Original subtitles

Columbia police! Search warrant!

Columbia police! Search warrant!

Kick it open!

Get to the door! Go, go, go! Get to the door!

Police Department! Don't move!

Police Department! Don't move!

Police Department! Don't move!

O.S. Bang.

Police Department! Don't move!

Move past us! Move past!

Come on, guys, you're fine. You're fine.

Don't move! Do you understand?

Put your hands behind your back! Do it now!

Behind your back!

Just shoot me!

Did you shoot my dog?

Did you shoot my fucking dog?

Oh my God!

What the fuck did you do that for?

If you cannot afford to hire a lawyer,

one will be appointed

to represent you and answer any questions you wish.

You can decide at anytime to exercise these rights,

not to answer any questions or make any statements.

Do you understand? Do you understand?

We'll take that as a yes.

¶

We can't live in a society which is both free

and drug-free. You can't have 'em both.

The whole process of moving from one state of mind

being persuaded to another by seeing the truth

is one of actually feeling an identification

that resonates and has a feeling of wholeness

and coherence to it. It makes chaos orderly.

It's the mindset that got us here

and the journey that we've taken.

Fifty years of criminalization. It came out of the whole idea

that we don't have to care for each other anymore.

It's every man for himself. We weren't always like that!

The question is, can we go back

to caring about each other?

What are the nuances that define a culture?

Is it the way we police ourselves?

The way we take care of our sick?

How we govern?

The way we share information?

77 years ago, marijuana became prohibited in the United States.

By 1961, its criminalization reached global status.

Today, we find the topic of marijuana's legality

penetrating all forms of media and every level of politics.

It is now the polarizing topic

in an endless display of public debates.

The goal? To answer the question that refuses to die:

Should marijuana be legalized?

But, ever so slowly, a second question is starting to appear

a question that seeks an answer to whether marijuana

prohibition itself has gained characteristics

that reveal a greater truth about ourselves

and the way our society operates.

Is this a bad idea? Is this a downward spiral of our culture?

A new study reveals that smoking marijuana

could increase your risk for testicular cancer.

So the research doesn't bother you

that smoking pot can cause man boobs?

Pot just makes you dumb.

What's to keep somebody from gettin' all potted-up on weed

and then gittin' behind the wheel?

"Marijuana leads to breast development in males,".

Like all of these myths, front page story!

Those things have been coming along one, after another.

I should be impotent when I smoke marijuana. Well I'm not!

The thought process behind demonizing something like

marijuana is completely out of ignorance.

Where's the bodies?

Where's the numbers? Is there one?

Because I have heard from experts whose judgment

I respect that they don't know of any.

The only way marijuana can kill you is if you

take 25lbs of it and you throw it out of a CIA drug plane

and it hits you in the fuckin' head.

That's how you die from marijuana.

There's that famous 911 call

where those cops stole pot from some kids,

and then turned it into pot brownies,

and then ate the brownies

and freaked the fuck out and called the cops on themselves.

It's beautiful 'cause they thought they were dying,

time is going by really slow, they're fine.

But everyone can agree anti- marijuana ads in this country

have gotten fuckin' ridiculous.

Like a girl will be melted on the couch with no bones

and she's like, 'I smoked pot and now I don't have bones.'

I associated a lot of these people that were smokin' pot

with poorly motivated people who were failures.

I had a prejudiced perception of what marijuana

actually did to a human being.

Among the perceived harms of marijuana,

two seem to arise on a daily basis more than any others.

Two seem to be the main reasons given

for why marijuana must be kept from the public. The first:

There's the famous 'just one spliff and you will go mental.'

The more you mess with cannabis,

the more it can mess with your mind.

My first seven years as a researcher were devoted

to schizophrenia. I can tell you, that is ridiculous.

We looked at the evidence-I think

we must have gone through about 2,000 papers

and it doesn't cause schizophrenia.

Maybe there are some individuals with schizophrenia

in which the illness is brought on perhaps a little earlier

because they smoked cannabis.

There often is what's called a precipitating event.

A precipitating event is something like an important

loss of a person, a severe car accident...

It certainly can be exacerbated by a number of drugs.

A bad alcohol trip can serve as a precipitating event, too.

The fact is schizophrenia has a prevalence

of about 1%... the world around.

Cannabis use... let's start with the 60s, its gone up like that.

So! You've introduced this new thing:

If it's schizophrenogenic

we should see a significant uptick in schizophrenia.

We should see more people with schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia has stayed just like that.

In all of the epidemiologic studies that I'm aware of,

there is no uptick.

So if marijuana causes schizophrenia it was introduced

now we should have more schizophrenia.

We don't see that.

We would certainly see some little rise in that

given the numbers of people who use this.

You really do need to strip this back and address this

from a neutral platform to understand that

anything to do with mental health is such a tenuous issue

built upon different contributing factors

and by applying it all to cannabis

you are possibly doing more harm

because you are negating all these other factors

that certainly play a part.

For a lot of people, the impact of life itself is overwhelming

so they'll seek out something to distract them

whether it's drinkin' cough syrup or takin' naps

or jerking off or gambling.

There's a lot of things that people do

to distract them from the angst of being alive.

It might not be for you, it might make you paranoid;

You might have smoked some bad weed once

and thought you were having a heart attack.

Cannabis is not for everybody.

Nobody should be forced to use it.

There's a lot of reasons why marijuana might not be for you.

But you shouldn't tell me that it's not right for me.

The most frequently-cited perceived harm

associated with marijuana today is addiction.

I mean, you do know it's addictive

highly addictive-right?

Because I believe it's addictive

and it leads to more serious drugs...

But in order to understand addiction in relation to marijuana

one must first have an understanding of the psychology

behind addiction in the first place.

It's interesting to see, or to ask, 'Who becomes addicted?'

People can have sex without being addicted to it,

they can go shopping, but some people

become severely addicted to all these pursuits.

Is a pack of cards addictive? Well, no.

Or yes. Depending on the individual.

So, it's the same process no matter what the addiction is.

The only difference is really is that

the substance addict is getting the dopamine from

an outside substance, where the behaviour addict

is having it triggered from the particular behaviour.

If I speak to a group of 100 people or 1000 people and I ask

how many of you have addiction issues to any substance?

A number of people put their hands up, and I say.

'What did it do for you? Not 'what was bad about it'

we already know that, but what did it do for you?

What was positive in your experience with it?

Well, 'it gave me a sense of peace; It gave me pain relief.

It made me feel more connected...

it made me more confident.

I could speak now and interact with people.

In other words, the addict is just after wanting to be

a normal human being and the real question is,

what keeps them from having those qualities in their lives

and what happened to them?

And so the addiction should be seen, not as the problem

although it is a problem, but it's not the problem.

It's the addict's attempt to solve the problem

in the first place.

The Adverse Childhood Experiences studies

done in California...

looked at conditions such as physical, sexual,

emotional abuse in the child's life

the loss of a parent to death or a rancorous divorce

or a parent being jailed or a mental illness in the parent

or an addiction of the parent, or violence in the family

and for each of these adverse childhood experiences,

the risk of addiction goes up exponentially.

By the time a male child had 6 of these adverse experiences

his risk of having become a substance-dependent

injection-using addict is 4600% greater

than that of a male child with no such experiences.

Why is that?

Its because that trauma shapes their brain in such ways

as to make the addictive substances

more appealing to the individual.

That trauma also gives that person the pain

that they will try to then escape from or soothe

through the addictive behaviors.

It's the social and emotional environment

that shapes the actual biology of the brain

so if you want to understand someone's addiction,

you have to look at what's created pain in their lives.

The person who occasionally has a beer,

occasionally smokes marijuana,

but generally has no negative consequences;

It does not impair their health,

it does not endanger their lives,

it does not impair their personal relationships-

you can't call those people addicts,

and you can't call those behaviors addictive.

So we have to make a real distinction between

the use of substances and the addiction to substances.

Which then leads us to the "War on Drugs:"

basically the War on Drugs is being waged against people

that were abused and traumatized as children

and have mental health problems.

There's enough punishment in there-

in the negative consequences of the addiction

that we don't have to add punishment on to that.

The number of deaths around the world

from cigarette consumption is five-and-a-half million

according to latest estimates.

Annually, cigarettes kill as many people as were killed

in the Germans' anti-Jewish genocidal campaign.

So we have a holocaust annually, owing to cigarettes.

If you smoke more than two packs a day,

the risk for developing lung cancer was twenty-fold.

That's 2000%.

Based on the largest case-controlled study ever done,

there was no evidence that marijuana increased

the risk of lung cancer.

You've gotta have some consistency: There's a million

different drugs that are sanctioned by the society

that don't have that happy ending-

- that you take too much and you're fucked.

I've got a friend whose auntie had to go to rehab for

buying two boxes of Krispy Kremes every day

and eating them in the woods so nobody found her.

Based on that anecdote, let's make Krispy Kremes illegal.

I will fight any man, by the way who suggests that.

It's just like eating a pound of salt and dying.

Yeah, ya didn't use salt right dude. You fucked up with salt.

If you just threw some salt on popcorn

it's actually quite yummy, but what'd you do, you stupid fuck?

You ate a pound of salt and you died.

Doesn't mean we should outlaw salt.

Our society doesn't object to people jumping out of airplanes

at fifteen thousand feet with parachutes.

Occasionally those parachutes break; People die.

Our society doesn't object to people climbing mountains.

Occasionally people fall off mountains and do harm

to themselves, but it's not illegal to climb a mountain.

If I had to compare marijuana to alcohol

from the medical point of view, if I asked the question,

'which of these has more potentially debilitating

and harmful life threatening, health-eroding effects?'

There's no comparison, there's no contest;

Alcohol wins, hands down.

The tune of 50000 plus per year die from alcohol poisoning.

They literally drink themselves zero.

Do we have a war on alcohol and tobacco when alcohol

is the drug that's involved with more murders

than any other drug on planet earth?

How do we view the effect of beer?

Holy shit!

We are so dependent on it.

If you have a social gathering and there isn't booze there,

people lose their minds!

Let's go to the pub

when we talk about commiserating:

Let's go to the pub.

I'm happy let's go to the pub! My dog died let's go to the pub.

It's wines-day Wednesday. Best day of the week!

Great job getting us drunk!

We could all use a stiff drink.

Fantastic! Margarita day.

If you're not gonna drink it, pass it around.

How are you spending New Year's Eve?

I'm gonna get real drunk!

Many years ago, we did a poll in parliament

and we asked them, 'is alcohol a drug?'

And the majority of politicians said alcohol was not a drug.

And they say well, it's not a drug because it's not illegal.

And that gets to this peculiar, dangerous concept

that once something's illegal, it must be dangerous,

and when something's not illegal, it must be safe.

