01/01/12 Siobahn Reynolds

Program
Cultural Baggage Radio Show

DTN 10 Years: Siobahn Reynolds, Ethan Nadelmann, Dr. Geoffrey Guy, Rep. Dan Burton, Editorial, Tommy Chong, Dr. Donald Tashkin & Atty Tony Serra

Audio file

Transcript

Cultural Baggage / January 1, 2012

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DEAN BECKER: Welcome to Cultural Baggage. The one hour Pacifica Radio program about the Drug War, the War on Terror, the theft of human rights and the government corporate media collusion that permits it.

Today we are privileged to have as our guest Mr. Kevin Zeese, president of Common Sense for Drug Policy out of Washington D.C. Kevin, welcome.

KEVIN ZEESE: Thanks for having me on.

DEAN BECKER: Kevin, I know you’re here in town to attend the local meeting of the Drug Policy Forum. What can you tell us? How does it look on the national scale? Are we making progress?

KEVIN ZEESE: Yeah, it’s always hard to tell if you’re making progress or not because when we make progress the other side stiffens their back and if you’ve worked in this as long as I have you can definitely see the progress we’re making. We’re winning votes across the country. We won 14 voter initiatives in over a dozen states on everything from medical marijuana to treatment instead of prison to marijuana decriminalization in Oregon to changing the forfeiture laws so police can’t seize property so easily. So we’re making progress on that front.

Polls nationally show that the public believes the Drug War is not going to win, not winning and never will win. If you look at the people who think we can wind the War on Drugs it’s about the same percentage of those who think Elvis Presley is still alive – about 15%. Sometimes I think it’s the same people.

So the public knows it’s not working.

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DEAN BECKER: And there you have it – the opening moment of the first Cultural Baggage program to be broadcast over the airwaves. About 8 months before I had been given a short segment in the middle of Ray Hill’s Prison Show on KPFT, the Houston Pacifica outlet. The Queer Show and Reach Out in the Darkness each gave me time for a segment. I got a couple one hour open journals segments if you know what I’m talking about. And then Hitaji Azziz and Earth 101 gave me a few more hours on the radio.

But this June 7th recording of the first Cultural Baggage is the first Drug Truth archive. And what was I thinking?! Well I was thinking about the cops or the cartels kicking in the front door. I was wondering, “Why am I on the radio?! Why are they letting me on the radio?!”

But I kept at it. Within a couple weeks we started picking up other broadcast affiliates so I guess I was doing something right even if the audio was a piece of crap in the beginning and it is getting better.

Well I billed this as the “Best of the Past Ten Years” and that’s not really true. There’s no way I can do that in an hour. We’re just going to give you some of the best. We’re going to start pretty much slap-dab in the middle with an August 12th, 2005 interview I conducted with Siobahn Reynolds, the founder of the Pain Relief Network who died last week in a plane crash. Siobahn Reynolds…

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SIOBAHN REYNOLDS: We are New York City-based although we say generally we’re web-based because we’re all over the country. I happen to live and have my offices in New York but we work all over the United States. We are a network of pain patients and physicians, lawyers, policy people all working toward a day when patients in pain are treated with the same level of dignity and autonomy and respect and decency that we expect of the treatment of other people with severe illness.

DEAN BECKER: Now on a daily basis we see the stories of how the DEA or local law enforcement officials go after people for taking pain medications and they go after the doctors and the pharmacists now for prescribing those now. Talk about just the general situation.

SIOBAHN REYNOLDS: The situation is bad. What happen was in the late 90s medicine moved forward not realizing that there was a federal push against the adequate treatment of pain in the United States. So the doctors went ahead and started saying, “You know everybody should get their pain treated.”

And the medical boards are the people who actually run the regulation of medicine. That’s what the constitution says so we can go ahead and do that. We’ll just change the way things are going. We’ll make it less punitive and we’ll make sure the doctors document what they’re doing and all that but we will insist that doctors who call themselves physicians treat pain. That that’s a normal part of medical practice.

Well, what happened, particularly after 9/11, the federal government started cracking down on physicians that actually did that. The FDA had called for pain treatment and many people…Health and Human Services. So the doctors were doing it and when they were doing it they became victims of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

They would send in decoys, fake patients. They would go through people’s pharmacy records and find any vulnerable people on there, ex-con or something like that and put them up against a bunch of years of time and suggest that if they would simply turn and testify against their physician then they would find themselves without any more legal problems.

