Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP)

0:02 um thank you all for coming um this event started had a genesis uh months ago of how it was going to happen but long story short this is the book that was chosen for our one book one alliance it's called the new jim crow mass incarceration in the age of color blindness by michelle alexander and i was really happy that this book was chosen

0:47 mainly because it's it's a documented and very scholarly work of a time that i personally and maybe a few of you lived through and you knew this stuff was going on but here we have all the documentation about what was happening in terms of racial profiling in the prison system okay so i'm going to read a quote from the book of michelle alexander and then i will let diane introduce herself because she knows more about her than i do right now although i guess we really met in november november but

1:33 we talked on the phone before that yeah lots we knew each other from different organizations outside of corpse so okay this is a quote from page 259 in the book and it's about what martin luther king jr said in 1967 okay and he was talking to his staff at the southern christian leadership conference retreat and basically what he was talking about is that the civil rights movement needed to go further and become a human rights movement so just just listen it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from

2:19 the era of civil rights to the era of human rights for the past 12 years we have been in a reform remember since 1967. i know a lot of you weren't born yet but it was a pretty tumultuous time in u.s history but after selma and the voting rights bill we moved into a new era which must be an era of revolution we must see that the great distinction between a reform movement and a revolutionary movement we are called upon to raise the we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society

3:08 thank you very much beth i'd like to start by thanking you guys for coming here and it's amazing to me that as a university that you choose a book or a theme for i don't know is it the year or the semester reading it and this book had a significant impact on me and and i didn't read it a long time ago i literally just uh read it last year and i think what i'd like to start is with my background i was hired in 1983 and i retired as the first female lieutenant in an agency in southern california in los angeles called redondo beach police department

3:53 i was it's i grew up in the south bay i was very fortunate i had a very good career and throughout my career i tended to view the role of law enforcement a little bit differently than i think how law enforcement now views themselves today and part of it was because of the way that our agency and and the people who taught me what the meaning of law enforcement was um so from a perspective of where i came from law enforcement in california is given its statutory authority under a penal code section called 832 of the penal code and what's important about it is it doesn't describe us as

4:41 police officers it gives us police authority but it describes us as peace officers and there's a huge connotation between being a peace officer and serving your community and policing people and so i started in 1983 ronald reagan was in office and saw the escalation of the war on drugs and its impact not only in our communities on the the macro level but also on the micro level i worked a gang unit i ran a gang unit we were very involved in community-based policing i started a school resource officer program the best four years of my career working on a high school campus because i was able to do

5:28 everything from intervention to gang intelligence i got promoted to sergeant i worked a career criminal narcotics unit spent two years really trying to eliminate the drug problem in our community and walked away from that as what an abject failure what the heck are we doing we this is not what law enforcement should be doing it doesn't work then i got promoted lieutenant and then ended up with a fairly significant back injury and i was retired out so i come from a lot of operational experience and i kind of call this you know from drug warrior to patriotic dissent why the drug the war on drugs has failed that's surrounding me is all marijuana

6:16 plants we were we were helicoptered in to the mountains in between riverside and orange county dropped in via helicopter and i spent three days chopping down and cutting marijuana down the most arduous grueling job that i have ever done my whole entire life but what i want to do is talk about leap and kind of why i'm in leap leap is law enforcement against prohibition it sounds kind of like a dichotomy people kind of go what are you kidding and leap was started in 2002 by five retired police officers who all had significant law enforcement experience back on the

7:02 east coast and they all took a look around after serving successful careers and said this doesn't work so they started a non-profit educational foundation that our goal is to educate the public legislators and to help move the criminal justice system specifically in the drug war from one of incarceration to treating drugs as a public health issue which in fact it should be so we're made up it's an international association now we have chapters all over the world uh in in the last month uh elite members have testified in front of the u.n commission they've been down in mexico

7:48 at a couple conferences meeting with past and current presidents to talk about how to move forward and really in some aspects is to tell the united states we're done you know if you can't control your drug consumption problem you know what we're doing to mexico as a country right now is horrible we've had 50 000 deaths since calderon took effect last five years our goals is the failure of our drug war policy uh the fiscal and social impact on our communities for me one of the most important things is to restore the public's respect for law enforcement just like prohibition in the 1920s and 30s drug prohibition is

8:36 no different is that what it has done is it has corrupted our government and quite frankly law enforcement and not just in the normal course of corruption in the sense of you know graft and taking money use of force over incarceration but by the federal government using federal grant funding asset forfeiture as a way for law enforcement to pad their budgets and so right now from a fiscal aspect is a lot of agencies throughout the nation for sure in california get federal grant money that takes resources away from investigating violent or property crime and directs them specifically just to

9:23 address narcotics and so what we're seeing from a law enforcement perspective is for the first time in in years is our solvability factor for violent crimes murders rapes robberies assaults is dropped to a historic low and that can be attributed directly to resources going to fight the war on drugs drug war facts drug arrest every 19 seconds in the nation there's a marijuana arrest every 31 seconds 82 of the arrests were all for simple possession

10:08 and i think everybody knows it at this point our high school students 48 of them by the time they graduate high school have all used some type of illicit substance i have a son who's a sophomore in college he grew up in orange county attended great schools both private and public and i would always do this experiment through his high school years if i give you or one of your friends 20 bucks what are you guys going to come back with alcohol tobacco methamphetamine marijuana everybody every kid said oh you want meth we can get math you want marijuana you want what do you want we can get it you know and the reason for it is because we've allowed um the market to go to an unregulated market and uh we've given up control to

