I mean, what is the response now from the citizenry of, I don't know, a year plus of legalized marijuana. Is the turmoil dying down?

JOHN URQUHART: I think the, I don't think there ever was much turmoil. I think it's pretty much ho-hum, for the most part. The problem that we had after the legalization of marijuana and the opening of retail marijuana stores is, we still had to deal with medical marijuana, and medical marijuana was not affected by the legalization of marijuana, and it was the wild wild west. Now the legislature in this last session, the Washington state legislature, changed the law on marijuana and essentially they're putting the, we're, we are, including myself, are in the process of putting medical marijuana stores out of business because they have to be rolled over and licensed as recreational marijuana stores.

And that's creating, certainly among those stores, some pushback, but that needed to be done. The, we can't have two systems, one that's legal, one that's illegal, one that collects, has taxes collected on the sales, one that doesn't. So we're in the process of doing that right now. But as far as the citizens, at least in King County, it's a ho-hum. There's been really no adverse effects that I've seen whatsoever, and certainly not a whole lot of controversy.

DEAN BECKER: All right. Well, sheriff, one other good news that came forward this past week. There was a memo from the United Nations that was leaked, called for decriminalizing drug use and possession, but that, it was immediately rescinded, and, you know, quashed. But it, that's just another sign that at nearly every level of government and oversight, people are taking another look at this prohibition. Are they not?

JOHN URQUHART: Oh, I think there's no question about that, Dean. I think people are, around the world, not just here. I mean, I've had, based on my outspokenness I've had meetings with police officers and public health people from France, from Canada, from Germany, it's really quite amazing to me about the people that have come to my door to want to talk about it, and look at what's going on here. This is a trend, at least a discussion. If not a trend, it's a discussion, all around the world. What are we going to do? Because everybody faces the same problem to one extent or another that we do. What do we do about this scourge of drugs, how do we handle the problem that we have with drugs? And clearly incarceration hasn't worked, and we need to look at something else, and we need to treat drugs for what they really are, which is a public health problem.

DEAN BECKER: It's time to play Name That Drug By Its Side Effects! Clammy skin, pinpoint pupils, shallow or absent breathing, dizziness, sedation, loss of consciousness, nausea, vomiting, weak or absent pulse, heart failure, death, thousands of deaths. Time's up! Designed to sedate adult elephants, this drug is 100 times more deadly than Fentanyl, ten thousand times deadlier than morphine. A portion smaller than a grain of salt can be fatal. The drug lord's dream fulfilled: Carfentanyl.

The following comes to us courtesy of NBC Nine out of Denver.

KYLE CLARK: Do Colorado a favor, would you? Tell your out of state friends that the new marijuana social use ordinance does not allow people to just light up anywhere anytime. Refer your reefer friends to Politics Guy Brandon Rittiman, who can explain the new ordinance in 60 seconds.

BRANDON RITTIMAN: First, Denver won't have hash bars. Not like the ones in Amsterdam. Under Colorado state law it's illegal to allow people to use pot at a pot shop. In theory, you could open a social use business right next door to a pot shop, but they'd have to be separate.

Aside from that, there aren't many restrictions on what kind of business can apply for a marijuana area. You might see pot areas in bars, coffee shops, restaurants, maybe even a book store for deep reading. If the business is going to allow smoking pot, that needs to be out of sight. The law says outdoor smoking at street level can't be visible from sidewalks or streets, or anyplace kids group together.

It's unlikely you'll see a business that allows smoking pot indoors. A cigar bar is about the only kind of business that could even try. But vaping and eating edibles could be allowed indoors. Businesses need to partner with one of roughly 200 official neighborhood organizations in Denver to apply for a license. They can agree on ground rules about hours, alcohol, and more, which means the rules might be a little different at each social pot place that opens.

For Next, I'm Brandon Rittiman.

KYLE CLARK: We need a reggae version of the Next theme music. Cody, can we do that? We can do that? Yeah, all right. New law also allows for temporary permits for events, takes effect early next year, expires at the end of 2020. This is a pilot. The city could pass its own plan to allow it to continue.

DEAN BECKER: The truth of the matter is that marijuana is not a threat, it is not the reefer madness that we heard for the last hundred years, and here to talk about it, to fill us in more, is Doctor Robert Melamede. Hello, sir.

