05/08/15 – Zoe Russell – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
First up on the show today is Zoe Russell.
She is the Assistant Executive Director of RAMP, Republicans Against Marijuana Prohibition.
You can believe that.
Welcome to the show.
Zoe, how are you?
I'm well.
Can you hear me okay?
Yeah, I can hear just fine.
Thanks for doing the show.
Appreciate it.
Absolutely.
I am a big fan of yours.
Oh, cool.
Well, that's very nice to hear.
All right.
So, you know what's even nicer to hear than that is this.
Texas House Panel approves full legalization of marijuana.
That's the Houston Chronicle today.
Boy, I must be living in the future or something.
What is going on?
It is the future.
It's 2015.
It's about time.
Don't you think?
Yeah.
Well, way past time.
But yeah, I still can't believe it, though, actually.
I would get back to me in 2035 or something.
Really?
So, tell me what's going on here with this.
Is this a real thing?
Yes.
It's a real thing.
Representative David Simpson put himself way out there on the line when he filed this bill.
And he took a leadership position and worked really, really hard on communicating this bill to his members, especially those on the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee with him.
And I'd heard whispers for a while that he had lined up the votes to get this out of committee.
And we had been working really, really hard in addition to his bill on HB 507.
And we were having a hard time getting that one voted out of committee.
So I was thinking, you know, Representative Simpson is really the man because he got even an added vote from ours.
He got Republican Todd Hunter supportive of his bill.
So we'll see where it goes from here in calendars.
I think that passing out of committee surprised a lot of people in that building.
So that alone is a victory for me because I get to go back in the Capitol building and say, you know, so I guess y'all didn't expect this.
We had more support than you thought.
And the more and more people hear from their constituents, I bet you it's going to be positive feedback for them.
And more people will take a stand like David Simpson.
Yeah.
Well, and it seems important, at least according to the Chronicle story here, that this guy Simpson is not some rhino liberal Republican Lincoln Chafee type or something.
They call him a deeply conservative member supported by the Tea Party and who cited God and said, hey, I don't believe that God made when God made marijuana, he made a mistake that government needs to fix.
So right on.
Right.
Right.
He came in with the several Tea Party candidates.
I mean, and there are still Tea Party candidates coming into the Texas legislature every year.
And he came in probably the first wave of Tea Party candidates and had to take time to really form relationships with other legislators, because I think they probably wrote him off early on.
And he is just one of the most thoughtful, sincere people that you will meet.
So it coming from him, you know that this is not a political ploy or it's not something he's trying to be goofy about.
He's thought long and hard and prayed about it.
And that's why he filed this bill.
So it is important that he is carrying it.
Wow.
OK.
Now, so the Houston Chronicle, though, says, well, this is nice, but it's not going to pass.
There's no chance that it's actually going to pass the full house.
What about that?
Well, I would say that there is a chance that it could pass the full house.
But I'd say passing the full legislature in time passing the Senate would probably be a harder task.
I think the Senate is more conservative on this issue or whatever you want to have conservative to mean to you.
And so I think that a floor debate would be excellent.
And I don't think that you can write off that they would kill the bill in the House floor that easily.
But it is very we don't have a lot of time.
So in that sense, there's not a lot of time to get through the full process and signed by the governor.
You know, I don't even know who the lieutenant governor is right now.
Dan Patrick.
Dan Patrick.
So tell me about him, because he's the dictator of the Senate, basically.
Right.
Right.
Well, Dan Patrick, the interesting thing about the Senate is they just passed a low THC marijuana oil bill.
And it's a very, very restrictive, no like almost zero psychoactive component.
You know, the THC part, all CBD and only for intractable epilepsy.
And you have to go through two specialized doctors to get at it.
But it's a recognition of the validity of marijuana as medicine by the Senate.
And it passed 26 to five.
So I think that we're entering a new time where Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick on the campaign trail was, you know, made very obvious statements that he was against any change in marijuana laws.
But when you get into the more nuanced discussions about how much money changing, you know, the criminal penalties could save the state, I think that he's, you know, more thoughtful than that.
And then but he is very conservative.
And listening to the testimony on the Senate side, the questions that they had on the oil bill only, you know, definitely gave me the viewpoint that the Senate was going to be a tougher sell.