10:55 thugs and criminals quite frankly um the one that i like uh and i don't know if it's on here uh it's probably on another slide is back in 2005 there was a survey that was conducted uh by the national chiefs of police association and i think it was one of their conferences and they had a lot of sheriffs and a lot of upper management 82 percent of our law enforcement leaders who attended that conference or participated in that survey feel that the drug war has failed in reducing consumption in the united states but no one's willing to address it what do we do why you know it's a failure why are we continuing to fund a

11:42 failing strategy albert einstein on prohibition i think that covers it you know is one of the reasons alcohol prohibition ended was simply because of the graft the corruption the deaths and our society at that point also from an economic perspective once again needed the tax revenue to survive and but more than anything else is we figured out we could not enforce alcohol prohibition but yet we engage in it once again it almost doesn't make any sense um when i talk i love questions i don't

12:28 like to just talk so if you guys have questions or disagree or have comments please you know is don't wait till the end we can have this discussion throughout because i'll tend to forget and i'll move on voices of reform i think this is really interesting i met beth through a social movement and i think what's so important about what michelle alexander talks about as did martin luther king back in the 60s is what does it take for us on a grassroots level to move the ball forward to get our government to do the right thing and i think just like you saw with prohibition ending with alcohol what you saw with the vietnam war

13:14 with the movement what you saw with civil rights is you are now starting to get a collection of voices they're pretty disparate you know you have everything from george schultz to alice huffman from the naacp you know is it is not a right or left issue it is a nonpartisan human rights issue more organizations are starting to call for at least to start with is the appropriate regulation and legalization of cannabis to start and then we can start talking about decriminalizing other drugs and moving to a public health model

14:01 the intent of drug policies uh when when i started in 1983 you know richard nixon started the war on drugs and every year the office of the national drug control policy the drug czar comes out with mission statement about what the intent of our drug policies are and they're very simple to reduce consumption production and distribution the problem is is what they do is if you go into their website one and it's a rhetorical goal and it's unattainable everywhere you see a drug free america i just you know i'm astounded by that i mean even from a prescription level from so we're not

14:48 going to be able to have coffee or a glass of wine and if someone wants to smoke cigarettes you know that's their business you know it's why are we engaged in a rhetorical goal that is completely unattainable in our society but you go back to the money i mean there's a lot of non-profit coalition movements that believe in this school and who actively oppose and lobby legislators to create drug-free communities to and dare is probably you know my biggest pet peeve because it doesn't work you know why was the federal government when in the 1980s when when dare started when nancy reagan basically said just say no that was

15:33 never a campaign strategy she was interviewed and it became this significant campaign strategy where the federal government spent millions and millions of dollars funding a untested and unproved educational program that we can now look at and say it didn't work so why are we still funding it and there's still money out there and if you go to the dare america website one of the things that you'll see is all the misinformation so my some of my philosophy has been with our children is you know drugs are bad abusive drugs are bad okay um and we can you know debate a lot of

16:19 different things and and i think that people can responsibly use drugs i know people that responsibly use cannabis i know both medically and personally you know and that's the thing it's responsible use so who should be addressing that you can't dictate responsible use through telling people it's against the law and especially if you start talking about addiction issues and other problems that we have in our community of why people use drugs or they don't use drugs so it's always my point what are we doing um history the war on drugs and and i don't know if people are really familiar i know there's a there's al michele

17:06 alexander touched about it a little bit is august ballmer was a famous police chief he professionalized law enforcement in california and then it swept across the nation one of the things that august vollmar did is he was both the president of the international association of chiefs of police as well as he was on the wickersham commit commission that helped end prohibition and back in the 1930s this is what he talked about in regards to the drug war so 1914 the harrison act started and opium cocaine marijuana were made illegal and volmer who is touted by the international

17:51 association of chiefs of police is one of the best police chiefs there he's got a department at cal berkeley that's the criminal justice department i mean his his papers are very valued there's tons of research that's still done and this is what he said and and he talked about which was really interesting with volmer back then he felt that the government should provide a pharmaceutical pharmaceutical model for drug addicts like switzerland does okay and that the government in order to prevent crime should provide the drug addict at cost their drugs and but we're doing it with methadone

18:36 right now which is actually much worse than heroin you can be a functioning heroin addict it's not good but you in fact can be a functioning heroin addict maintain your family work and everything else and if we put it into a pharmaceutical model that heroin addict could go to their doctor who would then prescribe an amount not to get the person high but to deal with the public health issue and the harm related to it so i always throw bulmer up at all these chiefs and all the legislators and all the all the cops that i've lost you know kind of their friendship and go hey vollmer said this back then so 1914 harrison act

19:22 the first um anti-narcotics act was loaded with racist tendencies for those that don't know it um i found this on the harrison act is there's tons of public documents and in fact in the process of debating it these are terms that were used by our politicians and debating why we should or should not outlaw drugs but i can tell you that they don't teach that in the police academy and seriously it wasn't until i went back to school and started

20:08 educating myself after my brother died from from a he was an addict and he died from a combination of psychotropic and alcohol but that's my kind of part of my epiphany moments uh what led me to this um 1914 heroin could be bought from the grocery stores what kills me with this stat is the u.s government at that point stated 1.3 percent of the u.s population is addicted to some substance some substance you know there's a constant rate of addiction that people don't understand is there's drug abuse there's responsible use and then there's that constant addiction rate so we enacted

20:53 drastic laws for 1.3 percent of the population who was potentially addicted to drugs 1937 the marijuana tax act was largely the federal government's response to the use of marijuana by mexicans and also jazz musicians and others but it really permeated out of the southwest border i was born in yes real quick in 1914 yeah um when i was sold in grocery stores just to get high no it was medicinal yeah it was it was it was uh in what yeah it was painkillers latimon i mean it was purely medicinal now yes they had an addiction problem no doubt