This sort of snitch-driven prosecution which everyone’s familiar with in terms of in the regular drug war was transferred over to medical practice. We had seen an absolute health catastrophe that has resulted from this. It’s a travesty but it’s inevitability when, as a society, we put the idea that we should be “drug free” ahead of any notions of decency or civility. So that’s what we get.

DEAN BECKER: Now I know as part of your work you are involved with and you track the situations where the DEA busts these pain doctors for working with legitimate patients. Tell us about some of those.

SIOBAHN REYNOLDS: I’ve worked with many of the prosecutions across the United States and all of the very high profile ones including Dr. Herwitz, the case of comprehensive care in South Carolina which was actually the DEA’s flagship prosecution in their campaign. Also Dr. Roche in Pennsylvania, Dr. Hasmen in Arizona…we’ve got doctors all over the United States whose had this happen to them.

I’ve watched the pattern. I’ve watched doctors who were treating pain in good faith suddenly set upon by so many different branches of the federal government that it’s mind boggling. If you take a look at the press release that was released after Dr. Herwitz’s sentencing the DEA proudly announces something like 7 different federal agencies were involved in that prosecution including the Office of Inspector General on the Pentagon.

So to say that they’re piling on is an understatement. They charge these doctors with hundreds and hundreds of crimes. They take each prescription and each doctor-patient exchange as an opportunity to charge the doctor with 3 or 4 different kinds of crimes like money laundering or tax evasion or controlled substances violations or Medicare/Medicaid fraud. You name it.

Basically what they have done is make so that nobody in their right mind would write a prescription for controlled substances at this point.

DEAN BECKER: What is that going to mean for the Baby Boomers as they age? What does that mean to each of us who might be in pain?

SIOBAHN REYNOLDS: Aging…it’s funny people bring that up. I’m more worried about getting hit by a car today. If you get hit by a car today and you get taken to a hospital and you’re lucky enough to live and they manage to fix you up but not to where you are completely out of pain…you might think that what the medical profession would do would be to at least paliate your situation, right?! They would at least do the best they could so you could go back to work, take care of your family, that sort of thing.

But what you would find, once it was too late, once you were in this terribly vulnerable spot – having not worked for several months – you would find that you weren’t going to be allowed to go back to work. That you weren’t going to be allowed to recover. That you were going to slowly and systematically die. That you were going to quit being able to sleep because you’re in so much pain. You would start gaining weight. Your organs would start depleting all the adrenalin that they provide that keeps you alive when you’re in a dire situation. And you basically would die of panic which is what people are doing all over the United States right now.

They go to doctors and they ask them for help and can’t they please treat their pain and the doctors simply can’t listen to them. The doctors don’t listen to them. You hear all kinds of doctors saying, “Well I don’t want to treat you because I’m afraid you’ll become addicted.”

That’s kind of code that the doctors are afraid that they might go to jail.

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DEAN BECKER: Sadly, Siobahn Reynolds passed away last week in a plane crash and her Pain Relief Network was destroyed years ago by machinations of pharmaceutical houses and their aids in the federal government.

Now we’re going to reach back to September 16th of 2003.

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DEAN BECKER: Today the Drug Policy Alliance releases a report that summarizes the changes that voters and legislatures have taken in regard to drug policy reform. This is the Executive Chairman of the Drug Policy Alliance, Ethan Nadelmann.

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ETHAN NADELMANN: You know there’s a tendency for people to focus on congress and if congress isn’t doing something to think that nothing is happening but this report that we’re releasing this week demonstrates that the majority of the states have actually been passing various aspects of drug policy reform legislation since the mid-1990s and over 150 bills have become law around the country on subjects ranging from medical marijuana to treatment instead of incarceration to repealing mandatory-minimums to improving access to clean needles to stop AIDS to a whole range of other things.

Congress is not going to move on this stuff. We’re not going to see a national transformation in Washington until we see the transformation happening first in the states. If you want to base drug policy based upon science, concerns for health, human rights, constitution – what have you – there’s no way you’re going to be able to justify what congress and even what most of the states have been doing.