Yeah.
Well, I could I could definitely see that.
And I guess the interest groups and maybe we could, you know, get to which all interest groups are on the other side of this, but they probably focus more of their attention on the Senate anyway, because that's where all the power really lies.
So.
Right.
And but they recognize, too, that everything in that building is incrementalism.
So they don't want these bills advancing at a committee and they don't want the bill advancing out of calendars.
And they certainly don't want this discussion to happen on the House floor, because, as you know, marijuana has basically been swept under the rug and any information that's spoken about marijuana is misinformation.
And that's the way that these laws have been maintained for so long.
So discussion in and of itself about the kind of savings and the actual success of prohibition.
I mean, we should be at the point where we're putting the opposition on their toes to defend their policy.
What good has it gotten us?
Why are kids still finding marijuana in their high schools?
So so, you know, they maybe they're working on the Senate, but they probably are disappointed that their work in the in the House hasn't gotten them as far.
Yeah, well, that's a very important point there about the discussion itself and how it's waged that put the burden of proof on them to justify it after the quantitative failure over all this time and all of that.
But let me ask you this.
Does David Simpson have much of a relationship with Dan Patrick?
Do you know?
I think that Representative Simpson, I don't know how close he is with Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, but I do know that that Representative Simpson is supported by groups that are also very supportive of Lieutenant Governor Patrick.
So they're not so far off on wavelengths.
And these groups that like Representative Simpson are very important policy groups in the state.
So I don't see David Simpson being, you know, put to the side.
I see him only gaining influence in Texas.
Well, that's good to hear, at least as far as this issue is concerned.
And now.
So so, Patrick, assuming that that, you know, he's an Enlightenment guy and can be persuaded about this at all.
What he needs is armor on his right flank.
Right.
That's why I'm so excited about your group and about this brand new news breaking about David Simpson, this Republican David Simpson being behind this effort and this whole thing, because you have to outflank the right on the right in order to, you know, make the old interventionist prohibition seem, you know, like really what it is, right.
A social engineering experiment on the part of big government that has not panned out and has cost us all our liberty and cost us all a bunch of money, just like any conservative could argue about any other government program.
And this is one of them.
And so now it's time to undo the mistake and that kind of thing.
And then it doesn't matter whether the hippies like it or not.
Right.
They're not even part of the argument.
The whole argument is a conservative business, Christian Texas Republican argument that it's time to stop pursuing this policy that does not work.
So, you know, the the more groups on the right can be won over to this cause and can be signed up on the list of all the right wing groups that will still support you, Lieutenant Governor, if you do get right on this, you know, that seems to be like probably the most effective thing that we could pursue right now.
Right.
It's it's, you know, so we could, you know, get into the Tea Party scene.
He's got a big Tea Party backing.
Dan Patrick does.
So we'd have to get into the Tea Party scene and explain the fiscal costs to them.
And also maybe some of the border border discussion.
And also we really need law enforcement to take up.
Like I was about to say, get police groups that are willing to have honest discussion about this involved, too.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back.
Everybody was Zoe Russell from Ramp Republicans against marijuana prohibition here in Texas.
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All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Zoe Russell, assistant executive director.
Of Ramp Republicans against marijuana prohibition.
And the big news is that some Republicans passed, at least out of committee in the House of Representatives here in Texas yesterday, a bill to just completely legalize weed.
And as you mentioned, you guys already had a bill that you had introduced there, Zoe.
And so I wonder then if you guys bill can be the compromise.
Oh, well, let's not go quite that far.
Let's just do the one that we had already proposed.
What about that?
You think that'll get anywhere?
I think that it's definitely helpful to have that bill out there that looks like a more extreme version.
It's almost kind of what happened on the medical side.
There was the low THC oil bill, which was filed, and then the full medical marijuana program, which was filed.
So it was like, OK, well, we have picked out this one condition that we feel has more medical viability and then maybe next session we'll get to these other qualifying conditions that you have in this bigger bill.
So it is always nice to have, I call it a menu of options.
I mean, we had 11 marijuana-related bills filed in the session, and I have a sheet.
