cannabisnews.com: Transcripts: The Truth About Medical Marijuana 





Transcripts: The Truth About Medical Marijuana 
Posted by CN Staff on December 03, 2003 at 10:33:45 PT
Transcripts from October 02, 2003
Source: Independent Institute
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is David Theroux and I’m the president of The Independent Institute. I’m delighted to welcome all of you to our program this evening. As you know, its title is “The Truth about Medical Marijuana.”We’re delighted that our program tonight is also co-sponsored by our friends at Harper’s Magazine, the Drug Policy Alliance, and the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California in Berkeley.
The Independent Institute regularly sponsors the Independent Policy Forum, a series of lectures, seminars, and debates held here in the San Francisco Bay Area. In all of our programs, we seek to get beyond the stereotypes of left and right and feature speakers that will present their own views so that we all have a better opportunity to make up our own minds.For those of you who are new to the Independent Institute, The Institute is a non-profit public policy research organization. We sponsor and publish many books and other publications, and conduct many conference and media programs like our program tonight.We also invite you to visit us at our website, which is at Independent.org, where you will find further information about our many publications, including our journal called The Independent Review. It’s a quarterly journal, and there are copies out in front if you would like to pick up one or get an idea what it’s about.You’re also welcome to receive our free weekly e-mail newsletter, which is called The Lighthouse. The Lighthouse will keep you up to date on many policy issues as well as advise you of upcoming Institute events and other programs. To receive it, please be sure to leave your contact information, including your e-mail address, before you leave after our program tonight.Our next event is going to be held on November 13th. It will be held at the Independent Institute’s conference center, which is located in Oakland just off of Route 880 by the Oakland airport. The topic will be the USA Patriot Act and the assault on civil liberties. The program is being organized by our Center on Peace & Liberty and will feature Margaret Russell, who is chairman of the ACLU of Northern California and professor of law at Santa Clara University, David Cole from Georgetown University Law Center, and best-selling author James Bovard. We hope that all of you will be able to join with us.Also in the program handout that hopefully everyone got, you will find information about the institute itself; and we hope that each of you will join as an institute associate member and become more directly involved in the battle over issues such as what we’ll be addressing this evening.To set the stage for tonight’s discussion, I want to mention a few developments that are worth noting. Articles today in Reuters, the New York Daily News, and USA Today now corroborate a major new National Enquirer story that Rush Limbaugh [Laughter], the influential talk show host and highly vocal supporter of the War on Drugs, is under criminal investigation by the state attorney general of Florida for his buying and maybe consuming thousands of addictive pain killers from a black market drug ring over the past four years. [Laughter and applause.] If true, how again do you spell “hypocrisy”?In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 215, allowing physicians to recommend marijuana for medical purposes. To date, as I understand, 10 states have enacted medical marijuana legislation that is actually being implemented, and a total of 36 states and the District of Columbia have formally recognized, in various ways, the value of medical marijuana. A year ago the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that doctors have a constitutional right to discuss marijuana with their patients, but in refusing to accept the role of the electorate, the federal government has been fighting back.Earlier this year, Oakland resident Ed Rosenthal was the target of the federal government’s campaign to destroy legal medical marijuana in California. The case and subsequent verdict against Rosenthal was based on withholding key information from the jury, including the fact that Mr. Rosenthal had been deputized by the City of Oakland, under California law, specifically to attend to the seriously ill. In the case, Mr. Rosenthal faced a sentence of 60 years in federal prison. However, facing subsequent public outrage about the case, including a public protest by the jurors themselves, the presiding judge handed down a sentence of only one day in jail and a nominal fine. But Ed Rosenthal remains a convicted felon and is currently seeking to have his sentence overturned in a state with “three strikes and you’re out.”Interestingly enough, in the current recall election in California all of the major candidates from across the political spectrum, including those that dropped out, have endorsed the legality of medical marijuana. How times change. Clearly, this is a reflection of the fact that over 70 percent of the public supports medical marijuana. Not to be discouraged, however, the Department