So it's interesting if we look at the whole issue

of illegal drugs in our society you'll find that

when the word 'drug' is used to refer to those substances,

another word is almost always attached to it

and that is, 'abuse.'

"Drug abuse."

What happens is that all illicit drugs get lumped together.

Caffeine is a drug, alcohol is a drug.

Tylenol is a drug, Sudafed is a drug.

Viagra is a drug. People, when they think of drugs,

...they think only of illicit drugs.

Theres a mass of disinformation and that misinformation

and disinformation confuses the shit out of people

when they're trying to form their version of

what's good and what's bad in the world.

If it's absurd to throw someone in prison for drinking coffee

or for drinking wine, then it's equally absurd and wrong

to throw someone in prison for smoking cannabis.

Nobody has ever overdosed on cannabis. D'you know that?

So what? They can't perform daily functions;

They're going to be on my tax bill!

The idea that one is OK and one isn't just seemed to require

something resembling evidence before

you could make that statement definitively.

One of the things I think is important about marijuana use

or alcohol use or anything is that you're responsible with it

and you could be irresponsible with anything

and you should weigh the risks and the rewards.

There's no moral middle ground. Indifference is not an option.

We want you to help us create an outspoken intolerance

for drug use.

Is the rationale of protecting people from themselves valid?

The only people who are responsible for protecting us

from ourselves are ourselves.

If our society denies us the opportunity to make mistakes,

it's denying us a very fundamental human right

because mistakes are part of the teaching process in this life.

Tell another grown human being ah, ah, ah! Nope!

Nope! Nope! Not allowed that. A grown man! No, not you!

But I'm a grown up; I'm an evolved human being.

No! Just .Put. That. Down!

If there's real harm in a drug and your real objective

is to persuade people that they shouldn't harm themselves

in that way, you don't need laws that send them to prison-

What you need is good infor- mation that they'll believe.

Just disseminate that infor- mation and free independent

sovereign adults will make their own choices about

either to continue with that drug

or not to continue with it, but they have the facts.

If a professional like you cannot answer clearly

that meth is more dangerous than marijuana-

which every kid on the street knows, which every parent knows

if you can't answer that, maybe that's why we're failing

to educate people about the dangers

I don't want kids smoking marijuana.

I agree with the chairman

but if the Deputy Director of the Office of Drug Policy

can't answer that question, how do you expect

high school kids to take you seriously?

I empathize with parents of teenaged kids; They can get lost.

A kid sitting in school stoned-you can't accept

accept a position that says, 'oh, that's fine, no problem.'

Yeah, that's a problem, but the question is

whether it's a criminal problem. The question is

whether it's a 'growing up' kind of a problem.

I want reasons more than 'you need to be afraid of

some cop catching you, and locking you up forever in a prison'

to talk to my children about how they relate

to various temptations in life.

This country is held up as a model around the world

of dealing with cigarette we brought it down.

Why? By educating people.

It doesn't make sense to punish people

if what you're mainly worried about is their welfare.

Name something that gets passed around.

Chris?

A joint!

A joint?

Its the only thing that came to mind...

The moral question of drug use, you can set aside,

because the drug use and the drug abuse is here.

We have a real fundamental enjoyment of

changing the way that this thing operates and,

for as long as that is true, you have demand.

You don't have to be a capitalist,

you don't have to to be economist,

but we all know:

Where there is demand, there is supply.

A plant that's very easy to grow suddenly becomes

something that's worth thousands and thousands

and thousands of dollars a pound

because you're compensating the producers

and the transporters for the risk of going to jail

or being arrested or being shot or other things

that happen to people involved in criminal activity.

And with that profit comes opportunity

sometimes to the most unlikely of people.

I went to Oxford to study nuclear physics

and some post-graduate history and philosophy of science,

but forsook the halls of academia to become a dope smuggler.

Quite early on, I started smuggling cannabis

from Europe to America. In those days, in the very early 70's-

there'd be a markup of about 300%.

British bands were beginning to get very popular

and they were visiting the States with an awful lot

of equipment, so we used to hide hashish in various speakers

and amplifiers et cetera.

Pink Floyd, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Eric Clapton, Genesis.

The bands didn't know; It was just an arrangement

I made with the road managers.

Organizations I was involved with; The Mafia, the Yakuza

the I.R.A. and a few cowboys from the C.I.A.,

- but it wasn't under C.I.A. - just a few cowboys

who were doing things behind the rest of the C.I.A's back.

Consignments I did into JFK in New York

the deal was structured

in such a way that one couldn't cheat them

even if one was daft enough to try.

The average load would be about a ton.

I had a huge number of aliases during my smuggling career;

At least 43 aliases, but it was so much easier in those days

to get a false passport.

I remember, on one occasion, applying

to the driving license center for a license

in the name of Elvis Presley of whom I'm a big fan

and they actually issued it because computers

didn't scream in the 50's! Oh, Elvis Presley? Fine!

The biggest shipment ever that I did was 30 tons.

The DEA say it was 50 tons, but I know it was only 30 tons!

The British had more or less no you can't catch him.

The Spanish had given up, no, you can't catch him...

Americans said, oh, we'll catch him - and they were right!

It was a combined effort of 14 different countries'

law enforcement spearheaded by the DEA actually.

Cannabis was the only drug I smuggled.

I think largely because I wasn't really tempted

to do anything else; The demand for cannabis wasn't met.

If cannabis had been legal, I would have

carried on being an academic of some sort.

I do miss smuggling; You could never get that thrill

that I had from crossing borders from writing! You can't...

I suppose if I thought I could get away with it,

I'd crank it up today and go back to doing it!

I mean I loved it.

It's interesting when you look at the amount of money

that these drugs are generating.

Where does that money go? And who's handling it?

With the vast amounts of money to be made,

the potential for a dark side

of the underground market begins to grow.

With enough time and enough money,

it can rise to inconceivable levels,

and often, right under our nose.

What the drug war has done to Mexico is horrific.

The death toll alone in the Mexican drug war

under the Calderon administration:

It's more than the number of Americans that were lost in Vietnam.

Now we're up to 70,000 dead. Seventy thousand!

The bloodshed follows a mass killing

in the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo last week

where nine bodies were left for the public to see

and fourteen other bodies were found mutilated.

And this is happening on our Southern border

and yet very little attention is paid to it.

It is the United States that sends the guns

across the borders to Mexico

it is the United States that, then in return for the guns

imports the drugs.

A lot of people think that those seventy thousand dead

are all gangsters shootin' it out with each other.

Not true. They're police officers, they're children

they're families, they're mothers and fathers.

You're raising your kids with an education

and your kids go off to a nightclub some night

and they never come home. Why?

Because kids have been kidnapped at random and mutilated.

Beyond the horrific death toll, and the

horrific acts of violence, and decapitations

and bodies hanging from bridges, the drug war has really

led to a deterioration in the infrastructures of society

which means that virtually every municipal police force

in much of Mexico is corrupted by one cartel or another.

What does that mean? That means

if you're a lower-middle class Mexican and

your house gets broken into, who do you call?

You have nobody to go to, and if you do call the police,

they're just as likely to tell the cartel

hey this person's ratting on you as they are to help you

and take a report, and bring somebody to jail.

So, if you murder somebody in Mexico, you have less than

a 5% chance of ever spending a day in jail for that

and that is almost entirely a product of

what the drug war has done to law enforcement,

the judiciary and the corrections systems in Mexico.

The last thing a Mexican drug- trafficking cartel would want

would be for drugs to be legalized in the United States

because that would take away their primary source of income.

How do you kill a cartel

and a street gang organization in drugs?

You take their source of nutrition away.

Their source of nutrition is -

money; Drug money. You dry 'em up.

The idea that you're gonna somehow or another be able to

be able to make marijuana illegal and it's not going to

have some of impact on organized crime

is so fuckin' dumb it's childish!

This prohibition allows them to flourish

I mean it did with alcohol.

When prohibition was going on and the mafia and Al Capone

and all them motherfuckers was in control,

they ran that shit!

The American people soon came to understand

that prohibition of alcohol brought greater harm

than the abuse of alcohol.

Declaring prohibition on the marijuana laws

makes everything more dangerous

370 billion dollars a year go into the underworld's pockets

and bad people with that kind of money can do horrendous things...

If marijuana prohibition isn't achieving

the goals we think it should,

what has caused it to be pursued the way it has?

What are the elements that keep it propped up...

and where did it all start?

While most fingers might point to the year 1937

when marijuana was first outlawed by a tax stamp required for hemp,

let's fast-forward 34 years to 1971.

That was the year the public first heard this:

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to summarize for you

the meeting that I have just had with bipartisan leaders.

America's public enemy number one, in the United States,

is drug abuse.

Attorney General Kliendienst for Nixon was quoted thereafter

and he was sorrowful that he had been involved in this.

He said that they knew-

in the Nixon administration-

that drug treatment works and incarceration does not,

but the enormous political benefit by declaring

a war on drugs, that can't really fight back.

He said they chose the incarceration route

for political reasons and then were absolutely overwhelmed at

positive political benefits they received for doing that.

There's actual documentation that shows

the United States government under Nixon was actively writing

to universities and saying 'pull your information of cannabis,

hemp and marijuana out of your libraries.'

purge it.

So it took them from 1972, '71... '72, to the late 1970's

to create this myth that marijuana would

lead to using harder substances.

Once that myth was established

then the numbers exploded

and you could go to Congress and get money.

I am glad that, in this administration we have increased

the amount of money for handling the problem

of dangerous drugs seven-fold.

It will be 600 million dollars this year.

This is one area where we cannot have budget cuts

because we must wage what I have called total war

against public enemy number one in the United States:

The problem of dangerous drugs.

Most law enforcement agencies, before the 1970s,

had very small narcotic units because

narcotics wasn't seen as a big problem.

By the end of the decade, the narcotic units had exploded;

Federal money came in...

and then... Ronald Reagan came.

Tonight I can report to you that we've made much progress.

37 federal agencies are working together

in a vigorous national effort and, by next year,

our spending for drug law enforcement will have

more than tripled from it's 1981 levels.

Whenever we hear the word 'war' on anything,

I think it should alert our antenna

that a mind-management game is going on.

What is meant by the war on drugs? That's a very good question.

How can you have a war on a noun? It's a bit like...

again, the war on terror: It's a war on a concept.

We humans are very motivated by war.

We are extremely motivated by

a metaphor of violent confrontation.

It goes all the way back to the very first foremothers of

bacteria 3.85 billion years ago.

Bacteria are incredibly social - they live in armies-

they live in armies of seven trillion and they are

constantly communicating with each other,

they are constantly exchanging data;

It's a little information processing network,

but what happens...

when two, three, four or seven colonies

of bacteria discover all the same food source?

