"Columbia police!" "Search warrant!" "Columbia police!" "Search warrant!" "Kick it open!" "Get to the door!" "Go, go, go!" "Get to the door!" "Police Department!" "Don't move!" "Police Department!" "Don't move!" "Police Department!" "Don't move!" "O.S. Bang." "Police Department!" "Don't move!" "Move past us!" "Move past!" "Come on, guys, you're fine." "You're fine." "Don't move!" "Do you understand?" "Put your hands behind your back!" "Do it now!" "Behind your back!" "Just shoot me!" "Did you shoot my dog?" "Did you shoot my fucking dog?" "Oh my God!" "What the fuck did you do that for?" "If you cannot afford to hire a lawyer, one will be appointed to represent you and answer any questions you wish." "You can decide at anytime to exercise these rights, not to answer any questions or make any statements." "Do you understand?" "Do you understand?" "We'll take that as a yes." "¶" "We can't live in a society which is both free and drug-free." "You can't have 'em both." "The whole process of moving from one state of mind being persuaded to another by seeing the truth is one of actually feeling an identification that resonates and has a feeling of wholeness and coherence to it." "It makes chaos orderly." "It's the mindset that got us here and the journey that we've taken." "Fifty years of criminalization." "It came out of the whole idea that we don't have to care for each other anymore." "It's every man for himself." "We weren't always like that!" "The question is, can we go back to caring about each other?" "What are the nuances that define a culture?" "Is it the way we police ourselves?" "The way we take care of our sick?" "How we govern?" "The way we share information?" "77 years ago, marijuana became prohibited in the United States." "By 1961, its criminalization reached global status." "Today, we find the topic of marijuana's legality penetrating all forms of media and every level of politics." "It is now the polarizing topic in an endless display of public debates." "The goal?" "To answer the question that refuses to die:" "Should marijuana be legalized?" "But, ever so slowly, a second question is starting to appear a question that seeks an answer to whether marijuana prohibition itself has gained characteristics that reveal a greater truth about ourselves and the way our society operates." "Is this a bad idea?" "Is this a downward spiral of our culture?" "A new study reveals that smoking marijuana could increase your risk for testicular cancer." "So the research doesn't bother you that smoking pot can cause man boobs?" "Pot just makes you dumb." "What's to keep somebody from gettin' all potted-up on weed and then gittin' behind the wheel?" ""Marijuana leads to breast development in males,"." "Like all of these myths, front page story!" "Those things have been coming along one, after another." "I should be impotent when I smoke marijuana." "Well I'm not!" "The thought process behind demonizing something like marijuana is completely out of ignorance." "Where's the bodies?" "Where's the numbers?" "Is there one?" "Because I have heard from experts whose judgment" "I respect that they don't know of any." "The only way marijuana can kill you is if you take 25lbs of it and you throw it out of a CIA drug plane and it hits you in the fuckin' head." "That's how you die from marijuana." "There's that famous 911 call where those cops stole pot from some kids, and then turned it into pot brownies, and then ate the brownies and freaked the fuck out and called the cops on themselves." "It's beautiful 'cause they thought they were dying, time is going by really slow, they're fine." "But everyone can agree anti- marijuana ads in this country have gotten fuckin' ridiculous." "Like a girl will be melted on the couch with no bones and she's like, 'I smoked pot and now I don't have bones.'" "I associated a lot of these people that were smokin' pot with poorly motivated people who were failures." "I had a prejudiced perception of what marijuana actually did to a human being." "Among the perceived harms of marijuana, two seem to arise on a daily basis more than any others." "Two seem to be the main reasons given for why marijuana must be kept from the public." "The first:" "There's the famous 'just one spliff and you will go mental.'" "The more you mess with cannabis, the more it can mess with your mind." "My first seven years as a researcher were devoted to schizophrenia." "I can tell you, that is ridiculous." "We looked at the evidence-I think we must have gone through about 2,000 papers and it doesn't cause schizophrenia." "Maybe there are some individuals with schizophrenia in which the illness is brought on perhaps a little earlier because they smoked cannabis." "There often is what's called a precipitating event." "A precipitating event is something like an important loss of a person, a severe car accident..." "It certainly can be exacerbated by a number of drugs." "A bad alcohol trip can serve as a precipitating event, too." "The fact is schizophrenia has a prevalence of about 1%..." "the world around." "Cannabis use..." "let's start with the 60s, its gone up like that." "So!" "You've introduced this new thing:" "If it's schizophrenogenic we should see a significant uptick in schizophrenia." "We should see more people with schizophrenia." "Schizophrenia has stayed just like that." "In all of the epidemiologic studies that I'm aware of, there is no uptick." "So if marijuana causes schizophrenia it was introduced now we should have more schizophrenia." "We don't see that." "We would certainly see some little rise in that given the numbers of people who use this." "You really do need to strip this back and address this from a neutral platform to understand that anything to do with mental health is such a tenuous issue built upon different contributing factors and by applying it all to cannabis" "you are possibly doing more harm because you are negating all these other factors that certainly play a part." "For a lot of people, the impact of life itself is overwhelming so they'll seek out something to distract them whether it's drinkin' cough syrup or takin' naps or jerking off or gambling." "There's a lot of things that people do to distract them from the angst of being alive." "It might not be for you, it might make you paranoid;" "You might have smoked some bad weed once and thought you were having a heart attack." "Cannabis is not for everybody." "Nobody should be forced to use it." "There's a lot of reasons why marijuana might not be for you." "But you shouldn't tell me that it's not right for me." "The most frequently-cited perceived harm associated with marijuana today is addiction." "I mean, you do know it's addictive highly addictive-right?" "Because I believe it's addictive and it leads to more serious drugs..." "But in order to understand addiction in relation to marijuana one must first have an understanding of the psychology behind addiction in the first place." "It's interesting to see, or to ask, 'Who becomes addicted?" "'" "People can have sex without being addicted to it, they can go shopping, but some people become severely addicted to all these pursuits." "Is a pack of cards addictive?" "Well, no." "Or yes." "Depending on the individual." "So, it's the same process no matter what the addiction is." "The only difference is really is that the substance addict is getting the dopamine from an outside substance, where the behaviour addict is having it triggered from the particular behaviour." "If I speak to a group of 100 people or 1000 people and I ask how many of you have addiction issues to any substance?" "A number of people put their hands up, and I say." "'What did it do for you?" "Not 'what was bad about it' we already know that, but what did it do for you?" "What was positive in your experience with it?" "Well, 'it gave me a sense of peace;" "It gave me pain relief." "It made me feel more connected... it made me more confident." "I could speak now and interact with people." "In other words, the addict is just after wanting to be a normal human being and the real question is, what keeps them from having those qualities in their lives and what happened to them?" "And so the addiction should be seen, not as the problem although it is a problem, but it's not the problem." "It's the addict's attempt to solve the problem in the first place." "The Adverse Childhood Experiences studies done in California... looked at conditions such as physical, sexual, emotional abuse in the child's life the loss of a parent to death or a rancorous divorce or a parent being jailed or a mental illness in the parent" "or an addiction of the parent, or violence in the family and for each of these adverse childhood experiences, the risk of addiction goes up exponentially." "By the time a male child had 6 of these adverse experiences his risk of having become a substance-dependent injection-using addict is 4600% greater than that of a male child with no such experiences." "Why is that?" "Its because that trauma shapes their brain in such ways as to make the addictive substances more appealing to the individual." "That trauma also gives that person the pain that they will try to then escape from or soothe through the addictive behaviors." "It's the social and emotional environment that shapes the actual biology of the brain so if you want to understand someone's addiction, you have to look at what's created pain in their lives." "The person who occasionally has a beer, occasionally smokes marijuana, but generally has no negative consequences;" "It does not impair their health, it does not endanger their lives, it does not impair their personal relationships- you can't call those people addicts, and you can't call those behaviors addictive." "So we have to make a real distinction between the use of substances and the addiction to substances." "Which then leads us to the "War on Drugs:"" "basically the War on Drugs is being waged against people that were abused and traumatized as children and have mental health problems." "There's enough punishment in there- in the negative consequences of the addiction that we don't have to add punishment on to that." "The number of deaths around the world from cigarette consumption is five-and-a-half million according to latest estimates." "Annually, cigarettes kill as many people as were killed in the Germans' anti-Jewish genocidal campaign." "So we have a holocaust annually, owing to cigarettes." "If you smoke more than two packs a day, the risk for developing lung cancer was twenty-fold." "That's 2000%." "Based on the largest case-controlled study ever done, there was no evidence that marijuana increased the risk of lung cancer." "You've gotta have some consistency:" "There's a million different drugs that are sanctioned by the society that don't have that happy ending  that you take too much and you're fucked." "I've got a friend whose auntie had to go to rehab for buying two boxes of Krispy Kremes every day and eating them in the woods so nobody found her." "Based on that anecdote, let's make Krispy Kremes illegal." "I will fight any man, by the way who suggests that." "It's just like eating a pound of salt and dying." "Yeah, ya didn't use salt right dude." "You fucked up with salt." "If you just threw some salt on popcorn it's actually quite yummy, but what'd you do, you stupid fuck?" "You ate a pound of salt and you died." "Doesn't mean we should outlaw salt." "Our society doesn't object to people jumping out of airplanes at fifteen thousand feet with parachutes." "Occasionally those parachutes break;" "People die." "Our society doesn't object to people climbing mountains." "Occasionally people fall off mountains and do harm to themselves, but it's not illegal to climb a mountain." "If I had to compare marijuana to alcohol from the medical point of view, if I asked the question, 'which of these has more potentially debilitating and harmful life threatening, health-eroding effects?" "'" "There's no comparison, there's no contest;" "Alcohol wins, hands down." "The tune of 50000 plus per year die from alcohol poisoning." "They literally drink themselves zero." "Do we have a war on alcohol and tobacco when alcohol is the drug that's involved with more murders than any other drug on planet earth?" "How do we view the effect of beer?" "Holy shit!" "We are so dependent on it." "If you have a social gathering and there isn't booze there, people lose their minds!" "Let's go to the pub when we talk about commiserating:" "Let's go to the pub." "I'm happy let's go to the pub!" "My dog died let's go to the pub." "It's wines-day Wednesday." "Best day of the week!" "Great job getting us drunk!" "We could all use a stiff drink." "Fantastic!" "Margarita day." "If you're not gonna drink it, pass it around." "How are you spending New Year's Eve?" "I'm gonna get real drunk!" "Many years ago, we did a poll in parliament and we asked them, 'is alcohol a drug?" "'" "And the majority of politicians said alcohol was not a drug." "And they say well, it's not a drug because it's not illegal." "And that gets to this peculiar, dangerous concept that once something's illegal, it must be dangerous, and when something's not illegal, it must be safe." "So it's interesting if we look at the whole issue of illegal drugs in our society you'll find that when the word 'drug' is used to refer to those substances, another word is almost always