21:40 but people weren't going out and raping and pillaging and robbing people for it they were way back when i was in nursing school they were actually i was working in the eye clinic there were actually bottles everywhere of tincture of cocaine to use for eye surgery and it was just out there but but again the history goes to support michelle alexander's theory is that i had i had several epiphany moments my brother

22:25 my brother and i were really close he started self-medicating when he was 11 or 12 years old he died at 44 there's 14 months age difference and i pretty much helped raise him his whole entire life and he had long periods of sobriety interspersed with you know hit and bottom self-medicating everything from meth to pot to heroin to alcohol and he lost his job and so he lost his ability to buy his psychotropic meds ended up moving into our house he was dual diagnosed clinical depression manic and really bad and suicidal the whole bit so he started self-medicating with methamphetamine and this was right as i was in the process of retiring

23:10 so my brother gets arrested for obsession of methamphetamine pipe and possession of methamphetamine and we go to court and prop 36 is available and my brother when he was in his early twenties had a felony conviction and walk in a court and i've never been treated so badly by another public servant ever went up to the d.a introduced myself and and not that i was looking for anything it's just you know is my brother's willing to plead guilty he doesn't need an attorney he wants prop 36 and she just went off on me and basically said no your brother's going to go to state prison for 18 months to three years because of one previous felony conviction

23:55 and i said okay he assigned him a public defender he's going to plead not guilty and i called up a friend my husband and i hired a close personal friend as an attorney and it took us six months to get him adjudicated and into a prop 36 program that was a living facility and it was it started kind of my defining moments of you know and and i had always viewed myself because i worked in the game unit and i did a lot of i mean i tried to do job placement i did a holistic law enforcement approach you know really work with people to prevent them from getting into the system and and one of the things and i had always because my brother been incredibly empathetic towards drug

24:42 addicts and drug addiction because i understood the impact on our family my dad was an alcoholic and um i felt that there was a better way to deal with it and sometimes people went to jail sometimes you had to take their kids away from them i mean i had a heroin addict who when i walked in the house um her husband was selling heroin she was a prostitute and the floor was covered with cockroaches it was there was no food in the house i mean it was horrible we took this baby and it was a failure to thrive baby and and we saved the baby so there's there's times where you have to intervene and you have to do something like that but there was not the resources that were available for people to help themselves and keep their families

25:27 together because they're all going to incarceration so my epiphany moment that started some wheels turning and then my brother got locked up again and his girlfriend was a heroin addict and was selling heroin and i wouldn't bail him out but i did go and watch the trial and i actually have the police report the law enforcement agency that arrest him in orange county lied about the probable cause and uh he the case was actually dismissed under what's called the 1538 motion uh because of it and that was the second epiphany moment that those three months in jail my brother did well got out got cleaned moved to new orleans and was doing really well until his accidental overdose

26:14 and then prop 19 came along and judge jim gray who is out of orange county has been a for the last 20 years has been preaching that the drug war has failed and he was at a debate and i went in and listened to the debate he got me in contact with lee and um it's ever since it's been a really great thing for me and but it wasn't until 2004 that i had to self-educate myself if i as a police officer knew this back when i was a police officer maybe things maybe there's other things i would have done that would have been different and i think what happens is is our law enforcement leaders and our police officer curriculum doesn't do a

27:01 good enough job of saying hey look this is why when you go out in your community and you do these mass raids that people are sensitive to the issues of racism you need to come up with different strategies so you don't impact people you need to serve your constituents not go in and be an occupier president nixon shaffer commission 1970 he you know he did this whole shaffer commission and they came back and said marijuana should not be a schedule 1 substance and he ignored it completely ignored it and started the road so this is what the shaffer commission said but we don't talk about it i'd just like

27:47 to say that no one has died from an overdose of marijuana no one has killed anyone from too much marijuana it's mostly when you hear about these crazed drug people it's usually alcohol and combination or something just remember alcohol disinhibits you so 20 almost 22 years as a police officer i have never once and this is my anecdotal experience i know other officers who have different stories but this is my experience and most of the people i know share this experience never once went to a house for someone who smoked pot beat their wife beat their kid molested them robbed someone raped pillaged or was

28:34 even involved in a fatal traffic accident that's my experience can marijuana be dangerous absolutely prohibitions worse because it marginalizes whole sections of our communities i mean you know marijuana conviction you can lose your federal student aid you can apply for it back again gotta wait two years you go through this whole process and i talked to a kid recently who got his his federal student aid money back after having a marijuana conviction so he goes through this whole process he calls them up and goes so what do i answer on the fafsa you lie you say you weren't convicted seriously so so what are we so what are we perpetuating as a governmental system

29:21 there's so so there's that one question that says have you ever been convicted of a drug crime well he's still convicted but because he peed clean and he's still using he's a medicinal marijuana patient he's you know he's he's still um you know he's been smart about it he's you know however it happens to be so when he calls up the federal government says oh yeah now you get to lie and say you have fine yeah it's you know it's how prevalent is drug use 46 of the population the past three presidents and the addiction level is the exact and the addiction level has not changed

30:08 president obama from his position i think everyone really thought that we were going to move at least more to a public health issue the problem is is he has not changed the staff positions of people who are still prohibitionists could he yes is he choosing to do it no i think that he believes it's unpopular at this point and that it won't gain him any traction but what we've been told is that the war on drugs is no longer a war on our communities what we've been told is that we're not going to go after