They make "war."

What motivates ants? They go about doing their daily business

all of the time, but when an alarm pheromone hits

that indicates there's been an invasion from outside the colony

wham-o!

Everybody drops what they're doing;

Everybody rushes to the site of the breach where the odor

is coming from.

I mean, we humans, we're the children of bacteria;

We humans, we're the cousins of ants:

Just tell us there's an outsider at the gates!

You use the metaphor of war for just about anything

and it gets us roused, but especially use it about

our group versus another group,

our subculture versus another subculture,

and you can really get us going.

It's clear in neurolinguistic programming.

Because if you associate war, you associate it

with a nation having to pull together to fight a baddy out there.

Now, some folks'll tell you that I'm dealing in poison,

but hey, do I look like the kinda guy

that would do that do a kid like you? Yes!

It's a rhetorical frame in which the sacrifice of

individual "liberty" seems... necessary.

This is what's needed to win the war.

Last year alone, over 10,000 drug criminals were convicted

and nearly 250 million dollars of their assets were seized

by the DEA-The Drug Enforcement Administration.

These are a measure of our commitment

and emerging signs that we can defeat this enemy.

The astounding thing about the War on Drugs, is

how long it's gone on and how little progress has been made.

When I was working for MI-5, I had my first, sort of...

inkling that all was not good

because I was working on the Irish terrorist logistics desk

which is the movement of people and weapons

into and out of the UK-and, of course, doing that,

I had to work very closely with customs, which is there

to try and stop the drugs coming into the UK.

They just, knew it was like looking for the needle in a haystack

just to try and stop these drugs flooding into the UK.

I had record-breaking arrests, record-breaking interdiction

of supply, but it didn't make one iota of difference.

You don't see us knocking off the big guys

so often that, you know, there's scarcity of drugs.

When was the last time you couldn't

cop marijuana in this country? I mean,

there's no marijuana out there!

Oh my God, what am I gonna do?

I don't think you could go into any high school in

the country, I don't think you could go into any small town

in this country, I don't think you could go into any prison

in this country and not find marijuana

if you were looking for it.

So the argument that marijuana prohibition has had

any impact on the availability on the drug, I think,

really doesn't hold water.

What we see are a regular meal of arrests

and how many bales of this or kilos of that.

The show-and-tell is the glamorous side of it

all of this pot found inside one semi-truck.

20000 lbs. Worth. Border patrol calling it

the biggest bust in our state's history.

You wheel out your 60, 70, 80 kilos of marijuana,

your two assault rifles. The thing of it is,

if you took the average show-and-tell...

from the average arrest...

you'd have some little kid- I mean he might

be 15, 17, 18, 20 years old-

and you would proudly display...

a small bag of marijuana on your table

and say, we got him! We got him.

Came from Ontario, Oregon into Idaho with some mushrooms

and some weed, and I got caught with an exhaust so

he pulled me over, he put his head in the window

and said he smelled it, so I just

handed it to him just to get it over with.

It's such a joke to say

that they're going after hardcore criminals.

About one-and-a-half million arrests on drug-related offenses

in the year 2011-about 50% were for marijuana use.

It's practically legal! I get that all the time...

especially here in California

and what I say to those people is,

'it's absolutely NOT practically legal.'

It's very, very federally illegal.

It's just an ongoing story that at this point really

it seems little more than the premise for television shows.

Dangerous, deadly, illegal.

Tonight, the county's top cop says

much of this stuff was being made in the back of that plaza.

They got away with it for a little bit,

but at the end of the day,

they're not going to get away with it for very long.

There's another aspect to this game:

That is the economic side of it.

There's a deal between the feds and the state

and that's asset seizures.

They call it an "equitable sharing program" where

they encourage local law enforcement to seize items

that maybe involved in criminal activity.

They do an 80/20 split.

Without even getting a conviction and then they

keep the bulk of the money or the assets seized.

Maybe ya just wanna see the kind of stuff

the government seizes from criminals.

Right now you can actually check out a number of

forfeited vehicles going up for auction tomorrow

at the Apple Towing in Guadalupe.

These are awesome cars! This one caught my eye of course

first it's a 1968 Chevy Camaro...

I'll lock him up.

I'll seize his car. I'll hit a house,

I'll seize bank accounts, I'll seize land -

all because I'm producing for the state.

There's an incentive for the state to say, 'do it, '

but the law is such that the onus to get back your property

is on you! Not on the police department;

You have to fight to get back something

through the court system-

that they took away

that they had no right taking in the first place.

Between 1989 and 2010, an estimated 12.6 billion dollars

was seized by U.S. attorneys in asset forfeiture cases.

The growth rate of seizures during that time

was nearly a 20% increase every single year.

In the country where I grew up- America-where, you know

everybody is so proud of having guns

and proud of their freedom. 'No, I'm not afraid!'

Really? Go plant some cannabis in your front yard

and tell me how fast it takes for the man to come

and take everything you own!

Every year the DEA tells you how many seizures they've made

is That we have failed again.

What's your budget?

Well, currently... um.

Approximately...

Uh, two million...

Two million?

Two-I'm sorry- two billion dollars...

Yeah...

You can look into any federal agency you want to...

literally in their budget you will see

the extra tens of millions of dollars are earmarked

expressly to fight "the war on drugs."

When you get to the top of both towers,

the interests are the same.

The major drug dealer wants to continue selling drugs...

law enforcement wants to continue trying to prosecute

people who are using the drugs and there's a harmony there.

If you've ever seen the film of the head of the DEA-

Lionhart I believe is her name-when they asked her

is marijuana worse than heroin? And she sat there

and stuttered around; She wouldn't answer the question.

Uh, is crack worse for a person than marijuana?

I believe all illegal drugs are bad.

Is methamphetamine worse for somebody's health

than marijuana?

I don't think any illegal drug...

Is heroin worse for someone's health than marijuana?

Again...

I mean, either yes, no, or I don't know!

I mean, if you don't know, you can look this up;

You should know this as the chief administrator

for the Drug Enforcement Agency

I'm asking you a very straightforward question.

She couldn't answer the question because

she's a dyed-in-the-wool prohibitionist and her industry

her life, is dependent upon us

continuing to put 43 million people in jail.

About 85% of everybody in our country that

uses any form of illicit substance whatsoever

uses only marijuana and so if you were to remove

those people from the criminal justice system

the sheer number of everyone else in the country

using every other illegal drug combined would not justify

this colossal bureaucracy we have to fight the war on drugs.

It would fall apart. If you lose marijuana prohibition,

you lose drug prohibition and the government knows it;

They don't want to give that up

because of the sheer money involved,

Going down the path to legalization in this country

is reckless and irresponsible. It scares us;

The treatment people are afraid,

the education people are afraid. Law enforcement is, is, is worried...

what is gonna happen?

People say, 'well, the vice cops who work on

on marijuana prohibition would be out of work,

the people who work for the DEA,

some of them would be out of jobs, '

the White House drug czar office and so on and so forth.

I mean, that's just the most lunatic defense of prohibition.

By that logic, we should prohibit everything!

Because then we'd need to cops to enforce

food prohibition and housing prohibition

and medicine prohibition.

Beginning in the 1980s, the police departments became

a number-driven group.

One arrest is one arrest so if I spend a year and a half

taking down a violent drug organization that's

killed maybe 15-20 people and I lock up six guys.

I get six ones. If I went out on the corner tomorrow,

I can get fifteen "ones" and they all count the same.

There's no weighing for like, 'this is the murderer:

We give him fifteen points. This guy's the marijuana guy:

We give him .2 points.'

No, no, it's all the same.

One thing about a cannabis arrest is it's easy,

it's not dangerous, and it turns into a solved crime very quickly

with very little paperwork.

The whole thing is numbers because numbers generate revenue.

That revenue keeps Congress giving you money.

That money, then, you can turn around part of it

and keep pressure on Congress.

You don't come with those numbers-they retaliate

by giving you bad evaluations.

That's basically what they did to me.

We have almost a five billion

dollar budget a year so we run it like a business and

it's fair to ask the employees here to do their fair share.

It's not easy to get a trafficker.

It's not like walking up to the corner

or shaking the lockers of a high school.

You reach a point, especially as an executive or a supervisor

where you are now part of administering the policies

and you start to ask the hard questions.

Is it really worth a police officer's time

to bust somebody for a marijuana cigarette,

take them off the street, put them in jail, book the evidence

write the report and then be able to go back

out on the street and attend to public safety after

you've been gone for 3 hours for one marijuana arrest?

I used to go to meetings of chief police officers in the UK

after the formal conference was over

around the bar and around the dinner table,

they were all agreeing that there was

no point in keeping cannabis illegal

and yet what they said when the cameras were rolling,

when the microphones were in front of them,

was completely different.

In the 15 years I've been in policy,

I'm a little disillusioned by how much we were

able to achieve and very disillusioned on

the ability of leaders to still pretend we are achieving.

You know we need police forces.

If I was in charge of society, of course

I'd have a police force, but I'd make sure there were

sensible laws for them to enforce.

And there are plenty of police who feel like that too.

There's immense pressure on the inside of these sort of

professions to toe the line and just keep quiet.

The culture will eat you up if in fact

you come out while you're a police leader.

If they were to come out and say that they

were in favor of taxation, regulation of marijuana

they wouldn't get their promotions, they wouldn't

be able to move through the ranks; they'll be labeled

and I've seen that take place.

There's alot of work being done

on what creates respect for laws;

To what extent do people feel that laws are legitimate.

If they feel that laws are legitimate, they're likely

to comply with them without needing

to be coerced into them and punished.

And the research is suggesting that people want fairness.

In a sense, what creates respect for law is justice.

Seeing it done. That elicits great respect

when you actually see it being done.

There's another kind of respect though, which is

respect for the stick-it's like the force of authority.

Pretty much, marijuana works with the stick.

One of the consequences of the War on Drugs is

people have stopped looking at the police

as their protectors and more see them, right,

as their potential persecutors.

The police department basically becomes

the 'other' to the community,

and once you have that breakdown,

then information stops flowing.

So you don't learn about crimes and then the only

crime you really become interested in is the one

ou can solve which is locking people up

on the corner for using drugs.

And, you know, a great metric of that

is murder clearance rates. So, a murder is cleared when

an arrest is made and somebody goes to jail

and in 1965, we were clearing- police were clearing-

about 90% of the murders that were committed in this country.

That means, for 90% of the murders in this country

there was an arrest and a charge and today that's under 65%.