attached to it" "and that is, 'abuse.'" ""Drug abuse."" "What happens is that all illicit drugs get lumped together." "Caffeine is a drug, alcohol is a drug." "Tylenol is a drug, Sudafed is a drug." "Viagra is a drug." "People, when they think of drugs, ...they think only of illicit drugs." "Theres a mass of disinformation and that misinformation and disinformation confuses the shit out of people when they're trying to form their version of what's good and what's bad in the world." "If it's absurd to throw someone in prison for drinking coffee or for drinking wine, then it's equally absurd and wrong to throw someone in prison for smoking cannabis." "Nobody has ever overdosed on cannabis." "D'you know that?" "So what?" "They can't perform daily functions;" "They're going to be on my tax bill!" "The idea that one is OK and one isn't just seemed to require something resembling evidence before you could make that statement definitively." "One of the things I think is important about marijuana use or alcohol use or anything is that you're responsible with it and you could be irresponsible with anything and you should weigh the risks and the rewards." "There's no moral middle ground." "Indifference is not an option." "We want you to help us create an outspoken intolerance for drug use." "Is the rationale of protecting people from themselves valid?" "The only people who are responsible for protecting us from ourselves are ourselves." "If our society denies us the opportunity to make mistakes, it's denying us a very fundamental human right because mistakes are part of the teaching process in this life." "Tell another grown human being ah, ah, ah!" "Nope!" "Nope!" "Nope!" "Not allowed that." "A grown man!" "No, not you!" "But I'm a grown up;" "I'm an evolved human being." "No!" "Just .Put." "That." "Down!" "If there's real harm in a drug and your real objective is to persuade people that they shouldn't harm themselves in that way, you don't need laws that send them to prison" "What you need is good infor- mation that they'll believe." "Just disseminate that infor- mation and free independent sovereign adults will make their own choices about either to continue with that drug or not to continue with it, but they have the facts." "If a professional like you cannot answer clearly that meth is more dangerous than marijuana- which every kid on the street knows, which every parent knows if you can't answer that, maybe that's why we're failing" "to educate people about the dangers" "I don't want kids smoking marijuana." "I agree with the chairman but if the Deputy Director of the Office of Drug Policy can't answer that question, how do you expect high school kids to take you seriously?" "I empathize with parents of teenaged kids;" "They can get lost." "A kid sitting in school stoned-you can't accept accept a position that says, 'oh, that's fine, no problem.'" "Yeah, that's a problem, but the question is whether it's a criminal problem." "The question is whether it's a 'growing up' kind of a problem." "I want reasons more than 'you need to be afraid of some cop catching you, and locking you up forever in a prison' to talk to my children about how they relate to various temptations in life." "This country is held up as a model around the world of dealing with cigarette we brought it down." "Why?" "By educating people." "It doesn't make sense to punish people if what you're mainly worried about is their welfare." "Name something that gets passed around." "Chris?" "A joint!" "A joint?" "Its the only thing that came to mind..." "The moral question of drug use, you can set aside, because the drug use and the drug abuse is here." "We have a real fundamental enjoyment of changing the way that this thing operates and, for as long as that is true, you have demand." "You don't have to be a capitalist, you don't have to to be economist, but we all know:" "Where there is demand, there is supply." "A plant that's very easy to grow suddenly becomes something that's worth thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars a pound because you're compensating the producers and the transporters for the risk of going to jail or being arrested or being shot or other things" "that happen to people involved in criminal activity." "And with that profit comes opportunity sometimes to the most unlikely of people." "I went to Oxford to study nuclear physics and some post-graduate history and philosophy of science, but forsook the halls of academia to become a dope smuggler." "Quite early on, I started smuggling cannabis from Europe to America." "In those days, in the very early 70's- there'd be a markup of about 300%." "British bands were beginning to get very popular and they were visiting the States with an awful lot of equipment, so we used to hide hashish in various speakers and amplifiers et cetera." "Pink Floyd, Emerson, Lake  Palmer, Eric Clapton, Genesis." "The bands didn't know;" "It was just an arrangement" "I made with the road managers." "Organizations I was involved with;" "The Mafia, the Yakuza the I.R.A. and a few cowboys from the C.I.A.," " but it wasn't under C.I.A. - just a few cowboys who were doing things behind the rest of the C.I.A's back." "Consignments I did into JFK in New York the deal was structured in such a way that one couldn't cheat them even if one was daft enough to try." "The average load would be about a ton." "I had a huge number of aliases during my smuggling career;" "At least 43 aliases, but it was so much easier in those days to get a false passport." "I remember, on one occasion, applying to the driving license center for a license in the name of Elvis Presley of whom I'm a big fan and they actually issued it because computers didn't scream in the 50's!" "Oh, Elvis Presley?" "Fine!" "The biggest shipment ever that I did was 30 tons." "The DEA say it was 50 tons, but I know it was only 30 tons!" "The British had more or less no you can't catch him." "The Spanish had given up, no, you can't catch him..." "Americans said, oh, we'll catch him - and they were right!" "It was a combined effort of 14 different countries' law enforcement spearheaded by the DEA actually." "Cannabis was the only drug I smuggled." "I think largely because I wasn't really tempted to do anything else;" "The demand for cannabis wasn't met." "If cannabis had been legal, I would have carried on being an academic of some sort." "I do miss smuggling;" "You could never get that thrill that I had from crossing borders from writing!" "You can't..." "I suppose if I thought I could get away with it," "I'd crank it up today and go back to doing it!" "I mean I loved it." "It's interesting when you look at the amount of money that these drugs are generating." "Where does that money go?" "And who's handling it?" "With the vast amounts of money to be made, the potential for a dark side of the underground market begins to grow." "With enough time and enough money, it can rise to inconceivable levels, and often, right under our nose." "What the drug war has done to Mexico is horrific." "The death toll alone in the Mexican drug war under the Calderon administration:" "It's more than the number of Americans that were lost in Vietnam." "Now we're up to 70,000 dead." "Seventy thousand!" "The bloodshed follows a mass killing in the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo last week where nine bodies were left for the public to see and fourteen other bodies were found mutilated." "And this is happening on our Southern border and yet very little attention is paid to it." "It is the United States that sends the guns across the borders to Mexico it is the United States that, then in return for the guns imports the drugs." "A lot of people think that those seventy thousand dead are all gangsters shooting' it out with each other." "Not true." "They're police officers, they're children they're families, they're mothers and fathers." "You're raising your kids with an education and your kids go off to a nightclub some night and they never come home." "Why?" "Because kids have been kidnapped at random and mutilated." "Beyond the horrific death toll, and the horrific acts of violence, and decapitations and bodies hanging from bridges, the drug war has really led to a deterioration in the infrastructures of society which means that virtually every municipal police force" "in much of Mexico is corrupted by one cartel or another." "What does that mean?" "That means if you're a lower-middle class Mexican and your house gets broken into, who do you call?" "You have nobody to go to, and if you do call the police, they're just as likely to tell the cartel hey this person's ratting on you as they are to help you and take a report, and bring somebody to jail." "So, if you murder somebody in Mexico, you have less than a 5% chance of ever spending a day in jail for that and that is almost entirely a product of what the drug war has done to law enforcement," "the judiciary and the corrections systems in Mexico." "The last thing a Mexican drug- trafficking cartel would want would be for drugs to be legalized in the United States because that would take away their primary source of income." "How do you kill a cartel and a street gang organization in drugs?" "You take their source of nutrition away." "Their source of nutrition is - money;" "Drug money." "You dry 'em up." "The idea that you're gonna somehow or another be able to be able to make marijuana illegal and it's not going to have some of impact on organized crime is so fuckin' dumb it's childish!" "This prohibition allows them to flourish" "I mean it did with alcohol." "When prohibition was going on and the mafia and Al Capone and all them motherfuckers was in control, they ran that shit!" "The American people soon came to understand that prohibition of alcohol brought greater harm than the abuse of alcohol." "Declaring prohibition on the marijuana laws makes everything more dangerous" "370 billion dollars a year go into the underworld's pockets and bad people with that kind of money can do horrendous things..." "If marijuana prohibition isn't achieving the goals we think it should, what has caused it to be pursued the way it has?" "What are the elements that keep it propped up... and where did it all start?" "While most fingers might point to the year 1937 when marijuana was first outlawed by a tax stamp required for hemp, let's fast-forward 34 years to 1971." "That was the year the public first heard this:" "Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to summarize for you the meeting that I have just had with bipartisan leaders." "America's public enemy number one, in the United States, is drug abuse." "Attorney General Kliendienst for Nixon was quoted thereafter and he was sorrowful that he had been involved in this." "He said that they knew- in the Nixon administration- that drug treatment works and incarceration does not, but the enormous political benefit by declaring a war on drugs, that can't really fight back." "He said they chose the incarceration route for political reasons and then were absolutely overwhelmed at positive political benefits they received for doing that." "There's actual documentation that shows the United States government under Nixon was actively writing to universities and saying 'pull your information of cannabis, hemp and marijuana out of your libraries.' purge it." "So it took them from 1972, '71... '72, to the late 1970's to create this myth that marijuana would lead to using harder substances." "Once that myth was established then the numbers exploded and you could go to Congress and get money." "I am glad that, in this administration we have increased the amount of money for handling the problem of dangerous drugs seven-fold." "It will be 600 million dollars this year." "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." "Most law enforcement agencies, before the 1970s, had very small narcotic units because narcotics wasn't seen as a big problem." "By the end of the decade, the narcotic units had exploded;" "Federal money came in... and then..." "Ronald Reagan came." "Tonight I can report to you that we've made much progress." "37 federal agencies are working together in a vigorous national effort and, by next year, our spending for drug law enforcement will have more than tripled from it's 1981 levels." "Whenever we hear the word 'war' on anything," "I think it should alert our antenna that a mind-management game is going on." "What is meant by the war on drugs?" "That's a very good question." "How can you have a war on a noun?" "It's a bit like... again, the war on terror:" "It's a war on a concept." "We humans are very motivated by war." "We are extremely motivated by a metaphor of violent confrontation." "It goes all the way back to the very first foremothers of bacteria 3.85 billion years ago." "Bacteria are incredibly social - they live in armies- they live in armies of seven trillion and they are constantly communicating with each other, they are constantly exchanging data;" "It's a little information processing network, but what happens... when two, three, four or seven colonies of bacteria discover all the same food source?" "They make "war."" "What motivates ants?" "They go about doing their daily business all of the time, but when an alarm pheromone hits that indicates there's been an invasion from outside the colony wham-o!" "Everybody drops what they're