ROBERT MELAMEDE, PhD: Hey there, Dean. How are you, my friend?

DEAN BECKER: I'm good. Now, Doctor Bob, I want to focus today on the fact that it has been a legacy of hysteria and delusions that brought us to this point. Am I right?

ROBERT MELAMEDE: Absolutely. But the tragedy is that it's the same underlying cause that got us to this point of insanity that is still out there in the form of our politicians and so-called leadership. And I don't mean that simply in America. If you look at the international situation, it should be obvious to any person that the people involved in international relationships have failed, as well as the government looking internally to control things like marijuana, is an absolute absurdity. The whole drug war itself is responsible for the bulk of crime that exists. So, these people are doing all the wrong things consistently. We should expect the wrong things from them, and it's our fault for allowing them to remain in their positions of power. And I think what we're starting to see now is the rejection of that, you know, that we're not going to let these morons continue to screw up the world and our communities and our families and our environment, driven by their greed and their absurdity.

DEAN BECKER: And, I've got to say that, you know, as much as the politicians, the officials in charge, are responsible, you also have the talking heads that they bring on the media to talk about the need for incremental change, to talk about nuancing it, that they don't want to tempt our children with legal marijuana. It's just turned on its head, isn't it?

ROBERT MELAMEDE: Well, that's because these are the blips, these are the backward looking cannabis deficient people who cannot tolerate change, and they're the ones who are in need of controlling others, because of their cannabinoid deficiency. They're attempting to find peace and quiet within themselves, but they can only do that if they don't have any unknowns in their future. So they try to control their future so they're not stressed by the unknowns, but instead they stress themselves and everyone else because it's an absurd thought, that you can, you know, control the future through more and more rules rather than having an evolutionary development of consciousness and kindness.

DEAN BECKER: Well, and let's talk about that. We've talked about it in the past, but we have the flips, and we have the blips, and let's talk about those two sides of that equation.

ROBERT MELAMEDE: Yes. Well, let's explain it from the beginning again here. Why do we have an endocannabinoid system? Because it protects us, and it protects us from stress. And stress biochemically is in the form of free radicals. And stress in our minds involves biochemical pathways that promote inflammation, which is the consequence of free radicals. So, what we want to, you're going to naturally have people who have more or less cannabinoid activity, and who can therefore better or not tolerate stress. And what I'm saying is that all change, no matter if it's good or bad, from a biochemical point of view, is stress, because the system has to adjust to the new situation.

So, the people who can adjust are more mellow naturally, because they're not worried about the unknown. Their nature is to be optimistic, because they basically make enough pot. Whereas the other people, who don't make enough pot, they're too worried about what might happen to even be present in the present, because they're worried about the future all of the time, and how they can protect themselves from all of the onslaughts that await them. You know, is the glass half full or half empty.

What we need to be able to do is to understand how the current situation became as dysfunctional as it really is, as evidenced by international relationships and crime and, you know, etc. etc., what can be done about it.

So, what I'm suggesting is that, once you reach a certain level of development, of functional humane development, then it becomes more obvious what's right and wrong, and what's positive and what's negative, and you want to kind of evolve into a collaborative, cooperative future. So I think that that's the point that we've reached right now, that has gotten us a lot of wonderful things, in terms of our knowledge, in terms of our iPhones etc. Those are great tools, we're able manipulate our environment and create things, to learn and discover more, which essentially, from my perspective, is to move us further from equilibrium, which is naturally healthier.

So, cannabis helps us with the discovery and the unfolding, and on the other hand, everything has to be balanced, so you need to have the people who, you know, implement and who drive things in a linear fashion.

All I'm saying is that the step point of the balance is no longer appropriate. That, whereas in the past, strong leadership with somewhat limited diversity was appropriate to accomplish things, we've now accomplished so many things that we're actually destroying our environment and therefore the ability to sustain ourselves and our continued development. So what we need to do is change the fundamental paradigm, and when you look around and you see the international relationships and how screwed they are, the absurdity of so many of our laws, cannabis being the prime example.

I mean, just imagine these incompetent fools have outlawed the very essence of our life, because that's what our cannabinoid system is. And how, from the point of view of evolution, god, whatever you want to call it, that there's been a continued increase in cannabinoid activity. Why would we expect that not to continue? So basically we have governments that are fighting, not only the will of the people, but fighting mother nature.