That's after all the tremendous technological advances

you know, DNA evidence all sorts of

forensics and, you know, expanding police budgets

and that sort of thing. I think if we were to look

at one cause for that drop in murder clearance rates

it's the breakdown in the relationship between

society at large and the police

and, you know, that by extension, is a consequence

almost entirely of the war on drugs.

By having to uphold these outdated and failed policies,

it ruins our reputation and it damages

the community relations between the police

and the policed, as well.

Whole generations have grown up

distrusting their local police rather than seeing them

as a potential protective layer of society.

When you do this, you change the whole nature

of the game, and from 1980 on

the police become more and more militarized.

The initiation of the drug war was the initiation of

a general loosening of const- raint on search and seizure.

It became just part of police practice

to be breaking down the door. We see it now

as a staple of Cops; that's now our reality.

That wasn't the reality before... the drug war.

Columbia police! Search warrant!

Columbia police! Search warrant!

Columbia police! Search warrant!

Search warrant! Search warrant!

Don't move! Don't move!

Don't move!

Search warrant!

Search warrant! Don't move!

Search warrant! Don't move!

That's on him.

Yeah. The money and the dope.

Now you see police and most often they look like soldiers:

They're dressed in black, they have jackboots

high-caliber arms and they don't walk the street

and get to know the community, right?

They drive around in cruisers

that look they belong on the battle field

that's the difference between

the Greenville police department's new.

SWAT truck compared to the old one.

The truck has a lot of bells and whistles:

From the simple storage compartments,

to the gunports on the side. They're actually proud

to say they did not use any taxpayer money.

We paid for it with seized funds

it came out of money we had seized from drug dealers...

That's where respect is lost. The officers on the street

have lost it; the institution itself has lost it.

You're not being seen as anything but the other-

people warring on us.

The war on drugs has had a puzzling effect

on how society seeks to police itself.

With hundreds of thousands of marijuana arrests annually,

once you start gathering a large

group of prisoners, where do you put them all?

Well, private prison is as scary as all shit

and they're scary as hell for a very simple reason:

They make it highly profitable to incarcerate people.

We've lost track of how

ridiculous some of the things we do are.

So we're gonna give people a profit motive

in putting more people in jail?

Gee, I wonder what's gonna happen...

Corrections Corporation of America is

the Hilton of the private prison industry:

A multi-billion dollar business that's getting

rich off punishment.

The more people locked up behind bars

and the longer they stay there the more money CCA makes.

Last year the company banked

a reported 1.7 billion dollars.

When you have a privatized prison, there's a contract

between the state and the prison

that the state has to maintain a certain

occupancy rate in the prison.

Meaning that the state guarantees

that the prison will stay anywhere from 80 to 100% full.

Crime could go down, it doesn't matter.

The taxpayers are still on

the hook and the government is still on the hook

for filling up your prisons.

Well, where do you get these numbers from?

The easiest way to make sure that the quotas are full

in these private prisons is to get the low hanging fruit

which is just the drug user as a criminal

rather than someone who might need a bit of medical help.

And that means that every fourth person in the world

in jail

is a citizen of the "land of the free."

You just become a commodity, rather than a human being,

churned through the system to make money

for these big corporations.

If we go on down this path, we'll see more

and more laws being invented and created to justify the

imprisonment of more and more people. Public money

will ironically be plunged into

pursuading us that that is right.

Each state is constantly arguing about the fact

that they don't have enough money for

for their public education, but then

at the same time, they'll take

state funds-or in a lot of cases, federal money-

and put it into the prison system.

This is Carl Holton school and it's been closed

for some time now and in it's place will rise

a hospital prison with over 1700 beds.

California, since 1980, we've built 23 prisons,

we've hired 14,000 prison guards

and we've fired 5000 teachers.

West Virginia is strapped for money, but we're

building another prison here. Got to!

A lot of people getting arrested here.

Most states are just like mine of California:

The largest, strongest political lobby group

in our state is - the prison guards' union.

You have unions that are lobbying to make sure that

certain drugs stay illegal regardless of

of how safe they are, to make sure that prisons

are filled because prisons extract money from the system.

It's insanity!

It's not rational or logical; It's... financial.

Money is the backdrop to everything. You can't

even run from it; I try to see other things or

put other perspectives on it,

but it always boils down to money.

We've even seen, in places like Pennsylvania, where

judges have gone and faced high federal sentences for

actually streamlining children

into these private facilities.

A former juvenile court judge in Pennsylvania could face

more than 10 years in prison after being convicted

in a kids for cash scheme. Prosecutors say he used

children as pawns-locking them up unjustly

in a plot to get rich.

Remember my son?

An all-star wrestler!

He's gone, he shot himself in the heart!

You scumbag, you ruined my fucking life!

And what could be more harmful to one's self than

being sent to prison?

No effect of the drug can be possibly as harmful

as doing jail time for consuming it.

And they end up with a criminal record.

What does that do to them? They could lose their job;

In some parts of the world, they will lose their housing.

They will lose the right to education.

This is a fucking kid who just got arrested recently

for having marijuana on him. They put him in jail

and he had an extreme food allergy. He asked them

if there was any milk in any of their products,

they wouldn't answer him, they gave him food, he ate it and

he fucking died in jail.

How... criminal is that?

What they've made illegal isn't the problem, alright?

The problem is the policy itself.

This business about drug offenses; I mean it's time

we stopped locking up people for possession of marijuana.

It selects people that it puts in jail, so we see

widely disparate penalties among socioeconomic groups

among racial groups.

White people and black people in this country do drugs

at the same rate so they should be arrested

at the same rate, but the reality is, of course

that's not remotely true. Across the nation,

blacks are arrested at four times the rate of whites.

Now, in some places like Minneapolis,

Washington, D.C., Iowa, it's eight times the rate.

So, why in the world would you be arresting

black Americans at eight times the rate-or even

nation-wide at four times rate-of whites?

They're using it at the same rate! You have no excuse!

If you are a young black man walking around the

streets of London today, you are nine times more

likely to be stopped and searched on

suspicion of carrying drugs.

I have risen through classes, so I know

you know what I mean- the difference.

Growin' up in Pittsburgh, just being on the streets,

if I got caught with some weed, they're gonna look at me

me as I'm selling some weed or I'm trying to get

some weed to one of their kids I look like a threat

but when I started rapping and started associating myself

with other people, started getting money:

They'll be like, 'oh he's not dangerous, he can smoke.'

The War on Drugs is one of those issues that highlights

very clearly that there is one law for the rich and powerful

and one law for the rest of us.

HSBC is a giant bank that actually laundered money

for the Mexican drug cartels. Billions of dollars!

Nobody went to jail.

Naturally, if there is a big bank that is

laundering money for drug cartels, they should face

a federal prosecution and criminal charges but that's

not what happened. They got a fine of 1.9 billion dollars!

Well, what's a fine to HSBC? It's pocket change;

It's one of the costs of doing business.

And nobody goes to jail and a mother of four

is arrested for $30 worth of pot and

she's put in jail for ten years.

The people at HSCBC are

in the elite, the woman with the $30 worth of pot is not.

Every animal that's ever had a hierarchical social structure

going all the way back to lizards, lobsters

and puppy dogs-has built that structure on prohibition

and there's always been a chicken at the

bottom the pecking order and the one on the bottom

of the pecking order ends up in a miserable

god awful, picked-on, pecked-on state and that

isn't mankind's social invention

that is mother nature's social invention. Does that mean

mean it's good? Hell no. And it's our job to reverse it,

natural or not.

Empathy is all it really takes to open up the avenues

of outrage and realize how appalling this is.

Let's remember something boys and girls:

Jails are there for people who hit us over the head

when we're walking down the street,

jails are there for people

who break into our homes and loot the place.

Jails are there for people who do genuine harm.

So I have no right to put them in jail

for having a different lifestyle than mine. In fact,

if I were to do that, it would be criminal.

And yet, the war on marijuana continues on.

Only now with new medical discoveries.

You might ask yourself, 'What possible health benefits

could an illegal plant have?'

The answer is starting to become more clear.

It begins with something that each and every

it's something called

the endocannabinoid system.

We think of marijuana as this violent, unnatural

intrusion on human biology. It's not.

We are built with all kinds of receptors for cannabis.

Cannabis mimics endogenous chemicals that we already

produce in the body called endocannabinoids.

That's why we have receptors that

pretty well fit cannabis.

Cannabinoids are these twenty-carbon molecules

that we produce, the plant produces

there's over a hundred of them in the plant

and these two systems work together to regulate cell,

cluster cell, and intracellular functions.

All the cannabinoids do is help cells function.

They don't care what the cell does

they don't care if its contracting, secreting thyroid

synthesizing this, remodeling bone, doesn't matter.

Just, they're doing something and they do it

a little more effectively.

Western medicine has never seen a substance like this.

We like single drug/ single function, and you come along

with a molecule that may have an interface

inside of every cell and help it function

more effectively and, really, it's a hard one to imagine.

I can't find any real legitimate doctor that thinks

smoking marijuana is good for anybody. Sure it may

relieve pain temporarily, but a fifth of Jack Daniels

might do the same thing, and nobody's calling

that medicine right?

People who say there is no established medical

use of marijuana simply don't know what they're talkin' about.

It's so versatile.

It seems every day when I open up the news, there's

another report on cannabinoids

having some type of medical utility.

Control of muscle spasticity, multiple sclerosis,

Glaucoma, colitis.

Nausea, pain.

Migraine headaches.

There are hundreds of reasons that

people find marijuana useful.

That's why I look so good after 41 years in the game.

It is the most non-toxic medicine I have ever encountered.

Once it's free of the prohibition tariff,

it's gonna be much less expensive than the

pharmaceutical products which it will replace.

Think of a strain as a little chemistry lab

an organic chemistry lab because what's happening is

mother nature is creating her own cannabinoid profile.

For instance you could smoke a variety or use a variety

that would help you with your headache or I could

use a variety that might help me with my back pain.

If an AIDS patient comes in and they're having problems

eating, or they can't sleep-okay, you can't eat,

you can't sleep, you know for sure the indica is

gonna put you down, it's gonna relax you 100%,

it's gonna give you appetite and you don't wanna

give him a sativa; Because you give him a sativa,

he's gonna be up thinking all night.

So it's about genes; It is about

this kind of character of plant can do this,

and this kind of plant can do that.

It's very important to keep these gene marks-

these original ones-it could be

the medicine that we need.

What is a land race? A land race is basically a

species of marijuana that's indigenous to an area

and has been growing there for hundreds of years

in a certain area.

Cannabis is from all over the world, so we have

Afghan varieties, Indian varieties.

In Colombia you have the famous Santa Marta Punta Roja

in Central Africa, you'll have the Malawi Gold.

When I started this whole new series on strain hunting

it was to show the world how much

people depend on marijuana around the world.