doing;" "Everybody rushes to the site of the breach where the odor is coming from." "I mean, we humans, we're the children of bacteria;" "We humans, we're the cousins of ants:" "Just tell us there's an outsider at the gates!" "You use the metaphor of war for just about anything and it gets us roused, but especially use it about our group versus another group, our subculture versus another subculture, and you can really get us going." "It's clear in neurolinguistic programming." "Because if you associate war, you associate it with a nation having to pull together to fight a baddy out there." "Now, some folks'll tell you that I'm dealing in poison, but hey, do I look like the kinda guy that would do that do a kid like you?" "Yes!" "It's a rhetorical frame in which the sacrifice of individual "liberty" seems... necessary." "This is what's needed to win the war." "Last year alone, over 10,000 drug criminals were convicted and nearly 250 million dollars of their assets were seized by the DEA-The Drug Enforcement Administration." "These are a measure of our commitment and emerging signs that we can defeat this enemy." "The astounding thing about the War on Drugs, is how long it's gone on and how little progress has been made." "When I was working for MI-5, I had my first, sort of... inkling that all was not good because I was working on the Irish terrorist logistics desk which is the movement of people and weapons into and out of the UK-and, of course, doing that," "I had to work very closely with customs, which is there to try and stop the drugs coming into the UK." "They just, knew it was like looking for the needle in a haystack just to try and stop these drugs flooding into the UK." "I had record-breaking arrests, record-breaking interdiction of supply, but it didn't make one iota of difference." "You don't see us knocking off the big guys so often that, you know, there's scarcity of drugs." "When was the last time you couldn't cop marijuana in this country?" "I mean, there's no marijuana out there!" "Oh my God, what am I gonna do?" "I don't think you could go into any high school in the country, I don't think you could go into any small town in this country, I don't think you could go into any prison in this country and not find marijuana" "if you were looking for it." "So the argument that marijuana prohibition has had any impact on the availability on the drug, I think, really doesn't hold water." "What we see are a regular meal of arrests and how many bales of this or kilos of that." "The show-and-tell is the glamorous side of it all of this pot found inside one semi-truck." "20000 lbs." "Worth." "Border patrol calling it the biggest bust in our state's history." "You wheel out your 60, 70, 80 kilos of marijuana, your two assault rifles." "The thing of it is, if you took the average show-and-tell... from the average arrest... you'd have some little kid- I mean he might be 15, 17, 18, 20 years old- and you would proudly display... a small bag of marijuana on your table" "and say, we got him!" "We got him." "Came from Ontario, Oregon into Idaho with some mushrooms and some weed, and I got caught with an exhaust so he pulled me over, he put his head in the window and said he smelled it, so I just" "handed it to him just to get it over with." "It's such a joke to say that they're going after hardcore criminals." "About one-and-a-half million arrests on drug-related offenses in the year 2011-about 50% were for marijuana use." "It's practically legal!" "I get that all the time... especially here in California and what I say to those people is, 'it's absolutely NOT practically legal.'" "It's very, very federally illegal." "It's just an ongoing story that at this point really it seems little more than the premise for television shows." "Dangerous, deadly, illegal." "Tonight, the county's top cop says much of this stuff was being made in the back of that plaza." "They got away with it for a little bit, but at the end of the day, they're not going to get away with it for very long." "There's another aspect to this game:" "That is the economic side of it." "There's a deal between the feds and the state and that's asset seizures." "They call it an "equitable sharing program" where they encourage local law enforcement to seize items that maybe involved in criminal activity." "They do an 80/20 split." "Without even getting a conviction and then they keep the bulk of the money or the assets seized." "Maybe ya just wanna see the kind of stuff the government seizes from criminals." "Right now you can actually check out a number of forfeited vehicles going up for auction tomorrow at the Apple Towing in Guadalupe." "These are awesome cars!" "This one caught my eye of course first it's a 1968 Chevy Camaro..." "I'll lock him up." "I'll seize his car." "I'll hit a house," "I'll seize bank accounts, I'll seize land - all because I'm producing for the state." "There's an incentive for the state to say, 'do it, ' but the law is such that the onus to get back your property is on you!" "Not on the police department;" "You have to fight to get back something through the court system- that they took away that they had no right taking in the first place." "Between 1989 and 2010, an estimated 12.6 billion dollars was seized by U.S. attorneys in asset forfeiture cases." "The growth rate of seizures during that time was nearly a 20% increase every single year." "In the country where I grew up- America-where, you know everybody is so proud of having guns and proud of their freedom." "'No, I'm not afraid!" "'" "Really?" "Go plant some cannabis in your front yard and tell me how fast it takes for the man to come and take everything you own!" "Every year the DEA tells you how many seizures they've made is That we have failed again." "What's your budget?" "Well, currently... um." "Approximately..." "Uh, two million..." "Two million?" "Two-I'm sorry- two billion dollars..." "Yeah..." "You can look into any federal agency you want to... literally in their budget you will see the extra tens of millions of dollars are earmarked expressly to fight "the war on drugs."" "When you get to the top of both towers, the interests are the same." "The major drug dealer wants to continue selling drugs... law enforcement wants to continue trying to prosecute people who are using the drugs and there's a harmony there." "If you've ever seen the film of the head of the DEA" "Lionhart I believe is her name-when they asked her is marijuana worse than heroin?" "And she sat there and stuttered around;" "She wouldn't answer the question." "Uh, is crack worse for a person than marijuana?" "I believe all illegal drugs are bad." "Is methamphetamine worse for somebody's health than marijuana?" "I don't think any illegal drug..." "Is heroin worse for someone's health than marijuana?" "Again..." "I mean, either yes, no, or I don't know!" "I mean, if you don't know, you can look this up;" "You should know this as the chief administrator for the Drug Enforcement Agency" "I'm asking you a very straightforward question." "She couldn't answer the question because she's a dyed-in-the-wool prohibitionist and her industry her life, is dependent upon us continuing to put 43 million people in jail." "About 85% of everybody in our country that uses any form of illicit substance whatsoever uses only marijuana and so if you were to remove those people from the criminal justice system the sheer number of everyone else in the country" "using every other illegal drug combined would not justify this colossal bureaucracy we have to fight the war on drugs." "It would fall apart." "If you lose marijuana prohibition, you lose drug prohibition and the government knows it;" "They don't want to give that up because of the sheer money involved," "Going down the path to legalization in this country is reckless and irresponsible." "It scares us;" "The treatment people are afraid, the education people are afraid." "Law enforcement is, is, is worried... what is gonna happen?" "People say, 'well, the vice cops who work on on marijuana prohibition would be out of work, the people who work for the DEA, some of them would be out of jobs, ' the White House drug czar office and so on and so forth." "I mean, that's just the most lunatic defense of prohibition." "By that logic, we should prohibit everything!" "Because then we'd need to cops to enforce food prohibition and housing prohibition and medicine prohibition." "Beginning in the 1980s, the police departments became a number-driven group." "One arrest is one arrest so if I spend a year and a half taking down a violent drug organization that's killed maybe 15-20 people and I lock up six guys." "I get six ones." "If I went out on the corner tomorrow," "I can get fifteen "ones" and they all count the same." "There's no weighing for like, 'this is the murderer:" "We give him fifteen points." "This guy's the marijuana guy:" "We give him .2 points.'" "No, no, it's all the same." "One thing about a cannabis arrest is it's easy, it's not dangerous, and it turns into a solved crime very quickly with very little paperwork." "The whole thing is numbers because numbers generate revenue." "That revenue keeps Congress giving you money." "That money, then, you can turn around part of it and keep pressure on Congress." "You don't come with those numbers-they retaliate by giving you bad evaluations." "That's basically what they did to me." "We have almost a five billion dollar budget a year so we run it like a business and it's fair to ask the employees here to do their fair share." "It's not easy to get a trafficker." "It's not like walking up to the corner or shaking the lockers of a high school." "You reach a point, especially as an executive or a supervisor where you are now part of administering the policies and you start to ask the hard questions." "Is it really worth a police officer's time to bust somebody for a marijuana cigarette, take them off the street, put them in jail, book the evidence write the report and then be able to go back" "out on the street and attend to public safety after you've been gone for 3 hours for one marijuana arrest?" "I used to go to meetings of chief police officers in the UK after the formal conference was over around the bar and around the dinner table, they were all agreeing that there was no point in keeping cannabis illegal" "and yet what they said when the cameras were rolling, when the microphones were in front of them, was completely different." "In the 15 years I've been in policy," "I'm a little disillusioned by how much we were able to achieve and very disillusioned on the ability of leaders to still pretend we are achieving." "You know we need police forces." "If I was in charge of society, of course" "I'd have a police force, but I'd make sure there were sensible laws for them to enforce." "And there are plenty of police who feel like that too." "There's immense pressure on the inside of these sort of professions to toe the line and just keep quiet." "The culture will eat you up if in fact you come out while you're a police leader." "If they were to come out and say that they were in favor of taxation, regulation of marijuana they wouldn't get their promotions, they wouldn't be able to move through the ranks; they'll be labeled" "and I've seen that take place." "There's alot of work being done on what creates respect for laws;" "To what extent do people feel that laws are legitimate." "If they feel that laws are legitimate, they're likely to comply with them without needing to be coerced into them and punished." "And the research is suggesting that people want fairness." "In a sense, what creates respect for law is justice." "Seeing it done." "That elicits great respect when you actually see it being done." "There's another kind of respect though, which is respect for the stick-it's like the force of authority." "Pretty much, marijuana works with the stick." "One of the consequences of the War on Drugs is people have stopped looking at the police as their protectors and more see them, right, as their potential persecutors." "The police department basically becomes the 'other' to the community, and once you have that breakdown, then information stops flowing." "So you don't learn about crimes and then the only crime you really become interested in is the one ou can solve which is locking people up on the corner for using drugs." "And, you know, a great metric of that is murder clearance rates." "So, a murder is cleared when an arrest is made and somebody goes to jail and in 1965, we were clearing- police were clearing- about 90% of the murders that were committed in this country." "That means, for 90% of the murders in this country there was an arrest and a charge and today that's under 65%." "That's after all the tremendous technological advances you know, DNA evidence all sorts of forensics and, you know, expanding police budgets and that sort of thing." "I think if we were to look at one cause for that drop in murder clearance rates it's the breakdown in the relationship between society at large and the police and, you know, that by extension, is a consequence" "almost entirely of the war on drugs." "By having to uphold these outdated and failed policies, it ruins our reputation and it damages the community relations between the police and the policed, as well." "Whole generations have grown up distrusting their local police rather