of Justice has since asked the US Supreme Court to allow it to punish medical doctors who recommend marijuana, and the DEA continues to raid and close down clinics. Meanwhile, Congressmen Barney Frank and Sam Farr have each submitted bills to reduce the federal classification of marijuana, to decriminalize its medicinal use, and to allow defendants in federal cases to claim compliance with state laws. Unfortunately, neither bill probably has much chance yet of passage.There are many questions to ask about federal policies, state policies, who benefits, who loses. Is California leading the nation? What kind of views are actually being presented and based on what? And what about the lives of people who are suffering from cancer, AIDS, MS, and many other serious ailments? What happens to them in the meantime? Our Independent Policy Forum this evening has assembled several of the foremost experts to discuss the past, present, and future of medical marijuana.So I would like to introduce our speakers. Please hold your applause until I complete the introduction. First, to my left, your right, is Ed Rosenthal, the noted activist and best-selling author who has been a pioneer, as you all know, of the movement for medical marijuana. In 30 years of study, writing, and activism, he’s become a trusted expert on medic marijuana use and social policy. He’s also the co-author of an important book that we are featuring this evening called, Why Marijuana Should Be Legal, and there are copies on the front table. He’s written over a dozen other books on the subject.To his left, again your right, is Rob MacCoun. Rob is professor of law and public policy of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California Berkley and co-author of the other book that we are featuring this evening, Drug War Heresies from Cambridge University Press. He was formerly a behavioral scientist at the Institute for Civil Justice and the Drug Policy Research Center at RAND Corporation. He’s one of the world’s foremost authorities on drug policy.To my right is Edwin Dobb. Edwin is contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine. His writings on civil liberties have been published in Harper’s, Amnesty Now, and San Francisco Magazine. He was formerly senior editor of The Sciences. He writes for New York Times Magazine and is a visiting lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism also at UC Berkeley.Finally, I want to introduce, to his right, your left, again, Donald Abrams. Don is professor of clinical medicine at the University of California here in San Francisco and one of the leading researchers in the world on medical marijuana. He’s also assistant director of the AIDS program at San Francisco General Hospital, and since 1981, has been involved in several landmark studies on HIV and AIDS. He’s conducted clinical trials of marijuana since 1997, including trials with grants from the National Institutes of Health.So, please join with me in welcoming the speakers. [Applause.]Before we begin, a couple of quick program matters I want to mention. After our discussion, we will have questions from the audience, and in the program that each of you have there should be a question card. Please just jot down your question during the presentations and there will be people circulating the aisles to pick up the cards for the Q&A period. In addition, after the Q&A period we’ll adjourn, and Mr. Rosenthal and Mr. MacCoun will be available to autograph copies of their books in the front lobby where you registered. So without further ado, I’m very pleased to introduce Ed Rosenthal. [Applause.]ContentsEd Rosenthal - Activist, Author: Why Marijuana Should Be LegalThe first thing, I’d like to thank The Independent Institute for sponsoring this forum and creating it -- I think that this is pretty incredible -- and especially you, David, and also Bill Selover who is here. They’ve just done so much work in getting this together. It’s inspiring. And I’d like to thank everybody who’s here and, in fact, the entire community, because the reason why I am here and can be here tonight is because I was only given a one-day sentence, and that is because of you. It wasn’t because of the judge. It wasn’t because of any of the legal things. It was because of the pressure that the community and the media placed on the court system. So I’d like to give you a hearty thanks for that. [Applause.]The issue of medical marijuana is of prime importance to perhaps 100,000 Californians who use marijuana in one way or another for their health, who have been given recommendations by doctors because it may improve the quality of their life. It may maintain their health or it may actually keep them alive. And so this is not just a loose issue or something like that. And this issue not only affects Californians but also people throughout the nation. There are probably somewhere between half a million and a million people who use marijuana medically whether or not they have a recommendation for it.Now, I’d like to go into a little bit about my case. As you know, I was convicted on three counts and those are cultivating marijuana, maintaining a place where marijuana is cultivated, and also conspiracy to cultivate marijuana. And, as you know, this was the result of a jury that was kept ignorant