We estimate that probably around two to three

hundred million people's families are

depending on this crop.

It's still a drug in most countries so

the police takes it, or it's expensive, so

robbers will steal it and these are areas where the.

UN or other big international NGO's like UNESCO

never will come.

In these very remote areas there are a lot of

very nice land races and we would like to preserve

these land races for the future so we try to

obtain them and find them and bring them back.

We have new varieties that we can play with to see

if they will have any benefit for the future-

medicinal or recreational.

It's like getting a new athlete on your team that

you can cross-breed and

create a new variety of marijuana.

In recent years, understanding of medical marijuana's

diversity has become universally widespread news.

With a greater knowledge of strains has come new

new discoveries. These discoveries are leading us to

medical benefits we never could have imagined.

Jayden is seven years old now

Jayden was born perfectly healthy.

At four months old, Jayden had his first seizure.

It was just a downhill road from there

for the next few years.

He was having 500 twitching, myoclonic seizures a day;

He'd have grand mals for an hour, hour and a half.

I remember he was crying from 1 o'clock at night

till 9 in the morning- screaming and crying in pain.

He was seeing things, he was hallucinating

from the medications.

At four and a half, Jayden was taking 22 pills a day

he was at 25,000 pills he had taken by the time

he was 5 years old.

Jayden had tried twelve different medications,

we had 40 ambulance bills, we were fighting with

the insurance company all the time. We lost our house,

we lost our cars, we lost our business

we lost our family.

I went to UCSF, I said, 'look, I don't think Jayden's

gonna make it another week. What do you suggest?'

They're all, 'I don't know, I mean, I would try anything.'

I go, 'what do you think about medical marijuana?'

They're all, 'well, like we said, we think we're in a

life and death situation- you should try anything.'

So I said alright, I went and picked up something.

I saw in a dispensary, and came home, I gave it to Jayden-

after four and a half years of having myoclonic

seizures, and twitching and head drops

and seizing-the first day I gave it to him was-

thank God one million times- was the first day he's

ever went seizure free in his life.

Second day, third day, fourth day,

the seizures were down dramatically; I could see his

eyes lighting up.

It was summertime-

it was June 1st the first day I gave it to him 2011.

He started swimming; Jayden's never been able

to swim before-the sudden temperature change of water

would give him a seizure

I put him in the front yard and my neighbor's like,

oh my gosh, we've never seen him in the front yard.'

They were so excited they were cheering him on...

I started weaning him off the medications after

one month I was on the CBD.

Every time I took him off, he'd suffer for two weeks

he'd become more human. Then take off

another pill, suffer for two weeks, boom:

Become more human.

Jayden started chewing.

Jayden was only eating Gerber food...

always till he was five years old. He started chewing.

With taking 25,000 pills, it really wears on your body

and brain, so it was kinda recovering more from the

medication than from the epilepsy.

And we decided to wean off the hardest one:

Benzodiazepines.

He was having tremors, nightmares, brain zaps;

I've contacted 30 different benzo withdrawal clinics,

they go, 'how old is the person

that you want to bring into our clinic?'

I tell them, 'seven years old' and they scream

at the top of their lungs - every single one vividly

say the same exact thing:

'You have a seven year old on benzos?

'Cause we have people here that are football players,

we have people here that are big, tough guys

that are dying, literally dying,

from benzos and you have a seven year old on it?

I said, 'seven year old? I go,

'my son's been addicted to it since he was 16 months old.'

So now we have to figure out a way to wean him off

by ourselves because the benzo detox clinics are not

are not willing to take in a seven year old.

Since we've been using the CBD's, he's been doing amazing.

It has under 1% THC, so it doesn't give you

that euphoria.

It's abstracted,

it's organic, we know the dosage in milligrams.

We're on the forefront of something huge:

It's either you're gonna give up, and just and let your son,

your child, be a vegetable and die or you're gonna

sit there and fight.

I still haven't met Jayden yet.

I know Jayden and 22 pills, but I'm down to Jayden and

two pills-that's who I know right now.

I don't know Jayden but on medication.

Christmas before Jayden was born-that was my

that Jayden was gonna be born.

My ex-wife had given me a box and I opened it

and I remember...

this is a hard one...

I remember opening the box and seeing

a pregnancy test saying positive with two baby shoes

and having so much expectation, you know?

Having so much expectation that you're gonna have a son.

As a parent, you're expecting your child to play football,

you're expecting your child to talk you know?

I mean, right now, my number one goal

right now is to have my son say I love you.

I mean people take that for granted.

People take that for granted that their kids can talk

and say I love you. That's all I want to hear my son say,

but I mean if I can hear him say that,

I'll be more than happy. He said it one time on CNN:

I la loo. He was really close!

I gotta hear it. If he says that,

I've already conquered the world.

Seeing your child suffer:

There's nothing worse than that;

There's no torture worse than that.

Especially every day.

Now is not the time to send a message to our young

people that marijuana is medicine. It is not.

It is a dangerous, illegal drug.

Is it legitimate for any human on the face of

planet earth to deny another human the thing that

will remove him from that infinite torture chamber?

No. It is not acceptable.

It is utterly and completely im-moral.

I'm not allowed to do this

because someone says I can't.

And that person never met me,

they're never likely to meet me...

they're never likely to meet someone with MS,

Parkinson's, cancer-and yet they can have total rule

over that entity's life.

This is pretty much the only time

that I'm gonna be lost for words. I just -

the justifications still not been explained to me.

Should marijuana be legalized for medical use?

Aren't there issues of significance that you'd like

to talk about? The economy, the economy, the economy,

the growth of jobs, the need to put people back to work

the challenges of Iran? We've got enormous issues

that we face. But you wanna talk. Go aheadyou wanna

talk about.

Medical marijuana

I think marijuana should not be legal in this country

I believe it's a gateway drug...

Marijuana is still a schedule I drug meaning

legally that it has no medical usefulness whatsoever

and benzodiazepines like Valium and Xanax and Klonopin

are are actually schedule IV drugs even though they put

put significantly more people in the emergency room

every year and cause even more deaths

than many Schedule I drugs.

Many attempts have been made to move cannabis

out of of Schedule I and ...they always fail.

How can the United States government claim that there's

no medical usefulness to cannabis while then patenting

the medical usefulness of cannabis?

It was a shocking idea that the federal government-

the Department of Health and Human Services

had a patent on cannabinoids as antioxidants and

neuroprotectants, heart disease and diabetes,

Alzheimer's and Huntington's, and includes cataracts and.

Down's syndrome as well as neoplasia. It really speaks

to the depth of the problem in terms of who's making

these decisions and who are they benefitting?

We need to get to the truth which is that

prescription drugs kill vast numbers of people.

Prescription drugs have a higher rate of overdose

than even things we think of as being horrific like

methamphetamine, heroin...

The number of people who are killed by heroin and

cocaine is tiny, tiny, just miniscule, microscopic

by comparison with the number of people who are killed

every year by prescription drugs. Let's look at the facts;

Let's not listen to the bullshit anymore.

Suspected drug overdoses are rising at an alarming

rate in Haywood County.

And it's not illegal drugs officials are worried about

but prescription drugs.

It's being described as an epidemic. Authorities say

too many young people are dying accidental deaths.

The fifth or sixth top selling drugs in North America

are antipsychotics which we're giving out like candy

now to people, including children.

At Vancouver's Children's Hospital they've had to

establish a special clinic just to deal with the

effects of antipsychotics in kids.

I recently lost my father two years ago and we were

really close and so it was like having the rug pulled

out from underneath me and I started to see a therapist

and a psychiatrist because I was experiencing these

panic attacks and at least fifteen medications

I was written, you know,

within two minutes of meeting, one of the psychiatrists

she called me bipolar II and wrote a diagnosis of it

without even knowing me, you know?

What I really needed was a fuckin' hug.

In 2010, doctors prescribed enough painkillers to give

45 milligram Percocets and 245-milligram Vicodins

to every person in the United States.

It's a huge industry creating pills for us to take.

Most of the time, they're not really anything that's

curing you, they're just suppressing whatever your

ailment is and in some cases making it worse.

In depressed patients, worsening of depression

including risk of suicide may occur.

Sometimes fatal events including infections

tuberculosis, lymphoma, other cancers.

Blisters, peeling rashes, hives or mouth sores.

Nervous system and blood disorders

and allergic reactions have occurred.

The makers of OxyContin have marketed it as a

non- or less-addictive opiate, knowing already

that this wasn't true. They simply suppressed that research.

Hundreds of overdose deaths. They plea-bargained and

they agreed to pay fines. Well, they could pay that

out of their left hip pocket. Nobody went to jail,

nobody suffered any criminal consequences.

If you read the small print, you'll find that there's

side-effects to certain drugs but you've got to really

get your microscope out.

I see this all the time with friends-even with peers-

where they carry a diagnosis and they can't pronounce it.

They don't know what the disease they have is called.

They take drugs and they don't know what the medication is

or what it could potentially do to their body.

All kinda pills and medicine and bullshit that

they can't pronounce; Makin' money off your ass.

Fuckin' you up with more medicine than you need.

There's people strung out on those pills, man.

Chief medical examiner Glenn Wagner says he's noticed

a big rise in the quantity of different drugs

people are taking.

This shopping bag represents one individual and the

number of drugs that that person had onboard.

There are 19 separate lines on this one and it

goes for several pages.

People don't look at them as drugs anymore when

they're legal-when they're over the counter. They just

look at it as somethin' you can buy from the store and

put in your body, but it's still a drug.

Unintentional deaths from one dies

- one American dies. - Every 19 minutes.

Nothing comparable in marijuana. Is that correct?

Correct.

Well, when you've got a drug that costs a billion

dollars to bring to market, your investment is so

huge that you have to do everything in your power

to make sure that drug succeeds and sometimes the

things that you do are troubling.

There are some pharmaceutical products today that are

in short demand because the profit margin isn't big enough.

Just how tough is it to find the flu shot, Jocelyn?

Sonia, Darren, you'll have to make a couple of calls,

and those that do have it only have a limited supply.

I mean, this happens every year when there's a bad flu

and there's shortages of vaccines, right, because

there's not really a big profit motive tied to flu vaccines

it's a single dose and you move on. Unlike something

like Viagra or especially things like cholesterol

medication, heart medication. Maintenance medications

that people who are ill have to stay on

in order to live normal lives.

If you don't need that medication, you don't need them

they take a dent in the pockets, you know what I mean;

Those are very deep pockets and they don't want 'em dented.

So every night on TV you see a weird-ass drug commercial

tryin' to get you hooked on some legal shit

and they just keep naming symptoms till they get one that

you've fucking got! Got athlete's foot? Are ya hot?