than seeing them as a potential protective layer of society." "When you do this, you change the whole nature of the game, and from 1980 on the police become more and more militarized." "The initiation of the drug war was the initiation of a general loosening of const- raint on search and seizure." "It became just part of police practice to be breaking down the door." "We see it now as a staple of Cops;" "that's now our reality." "That wasn't the reality before... the drug war." "Columbia police!" "Search warrant!" "Columbia police!" "Search warrant!" "Columbia police!" "Search warrant!" "Search warrant!" "Search warrant!" "Don't move!" "Don't move!" "Don't move!" "Search warrant!" "Search warrant!" "Don't move!" "Search warrant!" "Don't move!" "That's on him." "Yeah." "The money and the dope." "Now you see police and most often they look like soldiers:" "They're dressed in black, they have jackboots high-caliber arms and they don't walk the street and get to know the community, right?" "They drive around in cruisers that look they belong on the battle field that's the difference between the Greenville police department's new." "SWAT truck compared to the old one." "The truck has a lot of bells and whistles:" "From the simple storage compartments, to the gunports on the side." "They're actually proud to say they did not use any taxpayer money." "We paid for it with seized funds it came out of money we had seized from drug dealers..." "That's where respect is lost." "The officers on the street have lost it; the institution itself has lost it." "You're not being seen as anything but the other- people warring on us." "The war on drugs has had a puzzling effect on how society seeks to police itself." "With hundreds of thousands of marijuana arrests annually, once you start gathering a large group of prisoners, where do you put them all?" "Well, private prison is as scary as all shit and they're scary as hell for a very simple reason:" "They make it highly profitable to incarcerate people." "We've lost track of how ridiculous some of the things we do are." "So we're gonna give people a profit motive in putting more people in jail?" "Gee, I wonder what's gonna happen..." "Corrections Corporation of America is the Hilton of the private prison industry:" "A multi-billion dollar business that's getting rich off punishment." "The more people locked up behind bars and the longer they stay there the more money CCA makes." "Last year the company banked a reported 1.7 billion dollars." "When you have a privatized prison, there's a contract between the state and the prison that the state has to maintain a certain occupancy rate in the prison." "Meaning that the state guarantees that the prison will stay anywhere from 80 to 100% full." "Crime could go down, it doesn't matter." "The taxpayers are still on the hook and the government is still on the hook for filling up your prisons." "Well, where do you get these numbers from?" "The easiest way to make sure that the quotas are full in these private prisons is to get the low hanging fruit which is just the drug user as a criminal rather than someone who might need a bit of medical help." "And that means that every fourth person in the world in jail is a citizen of the "land of the free."" "You just become a commodity, rather than a human being, churned through the system to make money for these big corporations." "If we go on down this path, we'll see more and more laws being invented and created to justify the imprisonment of more and more people." "Public money will ironically be plunged into pursuading us that that is right." "Each state is constantly arguing about the fact that they don't have enough money for for their public education, but then at the same time, they'll take state funds-or in a lot of cases, federal money" "and put it into the prison system." "This is Carl Holton school and it's been closed for some time now and in it's place will rise a hospital prison with over 1700 beds." "California, since 1980, we've built 23 prisons, we've hired 14,000 prison guards and we've fired 5000 teachers." "West Virginia is strapped for money, but we're building another prison here." "Got to!" "A lot of people getting arrested here." "Most states are just like mine of California:" "The largest, strongest political lobby group in our state is - the prison guards' union." "You have unions that are lobbying to make sure that certain drugs stay illegal regardless of of how safe they are, to make sure that prisons are filled because prisons extract money from the system." "It's insanity!" "It's not rational or logical;" "It's... financial." "Money is the backdrop to everything." "You can't even run from it;" "I try to see other things or put other perspectives on it, but it always boils down to money." "We've even seen, in places like Pennsylvania, where judges have gone and faced high federal sentences for actually streamlining children into these private facilities." "A former juvenile court judge in Pennsylvania could face more than 10 years in prison after being convicted in a kids for cash scheme." "Prosecutors say he used children as pawns-locking them up unjustly in a plot to get rich." "Remember my son?" "An all-star wrestler!" "He's gone, he shot himself in the heart!" "You scumbag, you ruined my fucking life!" "And what could be more harmful to one's self than being sent to prison?" "No effect of the drug can be possibly as harmful as doing jail time for consuming it." "And they end up with a criminal record." "What does that do to them?" "They could lose their job;" "In some parts of the world, they will lose their housing." "They will lose the right to education." "This is a fucking kid who just got arrested recently for having marijuana on him." "They put him in jail and he had an extreme food allergy." "He asked them if there was any milk in any of their products, they wouldn't answer him, they gave him food, he ate it and he fucking died in jail." "How... criminal is that?" "What they've made illegal isn't the problem, alright?" "The problem is the policy itself." "This business about drug offenses;" "I mean it's time we stopped locking up people for possession of marijuana." "It selects people that it puts in jail, so we see widely disparate penalties among socioeconomic groups among racial groups." "White people and black people in this country do drugs at the same rate so they should be arrested at the same rate, but the reality is, of course that's not remotely true." "Across the nation, blacks are arrested at four times the rate of whites." "Now, in some places like Minneapolis," "Washington, D.C., Iowa, it's eight times the rate." "So, why in the world would you be arresting black Americans at eight times the rate-or even nation-wide at four times rate-of whites?" "They're using it at the same rate!" "You have no excuse!" "If you are a young black man walking around the streets of London today, you are nine times more likely to be stopped and searched on suspicion of carrying drugs." "I have risen through classes, so I know you know what I mean- the difference." "Growin' up in Pittsburgh, just being on the streets, if I got caught with some weed, they're gonna look at me me as I'm selling some weed or I'm trying to get some weed to one of their kids I look like a threat" "but when I started rapping and started associating myself with other people, started getting money:" "They'll be like, 'oh he's not dangerous, he can smoke.'" "The War on Drugs is one of those issues that highlights very clearly that there is one law for the rich and powerful and one law for the rest of us." "HSBC is a giant bank that actually laundered money for the Mexican drug cartels." "Billions of dollars!" "Nobody went to jail." "Naturally, if there is a big bank that is laundering money for drug cartels, they should face a federal prosecution and criminal charges but that's not what happened." "They got a fine of 1.9 billion dollars!" "Well, what's a fine to HSBC?" "It's pocket change;" "It's one of the costs of doing business." "And nobody goes to jail and a mother of four is arrested for $30 worth of pot and she's put in jail for ten years." "The people at HSCBC are in the elite, the woman with the $30 worth of pot is not." "Every animal that's ever had a hierarchical social structure going all the way back to lizards, lobsters and puppy dogs-has built that structure on prohibition and there's always been a chicken at the bottom the pecking order and the one on the bottom" "of the pecking order ends up in a miserable god awful, picked-on, pecked-on state and that isn't mankind's social invention that is mother nature's social invention." "Does that mean mean it's good?" "Hell no." "And it's our job to reverse it, natural or not." "Empathy is all it really takes to open up the avenues of outrage and realize how appalling this is." "Let's remember something boys and girls:" "Jails are there for people who hit us over the head when we're walking down the street, jails are there for people who break into our homes and loot the place." "Jails are there for people who do genuine harm." "So I have no right to put them in jail for having a different lifestyle than mine." "In fact, if I were to do that, it would be criminal." "And yet, the war on marijuana continues on." "Only now with new medical discoveries." "You might ask yourself, 'What possible health benefits could an illegal plant have?" "'" "The answer is starting to become more clear." "It begins with something that each and every it's something called the endocannabinoid system." "We think of marijuana as this violent, unnatural intrusion on human biology." "It's not." "We are built with all kinds of receptors for cannabis." "Cannabis mimics endogenous chemicals that we already produce in the body called endocannabinoids." "That's why we have receptors that pretty well fit cannabis." "Cannabinoids are these twenty-carbon molecules that we produce, the plant produces there's over a hundred of them in the plant and these two systems work together to regulate cell, cluster cell, and intracellular functions." "All the cannabinoids do is help cells function." "They don't care what the cell does they don't care if its contracting, secreting thyroid synthesizing this, remodeling bone, doesn't matter." "Just, they're doing something and they do it a little more effectively." "Western medicine has never seen a substance like this." "We like single drug/ single function, and you come along with a molecule that may have an interface inside of every cell and help it function more effectively and, really, it's a hard one to imagine." "I can't find any real legitimate doctor that thinks smoking marijuana is good for anybody." "Sure it may relieve pain temporarily, but a fifth of Jack Daniels might do the same thing, and nobody's calling that medicine right?" "People who say there is no established medical use of marijuana simply don't know what they're talkin' about." "It's so versatile." "It seems every day when I open up the news, there's another report on cannabinoids having some type of medical utility." "Control of muscle spasticity, multiple sclerosis," "Glaucoma, colitis." "Nausea, pain." "Migraine headaches." "There are hundreds of reasons that people find marijuana useful." "That's why I look so good after 41 years in the game." "It is the most non-toxic medicine I have ever encountered." "Once it's free of the prohibition tariff, it's gonna be much less expensive than the pharmaceutical products which it will replace." "Think of a strain as a little chemistry lab an organic chemistry lab because what's happening is mother nature is creating her own cannabinoid profile." "For instance you could smoke a variety or use a variety that would help you with your headache or I could use a variety that might help me with my back pain." "If an AIDS patient comes in and they're having problems eating, or they can't sleep-okay, you can't eat, you can't sleep, you know for sure the indica is gonna put you down, it's gonna relax you 100%," "it's gonna give you appetite and you don't wanna give him a sativa;" "Because you give him a sativa, he's gonna be up thinking all night." "So it's about genes;" "It is about this kind of character of plant can do this, and this kind of plant can do that." "It's very important to keep these gene marks- these original ones-it could be the medicine that we need." "What is a land race?" "A land race is basically a species of marijuana that's indigenous to an area and has been growing there for hundreds of years in a certain area." "Cannabis is from all over the world, so we have" "Afghan varieties, Indian varieties." "In Colombia you have the famous Santa Marta Punta Roja in Central Africa, you'll have the Malawi Gold." "When I started this whole new series on strain hunting it was to show the world how much people depend on marijuana around the world." "We estimate that probably around two to three hundred million people's families are depending on this crop." "It's still a drug in most countries so the police takes it, or it's expensive, so robbers will steal it and these are areas where the." "UN or other big international NGO's like UNESCO never will come." "In these very remote areas there are a lot of very nice land races and we would like to preserve these land races for the future so we try to obtain them and find them