30:54 legitimate businesses and dispensaries for operating with their state laws and what has occurred has been completely different now not talking because i don't want to talk politics but you know i'm hoping for his second term because there's no way romney or santorum will ever get elected in this country but i'm hoping that because if he gets in as a second term that he can deal with this issue in a much more humane way and actually appoint people who understand what is going on in our country with in regards to the mass incarceration of drug users yes yeah i had the opportunity to hear

31:40 michelle alexander interview i don't remember the whole thing and i don't remember all the sailing points because oh she's fabulous isn't she but it sounds as though it's just sitting here listening i've been i've been really trying to not say anything because i really want to hear your sure presentation but uh i am interrupting the naacp and i am familiar with alice hoffman i don't agree with alice mr ballista policies sure just to put it bluntly i don't agree with the naacp's position on this and i also think that it sounds as though we're really focusing most of the argument on marijuana use as opposed to some of the other harder drugs that can have i think more devastating effects than just

32:25 quote-unquote marijuana now if that is the if that is the position for belief and for the organizations that are supporting uh you know making it legal then i think that that's one argument but i don't think that's coming out loud enough if in fact that is true you know what it's i think it's really nuanced i think you're correct in some aspects here's the thing i think all of us can agree that drug abuse is harmful to our society correct the only issue i have with the whole debate is that we're putting everything in one pot crap and then we start taking pieces out and so it confuses yeah people like me and i'm going what are we really so so but see i think we're talking about multiple things there

33:10 there's been several experiments and i was going to get to that that we can we can talk about a little bit right here is there's a couple different ways to approach it i think from a social experiment the one place there is a huge difference between marijuana and someone who uses heroin huge difference someone who uses methamphetamine someone who uses crack cocaine there's it's it's night and day so i think from a societal experiment what we have to do is we have to separate marijuana out of that which would do a tremendous amount of good both fiscally it would open up our jails it would allow a lot of other very positive things to happen

33:55 once we do that social experiment at the same time we need to understand that people who are addicts it's much more effective to treat them in a public health model than to lock them up if they commit a crime outside of being a drug addict they deserve to go to jail and so there's there's different steps along the way so decriminalization would be a good place for us to start with hard drugs and in fact in california is senator leno just introduced a bill that would reduce all felony drug possession arrests to simple misdemeanors so that in fact would

34:43 eliminate the stigmatization that michelle alexander calls from from having a drug conviction you would not get sent to state prison and that should hopefully open up if it passes because i'm sure law enforcement will oppose it if it passes it should open up monies to to do public health treatment options but outside of and it's no different than what let's say portugal is doing now and and we'll get get to the portugal success is portugal decriminalized every single drug and it's not it's it yeah yeah it's not it's not a decriminalization like we know decriminalization in the united states still carries criminal penalties it actually should be called depenalization

35:29 which is it's an administrative remedy to a drug problem and in portugal yeah well yes and now the consequences no no but but there's not but there's not a criminal penalty but if you're out and open and you're smoking a joint or you have a possession of a drug then the cop can still stop you you're not getting arrested you're not getting a criminal record you get cited into an administrative court who then potentially comes up with a list you may get a hundred dollar fine or they can recommend that you go into drug treatment and they've had some tremendous success with that okay if that will get past that you just mentioned yeah wouldn't there be any

36:16 uh grandfathering in of all the people in the last let's say 20 years who never went to jail but flea bargained so they wouldn't have to get these horrible things and yet can't vote can't can't can't get uh you know their answer will there be any of going back because we don't somehow go back there we're talking hundreds of years before we i you know i yeah and talk about the ones who never even went to jail well but but if you're talking about if you've had a felony conviction because it's a felony conviction which is what eliminates the voting and other issues you can have a misdemeanor drug conviction and still have administrative penalties not like not being you know what that's almost like beyond

37:01 my pay grade yes that would be i mean i i would think that from a legislative process that in fact should be done you know so i can't answer your question what the the problem with the decriminalization model is you're not eliminating the black market which means that you still have the cartels and and then you're never going to completely eliminate the black market because if we could you wouldn't be able to get drugs in prisons you know you're always in a free society you're always going to have the black market issues but you're going to greatly reduce the harm and so i think what happens and sometimes my only beef with with lee is that we should be talking about regulation you know legalization is a good you know

37:47 cliche you know cops say legalize drugs because people it kind of gets people's attention but what leap is really talking about is and initiating a smart cost effective regulatory model that takes the the cartels and the criminals out of it and you know so so there's different ways to get there but i think and and most of the people who started leap and and the executive director and everyone else believes that we have to start with marijuana we have to lose the fear of marijuana and understand that you know it's going to it needs to be appropriately regulated

38:33 you know and once we're there then let's decriminalize and let's treat people and let's see what the differences are you know it's huge dollars you know the illegal drug market trades 300 percent profit and we continue and and i haven't been able to uh update this but this is not 52 billion anymore it's 55 billion now so these numbers go up so this is what we spend you know this was 2010 169 dollars for every man woman child what we're spending on just simply marijuana across the nation 2.67 billion in in law enforcement costs judicial

39:19 prosecution correctional based expenses it's a huge amount of money let's take that money what would that do to bolster academic institutions public infrastructure job creation and and i think we need to start looking at effective policing strategies based on scientific evidence which law enforcement kind of doesn't do real well um you know so here we are you know how many years later constant addiction rate 1.3 percent still what's the incentive for law enforcement to approach these matters differently where is the pressure gonna come from to make

