08/04/15 – Mike Maharrey – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey, y'all.
How's it going?
Welcome back.
All right, next up on the show is Mike Meharry from the Tenth Amendment Center.
That is TenthAmendmentCenter.com.
Welcome back to the show, Mike.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
I'm doing good.
I always love coming on your show because you've got, like, the best bump music of any show anywhere.
I do have really good bumper music.
Yeah, it rocks.
Actually, that one belongs to me.
Well, it's called Dang Ol' Bobby, but a friend of mine wrote that just to be theme music on this show.
That's awesome.
But most of it is not, just that one.
Anyway, so hey, thanks, and welcome back to the show.
Very good to have you here.
Thanks for doing what you do and writing the things you write and saying the things you say.
I really appreciate it.
Six state laws nullifying federal actions in practice go into effect for immediate release August 3rd, it says here at TenthAmendmentCenter.com.
So let's start with the FDA.
Yeah, this is one of my favorite actions that states have engaged in over the last year or so, and this is one of those things that just kind of blew up this year.
We've got these laws.
They're called right-to-try laws, and basically what they do is they cut through the FDA bureaucratic red tape by completely ignoring it and create a mechanism within a state where people can access unapproved treatments and medications if they're critically ill or considered to be possibly terminally ill.
So as it is now under FDA rules, you have to go through all kinds of bureaucratic red tape.
You've basically got to get federal permission to try out these drugs that could well save your life.
Twenty-two states now have put laws on the books that bypass the FDA.
They allow people to access those medications within that state without the FDA approval or the process, and they also provide some shielding for the manufacturers and the doctors that help them be able to offer these experimental drugs.
So this is a no-brainer.
How in the world can you look at somebody in the eye and say, ìYou know what?
We're really sorry that you're dying, but you're going to have to wait six months while we approve your application.
î It's just absurd, and this is one of those things that crosses party lines.
And like I said, 22 states have passed these types of law.
Three states went into effect on August 1st, as Alabama, Minnesota, and North Dakota, if I'm not mistaken off the top of my head.
So three more states where you can get treatment if you need it without having to deal with the feds.
And so that counts for people who just say, ìWell, screw this.
I'm going to North Dakotaî or whatever too, right?
As far as I know, it does.
Well, I imagine you would probably have to have a doctor there in North Dakota.
Maybe you could take your doctor with you.
But yeah, as long as you're within the border of the states, the state laws govern what happens there.
People really need to know about this.
And you know what?
Again, like you're saying, as far as it being a no-brainer, it's also – it shouldn't be political at all.
The only reason it's political is because of the lobbyists of big pharma and the power of the national government.
But for any person of any description at all in America, as long as they're adults, this ought to be absolute unanimous consensus.
And how dare they stand between people and their last gasp, dying chance at prolonging their life or surviving.
It's just crazy to think that the federal government would dare stand in the way like this.
Although I guess on the other hand, Mike, that a lot of government school graduates would counter that.
Come on.
These companies are going to be putting out all kinds of crazy medicines.
And there's an FDA for a reason to protect us from these terrible capitalists just selling us poison.
They don't care if we die.
So we need the government to make them go through the process and double-check these drugs and make sure they're safe.
Yeah, it's kind of an absurd article or argument when you break it down though because basically people – what they're saying is we got to protect you and the government is going to protect you.
So we're going to let you die while we protect you.
That's absurd, and we have doctors for a reason.
Doctors are – they're trained.
They can weigh the risks and benefits of these various medications, and we're talking about people here who – this is their last chance.
And this should be up to the doctor and the individual, not some bureaucrat in Washington, D.C.
So this whole idea that we need some guy in a suit and tie sitting at a desk in an office on Capitol Hill to make these decisions for us is just absurd.
And I think anybody that says that has their head up the wrong place to be quite blunt.
Yeah.
Well, again, yeah, I mean no matter who you are or where you're from, it's basically just, as you said, kind of beyond argument.
And I think the next step here, you say we got 22 states now that passed laws like this.
Well, then that means that we got a lot of millions of Americans who ought to be very jealous of that and very angry at their state representatives for allowing it to be that way, that their state is not one of the states.
They're not one of the states that would allow this, and what are they waiting for?
And this ought to be a no-brainer as an easy political win for any state congressman or state senator anywhere in America that, look at me.
I'm the champion of dying old ladies.
Who can argue with that?
That's exactly right, and nobody has.
When you look at the vote totals in the various legislatures in these states where this has passed, it's not even been close.