and bring them back." "We have new varieties that we can play with to see if they will have any benefit for the future- medicinal or recreational." "It's like getting a new athlete on your team that you can cross-breed and create a new variety of marijuana." "In recent years, understanding of medical marijuana's diversity has become universally widespread news." "With a greater knowledge of strains has come new new discoveries." "These discoveries are leading us to medical benefits we never could have imagined." "Jayden is seven years old now" "Jayden was born perfectly healthy." "At four months old, Jayden had his first seizure." "It was just a downhill road from there for the next few years." "He was having 500 twitching, myoclonic seizures a day;" "He'd have grand mals for an hour, hour and a half." "I remember he was crying from 1 o'clock at night till 9 in the morning- screaming and crying in pain." "He was seeing things, he was hallucinating from the medications." "At four and a half, Jayden was taking 22 pills a day he was at 25,000 pills he had taken by the time he was 5 years old." "Jayden had tried twelve different medications, we had 40 ambulance bills, we were fighting with the insurance company all the time." "We lost our house, we lost our cars, we lost our business we lost our family." "I went to UCSF, I said, 'look, I don't think Jayden's gonna make it another week." "What do you suggest?" "'" "They're all, 'I don't know, I mean, I would try anything.'" "I go, 'what do you think about medical marijuana?" "'" "They're all, 'well, like we said, we think we're in a life and death situation- you should try anything.'" "So I said alright, I went and picked up something." "I saw in a dispensary, and came home, I gave it to Jayden- after four and a half years of having myoclonic seizures, and twitching and head drops and seizing-the first day I gave it to him was" "thank God one million times- was the first day he's ever went seizure free in his life." "Second day, third day, fourth day, the seizures were down dramatically;" "I could see his eyes lighting up." "It was summertime- it was June 1st the first day I gave it to him 2011." "He started swimming;" "Jayden's never been able to swim before-the sudden temperature change of water would give him a seizure" "I put him in the front yard and my neighbor's like, oh my gosh, we've never seen him in the front yard.'" "They were so excited they were cheering him on..." "I started weaning him off the medications after one month I was on the CBD." "Every time I took him off, he'd suffer for two weeks he'd become more human." "Then take off another pill, suffer for two weeks, boom:" "Become more human." "Jayden started chewing." "Jayden was only eating Gerber food... always till he was five years old." "He started chewing." "With taking 25,000 pills, it really wears on your body and brain, so it was kinda recovering more from the medication than from the epilepsy." "And we decided to wean off the hardest one:" "Benzodiazepines." "He was having tremors, nightmares, brain zaps;" "I've contacted 30 different benzo withdrawal clinics, they go, 'how old is the person that you want to bring into our clinic?" "'" "I tell them, 'seven years old' and they scream at the top of their lungs - every single one vividly say the same exact thing:" "'You have a seven year old on benzos?" "'Cause we have people here that are football players, we have people here that are big, tough guys that are dying, literally dying, from benzos and you have a seven year old on it?" "I said, 'seven year old?" "I go, 'my son's been addicted to it since he was 16 months old.'" "So now we have to figure out a way to wean him off by ourselves because the benzo detox clinics are not are not willing to take in a seven year old." "Since we've been using the CBD's, he's been doing amazing." "It has under 1% THC, so it doesn't give you that euphoria." "It's abstracted, it's organic, we know the dosage in milligrams." "We're on the forefront of something huge:" "It's either you're gonna give up, and just and let your son, your child, be a vegetable and die or you're gonna sit there and fight." "I still haven't met Jayden yet." "I know Jayden and 22 pills, but I'm down to Jayden and two pills-that's who I know right now." "I don't know Jayden but on medication." "Christmas before Jayden was born-that was my that Jayden was gonna be born." "My ex-wife had given me a box and I opened it and I remember... this is a hard one..." "I remember opening the box and seeing a pregnancy test saying positive with two baby shoes and having so much expectation, you know?" "Having so much expectation that you're gonna have a son." "As a parent, you're expecting your child to play football, you're expecting your child to talk you know?" "I mean, right now, my number one goal right now is to have my son say I love you." "I mean people take that for granted." "People take that for granted that their kids can talk and say I love you." "That's all I want to hear my son say, but I mean if I can hear him say that," "I'll be more than happy." "He said it one time on CNN:" "I la loo." "He was really close!" "I gotta hear it." "If he says that," "I've already conquered the world." "Seeing your child suffer:" "There's nothing worse than that;" "There's no torture worse than that." "Especially every day." "Now is not the time to send a message to our young people that marijuana is medicine." "It is not." "It is a dangerous, illegal drug." "Is it legitimate for any human on the face of planet earth to deny another human the thing that will remove him from that infinite torture chamber?" "No." "It is not acceptable." "It is utterly and completely im-moral." "I'm not allowed to do this because someone says I can't." "And that person never met me, they're never likely to meet me... they're never likely to meet someone with MS," "Parkinson's, cancer-and yet they can have total rule over that entity's life." "This is pretty much the only time that I'm gonna be lost for words." "I just - the justifications still not been explained to me." "Should marijuana be legalized for medical use?" "Aren't there issues of significance that you'd like to talk about?" "The economy, the economy, the economy, the growth of jobs, the need to put people back to work the challenges of Iran?" "We've got enormous issues that we face." "But you wanna talk." "Go aheadyou wanna talk about." "Medical marijuana" "I think marijuana should not be legal in this country" "I believe it's a gateway drug..." "Marijuana is still a schedule I drug meaning legally that it has no medical usefulness whatsoever and benzodiazepines like Valium and Xanax and Klonopin are are actually schedule IV drugs even though they put put significantly more people in the emergency room" "every year and cause even more deaths than many Schedule I drugs." "Many attempts have been made to move cannabis out of of Schedule I and ...they always fail." "How can the United States government claim that there's no medical usefulness to cannabis while then patenting the medical usefulness of cannabis?" "It was a shocking idea that the federal government- the Department of Health and Human Services had a patent on cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants, heart disease and diabetes," "Alzheimer's and Huntington's, and includes cataracts and." "Down's syndrome as well as neoplasia." "It really speaks to the depth of the problem in terms of who's making these decisions and who are they benefitting?" "We need to get to the truth which is that prescription drugs kill vast numbers of people." "Prescription drugs have a higher rate of overdose than even things we think of as being horrific like methamphetamine, heroin..." "The number of people who are killed by heroin and cocaine is tiny, tiny, just miniscule, microscopic by comparison with the number of people who are killed every year by prescription drugs." "Let's look at the facts;" "Let's not listen to the bullshit anymore." "Suspected drug overdoses are rising at an alarming rate in Haywood County." "And it's not illegal drugs officials are worried about but prescription drugs." "It's being described as an epidemic." "Authorities say too many young people are dying accidental deaths." "The fifth or sixth top selling drugs in North America are antipsychotics which we're giving out like candy now to people, including children." "At Vancouver's Children's Hospital they've had to establish a special clinic just to deal with the effects of antipsychotics in kids." "I recently lost my father two years ago and we were really close and so it was like having the rug pulled out from underneath me and I started to see a therapist and a psychiatrist because I was experiencing these" "panic attacks and at least fifteen medications" "I was written, you know, within two minutes of meeting, one of the psychiatrists she called me bipolar II and wrote a diagnosis of it without even knowing me, you know?" "What I really needed was a fuckin' hug." "In 2010, doctors prescribed enough painkillers to give 45 milligram Percocets and 245-milligram Vicodins to every person in the United States." "It's a huge industry creating pills for us to take." "Most of the time, they're not really anything that's curing you, they're just suppressing whatever your ailment is and in some cases making it worse." "In depressed patients, worsening of depression including risk of suicide may occur." "Sometimes fatal events including infections tuberculosis, lymphoma, other cancers." "Blisters, peeling rashes, hives or mouth sores." "Nervous system and blood disorders and allergic reactions have occurred." "The makers of OxyContin have marketed it as a non- or less-addictive opiate, knowing already that this wasn't true." "They simply suppressed that research." "Hundreds of overdose deaths." "They plea-bargained and they agreed to pay fines." "Well, they could pay that out of their left hip pocket." "Nobody went to jail, nobody suffered any criminal consequences." "If you read the small print, you'll find that there's side-effects to certain drugs but you've got to really get your microscope out." "I see this all the time with friends-even with peers- where they carry a diagnosis and they can't pronounce it." "They don't know what the disease they have is called." "They take drugs and they don't know what the medication is or what it could potentially do to their body." "All kinda pills and medicine and bullshit that they can't pronounce;" "Makin' money off your ass." "Fuckin' you up with more medicine than you need." "There's people strung out on those pills, man." "Chief medical examiner Glenn Wagner says he's noticed a big rise in the quantity of different drugs people are taking." "This shopping bag represents one individual and the number of drugs that that person had onboard." "There are 19 separate lines on this one and it goes for several pages." "People don't look at them as drugs anymore when they're legal-when they're over the counter." "They just look at it as somethin' you can buy from the store and put in your body, but it's still a drug." "Unintentional deaths from one dies" " one American dies." " Every 19 minutes." "Nothing comparable in marijuana." "Is that correct?" "Correct." "Well, when you've got a drug that costs a billion dollars to bring to market, your investment is so huge that you have to do everything in your power to make sure that drug succeeds and sometimes the" "things that you do are troubling." "There are some pharmaceutical products today that are in short demand because the profit margin isn't big enough." "Just how tough is it to find the flu shot, Jocelyn?" "Sonia, Darren, you'll have to make a couple of calls, and those that do have it only have a limited supply." "I mean, this happens every year when there's a bad flu and there's shortages of vaccines, right, because there's not really a big profit motive tied to flu vaccines it's a single dose and you move on." "Unlike something like Viagra or especially things like cholesterol medication, heart medication." "Maintenance medications that people who are ill have to stay on in order to live normal lives." "If you don't need that medication, you don't need them they take a dent in the pockets, you know what I mean;" "Those are very deep pockets and they don't want 'em dented." "So every night on TV you see a weird-ass drug commercial trying' to get you hooked on some legal shit and they just keep naming symptoms till they get one that you've fucking got!" "Got athlete's foot?" "Are ya hot?" "Are ya cold?" "Whatcha got?" "You want this pill huh, motherfucker?" "Ya got to take this pill!" "Prescription drugs being advertised and marketed on television is certainly something that's happened in my lifetime as a physician." "They're saying things like 'ask your doctor if this drug is right for you.'" "Ask your doctor if Humira can work for you..." "Ask your doctor if Lunesta is right for you." "Ask your doctor about Cymbalta." "Do you get a weird pain in your bowel?" "Well then you need to go to a doctor and you need to tell him that this is the drug you need." "So hurry up!" "There's your check, there's my prescription, it's a transaction." "I'm not a drug addict!" "How dare you?" "I'm a patient." "In every other industrialized Western country, you don't see ads for drugs." "You go to your doctor, you