40:04 that happen because that's as i understand what you're saying and certainly what um ms alexander is saying that's where the pressure point is it is that's what's creating this continuing incarceration process which is really what we are trying to get at here yeah and things are just the convenience it's the mechanism to do it yeah it becomes another one down the road but this what do we do to get law enforcement on the other side you know education is a big part of it i think legislation is a huge portion of it you know we can talk about occupy wall street um and its impact on our society and if occupy wall street would stick to its one basic message which was crony

40:52 capitalism i believe that crony capitalism on both sides of the political equation and what they what they're doing is everyone's now using the relativist argument which is well the republicans are doing it so we have to do it in order to get reelected or they're doing it because we have to do it no one's taking the moral high ground we have to force our legislators to not allow public safety to lobby quite frankly i think it's unethical law enforcement just like the military was placed into the executive branch of government for a particular reason they weren't supposed to legislate laws they weren't supposed to influence laws

41:39 they were supposed to serve their communities based on what their community's needs were and i think that's a big portion of it there's a there's a lobbyist by the name of john level in california who lobbies for the california narcotics officers association who also lobbies for the california chiefs association and anytime you have any legislation that would go against law enforcement he is up there getting in front of legislators and basically selling the public safety will support you in your election campaign and it's both sides okay this is a and so i think that's one of the moves that we can push is we can have a demand

42:25 california you know what's the strongest other than this year where the teachers union has put more money into lobbying but for the most part in the last 10 years the california peace officers association is the strongest law enforcement lobby not just in california but in the nation they not only lobby here but they lobby in washington and you know for those that don't know it they've also started victim support groups so they they they put lots of money against prop 36 they were one of the big backers of three strikes and so you have to go back to it's about the money so we're going to need to address this and the drug issues is in fact a part of it

43:12 there's no if ands or buts about it i think it's a a piece that you can pull out that shows the inefficiency of the system and how it's been corrupted um 300 profit margin 500 billion dollars international um is what the drug trade is worth across the whole entire world so this was 255 million and a hundred dollar bills that's so prison overcrowding we all know it i mean michelle alexander speaks about it in this book i think this is this is one of the stats that i'm most embarrassed about you know until you start reading it and

43:59 you start picking up um the pew pew center on state's research on one in 100 when you start looking at it you know blacks constitute 53.5 percent of all persons who have a drug conviction and yet their drug prevalence rate is lower than whites and part of the part of the issue has been is because of communities low economics it's you know a white kid is probably sitting inside the house not in the presence of law enforcement but someone is calling because that kid is smoking pot out on the corner and and then it's the

44:45 mass militarization of law enforcement of well we're going to solve this game problem in this issue when i started law enforcement the gang problem was about territory it wasn't about drugs gangs have turned into drug trafficking organizations period simple in the story it's not just about protecting their neighborhood it's about making money and a lot of it south africa 1993 2008 what are we doing as a society we're supposed to be the most open and free society in the world and this is this is what we do to our own citizens i find it appalling you know does anyone here think that the war on drugs has worked in our society

45:31 even if even if we disagree on how we solve it i probably um i lecture you know between five to ten times a month i in the last two years i've asked people at this point you know raise your hand if what we're doing is working successfully even in very conservative communities for very pro public safety i don't ever get a hand up so if we all agree that what we're doing is failing why aren't our politicians and our law enforcement leaders doing it you know this is the bottom line drug dealers don't ask for id that's why marijuana is a gateway drug because your

46:17 kid my kid you know your nephew your niece your neighbor walks in to get pot one day and the drug dealer says i don't have any or spikes it with methamphetamine or pcp or basically says here well how about some cocaine today because we're out that's how we get the gateway theory because it's not appropriately regulated we should not be giving control up to the drugs and the criminals i would argue that alcohol is the gateway no absolutely no i would too but but that's i mean you still hear people are afraid right you know is marijuana and that's the other issues we don't even adequately educate our children really to the the harms of drug abuse appropriately because we scare them at a very young age

47:03 both about alcohol and about cigarettes and about marijuana and other drugs and we tell our kids i mean it's still on the their website you know if you're if you smoke marijuana you're gonna be a heroin addict so then our kids smoke pot and they don't get addicted to heroin and then they go well i'm gonna try something else yes i can't remember what percentage of arrests any given year is drug-related huge the latest figures and i don't have my is um all drug arrests um like we had 858 000 drug arrests last year and that was

47:49 according to the fbi uh and no i'm sorry it was more because that was just the potteris there was like 1.6 million drug arrests all drug arrests from sales to cultivation simple possession over 800 000 were simply for pot and the rest were for other harder drugs that out of that 1.6 million is you know we arrest it's double what we're arresting for drug offenses versus what we're arresting for violent crimes or for property crimes either way it sounds like it's too big of a business too many people are getting paid are relying on people to get arrested for drug offenses for them to even have an incentive to even want to

48:35 do away with it well law enforcement gets a lot of incentives they get a lot of incentives through asset forfeiture they get a lot of incentives through federal grant funding this year california got 72 million dollars up and down the the state to police agencies simply to hire police officers to do nothing but narcotics arrest but what happens with that is people aren't hiring police officers because what what the public doesn't understand is with that federal budget it it doesn't cover benefits it doesn't cover pension it just covers the straight salary and costs and they're short term it's only three years and you know they're not necessarily you have to apply for it you may not get it

49:21 the next time so when a law enforcement leader accepts federal grant and city hall accepts federal grants they don't go out and hire three more police officers they just divert that personnel from another assignment in order to get that money there's tons of incentives that way and it happens all the time and i and i think in some aspects we have to remove that you know is prohibitions been tried all over the place it hasn't worked still doesn't work international association of chiefs of police in 2011 came out and said that what they want law enforcement to do in california or not just in california but across the nation is to use scientific