Are ya cold? Whatcha got? You want this pill

huh, motherfucker? Ya got to take this pill!

Prescription drugs being advertised and marketed

on television is certainly something that's happened

in my lifetime as a physician.

They're saying things like 'ask your doctor if

this drug is right for you.'

Ask your doctor if Humira can work for you...

Ask your doctor if Lunesta is right for you.

Ask your doctor about Cymbalta.

Do you get a weird pain in your bowel? Well then you

need to go to a doctor and you need to tell him that

this is the drug you need. So hurry up! There's your

check, there's my prescription, it's a transaction.

I'm not a drug addict! How dare you? I'm a patient.

In every other industrialized Western country, you don't

see ads for drugs. You go to your doctor, you tell

your doctor what you're dealing with, they're well-

informed about the drugs that are on the market and they

make a recommendation for you.

I remember these commercials and they looked so happy

and I remember thinking, oh my God, there's a pill that

you can take to make yourself happy?

Like how fucking awesome would that be?

If you got somebody makin' a commercial sayin',

oh, do you have these problems,

do you have these problems?

You're gonna relate to it like, oh yeah, that is me!

Maybe I do need that.

It's really frustrating to me that as a society we

don't know better at this point. They're telling you

that you can take this medicine, but risk literally

killing yourself to do it!

For me, it reinforces our cultural belief that if you

go to a doctor, if you don't get a prescription,

you haven't really had a valid encounter.

One study by a British medical journal found that

for every dollar that pharmaceutical companies spent

on R and D -research & development-they spend

19 dollars on promotion and marketing of their drugs.

If I go to my doctor and I say, 'I saw this ad for this drug;

I really would like to try it, ' and he

says, 'yeah, let's give it a shot, ' is he my doctor,

or is he my drug dealer?

They form groups like.

Partnership for a Drug Free America

where they get their fucking money

from prescription drugs!

I wish you didn't smoke weed.

You're not the same when you smoke, and I miss my friend.

Prescription drugs making

commercials against weed is like hookers making

commercials against strippers, I mean that's...

(it would of been better if I didn't stumble through

(the word commercial), but that's what it is!

Guess what. All of the big drug companies have used

corruption in North America for at least 50 years.

If you were a doctor, they will come to you and say,

I will pay you to participate in a conference

on the phone-it will only take a half an hour of your time.

Well, guess what the conference is. It is a drug

company salesman selling you on the latest drug

to influence you to prescribe that drug the next time

a patient comes into your office. How are you gonna feel?

You feel gratitude and your gratitude

influences your decisions. Nothing should influence

your decision but what is best for a patient.

There are pros to having a capitalist endeavor.

There may be drugs on the market that never would

have been available because that profit motive wasn't

pushing these pharmaceutical companies to try

and develop those new drugs. The problem is that it's

it's not really a free there's, like, a small

percentage of pharmaceutical companies that are really

propped up by our Congress people because they have

huge lobbies supporting them.

I recently received a notification of the top 100

pharmaceutical drugs and how much they made a year

and you see exactly what all the frenzy is about.

In 2012, the top-11 global drug companies

made nearly 85 billion dollars in net profits.

Just an ungodly amount of money for medicines that

many of which my patients have been able to stop with

something that can grow in their backyard.

Now, look, I was in bed for fifteen years with an

extremely serious illness. I believe in the importance

of the major drug companies. Does that mean I believe

in their right to push research that they've paid for

into peer-reviewed journals and to prevent research

that tends to indicate that their drugs don't work?

There's a case to be made for these pharmaceuticals

there's the appropriate use of all kinds of medications

including antidepressants, including antipsychotics,

but it's hard to make a rational case for the use

to the extent that they're employed in today's society.

So, once more, we're faced with the arbitrariness of

what we consider to be

acceptable and what is

unacceptable.

This seems to be information

that society could benefit from.

But how has this vital knowledge managed

to fly under radars for so long?

Why are these issues not making their way

to the forefront of concern in our news?

So a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that

the news stations are gonna cover things in the order

of importance, but in reality they cover them

in the order of ratings. So if Justin Bieber

is gonna give you the best ratings,

they're gonna go first.

Congressman, let me interrupt you just for a moment.

We've got some breaking news out of Miami-stand by

if you will. Right now, in Miami, Justin Bieber has

has been arrested on a number of charges.

You gotta sell whatever it is that wants to advertise

on your show and if your show is getting shitty ratings,

they're gonna replace you with a chick with big tits.

Hey, starting the news off tonight:

A motherfucker killed three people. We got my guy.

Hal Fishman standing outside right now. Hal, what's going on?

'Yeah, the nigga shot three people'

and blah, blah, blah. That's more attractive!

Yeah, I don't watch the news; The news is fuckin' depressing.

They pick the worst shit to follow

for a long-ass amount of time.

You think they give a fuck if Barack Obama was

born in Kenya? They do if it's a good story.

Because it means that two million people are gonna

tune in instead of 600,000.

Then you get people coming out saying,

'well, what about nuclear bombs?

That's a good point! We'll be back after this.'

They're gonna be able to sell advertisement for X-amount

of money instead of W.

That kinda shit happens everyday all day

it's just a matter of which one do they want to put

the most attention on?

There's skydiving cats!

¶ I believe I can fly..¶

In all that froth, I think serious debate around

key policy issues often gets lost.

That's the problem with current affairs!

You forget about what's important and you allow the

agenda to be decided by superficial information.

Everybody cares about the advertisers.

They care a tremendous amount.

If you're gonna do a story that affects the advertisers,

you will get a call from management. Now, it doesn't

mean you can't do the story although there is heavy

pressure to shift priorities within the story.

It's fucking ridiculous! Puttin' makeup on

and pretending they're not reading off a script that's

corporate approved. They have a very specific set of

parameters that they're supposed to fall into.

It's OK, you can admit it if you've bought an item or

two or ten for yourself.

It's OK, you can admit it if you've bought an item or

two or maybe... ten for yourself...

It's OK, you can admit it if you've bought an item or

two or ten for yourself.

Originally, when TV first started, news was seen as

something that was a public service so that you

informed the American people. The deal was:

You give us news and we give you the public airwaves

and then at some point along the lines, the TV stations

forgot that they weren't supposed to make money off

the news and then a second thing kicked in that's

they realized whenever they did

investigative reporting, they would uncover something

that the government was doing wrong and it'd be

a giant hassle.

You're supposed to question authority as a journalist.

That's the whole point of the media.

If you don't question authority, then what the hell

is the point? CNN just got rid of its investigative team.

When I was at MSNBC, I looked for an investigative

reporter to do some of the stories that I wanted

to cover and they said, 'there isn't one in the

building.' So I got this amazing speech from the

head of the network who said, 'look, outsiders are

they wear leather jackets and

they ride motorcycles, ' he said, 'but, we're insiders here

at NBC; We're part of the establishment and you have to

act like it.' He was telling me that he had just

gone to Washington and they were not happy with my tone.

Do you think all these corporations and rich folks

are spending money on politics because it's not good

for business? No! Obviously they think it's a great

investment for them.

I was challenging the Republicans and the Democrats

too much.

How about if we didn't go into that dumbass war in

Iraq and waste a trillion dollars when we found

zero weapons of mass destruction. You flushed

that down the toilet!

We're talking social security not your politics!

And now you're talking about robbing people's social security!

That is outrageous!

Not your contempt for America, we're talking about

social security. Stick to the topic!

Contempt for America? You lost 4400 American lives

in Iraq! You have contempt for America!

I remember taking several guests to task

saying all of our politicians are systematically corrupt.

They get legalized bribes which we

call donations. We've forgot- tten that they're in essence

just bribes. Who's gonna give you money for nothing?

No one right? They're gonna give you money so that

you do them a favor. Every time I would point that out

there'd again be a call from management like,

'hey, we're not saying you can't do that. On the other hand

if you'd like to keep the six o'clock slot...'

But in that one meeting that I had

with the head of of the network, it was no longer implicit.

It was explicit and he said,

'this is the reality and you either get back in line

or we go in a different direction.'

If anything, I went harder after the establishment

after that.

They sucked so much money out of the

system that we had one of the largest economic crashes

of all time and they're not even done yet!

And then, a couple months later, they called me in

and they're like, 'apparently you didn't get it!'

So, you were at six o'clock; We're moving you

from six o'clock to the weekends;

We're gonna pay you a ton of money

so hush up' and I said thanks but no thanks.

I didn't take the weekend job and I went back to

do the Young Turks online.

We have three branches of government,

and those three branches are supposed to be part

of the checks and balances that make the government work.

The media and journalists are a huge part of that. I mean,

you think Americans are complacent now?

They'll be even more complacent if they're not given

the information they need to be politically active.

Drama works on television.

Now, in the world of politics, the soap opera is.

Democrats versus Republicans. It's not who's right

in terms of the policies or ideology. What is easy is:

He said this, she said that; Isn't that amazing?

Look at the Democrats and Republicans, they're always

fighting... oh no, look at this: the Republicans are

fighting amongst themselves. Catfights sell.

Which is why you have the red team and the blue team,

you know, all over the world it's red team-blue team.

And they have these rigid ideologies that are

associated with these teams and they just run with it.

Find a place where you are surrounded by like-minded

people and the best way to find those people is you

should probably look at the maps on how counties voted.

We think it's a bunch of ideas about how the world

works and how we can make it better. Sorry, that's not

really what it is. Ideas are a badge of identity

they're a badge of identity for a subculture.

It's my group versus your group and I will make damn

sure that my representative represents my badge of

identity, my group's supposed ideas, the ones that

represent my group's uniform not your group's uniform.

And there's a lot of seemingly intelligent people

that have ridiculous ideas that are cleverly worded

in a nice flowing and confident way

that makes you think that what they're saying makes sense.

A lot of work gets done on tobacco whereas drugs

are pretty much specifically just to get high.

It's not, I'm enjoying-

But a lot of people drink to get high...

Yeah, but that's more of a subsidiary point.

People are not openly discussing anything,

they're just defending points of view and in defending

points of view, they're defending their egos.

Which means they're expressing the ideas that they think

others want to hear. Which means they're not thinking!

So, you can present the facts to people, but the facts

won't penetrate because it's not about facts,

it's about opinions they have to hold onto

in order to feel okay about themselves.

Potheads that I knew at that time, when I see 'em:

'Hey man, hey bro, hey what's that? What's going on?'

Every one of 'em are brain dead! It's fact.

Everyone that I know in my long history of life,

everyone that was a pot smoker, their brains are defuncitated!

Fox News, as we've known for a long time,

does Republican propaganda. Unfortunately, MSNBC

has now come to largely do Democratic propaganda.