tell your doctor what you're dealing with, they're well- informed about the drugs that are on the market and they make a recommendation for you." "I remember these commercials and they looked so happy and I remember thinking, oh my God, there's a pill that you can take to make yourself happy?" "Like how fucking awesome would that be?" "If you got somebody makin' a commercial saying', oh, do you have these problems, do you have these problems?" "You're gonna relate to it like, oh yeah, that is me!" "Maybe I do need that." "It's really frustrating to me that as a society we don't know better at this point." "They're telling you that you can take this medicine, but risk literally killing yourself to do it!" "For me, it reinforces our cultural belief that if you go to a doctor, if you don't get a prescription, you haven't really had a valid encounter." "One study by a British medical journal found that for every dollar that pharmaceutical companies spent on R and D -research development-theyspend" "19 dollars on promotion and marketing of their drugs." "If I go to my doctor and I say, 'I saw this ad for this drug;" "I really would like to try it, ' and he says, 'yeah, let's give it a shot, ' is he my doctor, or is he my drug dealer?" "They form groups like." "Partnership for a Drug Free America where they get their fucking money from prescription drugs!" "I wish you didn't smoke weed." "You're not the same when you smoke, and I miss my friend." "Prescription drugs making commercials against weed is like hookers making commercials against strippers, I mean that's... (it would of been better if I didn't stumble through" "(the word commercial), but that's what it is!" "Guess what." "All of the big drug companies have used corruption in North America for at least 50 years." "If you were a doctor, they will come to you and say," "I will pay you to participate in a conference on the phone-it will only take a half an hour of your time." "Well, guess what the conference is." "It is a drug company salesman selling you on the latest drug to influence you to prescribe that drug the next time a patient comes into your office." "How are you gonna feel?" "You feel gratitude and your gratitude influences your decisions." "Nothing should influence your decision but what is best for a patient." "There are pros to having a capitalist endeavor." "There may be drugs on the market that never would have been available because that profit motive wasn't pushing these pharmaceutical companies to try and develop those new drugs." "The problem is that it's it's not really a free there's, like, a small percentage of pharmaceutical companies that are really propped up by our Congress people because they have huge lobbies supporting them." "I recently received a notification of the top 100 pharmaceutical drugs and how much they made a year and you see exactly what all the frenzy is about." "In 2012, the top-11 global drug companies made nearly 85 billion dollars in net profits." "Just an ungodly amount of money for medicines that many of which my patients have been able to stop with something that can grow in their backyard." "Now, look, I was in bed for fifteen years with an extremely serious illness." "I believe in the importance of the major drug companies." "Does that mean I believe in their right to push research that they've paid for into peer-reviewed journals and to prevent research that tends to indicate that their drugs don't work?" "There's a case to be made for these pharmaceuticals there's the appropriate use of all kinds of medications including antidepressants, including antipsychotics, but it's hard to make a rational case for the use to the extent that they're employed in today's society." "So, once more, we're faced with the arbitrariness of what we consider to be acceptable and what is unacceptable." "This seems to be information that society could benefit from." "But how has this vital knowledge managed to fly under radars for so long?" "Why are these issues not making their way to the forefront of concern in our news?" "So a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that the news stations are gonna cover things in the order of importance, but in reality they cover them in the order of ratings." "So if Justin Bieber is gonna give you the best ratings, they're gonna go first." "Congressman, let me interrupt you just for a moment." "We've got some breaking news out of Miami-stand by if you will." "Right now, in Miami, Justin Bieber has has been arrested on a number of charges." "You gotta sell whatever it is that wants to advertise on your show and if your show is getting shitty ratings, they're gonna replace you with a chick with big tits." "Hey, starting the news off tonight:" "A motherfucker killed three people." "We got my guy." "Hal Fishman standing outside right now." "Hal, what's going on?" "'Yeah, the nigga shot three people' and blah, blah, blah." "That's more attractive!" "Yeah, I don't watch the news;" "The news is fuckin' depressing." "They pick the worst shit to follow for a long-ass amount of time." "You think they give a fuck if Barack Obama was born in Kenya?" "They do if it's a good story." "Because it means that two million people are gonna tune in instead of 600,000." "Then you get people coming out saying, 'well, what about nuclear bombs?" "That's a good point!" "We'll be back after this.'" "They're gonna be able to sell advertisement for X-amount of money instead of W." "That kinda shit happens everyday all day it's just a matter of which one do they want to put the most attention on?" "There's skydiving cats!" "¶ I believe I can fly..¶" "In all that froth, I think serious debate around key policy issues often gets lost." "That's the problem with current affairs!" "You forget about what's important and you allow the agenda to be decided by superficial information." "Everybody cares about the advertisers." "They care a tremendous amount." "If you're gonna do a story that affects the advertisers, you will get a call from management." "Now, it doesn't mean you can't do the story although there is heavy pressure to shift priorities within the story." "It's fucking ridiculous!" "Puttin' makeup on and pretending they're not reading off a script that's corporate approved." "They have a very specific set of parameters that they're supposed to fall into." "It's OK, you can admit it if you've bought an item or two or ten for yourself." "It's OK, you can admit it if you've bought an item or two or maybe..." "ten for yourself..." "It's OK, you can admit it if you've bought an item or two or ten for yourself." "Originally, when TV first started, news was seen as something that was a public service so that you informed the American people." "The deal was:" "You give us news and we give you the public airwaves and then at some point along the lines, the TV stations forgot that they weren't supposed to make money off the news and then a second thing kicked in that's" "they realized whenever they did investigative reporting, they would uncover something that the government was doing wrong and it'd be a giant hassle." "You're supposed to question authority as a journalist." "That's the whole point of the media." "If you don't question authority, then what the hell is the point?" "CNN just got rid of its investigative team." "When I was at MSNBC, I looked for an investigative reporter to do some of the stories that I wanted to cover and they said, 'there isn't one in the building.' So I got this amazing speech from the" "head of the network who said, 'look, outsiders are they wear leather jackets and they ride motorcycles, ' he said, 'but, we're insiders here at NBC;" "We're part of the establishment and you have to act like it.' He was telling me that he had just gone to Washington and they were not happy with my tone." "Do you think all these corporations and rich folks are spending money on politics because it's not good for business?" "No!" "Obviously they think it's a great investment for them." "I was challenging the Republicans and the Democrats too much." "How about if we didn't go into that dumbass war in" "Iraq and waste a trillion dollars when we found zero weapons of mass destruction." "You flushed that down the toilet!" "We're talking social security not your politics!" "And now you're talking about robbing people's social security!" "That is outrageous!" "Not your contempt for America, we're talking about social security." "Stick to the topic!" "Contempt for America?" "You lost 4400 American lives in Iraq!" "You have contempt for America!" "I remember taking several guests to task saying all of our politicians are systematically corrupt." "They get legalized bribes which we call donations." "We've forgot- tten that they're in essence just bribes." "Who's gonna give you money for nothing?" "No one right?" "They're gonna give you money so that you do them a favor." "Every time I would point that out there'd again be a call from management like, 'hey, we're not saying you can't do that." "On the other hand if you'd like to keep the six o'clock slot...'" "But in that one meeting that I had with the head of of the network, it was no longer implicit." "It was explicit and he said, 'this is the reality and you either get back in line or we go in a different direction.'" "If anything, I went harder after the establishment after that." "They sucked so much money out of the system that we had one of the largest economic crashes of all time and they're not even done yet!" "And then, a couple months later, they called me in and they're like, 'apparently you didn't get it!" "'" "So, you were at six o'clock;" "We're moving you from six o'clock to the weekends;" "We're gonna pay you a ton of money so hush up' and I said thanks but no thanks." "I didn't take the weekend job and I went back to do the Young Turks online." "We have three branches of government, and those three branches are supposed to be part of the checks and balances that make the government work." "The media and journalists are a huge part of that." "I mean, you think Americans are complacent now?" "They'll be even more complacent if they're not given the information they need to be politically active." "Drama works on television." "Now, in the world of politics, the soap opera is." "Democrats versus Republicans." "It's not who's right in terms of the policies or ideology." "What is easy is:" "He said this, she said that;" "Isn't that amazing?" "Look at the Democrats and Republicans, they're always fighting... oh no, look at this:" "the Republicans are fighting amongst themselves." "Catfights sell." "Which is why you have the red team and the blue team, you know, all over the world it's red team-blue team." "And they have these rigid ideologies that are associated with these teams and they just run with it." "Find a place where you are surrounded by like-minded people and the best way to find those people is you should probably look at the maps on how counties voted." "We think it's a bunch of ideas about how the world works and how we can make it better." "Sorry, that's not really what it is." "Ideas are a badge of identity they're a badge of identity for a subculture." "It's my group versus your group and I will make damn sure that my representative represents my badge of identity, my group's supposed ideas, the ones that represent my group's uniform not your group's uniform." "And there's a lot of seemingly intelligent people that have ridiculous ideas that are cleverly worded in a nice flowing and confident way that makes you think that what they're saying makes sense." "A lot of work gets done on tobacco whereas drugs are pretty much specifically just to get high." "It's not, I'm enjoying" "But a lot of people drink to get high..." "Yeah, but that's more of a subsidiary point." "People are not openly discussing anything, they're just defending points of view and in defending points of view, they're defending their egos." "Which means they're expressing the ideas that they think others want to hear." "Which means they're not thinking!" "So, you can present the facts to people, but the facts won't penetrate because it's not about facts, it's about opinions they have to hold onto in order to feel okay about themselves." "Potheads that I knew at that time, when I see 'em:" "'Hey man, hey bro, hey what's that?" "What's going on?" "'" "Every one of 'em are brain dead!" "It's fact." "Everyone that I know in my long history of life, everyone that was a pot smoker, their brains are defuncitated!" "Fox News, as we've known for a long time, does Republican propaganda." "Unfortunately, MSNBC has now come to largely do Democratic propaganda." "CNN does propaganda for both;" "They say, 'the Republicans said this and the Democrats said that." "Now, what's the truth?" "Who cares?" "My job is just to tell you what the latest catfight is." "It creates this partisan division in the country where people feel like, 'I have to root for my team regardless of what they do.'" "It's sometimes hard to see contradictions that find their way into politics." "Inconsistencies with politicians tend to get lost in a mass amount of information that now finds its way to our attention." "In some cases, these contradictions sit right in front of our face." "When you look at the Obama website where they were looking for information-what is important to you, what do want to see us do?" "I