50:07 based evidence and research practices to in order to determine policy and to do what's best for our communities we do it in other places we don't do it in drug policy because they don't like what the scientific evidence shows so we can talk treatment versus enforcement this is 1994 the original report the samsa was 1996. 1994 i was a police officer still i hadn't gotten promoted and i've always been a big rand fan so i bring in the rand report to briefing to share and i you know took it to a couple of bosses and you know maybe we ought to be doing some more proactive work working with local community groups there's i think so school resource officer at the time there's a lot of grant-based funding to set up programs

50:55 in order to treat drug offenders 1994 so supply versus demand analysis of cocaine and marijuana for every dollar spent on drug treatment it returned seven times the value so for one dollar spent on on drug treatment the taxpayer received seven dollars back in value that's huge it also showed domestic enforcement cost four times more than treatment and that treatment was 23 times more effective than source control and supply side which is all arrest incarceration enforcement so we've had the information our government samsa which is run by the federal government has had this information as well and so is the drug czar and i think that's what's

51:40 irritating to me about talking about developing smart strategic policies is samhsa's study was you know a year-long study this is what they saw if you treated people drug selling was reduced by 78 shoplifting by 82 percent assaults by 78 all crime went down employment increased and medical visits both for inpatient mental health and standard medical went down tremendously and those costs haven't even they couldn't figure out what that cost was in savings to the taxpayer that's huge and we ignore it because it doesn't make our communities in law enforcement money

52:25 so 2005 rand corporation again did a report how goes the drug war and what they said is you know let's every on both sides of the equation let's take the rhetoric out both by the people who want to completely legalize drugs and both by the prohibitionists who want to continue in this fashion and what they said is the drug war has failed by metrics more money we would have been much more uh better off if more money had been expended on treatment less emphasis on mandatory minimums which is what caused the mass incarceration rate to go on and if as a governmental entity whether you were law enforcement or public health treatment if we would have been much more sensitive to the

53:11 variations of drugs and how best to treat it that no one was really being as insightful as they should have been and quite frankly we continue in overspending for enforcement versus treatment it's still two to one nothing's changed you know our federal government said it was going to change it wasn't going to be a war on our communities we're going to treat people as a public health issue it has not changed um reclassification petition going back to the marijuana thing you know the dea keeps saying that cannabis has no medical efficacy so right now the governors of the state of washington rhode island vermont colorado and there's others that are signing on board are asking the federal government to move

53:58 cannabis from schedule one to schedule two so there can be scientific studies conducted to continue to see what the the efficacy level of medicinal marijuana is and what they did and i have the report is they have 756 citable studies that goes towards disproving what the dea continues to say is that there is no medicinal value in cannabis but there's no medicinal value in alcohol or cigarettes that i'm aware of and our society is so hypocritical yeah because the numbers say why why have we allowed those to proliferate throughout and i i think it comes down to a financial aspect somebody probably screwed up years ago and didn't realize

54:43 they could have done the same thing with marijuana sure and made a whole ton of money legally well i think i think there's been a rhetorical war on drugs and you know we can talk about the moral issues and what i what i try to say because i'm not a theologian okay is from a moral perspective drugs are neither good or bad no different than guns people always get irritated when i say guns aren't good or bad it's what people do with them and so what we need to deal is with the behaviors associated with the drug use so if you go out and rob and rape and hurt someone you need to go to jail but dr you know in and

55:30 we can have personal opinions that drugs are immoral based on our own religion but our government should not be imposing those values in our society because it has caused more problems than it has good you know and and i don't want my kid to use drugs but you know i know that you know he's going to drink so i'm going to teach him how to drink responsibly i'm not going to teach him how to use drugs responsibly but i'm sure as heck going to educate him and make certain he understands the ramifications i don't want high school kids smoking pot if you're 21 and you smoke a joint and you don't want to get in a car and you don't get in the car and drive it's not our business i also like the point that you made earlier at least you know i'm very

56:16 anti-alcohol in cigarettes yeah and probably the less so than i am with those with what are currently illegal substances but the good thing i see about well this sounds the good way we administer alcohol is at least if you go somewhere legally buying it it has some controls and regulations purity levels point of buying something off the street that is supposedly what you believe to be something you have no clue that's my big fear for all the kids that i know are acquiring this stuff because you're going to do it whether i tell them no or not but they don't really know what is in their hand what they end up smoking what they end up inhaling except absolutely absolutely um i have a friend who's actually a producer who

57:01 um when he was and he's made a lot of motivation you might know anyway when his kids were growing up he told his and i never heard this from any father before he told his kids look you know i use drugs you're going to use drugs i'll get you whatever you need oh yeah don't buy from the shoes yeah i know and i understand that but it just kind of scares me there's a lot of different angles to this and i think some of us probably can can look at a lot of these things because we're wearing different hats whether it's a parent yeah i remember my mom buying my brother condoms because she said he's probably going to do it anyway i thought you know so yeah

57:47 hey you know what when when my son went to college my husband bought went to costco and bought him the industrial-sized condom and he said you're stupid if you don't think he's having sex already you know so there's some logic to that but then you know so as a parent another angle from parental standpoint is you know when you've got a you've got a daughter and you go we legalize drugs do i really do i really want that and i'm using drugs plural here because i don't think any of the arguments i've heard anything i've read is doing a good enough job of singing out you're right the different types of drugs so i'm just going to leave it in the pot since it's all in there yeah that's just part of the pun yeah but i like that i like that and so i'm going and i had this thought