CNN does propaganda for both; They say, 'the Republicans said

this and the Democrats said that.

Now, what's the truth? Who cares?

My job is just to tell you what the latest catfight is.

It creates this partisan division in the country

where people feel like, 'I have to root for my team

regardless of what they do.'

It's sometimes hard to see contradictions

that find their way into politics. Inconsistencies

with politicians tend to get lost

in a mass amount of information

that now finds its way to our attention.

In some cases, these contradictions sit right

in front of our face.

When you look at the Obama website where they were

looking for information-what is important to you,

what do want to see us do?

I have to say that there was one question that was

voted on that ranked fairly high and that was

whether legalizing marijuana would improve the

economy and job creation and, uh, I don't

know what this says about the online audience.

And he goes, 'ha ha, I don't know what that says about

this group.' What it says about this group is:

They like pot! Why don't you explain to me what's

wrong with the idea that people want you to make it

so that someone doesn't get locked in a fucking cage

for a forbidden plant?

Yeah, I did it, I got away with it, too bad you're not.

So move on to the next question. Look at how

many of us they're locking up.

There's nothing funny about it.

Now, think about how mental the last three

presidents, at least, confirmed that they in fact

did smoke marijuana. So, shouldn't they be in jail?

I mean they've admitted it, right?

Obama apparently rather enjoyed it.

It makes him the him the hip President! 'I'm the cool.

President, I'm the happeningest President

I say weed, I say blow, it's all a big deal ha ha ha!'

Huge laugh from the college students and if he had

done time in prison, time in federal prison,

time for his weed and a little blow,

he would not be President of the United States of America.

This is his quote from 'I'm not going to be

using Justice department resources to try to

circumvent state laws on this issue.'

Well, bullshit, that's exactly what he's been doing.

He has launched the most vicious attack on medical

marijuana patients and dispensaries

that pales Bush by comparison.

He's raided me. The DEA has been in this house.

One of the reasons we are making these announcements

today is to try to put to rest the notion that large

marijuana businesses can shelter themselves under

state law and operate without

fear of federal enforcement.

In a report issued in June 2013 it was found that the DEA

had performed 270 medical marijuana raids

under Barack Obama in the first four and a half years

of his presidency. This was more than all 12 years combined

before he took office.

The Obama administration outspent the Bush administration

by 100 million dollars in about half the time.

People get freaked out when you say that.

'But Obama is hope and change! He's a Democrat;

He's a good guy! You can't say that about Obama!

He had a choice...

he coulda done as his campaign promised and said,

hey, you know what? We're not gonna do the dispensary

raids anymore. If you have made medicinal marijuana

in your legal state, we're gonna respect that.'

That's what he said during the campaign.

But when he goes to act, what did he do?

He put the most right-winger that they had in the DEA,

who was left over from the Bush years, as the head

of the DEA. Now, why would you do that? You could have

picked anybody but you picked the biggest

right-winger in the department.

Why? And this is what people can't

he's a politician just like

the rest of them so he thinks, 'if I can curry a little

bit of favor by putting this right-winger in, well,

I will seem so moderate and that will increase

my chances of winning in 2012 by maybe half a percent.

President George W. Bush, who pretty much has

acknowledged while he was young and irresponsible

and a playboy, he used cocaine

and then when he was governor of Texas

signed legislation mandating anyone

that uses cocaine must go to jail

a minimum of 180 days.

That's beyond hypocrisy.

When asked about drugs, he said, 'I don't want to

answer the marijuana question. You know why?

I don't want young kids doing what I did.'

Likewise, I mean when you look at interviews

that have been done with Bill Clinton

after he left office, he openly admitted

that he thinks that marijuana should be decriminalized

and it's like, oh, well if only you were in a position

to do something about that!

I wouldn't pretend that I know what pulls a President's

strings, but I do know there's a stark contrast

between the way every President behaves before

they get into office and then once they get into office.

The general public should hold politicians accountable

for saying one thing when they're not in power

and doing another when they come into power.

There's a sort of rhetorical trick they quite often use

to say, 'oh, this is something I did in the past,

it's something I regret, I wouldn't advise anyone else

to do it.' So, they somehow

distance themselves from their own person.

And the public puts up with that hypocrisy

they get it when you point it out to them, but I don't

know why they put up with it.

So it may be that President X or President Y has

smoked cannabis at some point in their lives or used

other illegal drugs, but when they get to the top

they are going to oppress others for using illegal drugs.

That's an idea that never would have crossed the mind

of any of our founding fathers. If anyone had stood up

at a constitutional convention and said

hey! Let's ban alcohol, ' that idea wouldn't have

gotten very far and it wouldn't have gotten very far

not because they were a bunch of drunks, but because

the idea that the federal government had that degree

of power over sovereign individuals was anathema to

what they were trying to create in forming a new country.

That's why it's essential to make decisions in public

wherever possible, based on the actual evidence that

there is for something.

How else are you going make policy? Are you going to

base it on some sort of faith? Or a wish that something

will happen just because you want it to? What are you

going to do? Stand and sort of scream on the spot

until you get your way like a small child?

And that's effectively what some of our politicians

seem to be doing.

For six months, I worked as a policy advisor at the

highest levels of the British civil service,

working to advise the most senior people

on the issues of drugs and crime

and the aim of that was to get an academic in there

to help give them some evidence

that they could base their policies on, but I found

that that was actually quite a difficult job to do.

Those civil servants told me that they had learnt

that it was not helpful to use evidence which

challenges the dominant way of thinking that's already

structuring most policies.

It's much easier to take evidence that supports

what you're already doing

and use that to justify the continuation

of your existing policy.

One of the leading figures in research in Drugs and Policy

is Professor David Nutt.

He was the government advisor for the ACMD.

The ACMD is the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.

We had created a 16-point scale of harms and then we

took twenty drugs and we ranked all those drugs on

these sixteen different harms, and then when we

put all that together into this computer program called

multi-criteria decision analysis, we discovered that

the most harmful drug overall was alcohol.

It showed that the drug laws, which ignore the most harmful

drug, were actually based on a wrong

understanding of harms. Politicians wanted to get

some kind of political advantage by being hard

on cannabis and our study said, 'well hang on, cannabis

is much, much less harmful than alcohol.'

I thought I was going to be encouraged

to tell the scientific truth

and then suddenly one afternoon,

I got a phone call saying effectively,

'you've gotta resign' and I said, 'why?'

And he said, 'because you're giving mixed messages;

We've gotta have cannabis is bad,

alcohol is good. When we say we want you to resign

it means you're sacked' and so I was sacked.

Professor's Nutt's dismissal came after he dared to suggest

drugs like cannabis and ecstasy are less harmful

than alcohol and tobacco.

It was a very interesting experience because, here,

you've spend ten years of your life doing what you

know is right and what you know-if that was accepted

by government, by policy- makers-would be better for

society and then for simple political reasons,

you get humiliated publically.

After an angry exchange on Sky News yesterday,

Alan Johnson reiterated his argument in a letter to.

The Guardian today:

'Professor Nutt was not sacked for his views,

which I respect but disagree with. He was asked to go

because he cannot be both a government adviser

and campaigner against government policy.

But it kind of backfired on the government because his sacking

attracted an enormous amount of media attention.

Suddenly the debate wasn't just about whether this

expert committee had got it right about drugs,

it was a whole debate about the role of science

in policy-making.

This brings us to an interesting question:

If evidence doesn't play the role we think it does

in policy-making, then what does?

Turns out there's this thing called lobbying.

And just what is lobbying?

Lobbying is supposed to be simply getting access

to the politicians and making your case.

So, the American people can lobby

just as much as a special interest could.

It's supposed to work like that, and the politician

then ponders it and says, 'oh, well,

you've both made an interesting case,

but I'm going to go with this side or that side.'

Now, that's not what it is at all,

okay? The reality of what it has become is:

Two sides come in with two checks-whoever has the

larger check wins. That's lobbying in a nutshell.

So, if it's defense contractors, or private prisons,

or whoever it might be that's giving money for that issue

they're gonna win! They're not gonna win some

of the time; They're gonna win all of the time.

I think Bill Hicks said it best. Bill Hicks said,

'this is my impression of American politics.'

He goes-it's a guy holding two puppets-and people go,

'well the puppet on the right is more to my liking,

well I feel like the puppet on the left suits my beliefs

like, hey, wait a minute: It's one guy and he's

holding both puppets!

Once corporations were allowed to spend money in

politics, they owned politics.

Corporations are people, my friend. We could raise taxes

of course they are- everything corporations earn

ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes?

You give me money, I do you favors-everybody got

used to it. Now the media doesn't even blink;

They think, 'well if you're good at raising money, that

must mean you're a good politician.' Now, what does

that have to do with serving the people? Do you know

that, 95% of the time, the person with more money wins

the congressional election at the national stage?

It doesn't matter if you're liberal or conservative,

the main thing that matters is do you have more money?

So, for the 2012 elections, they spent six billion dollars

on all the national elections.

They spent a billion for the Obama campaign,

a billion for the Romney campaign

and four billion for all the senate and

congressional elections.

It's large donors and

they're not spending six billion dollars for their health.

They're spending the six billion dollars to

get back 12 billion

or 60 billion

I got a campaign. I need money. Who's got money?

That woman with four kids selling $31 worth of marijuana,

she's got no money, but that banker,

that Wall Street guy, that corporation guy-

hey, I think they have a few bucks to spread around.

It actually becomes an undercurrent to every single

legislative action that we see. Everybody's concerned

about re-election; Everybody's concerned about how to

sell themselves, not to their constituents,

but to the lobbying and to the interest groups.

It fucks up the framework and the groundwork for the

world that we operate in.

So where does this leave society when those who are

elected to represent the public no longer have the

motivation to do so? How can balance be re-achieved?

What else can alter the framework

of the world around us?

If you think in terms of our communication environment,

the advent of the 'net represented a tremendous

inflection point.

Before that, the sources of information

that we had were pretty much

institutionally structured.

That very strong filter is breaking down and that's

giving people around the world the chance

to think for themselves

I have a real bug about nobody respects books

anymore; Books going out the window and everyone's

reading on these bloody screens. It's just so easy to

Google stuff. Everyone's just like, 'oh, let's check.

Google' no! It's a real, like, big bug there for me;

It really annoys me.

Where do you get most of your news from today?

I think, the internet actually!

Suddenly, it's a different world. The folk that control

big media now no longer control the whole of

that media environment.

We're not reliant, say, in England,

on the Daily Telegraphs and the fear that politicians have

over two or three publications.

Blogs have become the media; there really is a public debate.

This is like the public forum of Athens or Rome.

It's the freedom to do what you want. Can't nobody

tell you what you can and can't do on the internet.