have to say that there was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation and, uh, I don't know what this says about the online audience." "And he goes, 'ha ha, I don't know what that says about this group.' What it says about this group is:" "They like pot!" "Why don't you explain to me what's wrong with the idea that people want you to make it so that someone doesn't get locked in a fucking cage for a forbidden plant?" "Yeah, I did it, I got away with it, too bad you're not." "So move on to the next question." "Look at how many of us they're locking up." "There's nothing funny about it." "Now, think about how mental the last three presidents, at least, confirmed that they in fact did smoke marijuana." "So, shouldn't they be in jail?" "I mean they've admitted it, right?" "Obama apparently rather enjoyed it." "It makes him the him the hip President!" "'I'm the cool." "President, I'm the happeningest President" "I say weed, I say blow, it's all a big deal ha ha ha!" "'" "Huge laugh from the college students and if he had done time in prison, time in federal prison, time for his weed and a little blow, he would not be President of the United States of America." "This is his quote from 'I'm not going to be using Justice department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue.'" "Well, bullshit, that's exactly what he's been doing." "He has launched the most vicious attack on medical marijuana patients and dispensaries that pales Bush by comparison." "He's raided me." "The DEA has been in this house." "One of the reasons we are making these announcements today is to try to put to rest the notion that large marijuana businesses can shelter themselves under state law and operate without fear of federal enforcement." "In a report issued in June 2013 it was found that the DEA had performed 270 medical marijuana raids under Barack Obama in the first four and a half years of his presidency." "This was more than all 12 years combined before he took office." "The Obama administration outspent the Bush administration by 100 million dollars in about half the time." "People get freaked out when you say that." "'But Obama is hope and change!" "He's a Democrat;" "He's a good guy!" "You can't say that about Obama!" "He had a choice... he coulda done as his campaign promised and said, hey, you know what?" "We're not gonna do the dispensary raids anymore." "If you have made medicinal marijuana in your legal state, we're gonna respect that.'" "That's what he said during the campaign." "But when he goes to act, what did he do?" "He put the most right-winger that they had in the DEA, who was left over from the Bush years, as the head of the DEA." "Now, why would you do that?" "You could have picked anybody but you picked the biggest right-winger in the department." "Why?" "And this is what people can't he's a politician just like the rest of them so he thinks, 'if I can curry a little bit of favor by putting this right-winger in, well," "I will seem so moderate and that will increase my chances of winning in 2012 by maybe half a percent." "President George W. Bush, who pretty much has acknowledged while he was young and irresponsible and a playboy, he used cocaine and then when he was governor of Texas signed legislation mandating anyone that uses cocaine must go to jail" "a minimum of 180 days." "That's beyond hypocrisy." "When asked about drugs, he said, 'I don't want to answer the marijuana question." "You know why?" "I don't want young kids doing what I did.'" "Likewise, I mean when you look at interviews that have been done with Bill Clinton after he left office, he openly admitted that he thinks that marijuana should be decriminalized and it's like, oh, well if only you were in a position" "to do something about that!" "I wouldn't pretend that I know what pulls a President's strings, but I do know there's a stark contrast between the way every President behaves before they get into office and then once they get into office." "The general public should hold politicians accountable for saying one thing when they're not in power and doing another when they come into power." "There's a sort of rhetorical trick they quite often use to say, 'oh, this is something I did in the past, it's something I regret, I wouldn't advise anyone else to do it.' So, they somehow" "distance themselves from their own person." "And the public puts up with that hypocrisy they get it when you point it out to them, but I don't know why they put up with it." "So it may be that President X or President Y has smoked cannabis at some point in their lives or used other illegal drugs, but when they get to the top they are going to oppress others for using illegal drugs." "That's an idea that never would have crossed the mind of any of our founding fathers." "If anyone had stood up at a constitutional convention and said hey!" "Let's ban alcohol, ' that idea wouldn't have gotten very far and it wouldn't have gotten very far not because they were a bunch of drunks, but because the idea that the federal government had that degree" "of power over sovereign individuals was anathema to what they were trying to create in forming a new country." "That's why it's essential to make decisions in public wherever possible, based on the actual evidence that there is for something." "How else are you going make policy?" "Are you going to base it on some sort of faith?" "Or a wish that something will happen just because you want it to?" "What are you going to do?" "Stand and sort of scream on the spot until you get your way like a small child?" "And that's effectively what some of our politicians seem to be doing." "For six months, I worked as a policy advisor at the highest levels of the British civil service, working to advise the most senior people on the issues of drugs and crime and the aim of that was to get an academic in there" "to help give them some evidence that they could base their policies on, but I found that that was actually quite a difficult job to do." "Those civil servants told me that they had learnt that it was not helpful to use evidence which challenges the dominant way of thinking that's already structuring most policies." "It's much easier to take evidence that supports what you're already doing and use that to justify the continuation of your existing policy." "One of the leading figures in research in Drugs and Policy is Professor David Nutt." "He was the government advisor for the ACMD." "The ACMD is the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs." "We had created a 16-point scale of harms and then we took twenty drugs and we ranked all those drugs on these sixteen different harms, and then when we put all that together into this computer program called multi-criteria decision analysis, we discovered that" "the most harmful drug overall was alcohol." "It showed that the drug laws, which ignore the most harmful drug, were actually based on a wrong understanding of harms." "Politicians wanted to get some kind of political advantage by being hard on cannabis and our study said, 'well hang on, cannabis is much, much less harmful than alcohol.'" "I thought I was going to be encouraged to tell the scientific truth and then suddenly one afternoon," "I got a phone call saying effectively, 'you've gotta resign' and I said, 'why?" "'" "And he said, 'because you're giving mixed messages;" "We've gotta have cannabis is bad, alcohol is good." "When we say we want you to resign it means you're sacked' and so I was sacked." "Professor's Nutt's dismissal came after he dared to suggest drugs like cannabis and ecstasy are less harmful than alcohol and tobacco." "It was a very interesting experience because, here, you've spend ten years of your life doing what you know is right and what you know-if that was accepted by government, by policy- makers-would be better for" "society and then for simple political reasons, you get humiliated publically." "After an angry exchange on Sky News yesterday," "Alan Johnson reiterated his argument in a letter to." "The Guardian today:" "'Professor Nutt was not sacked for his views, which I respect but disagree with." "He was asked to go because he cannot be both a government adviser and campaigner against government policy." "But it kind of backfired on the government because his sacking attracted an enormous amount of media attention." "Suddenly the debate wasn't just about whether this expert committee had got it right about drugs, it was a whole debate about the role of science in policy-making." "This brings us to an interesting question:" "If evidence doesn't play the role we think it does in policy-making, then what does?" "Turns out there's this thing called lobbying." "And just what is lobbying?" "Lobbying is supposed to be simply getting access to the politicians and making your case." "So, the American people can lobby just as much as a special interest could." "It's supposed to work like that, and the politician then ponders it and says, 'oh, well, you've both made an interesting case, but I'm going to go with this side or that side.'" "Now, that's not what it is at all, okay?" "The reality of what it has become is:" "Two sides come in with two checks-whoever has the larger check wins." "That's lobbying in a nutshell." "So, if it's defense contractors, or private prisons, or whoever it might be that's giving money for that issue they're gonna win!" "They're not gonna win some of the time;" "They're gonna win all of the time." "I think Bill Hicks said it best." "Bill Hicks said, 'this is my impression of American politics.'" "He goes-it's a guy holding two puppets-and people go, 'well the puppet on the right is more to my liking, well I feel like the puppet on the left suits my beliefs like, hey, wait a minute:" "It's one guy and he's holding both puppets!" "Once corporations were allowed to spend money in politics, they owned politics." "Corporations are people, my friend." "We could raise taxes of course they are- everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people." "Where do you think it goes?" "You give me money, I do you favors-everybody got used to it." "Now the media doesn't even blink;" "They think, 'well if you're good at raising money, that must mean you're a good politician.' Now, what does that have to do with serving the people?" "Do you know that, 95% of the time, the person with more money wins the congressional election at the national stage?" "It doesn't matter if you're liberal or conservative, the main thing that matters is do you have more money?" "So, for the 2012 elections, they spent six billion dollars on all the national elections." "They spent a billion for the Obama campaign, a billion for the Romney campaign and four billion for all the senate and congressional elections." "It's large donors and they're not spending six billion dollars for their health." "They're spending the six billion dollars to get back 12 billion or 60 billion" "I got a campaign." "I need money." "Who's got money?" "That woman with four kids selling $31 worth of marijuana, she's got no money, but that banker, that Wall Street guy, that corporation guy- hey, I think they have a few bucks to spread around." "It actually becomes an undercurrent to every single legislative action that we see." "Everybody's concerned about re-election;" "Everybody's concerned about how to sell themselves, not to their constituents, but to the lobbying and to the interest groups." "It fucks up the framework and the groundwork for the world that we operate in." "So where does this leave society when those who are elected to represent the public no longer have the motivation to do so?" "How can balance be re-achieved?" "What else can alter the framework of the world around us?" "If you think in terms of our communication environment, the advent of the 'net represented a tremendous inflection point." "Before that, the sources of information that we had were pretty much institutionally structured." "That very strong filter is breaking down and that's giving people around the world the chance to think for themselves" "I have a real bug about nobody respects books anymore;" "Books going out the window and everyone's reading on these bloody screens." "It's just so easy to" "Google stuff." "Everyone's just like, 'oh, let's check." "Google' no!" "It's a real, like, big bug there for me;" "It really annoys me." "Where do you get most of your news from today?" "I think, the internet actually!" "Suddenly, it's a different world." "The folk that control big media now no longer control the whole of that media environment." "We're not reliant, say, in England, on the Daily Telegraphs and the fear that politicians have over two or three publications." "Blogs have become the media;" "there really is a public debate." "This is like the public forum of Athens or Rome." "It's the freedom to do what you want." "Can't nobody tell you what you can and can't do on the internet." "You can do what the hell you wanna do when you wanna do it." "You may connect with somebody in another country who may have some information that'd really enlighten the world." "Because we don't know it all in America:" "We only know half the story." "I was, you know, close-minded" "I was just thinking about California and the lifestyle I grew up in." "In Alice in Wonderland, it said something like this:" "'How do I know what I think until I hear what I have