Look at what happened in Texas. A Republican Governor signed a bill backed by people in both parties to provide treatment instead of incarceration for non-violent drug offenders. Very much like what passed in California as Prop 36 in 2000.

DEAN BECKER: Thank you, Ethan. When you stop and think about it, the progress is really astounding. But the “shaman” who run the HHS and the DEA say that marijuana is a dangerous drug.

Today we’ll learn about a new, exciting cannabis product called Sativex. It’s made by GW Pharmaceuticals out of Great Britain and it’s going to be distributed by Bayer Pharmaceuticals.

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DEAN BECKER: Now remember we’re still listening to September 16th of 2003, OK?

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DEAN BECKER: And our guest for the evening is the Executive Chairman of GW Pharmaceuticals in the UK.

GEOFFREY GUY: I’m Dr. Geoffrey Guy. I’m a pharmaceutical physician which means I spent about 23 years in the pharmaceutical industry developing drugs. I founded GW Pharmaceuticals at the end of 1997. I founded the company really in response to a debate that was beginning to become more pressing in the UK during 1997 and that was mainly that a number of patients were finding themselves in front of judges in court having used cannabis, marijuana for certain debilitating conditions, mainly Multiple Schlerosis, spinal cord injury, and other neurological conditions.

But the courts weren’t taking pity on them and this presented a quandary to the British government and certainly the civil servants of the Home Office because the law was being broken [inaudible] And therefor the solution was sought to find a way in which the patients could be treated with a legal prescription pharmaceutical and I led that program and developed the plan which was then accepted by the UK authorities and the UK government.

DEAN BECKER: I understand that you have now developed a couple of products under the brand name Sativex.

GEOFFREY GUY: Sativex is one particular product. It is a cannabis-based extract which is made from the extract of two cannabis plants. The plants have been bred specifically to exhibit one or other of the cannabinoids in abundance.

One plant has very high levels of THC and the other plant exhibits very high levels of CBD which is cannabidiol. We make pharmaceutical-grade extracts from each of these plants and then we blend them in certain ratios.

In the case of Sativex the ratio is approximately 50-50 so that we have equal quantity of THC and CBD in the material. The reason we did this is this very much mimics the sort of cannabis that is found in Europe derived from Northern Africa, for example, when the CBD content is typically much higher than the cannabis that would be found in the U.S.

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DEAN BECKER: Alright, now, from December of 2002, courtesy of CNN ( I think it was) this is U.S. congressman Dan Burton. He was then head of the house Government Reform and Oversight Committee. Listen to this.

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DAN BURTON: I want to tell you something. I have been in probably 100, 150 hearings like this at various times in my political career and the story is always the same. This goes all the way back to the 60s – 35-40 years ago – but there’s no end to it.

Over 70% of all crime is drug-related and you’ve eluded to that today. We saw on television recently where Pablo Esqobar was gunned down and everybody applauded and said, “That’s the end of the Medellian cartel.” But that wasn’t the end. There’s still a cartel down there. There still all over the place.

When you kill one – there’s 10 or 20 or 50 waiting to take his place. There’s always going to be another person in line to take his place and make that money.

And we going to drug eradication, and we going to rehabilitation and we going to education and we do all these things and the drug problem continues to increase and it continues to cost us not billions but trillions of dollars – TRILLIONS!

And we continue to build more and more prisons. And we put more and more people in jail and we know that the crimes that they are committing are related most of the time to drugs.

So I have one question I’d like to ask all of you and I think this is a question that needs to be asked. What would happen if there was no profit in drugs? If they couldn’t make any money out of selling drugs, what would happen?

We’ve been fighting this fight for 30 to 40 years and the problem never goes away. New generations – younger and younger people – get hooked on drugs. Kids in grade schools are getting hooked on drugs. Their lives are ruined. They’re going to jail. They’re becoming prostitutes and drug pushers because they have to make money to feed their habit.

And the problem increases and increases and increases and nobody ever asks this question and I’m not inferring anything because I hate drugs but the question needs to be addressed at some point.

What would happen if they don’t make any money out of it?

[chuckles] Well I don’t think that the people in Colombia would be planting coca if they couldn’t make any money. I don’t think they’d be refining coca and heroin in Colombia if they couldn’t make any money. I don’t think that Al Capone would have been the menace to society that he was if he couldn’t sell alcohol on the black market. And he did and we had a horrible crime problem.