58:32 when all this argument came out here in california i said well my daughter's getting married this summer and if you know the guy she's marrying decides well i just want to smoke a few joints tonight and he's high as a kite now again i'm speaking but purely because i look at it from several different angles and she's trying to talk about something and he's totally stoned out and spaced out and she calls me now what am i supposed to say what am i supposed to do we're starting to venture into territories that we haven't before the other half that i wear is an ordained minister that says if it's illegal there's really no discussion here it's illegal i don't write the laws i didn't make i'm i'm governed to enforce the law that's my commission so i've got a lot of different angles there look at then i'm a part of an organization that says oh we should legalize it but the only reason i think

59:19 anyway some of the organizations are saying this specifically than double acp is because i think there's been a lot of wrongs that that hopefully this will make right yeah and it'll it will help like you said decrease some of that population but you can't do it with a one-sided agenda you have to have a holistic agenda because now they're coming out uh and now they're not going in so what are you going to do with all of this now so i think it's been it's been looked at from a very short short-sighted viewpoint because no matter how much you they talk about it i still have tons of questions going has anyone thought about this is it sure about that now that these guys are hanging out on the streets and you're not arresting them what are we going to do with it they're unemployed i mean the questions are just insurmountable

1:00:05 well and and that's and that's really the question about what regulatory model are we going to use so so it's almost like it's hard because we're putting the cart in front of the horse we can't even get to the regulatory models because we can't even get our politicians to have an honest conversation and discourse about the harms that prohibition has had so we have to hammer we have to have this discussion and i think for the first time in our society we're having discussions that are going to bring us to what is that regulatory model going to be and there's all sorts of different regulatory models that can be applied whether it's full legalization or just legalization of pot and regulation and then decriminalization and how do we

1:00:50 divert our monies to make certain that there's job training public infrastructure good education that type of stuff okay so then so you produce numbers up here in this presentation that show going from one way to another sure we don't know what the cost will be going from this way to the next way which is the regulatory all these things that you just discussed and listed and stuff we don't know how those numbers check sure okay so if you're going to go from not to then to not right yeah isn't it kind of a shell game really at this point where monies come from how much you have to filter in how much it gets used because whatever you don't use on on policing all of this won't it then

1:01:36 get shifted to than treating regulatory possibly but but isn't it sure but but isn't that but isn't but hang on a minute but isn't that but but isn't it a smarter way see i guess there's an interim there though where you have people that are you're gonna like you said right now that you have people that you let out from jail that what do you do with them they're sitting out on the street i agree we don't know but i think the facts have proven that what we're currently doing and you know what and it's a really nuanced thing because there is there's lots of things that go on but i think what i'm what i'm one of the things that we have to go through this is to show that there's other strategies

1:02:22 that were we as a governmental bodies have been unwilling to really discuss and to use effectively this is portugal this is what you saw in 10 years when they completely decriminalized and one of the things that's most important this is my favorite thing you know what they did they made marijuana not sexy not sexy it means doing our kids like to be rebels and do what's illegal it's not sexy in portugal because it's not a big deal i mean you know it's i wanted to point out regarding the cost um she mentioned earlier that 800 000 arrests were marijuana 1.6 million for

1:03:09 all drugs marijuana first of all you shouldn't be going to jail i don't think most people need treatment to smoke marijuana which is true we have to put 800 000 people in treatment we probably need to put in you know 600 000 people in treatment for not and and you know what it's probably it's probably a lot less because what you have to understand with the system right now it's called coercive treatment so if your kid gets caught with pot in the street and they go to juvenile court and maybe they get diverted out of the system or they just go to traffic court and they're forced to go whether they have an addiction or not they're forced to go to treatment and then that stat is used as look at all these kids who are in drug treatment also i think specifically marijuana i

1:03:55 think of marijuana i don't just think about the thug or the gang member that's on the corner of stamping weed or just trying to sell a dime bag also being about my closest friend's father who smoked every day of his life um who also went to work every day yeah so so i think about that type of person as well and he could immediately gotten caught a minute yeah hang on a minute she had a question first too there's a big group of people being missed here that have been plea bargained out not going to jail who were innocent who have now been blamed you know branded as felons and and they didn't they weren't they were innocent and they can't do all these

1:04:42 things we created a society of innocent people been granted as a felon yeah who never went to jail what about all those people what was the cost to our thing that they can't get jobs they can't find count the costs okay i mean what about that course we weren't even using yeah it no there there's there's a lot um switzerland took a public health approach to heroin this is what their results were felony crime down by more than 60 percent isn't that what we want in our communities and in switzerland heroin is not legal but but the treatment issues if you're a heroin addict you go to your doctor and you deal with it and they're not they're no longer you know raping a

1:05:28 pillage and stealing from the neighborhoods um i think across the world outside of our country even iran that actually their drug prevalence rate is uh probably i think is just as high as ours at this point and they also execute the seller and the user depending on the circumstances but even iran is is is offering public health treatment uh for heroin addicts now even though they still you know cut off their heads and you know that's a that's a novel way of doing it you know before they cut off their heads eventually i'm not certain how many times but so so you know but this is this is exactly what we're talking about what are we going to do down the road

1:06:14 but but i think really the the most important question is is we all can agree to disagree on how we get to a better strategy but what i really ask is that people not because i think our politicians and our public safety leaders have done a very good job of as i call it is using rhetoric to strike fear into our communities about drug use and they're not giving out all the information and so you know it's it's a it's a really it's a really tough thing i i lost my brother this is my brother i i mean makes me cry i do this because of my brother