So, we have a fundamental problem here that needs to be fixed. And I think that the American public and people all around the world are waking up to this problem, and that's why we're seeing Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as, you know, the leaders of the popular movement, so to speak, from the two different sides of right and left, because both of those guys are not part of the existing government.

But at least Bernie, unlike Trump, is much more of a cannabinoid endowed individual, although Trump may be, in his own right, as well, even though he's a bit of an egotistical wacko, at least he breaks paradigms, which is always good. He's not just following the trail. You know, the railroad tracks that people just can't seem to get off. We're living for a hopeful future here, and the cannabis revolution and awakening is spreading around the world, and we just have to dump all the failed politicians who've been running the world.

DEAN BECKER: Doctor Bob, I've witnessed officials at every level within the past month or two, from the UN, with their report that they immediately retracted, to our president, to many of the politicians you're talking about, Trump and Sanders, and government officials at the state level, local level, are all hiding from this truth, because they have spoken in the past, outrageously lying about cannabis, and it's so tough for them to now change their perspective, to admit they were wrong. Your thoughts, there.

ROBERT MELAMEDE: Well, that's an intrinsic property of blips. You see, that's one of, that's what defines cannabinoid deficiency. You can't forget wrong information, so you're able to lay down information when it's new, but because you're laying it down too strongly because you don't have enough cannabinoid activity, because it's involved in the whole learning process there, rather than having plasticity in being able to rewrite, you know, delete and rewrite. You can't believe what you can't rewrite.

So people get stuck with their original thoughts and new information doesn't supplant this. That's the essence of cannabinoid deficiency, being stuck with old information and not being able to relearn. You can't teach an old dog new tricks because he's not stoned anymore.

DEAN BECKER: Well, I think about the situation, Colorado, I'm hearing that it's cut down on traffic deaths and overdose, and children's access and all kinds of things, but we still have politicians that don't investigate, that have no actual knowledge, who say it's increasing traffic deaths and children's access.

ROBERT MELAMEDE: Well, that's what we should expect from the backward looking people, because that's what they were told 50 years ago, and they can't replace the information with new information. That's the whole point. We have to really start with the ground up, which really means the youth, because the youth naturally has more cannabinoid activity anyway, they're naturally growing and changing and absorbing newness, that's how they're living.

And once they get to be adults and they start to decline back to equilibrium, aging, and death, then, what we need to be able to do is change that decline and the way you do that is by embracing the future, by embracing newness, by doing all the things that move us further from equilibrium, that intrinsically involves cannabinoid activity, otherwise you damage yourself with inflammation.

DEAN BECKER: Folks, once again we're speaking with Dr. Robert Melamede. He has a PhD in molecular biology and biochemistry from the City University of New York. You know, Doctor Bob, there are those entrepreneurs that try to get a law to control the distribution there in Ohio. And I want to talk about the fact that in other states, Colorado, California, elsewhere, there are many millionaires that are controlling that distribution as well. What do we do with that situation? Does the, do we need to just let farmers, average farmers in the neighborhood take care of this? What's the future of that?

ROBERT MELAMEDE: Well, you know, part of the problem again is, because of all the government regulations, it requires people who are able to adhere to all of those regulations, both on a practical level in terms of dealing with all the bureaucratic horse****, as well as, in terms of the monetary requirements that are imposed on them because of all of this. So, some regulation is good, I mean we want people selling stuff that's healthy and analyzed, that doesn't have pesticides. That all makes a lot of sense. But everything else for the most part is crap, you know? I mean, just the same way we treat our food supply, is how we should be treating cannabis. You know? And when's the last time you had your head of lettuce analyzed?

DEAN BECKER: Right. Well, yeah. It is over-controlled, over, well, hysteria-ized, I don't know the word there. It's --

ROBERT MELAMEDE: Well, it's the blips, their nature is fear. So they're trying to control all of these possible negative scenarios that they invent in their paranoid frame.

DEAN BECKER: All right, folks, there you have it. A very forward looking individual, Doctor Robert Melamede.

Thanks for being with us on this Cultural Baggage. We'll have a live show coming up real soon. I hope that in the next week or two we'll also interview Doctor David Bearman, who has a new book out that underscores what Doctor Melamede has said. And as always, I remind you, because of prohibition, you don't know what's in that bag. Please be careful.