Now the people who are producing drugs over in SouthEast Asia and SouthWest Asia and in Colombia and every place else – they don’t do it because they like to do it. They do it because they are making money.

The problem, in my opinion, is at some point we have to look at the overall picture.

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DEAN BECKER: Again, that was from December 2002. That was Congressman Dan Burton, the head of the house Government Reform and Oversight Committee. Damn, he nailed it. I got to get him to join LEAP.

Just to show you my attitude is nothing new - here’s another segment form December 2002.

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GUEST: OK, so it’s true.

DEAN BECKER: What’s true?

GUEST: Oil money funds terrorism.

DEAN BECKER: It is true.

GUEST: OK.

DEAN BECKER: OK?!

GUEST: Look, let’s say I buy some oil.

DEAN BECKER: Let’s say.

GUEST: Hypothetical. So how much of my money actually makes it into the bad guys hand? A couple of bucks.

DEAN BECKER: A few bucks.

GUEST: That’s it. A few bucks. It’s peanuts.

DEAN BECKER: So what you’re saying is it’s alright to support terrorism a little bit.

GUEST: Did I say that?!

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DEAN BECKER: These ads are in direct response to the ads the DEA has been running on the networks of late. As if they’re reasoning was not faulty before – they are now reaching new highs and lows.

My friend Pat of the New York Times Drug Policy Forum summed it up pretty good. Here’s a quote:

“When you support the Drug War prohibition economic embargo policy – you support terrorism. It’s a fact. The Drug War prohibition creates and facilitates the international narco-black market. It’s a fact. The Drug War mandated black market gives license to gangsters to buy narcotics from terrorists and then sell those drugs to our children. It’s a fact.

When you support the Drug War – you support terrorism. It’s a fact.

Normally I’d say, “Let’s lighten it up with some Tommy Chong.” But that’s not how this discussion goes. From September 2nd, 2005…

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TOMMY CHONG: When they put me in jail for that bogus bong bust instead of shutting me up – they kind of opened me up. Now I have a duty to talk about what’s going on and I love it.

DEAN BECKER: I think much of what they do in prosecuting this drug war turns out to do quite the opposite of what they intended, does it not?

TOMMY CHONG: It’s like the privatizing of the prisons. Then the Drug War, any kind of war alots billions of dollars of budget …in other words, a lot of people are making money off the Drug War simply because they’re getting paid…they’re like fireman throwing gasoline on a forest fire. They got a job. They get paid for it and they get the benefit of busting millions of innocent people for a harmless substance.

So, it really is a huge scam. Eventually American people will…if enough of us stop smoking long enough to realize what’s going on – something might get done.

DEAN BECKER: I think there was this attempt when they busted all the glass blowers a few years back to undercut the financial infrastructure of reform of magazines like High Times and so forth where many of those firms advertised.

TOMMY CHONG: Well, yeah. What they did is they snuck all these stupid sort of sneaky paraphernalia laws in. First of all, the pot laws are illegal to begin with. There just out and out racist and illegal laws and that’s why people ignore them.

You look at the pot itself. It’s more beneficial than it is harmful. In fact, they’ve studied it up and down trying to find something wrong and all they keep coming up with is its benefits. It helps MS. It helps glaucoma. It helps the cancer people.

So what they’ve really come up with is this beautiful way of incarcerating peaceful, friendly people into jails so you don’t have violent jails. You just got them filled with really good people that help them run their jails and then they get to take away all our property to boot and it’s a perfect system for these guys, you know?!

And if they’re the least bit crooked like they are, like the DEA…there’s so many forfeitures that never go reported and these people…for every drug bust that you read in the paper – there’s millions of dollars that just get lost into the pockets of these Drug Enforcement agents. So they’re making so much money they can’t afford the truth to come out because that’s the way it works.

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DEAN BECKER: Now, from March of 2008 we have a little jingle from us. You get a chance to “Name that drug.” And we have an interview with a U.S. government NIDA scientist. All from March, 2008.

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[harmonica music]

The DEA’s the joker,
The FDA’s the joke.
The Joke is on the U.S.A.
So why not take a poke.