to say?" "'" "On the internet you can actually express yourself out loud;" "You can add a new dimension to thinking and for the first time, if you have an opinion, you can go out there and express it, and if you have the ability to promote it, you can get attention for it." "Post it and before you know it, a million people could be following you, talkin' with you, respecting' your views." "Or they could be talkin' bad about your views." "All of a sudden, issues that would not have been discussed before are being discussed." "There's these little communities based on ideas and thoughts that are building and those ideas turn into other ideas and other programming and it's weird if you were to look at it on a chart or on a graph." "In terms of the War on Drugs, the internet has been phenomenal." "There was a great thirst for the truth and so anytime that truth leaked out on the internet people would just jump on it." "'Oh, marijuana has medicinal benefits?" "Oh, wow, Richard Nixon already had the report that said marijuana wasn't bad for you?" "'" "They jump on it and they think, 'thank God there's now something that let's me access the truth!" "I was online in '94." "That's when I first got online, but it didn't really do anything it was sorta like puttin' around and no one knew what was going on." "You've got mail!" "Everyone I know is on it!" "Email!" "Instant messages!" "There's no better way to keep in touch." "You've got mail." "Now with 56k, connections are faster than ever!" "It's fast!" "If you have a phone line, you can go online." "What will they think of next?" "And the mail was all bullshit, and then slowly but but surely it became this interacting monster that it is today." "Anything that you need to know about marijuana, you can just go on there and look." "You can have your mind changed instantly." "In the old days, when there was twenty hippies sitting around trying to legalize marijuana with with their little flyers, there was no way to fact check any of it." "It sounded like a crazy hippie." "Wait, you're telling me marijuana is safe and it helps you with headaches and anxiety and all these important medical things that we're taking all these pills for?" "Yeah right, old hippie." "But nowadays, these hippies are online and they have proof and facts and for once we're like, 'wow, that's not a crazy hippie, that's a smart hippie.'" "You know, I can pick this phone up, and within 10 seconds," "I can Google any complex question that would've required a serious education to answer before." "It's become so commonplace, that we don't realize how fucking completely insane it is!" "It's a culture- changing reality shift." "People like me, who had to read about things in an encyclopedia, and actually go to a library, and take out books on things." "I'm a fuckin' dinosaur." "The young kids that are comin' up today-from the jump, have had the internet;" "They don't know what the world is like without the internet." "The internet is beginning to shake things up in politics but the old momentum is clinging stubbornly, irritatingly and disturbingly." "With the recent NSA leak, I think that you see a very specific example of politicians trying to destroy freedom of expression and freedom of speech." "Collecting data on people and spying on people is a form of intimidation." "If you know that the government is watching what you're doing, and you know that the government is monitoring what you are saying and what you're advocating for, you are less likely to be politically active." "You are more likely to be intimidated by power." "They're using that as a way to tell us to shut the fuck up." "The West fought for 500 years to acquire these basic rights and just to hand them away thoughtlessly means that we have to fight again for hundreds of years just to get them back." "It's very hard to acquire basic human rights;" "It's very easy to give them up." "The establishment is scared to death of the internet because that's the one thing they can't control." "So they've figured out a way to control our politicians through donations, they've figured out how to control" "TV through the advertising, but the internet is the wild, wild West and they can't grab it." "No matter how much they try to plug all the holes in, the truth seems to get out one way or another anyway." "It's basically the whole world sharing with one another and the one thing that we're sharing, that's really doing them damage, is the truth." "The trend, if you pay attention to it, clearly is the dissolving of boundaries between people and ideas and information and it's all going to come to a head." "The first cracks in the monolith of prohibition have already happened." "Suddenly you have Washington and Colorado actually succeeding in passing these legalization and regulation ballots and becoming the first jurisdictions anywhere in the world to do so." "What's happening in the United States is that the entire underpinnings of the War on Drugs are being pulled away by the population of the United States itself." "Washington state and Colorado that make it legal-legal, they're like, 'look, man, it's fuckin' legal here." "Period." "It's not "medically legal" it's legal' and the DEA is like, 'woah, you better not!" "'" "Like, whaddya mean, we'd better not?" "Come on, what is our fucking voting system for if a piece of legislation that the people want gets up there and you're still going out of your way not to recognize it?" "How could you ask people to believe in the process if you won't respect the vote?" "You can't ask people to vote- they won't want to." "That's all that's gonna have to happen to tear it all apart:" "Is more states just saying, 'you know what?" "We're gonna legalize.'" "They become a force that can stand up to the status quo." "It's then you start to take what is yours instead of waiting for the corporations and the government to give you what they think you deserve." "One by one, individual states are defying the federal government and responding to the wishes of their their own immediate population and changing the state law." "Once we see that gaining pace in the United States, it's gonna gain pace in the whole of the rest of the world as well." "The International Narcotics Control Board has made it clear that Washington and Colorado are in breach of the UN drug conventions, they're effectively breaking international law and that the U.S. is, by dint of what's happening in Washington and Colorado, also in breach" "of the UN conventions." "Given that the UN drug treaties were very much driven by the U.S. in the first instance, it does put them in this rather odd situation where something that they drove the formation of, they are now being disciplined and condemned for violating." "Because how can they impose these appallingly damaging laws and conventions across the other countries of the planet when they're legal- izing in their own backyard?" "I think it makes it very difficult for the United States to try to hold other countries in line." "They are experimenting with a completely new approach and that is for the state to be selling marijuana in marijuana shops throughout Uruguay." "All across Europe, in Australia, and in fact, all over the world, the whole house of cards is already coming crumbling down." "I mean even by the time you put this documentary on air," "I'm sure that there are going to be more states that have voted with their feet and changed the legal status of cannabis." "Big step today for those hoping to legalize recreational marijuana in Alaska." "The campaign to regulate marijuana turned in more than 45000 signatures to the lieutenant governor." "I mean it's impossible to keep up right now when it comes to research, political development." "Constant stream of books and documentaries, podcasts and blog posts." "The information's just overwhelming." "They just can't stop releasing shit." "Just like you can't stop making documentaries about it, just like I can't stop talking about it on stage or on a podcast." "In ten years from now, you're gonna look at this film and be like, 'that's ridiculous." "Remember when they had to make films about legalizing marijuana?" "'" "And it's one of the reasons why the age of information that we exist in today is so fuckin' important." "It's so important because it's never been in the hands of the people before and this is what happened:" "In the hands of the people you've seen more progress in ten years than we have in two fuckin' hundred years before." "Because it's swarming, all the greedy pigs are trying to hold on to it, but it's like standing in the middle of the river and trying to catch all the salmon with your hands." "You're not going to." "The world is already moving;" "We're already on it like we want it." "They doing it in Seattle, Washington." "Recreational." "You know I'm on my way out there as soon as I get off this TV screen." "Recreational work." "Establishment figures, they're beginning to get the message;" "They're realizing that it isn't in their interests any longer to demonize cannabis." "It does not make sense, from a prioritization point of view, for us to focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that under state law, 'that's legal.'" "When you see a broad social change taking place in society and you realize that you are behind the curve then, you pretty soon get it that you have to catch up with the curve." "It seems like they are falling under the weight of all this." "They just go where the wind blows in order to stay alive." "I don't think it matters why people jump ship as long as they do jump ship." "In 2009, you wrote a Time Magazine article entitled." "Why I Would Vote No on Pot." "You've changed your mind." "I have and as part of my thinking recently," "I've apologized for some of the earlier reporting because I think we've been terribly and systematically misled in this country for some time and I did part of that misleading." "There's a shift taking place in our culture." "The issue is once again on the table." "Will the forces backing marijuana deregulation overplay their hand in some way that allows the forces of incarceration to get a jump on them?" "The war on marijuana is a symptom of something that is fundamentally wrong in this country." "We have to break out of the fog because the media won't do anything no President is gonna come in and change things." "It comes from the bottom up not from the top down." "So, you can have minor little victories, but that's tinkering. 50 years of documentation says it's not working and what do we do tomorrow?" "The same damn thing." "The truth is not repeating what everybody around you automatically says." "It is not repeating what everybody is gonna pat you on the head for saying." "It is looking for the things that people will not pat you on the head for saying because those are the things that people really need to know, and once you are damn convinced of something of that sort, then it's your obligation" "to go out on a limb for it." "That's truth." "We have to figure out, A, that we are temporary and we are the people that have to pass down this fucking incredibly fucked up mess to our children and unless we operate this world with the idea of sustainability" "for the culture, sustainability for the community, sustainability for humanity in general, you're gonna have resentment at every turn." "You have people profiting and people failing and people being victimized, but the reason why we are so complex is also the reason that I think that we have hope." "Eight years and 2 films later, we once again arrive left with more questions than answers." "Where do we go from here?" "How do we move forward without taking two steps back?" "And, again, sits that ever- lingering question that we just can't seem to shake:" "Will marijuana ever fully be legalized?" "Um, probably yes..." "Oh yes, oh yes." "I've no doubt about it." "Marijuana prohibition is a zombie;" "It is a walking corpse." "It could be decades, but historically, it's a blip." "I think marijuana will be fully legalized and taxed in my lifetime." "Whether we'll ever get Singapore doing it, we'll see." "Globally?" "I can see Iran doing it, can't you?" "Instead of goin' one city, one state at a time." "Make that shit legal everywhere and pop the top and let's go!" "I think it's just around the corner, but you know," "I've always thought that!" "I've been wrong up to now, so I'm probably wrong now!" "I don't know." "I doubt it seriously." "I believe that the forces controlling the way things work in the United States will give us lots of process before we ever get to total legalization." "I can die with the satisfaction of knowing it's inevitable now." "They're never gonna get the cat back in that bag again." "He's out... and what we see now is this culture struggling to make an accommodation for this new kid on the block." "There'll come a point when this will probably end but if it's not today, then somebody will be locked up today, somebody's life will be ruined today and that somebody is probably hundreds of people." "To begin to demonstrate an understanding of humanity is so counter to our way of thinking- it's throw away the key, let's lock 'em up." "And you believe it, up until your son or your daughter or your friends or yourself gets caught up in the same nightmare and then you're going 'oh my God, now I understand, '" "But do you?"