I don't use this anymore because some of them are dead, but I would have the sheet and go around and be like, OK, which one can I sell to you?
If I can sell you on a reduction of the penalty for a small amount of marijuana from a Class B misdemeanor to a Class C misdemeanor, which is like a speeding ticket, then that's progress to me.
So I would always just try and show what all is out there that people are talking about.
And then the other good thing is with David Simpson's bill, it forces people to have the logical conversation about the entire war on marijuana.
And now, have you seen much movement among these legislators?
I mean, other than this obvious thing here, but in all your talking to them, do they seem like they're warming up to this?
Yes, there are definitely lawmakers that are learning a lot more.
And I would say that the medical marijuana hearing, the testimony was very compelling, and I feel like the progress made on most all of the committee members has been exceptional.
It's just the chairwoman that is not going to change her mind on it.
But on the criminal side, it is a resonating topic, and it's resonating because everybody's thinking the same thing.
I mean, in Houston and in Dallas and in Austin, each city has kind of a program to divert the marijuana user away from being arrested.
And Travis County has been around the longest, and Houston and Dallas are new.
So those are driven by law enforcement.
I mean, everyone across the board recognizes that marijuana users are an extremely low priority.
But what they don't face is that it accounts for, I mean, in a lot of places, about 10% of all the arrests.
So one in 10 arrests is for a marijuana user, and you're using all your court and law enforcement resources for that.
So my feeling is that most Republicans agree with this concept across the board, but they either want to say that marijuana is not their priority, that it's not a priority, or that it's too controversial for them to take on.
So that's where we need to chip away, and that's what we're doing within RAMP to generate that real support within the primary base.
And especially make that point like you just made.
These are police-driven policies in these major cities, where the cops are telling the city council, look, can you please just free us from having to deal with this?
I mean, they'll still use it as an excuse if they want to arrest you for something, but if they don't have to and they don't feel like it, they don't have to anymore, you know?
Right, exactly.
Yeah, and it's saving money, and it saves money, and is public safety any worse for it?
The lobbyist that works with Marijuana Policy Project told me this, and I thought it was just so brilliant, and I hadn't even thought of it before.
Would you walk into a room and make a joke about rape, or auto theft, or any other crime that has a victim?
No.
But every single room you walk into, there's a joke about marijuana.
That shows that this is not a question of public safety.
This is a question of public policy.
And when they fall back on marijuana drivers, well, that's a lazy answer, because people can very well smoke at home and go drive right now without anything in their possession, and if you don't have a way to catch it now, it's still a problem now.
So I think that that was exactly right, that if we're laughing at this as a topic, it's not that scary of a topic, and it doesn't need to be a crime.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, most of these politicians, all they care about is how they look and how it'll affect their political future.
And so if they get the idea that they'll look better if they are for liberalizing these laws, then that's exactly what they'll do.
But that's the impression that they've got to get.
I use the term liberalizing loosely here, because again, you're from Republicans Against Marijuana Prohibition, trying to conservatize the pot laws by getting rid of them, too, here.
Is that the right word I just made up?
Right.
Yeah.
Tell us about RAMP, please, Zoe.
Sure, sure.
So our founders are Bob and Ann Lee, and Bob recently passed away at the age of 90.
So we love Bob and know that he's still with us in spirit, big time.
Ann is 85, and their son is actually Richard Lee of Oaksterdam University.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with that.
In the early 90s, he had a workplace accident that put him into the wheelchair as a paraplegic, and he had severe issues with nerve pain and muscle spasticity.
He discovered marijuana as medicine way back in the early 90s, which was new for this, and relatively new.
So he told his parents, marijuana is my medicine, and that was a sea change, what Ann calls a sea change in her life.
It took her a lot of study and trusting in her son and prayer, and the first time in her life, she realized the government had lied to her about something.
She's been a Republican since the Goldwater days, her and Bob, and they've been in Harris County for forever.
So then she took on marijuana as one of her mantles, as her main issue, because she just couldn't conceive that her son, who moved to California in 1995 after the vote passed, he opened up a business, and he's been in the marijuana industry, and Oaksterdam University is known as the Princeton of Pot.
It's a trade school that teaches classes on marijuana.