of the facts of the case -- that I was deputized by the City of Oakland, I was providing medical marijuana, that I was told by the city that I was immune from prosecution. And once the jury found this out -- when they went home and read the newspapers that they hadn’t been reading while they were jurors -- within hours they got back to the media and repudiated their sentence. And, of course, that did not have a judicial meaning, but it certainly had a meaning to the media and it certainly had a meaning to the public, because this case was not fought just on one level. It was fought on two levels. It was fought in the court -- and so far we’re losing the court case -- but in the court of public opinion we’re the winners.And I want to mention something. Most of us, when we vote, we realize we’re minority voters in one way or another. We vote for all these candidates that don’t win quite a bit of the time, and we vote for causes that seem to be lost causes, but we’re the majority. When it comes to medical marijuana, we are the majority. Anybody who’s opposed to it, they’re in the minority. It’s a very unusual position to be in for most of us, I think. [Laughter.]But we have to realize that we’re not trying to convince people that medical marijuana is efficacious, or that it works, or that it should be legal. We’re just trying to convince a few politicians of it who are being wagged by the tail and I’ll get into that.Actually, eight of the jurors repudiated the verdict, two of the alternates. This had never happened before in American history.Now, I notice that it’s heating up because six members of the jury in the Oakland case -- I’m talking about the “Riders” case -- have just complained about what happened in their jury.So, four days after the jury convicted me, they were back in the courtroom, in the audience section, for the judge to look at while he was deciding whether I was going to be remanded into custody immediately.Now, I know that most of you were very relieved that I was given only a one-day sentence six months later, but I was more ambivalent about it. Because, it’s pretty good getting a one-day sentence, and actually the government owes me 12 hours because I served 36 hours. But let’s say they had given me five years and remanded me to prison right then and there. It would have been a lot more headlines. I would have had a book sold by now. [Laughter.] And I think it would have moved the laws. And I think that the government and the judge realized that, if he had done that, that it would have caused quite a bit more controversy. I’m going to just use the word controversy.Right now, the government is appealing my sentence and they’ve wanted me to do the 21 months, or five years, or whatever, and I’m appealing the conviction both on technical and on constitutional grounds. And I wanted to go through them because they’re of importance.And the first is that the judge, in pre-trial, was looking at the search warrant, and he realized that the DEA agent, Pickett, had lied on the search warrant. So instead of allowing a withering cross examination, he said, “Well, I’m just going to excise certain parts of the search warrant,” and what was left, after he excised everything, was that I had a high electric bill. And then my attorney said, “Well, let’s compare it with other electric bills in the area,” and the judge said, “I’m not going to allow it, because there are industrial users in the area, and then the search warrant might not be good.“ So we’re appealing on that basis.Then we’re appealing because the judge found that the prosecutor had actually lied to the grand jury, and the judge found that he had misled the grand jury. But the judge said that no harm was done. And I don’t know. If one of you had lied to the grand jury, you would be up for perjury, and here the prosecutor is lying to the grand jury, and he shouldn’t have even been testifying.So those are the two technical grounds that we’re appealing on, and we may very well win on those grounds. If we win, for instance, on the first one, it would mean that the way that search warrants are looked at would change, and the change would have court precedent there. But there are other, more important, issues that we’re covering, and I’m going to go through these very quickly.The first is the 9th Amendment. Now, you know, the 9th Amendment has never been used in court record, or it’s been used very little. Even the Griswold decision, which was for birth control, and the abortion decisions, did not rely on the 9th Amendment. And what the 9th Amendment says is that those rights of the people that are not enumerated in the Constitution, remain with the people and shall not be denigrated.That means, for instance, you have the right to eat strawberries. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says that you have an inherent right to eat strawberries, but you have it because it’s in there. Those are some of your natural rights.And there are two natural rights that the 9th Amendment covers in this case, and the first is that you have the right to seek help. Everybody has the right to seek help in their own way, whether you want to use herbal supplements, or whether you want to use vitamins, or whether you want to use religion and prayer for your health. You have a right to determine how you will gain your health. And so, by restricting medical marijuana, the government is restricting your right to health.The second part is this: Before the Constitution, people in the United States had the right to use marijuana. Up until 1937 there were no federal laws against marijuana. So that was practically 150 years during the United States that people were using marijuana.Then in 1937, the government realized that, in order to restrict marijuana, it would have to pass a constitutional amendment. So instead, it passed a tax law that was confiscatory. It was $100 an ounce tax, which in 1937 was a lot, since an ounce only cost a couple of dollars. So people would be arrested not for possessing marijuana but for not possessing the tax stamp, or paying the taxes on the substance. It wasn’t until 1968 that marijuana was made illegal. I believe that’s unconstitutional. People had the right to use marijuana through that entire period of time, and it was only in 1968 that it was made illegal. Well, if people had the right to use it, then that was a Constitutional right. How can that be denied?Years ago I wrote a paper that said that the 9th Amendment is probably going to be the amendment of the 21st century -- and I hope this is the first case on it.Then the 10th Amendment, that’s the state’s rights amendment -- that any rights not given to the federal government remain with the states -- and the state has two basic rights in this area. One is to regulate the health of its citizens, and the other is to regulate doctors. So the federal government is violating these rights in terms of the 10th Amendment. And where this comes in, especially in my particular case, is in the Constitution -- and these are interwoven -- but in the commerce clause of the Constitution, which regulates interstate commerce. Well, look, this marijuana was grown in California, by Californians for Californians. It was recommended by California doctors for people to use in California. I fail to see where there’s any interstate commerce. So, if there’s no interstate commerce, and the state has a right to regulate health, and it’s already determined that marijuana is good medicine, then why is the federal government in here at all?And then another issue is 885d, a federal law that’s part of the Controlled Substances Act. If you’re a federal, state, or city health and safety officer, and in the course of your business, you’re dealing with controlled substances, you’re immune from prosecution. Well, that’s so that narcs can buy and sell pot and other drugs and not get arrested for it. And I was a health and safety officer that the City of Oakland had appointed, and I was told by the city attorney’s office that I was immune from prosecution under this law. And Judge Breyer said that a literal meaning of this would seem to immunize Rosenthal from prosecution. But then he said, “I’m not going to allow that,” and then he didn’t allow the jury to hear it.And then there’s the other thing. Let’s say the city attorney was wrong. Let’s say the city attorney’s office was totally wrong, and they had told me that I was immune from prosecution but I wasn’t. Well, then, I should have been immune from prosecution because of estoppel, which means that, if you’re told that something that you’re doing is okay by the federal government, they can’t then come in and say, “Look, it isn’t right. You’re breaking the law and you’re under arrest.” That’s the idea of estoppel. Needless to say, I was a little surprised when I was arrested, and as you know, I never felt guilty.I’ll tell you why I did this. First of all, I’m successful, which is pretty unusual in America, and I own my own publishing company. And so I’m an upper-middle class, a middle class person, and I did not have to get involved in this. This is not my source of income. And the reason why I got involved in it was because the City of Oakland asked me to help patients.There are all kinds of sayings in life, and we read about most of them as they come out of the Ten Commandments in the daily papers, based on lust, greed, robbery, lying. [Laughter.] But then there are other sins too, and sort of sins of omission. When you see somebody who needs help and you say, “I’m not going to render that person help“ -- that’s a sin. That’s a sin as much as lusting after somebody else’s wife, or husband, or whatever. So I felt I was living with this and then, and when the city said, “Well, you have immunity,” well, I had no excuse not to do it.And then there were personal things like if I can legally grow pot. Just the thought of that. You know, the federal government says that pot’s addictive. Well, I don’t think that marijuana is really addictive, but growing it is. [Laughter.] And so, when I was given the opportunity to legally grow marijuana, I jumped at that.So, given all these circumstances, it was inevitable that when I was arrested, I would be fighting this. I had just read a book a few months before I was arrested called The Tipping Point, which talks about movements, and how movements form, and how little things make big changes in society. I think I was really fortunate in reading this book because it gave me insight into what was going to happen to me, what was happening to me, and what was going to happen to this