You can do what the hell you wanna do when you wanna do it.

You may connect with somebody in another country

who may have some information that'd really enlighten the world.

Because we don't know it all in America: We only know

half the story. I was, you know, close-minded

I was just thinking about California and the

lifestyle I grew up in.

In Alice in Wonderland, it said something like this:

'How do I know what I think until I hear what I have to say?'

On the internet you can actually express yourself

out loud; You can add a new dimension to thinking

and for the first time, if you have an opinion,

you can go out there and express it, and if you have

the ability to promote it, you can get attention for it.

Post it

and before you know it, a million people could be

following you, talkin' with you, respectin' your

views. Or they could be talkin' bad about your views.

All of a sudden, issues that would not have

been discussed before are being discussed.

There's these little communities based on ideas

and thoughts that are building and those ideas turn into

other ideas and other programming and it's weird if

you were to look at it on a chart or on a graph.

In terms of the War on Drugs, the internet has been phenomenal.

There was a great thirst for the truth

and so anytime that truth leaked out on the internet

people would just jump on it.

'Oh, marijuana has medicinal benefits?

Oh, wow, Richard Nixon already had the report

that said marijuana wasn't bad for you?'

They jump on it and they think, 'thank God

there's now something that let's me access the truth!

I was online in '94. That's when I first got online,

but it didn't really do anything it was sorta like

puttin' around and no one knew what was going on.

You've got mail!

Everyone I know is on it!

Email!

Instant messages!

There's no better way to keep in touch.

You've got mail. Now with 56k, connections are faster

than ever!

It's fast!

If you have a phone line, you can go online.

What will they think of next?

And the mail was all bullshit, and then slowly

but but surely it became this interacting monster

that it is today.

Anything that you need to know about marijuana,

you can just go on there and look.

You can have your mind changed instantly.

In the old days, when there was twenty hippies

sitting around trying to legalize marijuana with

with their little flyers, there was no way to

fact check any of it. It sounded like a crazy hippie.

Wait, you're telling me marijuana is safe and it

helps you with headaches and anxiety and all these

important medical things that we're taking all these

pills for? Yeah right, old hippie.

But nowadays, these hippies are online

and they have proof and facts and for once

we're like, 'wow, that's not a crazy hippie,

that's a smart hippie.'

You know, I can pick this phone up, and within 10 seconds,

I can Google any complex question that would've

required a serious education to answer before.

It's become so commonplace, that we don't realize

how fucking completely insane it is! It's a culture-

changing reality shift.

People like me, who had to read about things

in an encyclopedia, and actually go to a library, and take

out books on things. I'm a fuckin' dinosaur.

The young kids that are comin' up today-from the jump,

have had the internet; They don't know

what the world is like without the internet.

The internet is beginning to shake things up in politics

but the old momentum is clinging stubbornly,

irritatingly and disturbingly.

With the recent NSA leak, I think that you see

a very specific example of politicians trying to destroy

freedom of expression and freedom of speech.

Collecting data on people and spying on people is a

form of intimidation. If you know that the government

is watching what you're doing, and you know that the

government is monitoring what you are saying and

what you're advocating for, you are less likely to be

politically active. You are more likely to be intimidated

by power. They're using that as a way

to tell us to shut the fuck up.

The West fought for 500 years to acquire these basic rights

and just to hand them away thoughtlessly means

that we have to fight again for hundreds of years

just to get them back. It's very hard to acquire basic

human rights; It's very easy to give them up.

The establishment is scared to death of the internet

because that's the one thing they can't control.

So they've figured out a way to control our politicians

through donations, they've figured out how to control

TV through the advertising, but the internet is the wild,

wild West and they can't grab it. No matter how

much they try to plug all the holes in, the truth seems

to get out one way or another anyway. It's basically

the whole world sharing with one another and the one thing

that we're sharing, that's really doing them damage,

is the truth.

The trend, if you pay attention to it, clearly is

the dissolving of boundaries between people and ideas

and information and it's all going to come to a head.

The first cracks in the monolith of prohibition

have already happened. Suddenly you have Washington

and Colorado actually succeeding in passing

these legalization and regulation ballots

and becoming the first jurisdictions

anywhere in the world to do so.

What's happening in the United States is that the

entire underpinnings of the War on Drugs are being

pulled away by the population of the United States itself.

Washington state and Colorado that make it

legal-legal, they're like,

'look, man, it's fuckin' legal here. Period.

It's not "medically legal" it's legal'

and the DEA is like, 'woah, you better not!'

Like, whaddya mean, we'd better not?

Come on, what is our fucking voting system for

if a piece of legislation that the people want gets up

there and you're still going out of your way

not to recognize it?

How could you ask people to believe in the process

if you won't respect the vote?

You can't ask people to vote- they won't want to.

That's all that's gonna have to happen to tear it all apart:

Is more states just saying, 'you know what?

We're gonna legalize.'

They become a force that can stand up to the status quo.

It's then you start to take what is yours

instead of waiting for the corporations

and the government to give you what they think you deserve.

One by one, individual states are defying the federal

government and responding to the wishes of their

their own immediate population and changing the state law.

Once we see that gaining pace in the United States,

it's gonna gain pace in the whole of the rest of the world

as well.

The International Narcotics Control Board has made it clear

that Washington and Colorado are in breach

of the UN drug conventions, they're effectively breaking

international law and that the U.S. is, by dint of what's

happening in Washington and Colorado, also in breach

of the UN conventions.

Given that the UN drug treaties were very much driven

by the U.S. in the first instance,

it does put them in this rather odd situation where

something that they drove the formation of, they are

now being disciplined and condemned for violating.

Because how can they impose these appallingly damaging

laws and conventions across the other countries of

the planet when they're legal- izing in their own backyard?

I think it makes it very difficult for the United States

to try to hold other countries in line.

They are experimenting with a completely new approach

and that is for the state to be selling marijuana

in marijuana shops throughout Uruguay.

All across Europe, in Australia, and in fact, all over the world,

the whole house of cards

is already coming crumbling down.

I mean even by the time you put this documentary on air,

I'm sure that there are going to be more states

that have voted with their feet and changed

the legal status of cannabis.

Big step today for those hoping to legalize

recreational marijuana in Alaska.

The campaign to regulate marijuana turned in

more than 45000 signatures to the lieutenant governor.

I mean it's impossible to keep up right now when it

comes to research, political development.

Constant stream of books and documentaries, podcasts

and blog posts. The information's just overwhelming.

They just can't stop releasing shit.

Just like you can't stop making documentaries about it,

just like I can't stop talking about it on stage

or on a podcast.

In ten years from now,

you're gonna look at this film and be like,

'that's ridiculous. Remember when they had to make films

about legalizing marijuana?'

And it's one of the reasons why the age of information

that we exist in today is so fuckin' important.

It's so important because it's never been in the

hands of the people before and this is what happened:

In the hands of the people you've seen more progress

in ten years than we have

in two fuckin' hundred years before.

Because it's swarming, all the greedy pigs

are trying to hold on to it, but it's like standing

in the middle of the river and trying to catch all the salmon

with your hands. You're not going to.

The world is already moving; We're already on it like

we want it. They doing it in Seattle, Washington.

Recreational. You know I'm on my way out there

as soon as I get off this TV screen. Recreational work.

Establishment figures, they're beginning to get the message;

They're realizing that it isn't in their interests

any longer to demonize cannabis.

It does not make sense, from a prioritization point of view,

for us to focus on recreational drug users

in a state that has already said that under state law,

'that's legal.'

When you see a broad social change taking place

in society and you realize that you are behind the curve

then, you pretty soon get it

that you have to catch up with the curve.

It seems like they are falling under the weight of all this.

They just go where the wind blows

in order to stay alive.

I don't think it matters why people jump ship

as long as they do jump ship.

In 2009, you wrote a Time Magazine article entitled.

Why I Would Vote No on Pot. You've changed your mind.

I have and as part of my thinking recently,

I've apologized for some of the earlier reporting

because I think we've been terribly and systematically

misled in this country for some time

and I did part of that misleading.

There's a shift taking place in our culture.

The issue is once again on the table. Will the forces

backing marijuana deregulation overplay their hand

in some way that allows the forces of incarceration

to get a jump on them?

The war on marijuana is a symptom of something that

is fundamentally wrong in this country. We have to

break out of the fog because the media won't do anything

no President is gonna come in and change things.

It comes from the bottom up not from the top down.

So, you can have minor little victories,

but that's tinkering. 50 years of documentation says

it's not working and what do we do tomorrow?

The same damn thing.

The truth is not repeating what everybody around you

automatically says. It is not repeating what everybody

is gonna pat you on the head for saying.

It is looking for the things

that people will not pat you on the head for saying

because those are the things that people

really need to know, and once you are damn convinced

of something of that sort, then it's your obligation

to go out on a limb for it.

That's truth.

We have to figure out, A, that we are temporary

and we are the people that have to pass down this

fucking incredibly fucked up mess to our children

and unless we operate this world with the idea of sustainability

for the culture, sustainability for the community,

sustainability for humanity in general,

you're gonna have resentment at every turn.

You have people profiting and people failing

and people being victimized,

but the reason why we are so complex

is also the reason that I think that we have hope.

Eight years and 2 films later,

we once again arrive left with more questions than answers.

Where do we go from here?

How do we move forward without taking two steps back?

And, again, sits that ever- lingering question

that we just can't seem to shake:

Will marijuana ever fully be legalized?

Um, probably yes...

Oh yes, oh yes. I've no doubt about it.

Marijuana prohibition is a zombie; It is a walking corpse.

It could be decades, but historically, it's a blip.

I think marijuana will be fully legalized and taxed

in my lifetime. Whether we'll ever get Singapore doing it,

we'll see.

Globally? I can see Iran doing it, can't you?

Instead of goin' one city, one state at a time.

Make that shit legal everywhere

and pop the top and let's go!

I think it's just around the corner, but you know,

I've always thought that! I've been wrong up to now,

so I'm probably wrong now! I don't know.

I doubt it seriously. I believe that the forces controlling

the way things work in the United States will give us

lots of process before we ever get to total legalization.

I can die with the satisfaction of knowing

it's inevitable now.

They're never gonna get the cat back in that bag again.

He's out... and what we see now is this culture

struggling to make an accommodation for this

new kid on the block.

There'll come a point when this will probably end

but if it's not today, then somebody will be locked up

today, somebody's life will be ruined today

and that somebody is probably hundreds of people.

To begin to demonstrate an understanding of humanity

is so counter to our way of thinking-

it's throw away the key, let's lock 'em up.

And you believe it, up until your son or your daughter

or your friends or yourself gets caught up in the same nightmare

and then you're going 'oh my God, now I understand, '

But do you?