It's like the first of its kind in the U.S., and so she can't rationalize why he is a criminal, why he should be locked up for that, and he has been raided by the DEA, so it's come very close to her to be a reality of her son being in jail.
So she started RAMP.
She thought of RAMP in 2012, and it was her and Bob with a brochure in Harris County Republican Party circles and all the other groups, Republican women, the groups that she's affiliated with, and about a year, January 2014, myself and a couple other young people thought, this is something that we can run with in the GOP in Texas, and we should make this into a more structured thing and help Ann spread this message, and Ann is such a great messenger.
So many people in the GOP already knew about Ann, and one of our biggest successes was getting a medical marijuana resolution through to the point where we got it passed on the temporary platform committee of the state GOP convention, then the permanent committee passed a marijuana resolution, and then we argued it in front of a body of 7,000 delegates on the floor, and so like I said before, it's just about information, getting information out there, and that kind of discussion is really making waves in the GOP, and the more they see these documentaries like Weed, you can't deny it.
You can't deny the medical aspect at least.
I haven't seen that one.
Oh, so CNN has Weed 1, Weed 2, and Weed 3.
They've made documentaries over, you know, since I think 2013 when Sanjay Gupta came out with a big mea culpa that he was wrong about medical marijuana, and he's changing his mind and doubling down, and so they're really great documentaries to show a beginner on marijuana.
Right, yeah, I know about him being good on it now.
So yeah, now I read an article, as we discussed before at the FFF thing, I read an article probably in the Houston Chronicle, I guess, about Ann Lee, and you talk about her being a great messenger.
Yeah, she sure is, because according to this reporter, the reporter really got it and really did a great job of profiling her and the message and just what a conservative, down-home Texas kind of a message it is to go ahead and legalize pot and make it the conservative thing to do and all that kind of thing, and it really came through very well in the article, and that's not usually that easy to get a newspaper reporter to do to get something really right in context, you know, and it seemed like they did a real good job, and it makes for a great story, right?
Yeah.
You say she's 80, how many years old now?
85.
85.
So there's this 85-year-old, very conservative, Goldwater Republican from Houston, Texas leading the fight to legalize marijuana in this state.
That itself is a huge headline and makes all kind of waves, and now, I'm sorry, we're very short on time, but could you tell me a little bit about the interest groups that are against this that you know of?
Was there, I take it you were spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill there, down on 11th Street, lobbying.
Was there much pushback, and from who?
There is some pushback.
The biggest group that is actively opposing us is the Sheriff's Association.
I want to say the good news is the Texas Association of Business is supporting HB 507, so that's something for your callers to know if they call into offices in support of that, Texas Association of Business.
The people that were concerned about HB 507's process at the beginning were the DA Association, the District Attorney, District and County Attorneys Association, but I think they've backed off a little because the fine amount was raised to cover some of the filing fees they would have incurred.
There's CLEAT, Combined Law Enforcement Association of Texas, and TMPA, which I think is the Texas Police and Municipal Association, something like that.
I don't think they're actively opposing this, but certainly, it's my belief that law enforcement and prosecutors and DAs within these districts are calling on their reps and telling them to oppose this kind of stuff.
That's my prediction, but these association groups, besides the Sheriff's Association, haven't taken a hard stance testifying against it.
Well, very easy for me to say, you're the one who has to do the hard work, but you need to take those enemies and make them friends and just line them up on your side.
Right.
I agree with you completely, and that's what we really want to do is just say, what are your concerns?
Can we just talk about what the concerns are beyond just the rhetoric, beyond the sound bites?
I want to have a real conversation here.
That's what we're going to try and do and just finish out this session as strong as possible, but not go anywhere.
We're just going to keep working even harder for 2017.
Yeah.
Sounds like you're making great progress there.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for coming on the show, Zoe.
Thank you so much.
If anyone wants to find us, we're at rampgop.org, R-A-M-P-G-O-P dot org.
Okay.
Right on.
Thanks again.
Thank you.
All right.
So that's Zoe Russell, Assistant Executive Director of RAMP, Republicans Against Marijuana Prohibition.
Again, rampgop.org, and we'll be right back with Marcy Wheeler in just a sec.
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