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(Game show music)

DEAN BECKER: It’s time to play: Name That Drug by Its Side Effects.

Loss of personal freedom, family and possessions. Ineligible for government funding, education, licensing, housing or employment. Loss of aggressive mind set in a dangerous world. This drug’s peaceful, easy feeling can be habit forming.

(((gong)))

Time's up! The answer: Doobie, jimmy, joint, reefer, spliff, jibber, jay, biffa, jazz, blunt, steege, greener, cracker, hogger, bone, carrot, maryjane, marijuana, cannabis sativa.

Made by God. Prohibited by man.

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DEAN BECKER: Next we hear from Dr. Donald Tashkin, the UCLA lung specialist and government scientist funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Here’s his take regarding tobacco as opposed to medical cannabis.

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DONALD TASHKIN: When you are at risk of developing COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease…this is manifested by an accelerated rate of loss of lung function over time as you grow older. We fail to find a similar relationship with marijuana. That was one finding.

We are also interested in investigating the possibility that marijuana smoking might lead to lung cancer. Lung cancer is largely attributed to tobacco smoking and since marijuana and tobacco share similar ingredients including a number of carcinogens, it’s a reasonable hypothesis that smoking marijuana, at least heavily over a long period of time, could get predisposed to getting lung cancer - maybe not to the same extent as tobacco but to a greater extent than if you didn’t smoke any marijuana or tobacco at all.

So we did a very large study which we call a case-control study. In that study we identified 600 patients who were diagnosed with lung cancer and an additional 600 patients or so who were diagnosed with neck cancer like throat cancer, lip cancer, tongue cancer and over 1000 control subjects who did not have cancer.

Then we administered a detailed questionnaire to all these subjects including questions about marijuana use, tobacco use, family history of cancer and other punitive risk factors that could predispose to cancer. The results were entirely negative - if anything the risk for developing lung cancer was slightly less in relation to marijuana than no marijuana, although not statistically significantly so.

Despite the fact that the study was designed as well as we could possibly design it and we included a large number of subject over 100 of whom smoked marijuana heavily both among the cases in the controls, I think we can say with some confidence that there just is no evidence of an association between marijuana use and lung cancer.

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DEAN BECKER: Again, that was from March 2008. Our regular listeners know that I’m a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a former cop who believes the whole of the Drug War is an abomination before God. I work for medical marijuana, regulation of marijuana, legal marijuana but unlike most reformers I don’t stop when people talk about the word legalize.

Here to talk more about marijuana and the stupidity of this Drug War is Tony Serra, the infamous San Francisco attorney. This is from April 2002.

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TONY SERRA: Because the War on Drugs, because our war on marijuana our judicial system is once again tainted by informants at every level. We have more nomenclature for informants than any country in the history of law.

We’ve got material informants pursuing informants. We’ve got information resources. We’ve got participatory informants. We’ve got cooperative defendants and it goes on and on and we’ve developed a whole lexicon of legal principles that apply to regulation and use of informants but the bottom line, my friends, is that there is no truth seeking process that can ever rely on the word of an informant.

Truth will never be revealed …The manifestation of a spy society is a Orwellian prediction is a totalitarian state…manifestation

The War on Drugs has brought this ugly scar onto the face of the judicial process. It is called the use of informants not revealed, not credible, not corroborated and as we speak they are being debriefed all over this country and there will be the drug charges that emanate from frequently from false statements and, in a sense, because of the draconian sentencing and the way that they torture people they arrest psychologically by saying, “You’re going 20 to life and the only way you’re going to get a reduction is to put on this wire, go to the grand jury, testify against your associates.”

It’s a very ugly thing we have in this informant system. We have no balance. We're out of control. Our judicial system is rendered in terms of prosecution…no one wants to be convicted by and unspeaking, no confrontation, silent witness. Once again the beautiful flower has been destroyed.

We swim in a sea of snitches nowadays!
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DEAN BECKER: A question for you, my friends, what will you tell your grandkids you did to help stop America stop slide into the abyss of fear?! Call me curious.

Again that was from 2002. There will be more from this week’s Century of Lies. Got to ask you once again – what will you do to end the madness of drug war?

This is Dean Becker. This is Cultural Baggage on the Drug Truth Network.