issue.And, after all, the one thing that this did was change the paradigm in the way that people think about marijuana and the way the press reports it. And this is exactly what the federal government was afraid of. This is what they’ve been trying to stop. And their doing this actually made me into a much better activist than I’d ever been.One of my ironic thoughts is that for 35 years I was trying to think, “Well, what would make me a more effective activist? How can I be a more effective activist? How can I get this into the media so I could be speaking at places like The Independent Institute instead of at mass rallies?” So the federal government found it out for me. And so let this be a warning. You’d better be careful what you wish for. [Laughter.]So now the real question is, Why does the federal government want to do this? What do they have in it? What’s their vested interest in it this? And I have two ideas about this.The first is that they really hate marijuana more than any other drug, whether it’s legal or illegal. And the reason for that, whether you’re talking about tobacco, alcohol, amphetamines, cocaine, heroin, all those drugs ultimately make you dysfunctional in one way or another or can kill you. And the problem with marijuana, as far as the police are concerned, is that there is no payback to the people. They don’t get any dysfunction from it. They might be happier than the police are. [Laughter.] It doesn’t fit the Puritan ethic that if you have enjoyment, that in some way you have to pay for it. And I think, in a way, that’s the psychology of the police, but there’s something much more important. The whole criminal justice industry is based on arrests and on catching criminals. And so, if you decriminalized or regulated marijuana, then 8 percent of their budget would be down the drain. Eight percent of their budget. One out of every 12 arrests. One out of every 12 jails. One out of every 12 cop cars. One out of every 12 judges. It goes on and on down the line so that we’re talking about a tremendous amount of money.And the marijuana war cost the federal government and the state governments -- that means us, really -- somewhere between $15 billion and $30 billion dollars a year, and I’ll give you some quick statistics on that. There are about 730,000 people who were arrested for marijuana last year, 88 percent of them for simple possession. There are probably between 100,000 and 150,000 people in prison right now for marijuana. There are 20,000 people in federal prison for marijuana right now. It costs the government $1.5 billion dollars just to house a small town of 20,000 people. Half of those people are Hispanic, so there are 10,000 Hispanic people in federal prison just for marijuana.And so if you could think of how much resources are spent on this, it’s incredible. So let’s give a hypothetical. Let’s say tomorrow everybody stopped using illegal drugs, or let’s say they just stopped using marijuana. So the police went out to arrest people. There was nobody to arrest. Nobody was selling marijuana on the street. Nobody was using it in their home. It wasn’t being used. It would be a disaster for the DEA. Could you imagine that?Now, the DEA has had a pretty good growth period over the last 65 years. In 1937, when the tax stamp came in, there were estimated to be 55,000 users. Now last year there were 730,000 arrests. The arrests totaled 13 times the number of users when marijuana was originally regulated. There are 25 million users for the Feds and state authorities to poach upon. They’ve had a tremendous success. If you take a look at these statistics, statistical impossibility is going to happen sometime around 2020, when there will actually be more marijuana users in the United States than there are people. [Laughter.] So let’s see.Now, I wanted to step back for a moment from this and get into what this is all about. And let’s say we were talking about a river, and how we were going to use this river. And there’d be all these stakeholders in this river and the water that this river provided would get together and talk about it. You might have farmers, and urban people, and urban communities, and environmentalists, and maybe there would be fishermen who might get involved in it. And together they’d reach some sort of compromise that probably nobody would like but that everybody could live with or sort of live with. So let’s look at the stakeholders, in terms of medical marijuana. Well, you have patients. You have the doctors. You have the providers. You have caregivers. You have manufacturers. And all these people have something to lend to the discussion. You have the Public Health Service. They might have something to say about it. Insurers might have something to say about it, because they might have to pay for it.But where are the police in this? Where is the criminal justice system in this? What’s their stake in this? They claim to have a stake. Do they have a right to poach upon people? To poach upon sick people? Just what is their stake in it? And this is the problem. Their stake in this is arrests. They need arrests or else they can’t justify their budgets, and that’s what this whole thing is all about. And that’s why this is a culture war. We will hear later that this is a culture war. And this is part of the culture war. Whether they have a right to arrest a certain group of people because they’re using this substance just so that they can arrest them.Can you imagine all of the wasted resources of this? The thousands and thousands of people whose lives are being ruined. 