1:06:59 i lost my brother who was drug addict because there wasn't a system in place to help him you had a question i know that we were going back and forth um it wasn't really a question i think it was more that i'm not you can't it's very difficult and it comes with many classes it does say the term um well i agree that marijuana probably is not an illegal drug technically based on the fact that that all of the research of you know the um the fact that they're not violent you know you know all these things that we were talking about i understand that piece but it all gets slumped into one and there's way too many

1:07:45 points within that big lump that you have to take apart and so when i say about money we don't know what it looks like on the other end and when it comes to treatment that money then would get funneled into the treatment piece of it we don't know that it could but that's what should happen but see here's the thing and i agree but the thing is is that it's still money being spent like either way but if you pretend in a better way and i agree with that too but it's still money being spent it's still taxpayer money it's still all part of it then what do you do with all of the people that you again that you let out into the streets based on that and on top of that what do you do with um i lost my point right now um there's there's just i just think there are many facets many hats many ways to look at it many ways to slice and dice it and it can't be you can't just take marijuana

1:08:31 out of it like that but you can't take marijuana out of it you can take marijuana out of it because literally the scientific evidence shows you that marijuana does not have any of the propensities for other hard drugs you have to take marijuana out of it i recently went to montel williams's dispensary in sacramento and got a tour what you talk about the model of a business environment you know is what we've seen is the the dea is holding on to their power and their control with medicinal marijuana and it's interesting because i'm back in school because i i need to prop up my bachelor's degree in order to get to law school some so i'm in a legal studies program right now and one of the

1:09:18 things that happened last year was antonia scalia the most conservative supreme court justice basically stated that the biggest mistake of the federal judiciary was in fact expanding their arms and their grasp into the investigation and the enforcement the prosecution of drug laws that that should be a state by state basis that the federal government should have no business in that and we really do need to get back to that so then we need to craft in california what's best for california what the doj has done in their wholesale shutting down of a lot of dispensaries that were operating

1:10:05 completely within california state guidelines they've the state of california has lost i think somewhere over 250 million dollars in tax revenue that's a lot of money okay that's just the sales tax they're not even counting the business license the money paid into the federal government because they pay their employees i mean they were paying one of the dispensaries was paying their employees between 15 to 25 bucks an hour with full benefits and so what we have to do is we need to remove the first of all cannabis and i would agree with you there's two different things there's marijuana and then there's hard drugs okay marijuana we have to legalize

1:10:52 okay once we are not enforcing those laws you're not going to have a kids running chaos free smoking dope walking down the street because all those crimes are still going to be illegal you can't walk down the street with the beer in your hand unless it's a public you know you know you're at a concert you're at something like that okay you can't smoke a cigarette within 20 feet of here you can't smoke a cigarette in a bar and that's the regulatory model and you're right in some aspects we're going to divert some money from here to here but i as a taxpayer i'm willing to divert that money if it goes to higher education since the war on drugs

1:11:38 the prison budget now holds 11.5 percent of all of the state of california budget it used to be that higher education had 11.5 percent higher education now has 6.5 percent so i understand the fear i really do because i i struggle with the hard drug part of it i'll be very honest with you i i'm you know i don't struggle with the marijuana part of it at all you know both from because i know a lot of people simply from the last couple years who are both using it professionally and people who are using it medically that it is keeping them alive and so why do we deny medicine to six patients and force them

1:12:26 into the black market to deal with pardoned criminals and and none of this is going to happen overnight there's no way on earth but i believe that the impact of prohibition specifically in the minority communities i was born in mexico city i immigrated you know is the impact we've had in our minority communities with trying to prevent a drug from coming in here is not worth the cast anymore it isn't we have stigmatized whole segments of people and that's not i mean that's not what i believe america is about as an immigrant i came here we were poor i managed to put myself through school i became

1:13:12 successful i get it there's opportunity here is america perfect absolutely not and michelle alexander clearly shows that and this is a struggle for human rights and this isn't about allowing people chaos and letting them run free and you know become drug addicted or stoners that's that's not what any other country has experienced when they've done something as simple as decriminalized and they've lowered the priorities i want my cops if my mom gets killed i want my cops to solve that i don't want precious resources going to arrest a medicinal marijuana patient or a collective owner or a heroin addict

1:13:57 when public health treatment is the much better option go ahead um so i think what the real problem is for people that have anxiety about even thinking the possibility of legalizing drugs is if it all drugs and i think all drugs should be legalized um it doesn't mean that they're not bad for you because they're legalized alcohol is still bad for you smoking cigarettes still vacuum we're not saying that drugs are good good for us we're seeing that let them be legal and find a solution for controlling the person who has the addiction for giving someone you know the gum that stops you from smoking or

1:14:43 whatever you go to your doctor and you resolve your issue and it also means that they're not committing crimes to get their fix they're they have a medical you know they can go to the doctor to figure out how to figure it out and you know what we're never going to be a crime free society because that's not endemic in human nature i mean whether you know the part about free choice it's freedom but but even in in you know china has you know the most dictatorships still you still have crime and where people have you know get beheaded and whipped and all that other stuff you still have i mean that's and so what we have to do is almost like what we've done with drunk driving and alcoholism and tabasc tobacco i think there is a role in

1:15:30 government and that there is some places that they've done a tremendous job you know you start talking about the fear issues there was some legislation that was just introduced by a female legislator out of pomona that's a zero tolerance for cannabis in in dui so what she did is she amended it and she said any trace level of marijuana in your system makes you a drunk driver driving under the influence and there's no scientific evidence or base on that so so what she's done is she took a

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