730,000 people were arrested last year. That doesn’t affect just 730,000 people. It affects millions of people. It affects their families. It affects their employers. It might affect their employees. It affects them if they’re college students, because they lose eligibility to all federal grants.So 730,000 arrests -- and it doesn’t stop at the end of the year. These 730,000 are processed. It continues all their lives. They might lose professional licenses. They might lose the ability to continue with their education.So, when we step back and we see who are the stakeholders, here’s what I think. The police, the criminal justice system, is not a stakeholder in whether medical marijuana patients should be able to use marijuana, or how much they should be able to use, or how they should be able to grow it. They have absolutely no expertise in this area. Any expertise that they claim to have is negated by their official organization, the California Narcotics Officers Association. You can go onto the Internet and look at their position papers and here is what they say: “Marijuana is not a medicine.” These people are verbal terrorists.Now, the reason why I say they’re verbal terrorists. In order to remain a police officer in California, you have to continually get education. You have to take educational classes. And the California Narcotics Officers Association is deputized to give some of these classes. So this is what they’re teaching their students, who are the police. That marijuana isn’t a medicine. That anybody who’s using it is using it as a ruse. “Don’t believe it. Bust them now and let the courts sort it out.” And they’re giving a training session, in case anybody wants to go, on November 8th to the 13th. I’m going to try and register for one. [Laughter and applause.]And so they’re saying that the people who are supporting medical marijuana are just doing it as a means of pushing marijuana onto the public, so that this is the first step. This is the only thing that I agree with them about, that medical marijuana is only a first step, because everybody has a right to use it, whether they’re using it medically, or recreationally, or however they want to use it.And I know that people will say, the Narcotics Officers Association will say, “Well, that’s exactly what we said,” but let’s get real. Does the federal government differentiate between medical marijuana and recreational marijuana? There’s no differentiation in the law. And, in fact, what do they tell the juries? No matter what the state law might be, the federal government doesn’t recognize medical marijuana. So you have this Narcotics Officers Association functioning as verbal terrorists in this war. And then they want to sit down at the table with stakeholders and say, “Well, we’re stakeholders in it too.” But, I question, where is there stake in it?And I’ll give you one example of how this played out very recently. There was recently the Vasconcellos bill, which “former” Governor Davis is going to decide whether he’s going to sign or not. Part of the reason he’s going to be former Governor Davis is that he was always apathetic, and actually, anti-marijuana, and anti-medical marijuana. And maybe, if he had a little more empathy for a few sick people, he wouldn’t be in the terrible position that he’s in.What the Vasconcellos bill originally said, it adopted the SAM, the Sonoma guidelines, which were 99 plants in 100 or 200 square feet. Well, after it was ready to go right into the Senate, what happened was [Calif. Attorney General Bill] Lockyer got a hold of Vasconcellos and they changed it to six plants.Now, what expertise does Lockyer have about what six plants will produce? What does he know about medicine? Why was he even involved in it? Don’t you think it’s up to the people of this state to make policy and then for the attorney general and the district attorneys to follow that policy, and for the police to follow it, rather than for the tail to wag the dog? That’s where it’s at.Complete Transcripts: http://freedomtoexhale.com/independent.htmNewshawk: Paul Armentano - http://www.norml.org/Source: Independent Institute (CA)Published: October 02, 2003Contact: info independent.orgWebsite: http://www.independent.org/Related Article:Truth About Medical Marijuana To Be Discussedhttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread17304.shtmlCannabisNews Medical Marjiuana Archiveshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/list/medical.shtml 
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Comment #1 posted by escapegoat on December 07, 2003 at 01:37:14 PT
Verbal terrorists...well put, Ed!
So you have this Narcotics Officers Association functioning as verbal terrorists in this war. And then they want to sit down at the table with stakeholders and say, ?Well, we?re stakeholders in it too.? But, I question, where is there stake in it?---Exactly. This is like hunters complaining they're shut out of the decision making process at a zoo.
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