In a lot of cases, you're seeing unanimous votes or you'll see two or three pinheads that vote against it for whatever crazy reason.
And this is the fastest-moving state movement I've ever seen.
Most of these things, it takes a while.
You look at the drones, and this has been a really good year for drones as well, but that's taken three or four years to kind of build.
It took a couple of states taking that tentative first step, and then it's built from there.
This basically started last year with Arizona.
They actually passed it on a voter referendum, and once that happened, to see 22 states pass something like this, and there's two other states that have passed it, and they're still waiting for governor's signature, so that's actually 24.
When you see that many states in one year, that's pretty significant and shows just how much of a unanimity we're seeing on this particular issue.
I'm sorry I don't have a footnote here, but there was a study that came out not long ago where they looked back at drugs that had been approved that turned out it was a big mistake and they were much more dangerous than the FDA thought, and drugs that were denied or withheld for some long period of time, but then it turned out they were okay and could have saved this and that many lives.
The FDA ultimately is more violent than the Pentagon.
They actually kill more people than any other government agency, which is really saying something.
Department of Transportation, CIA, DOD, but the FDA, they're the most lethal of all.
That's an incredible statistic, and I'm not – this isn't something that I'm really in-depth nuts and bolts on.
I understand this legislation, but it's not something I've really studied.
Even from my basic knowledge, I've seen numerous cases, and I've actually known people that have wanted to access treatments that are readily available in Europe and have actually had to get on a plane and go to Europe to access these treatments because the FDA refuses for whatever reason to approve them.
So this is a very real thing, and to deny these people things, it just boggles my mind.
Like you said, you're looking at this poor person that's suffering from this disease, and you're saying, I don't know.
I don't know if you should have this or not.
It's just – I guess that's the state for you, right?
Yeah, well, exactly because it's the incentive structure of the whole thing.
Anybody in charge of enforcing that against you is not in charge of deciding that that's the rule.
And so they all just – for the paycheck, they make their peace very quickly with their job being to say to people, I'm sorry, but that's what the computer says.
That's what the rule says.
That's the way it has to be.
And so – but I'll see you at your funeral though, and I'll throw a little rose on the ground for you.
Exactly, and you see this on all kinds of different issues, and this is kind of getting off topic a little bit.
But that gets to this idea of – it just drives me crazy when people are so – well, we've got to respect their authority.
We've got to respect the process and the system.
Well, the process and system suck, so maybe it's time that we start breaking that down a little bit.
And that's the neat thing about doing these things through your state governments.
It gives you a little bit of power to face down that power so you're not standing there as a single individual trying to beat your head against this massive marble wall.
Yeah, give you some respectability as you disrespect.
Exactly.
All right, now, hold it right there, everybody, because when we get back, we're going to talk with Mike Meharry about other ways the government is screwing you, the national government that is, and other ways that the Tenth Amendment Center is working to use the power of the state governments to nullify and interpolate.
And interpose themselves between the people and the national government.
One second.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
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All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's me, Scott.
I'm doing my radio show.
I got Mike Meharry on the line.
He's from the Tenth Amendment Center.
And now we spent the whole first segment on the states interposing themselves between the people and the national government.
Twenty-two of them, 24 if you count the two just waiting on a governor's signature to allow people to take medicine if they want to, whether it's approved by the FDA or not, assuming they're in real dire straits anyway.
So that's going on.
And now we have quite a few topics to tackle in this next segment here.
And I'll just name them and then turn it over to you.
We've got ten minutes to go.
So first of all, hemp.
National government says no hemp.
State government said go ahead.
And then, ooh, the license plate trackers.
Very interesting news out of Montana there.
And then I wanted to end with – it's not in this press release, but I wanted to, at the end of the interview, if we could get to the latest progress in the Off Now campaign to nullify the NSA.
So, Mike, first of all, tell us about the progress in nullifying the federal hemp laws.
That one, to me, that's a no-brainer.
Especially, I live in Kentucky, and Kentucky used to be the number one state in the country in growing hemp.
It's a product that has like 25,000 uses, everything from biofuel to panels for automobiles to food, just so many things you can do with this plant.
And yet the federal government says, no, can't grow it because it looks a little bit like marijuana.
So we're starting to see a number of states that are saying, you know what, state government or federal government, you go ahead and try to enforce your ban on hemp.
We're going to let people grow it in our state and go ahead and create a market for this plant.
In North Dakota, their hemp law went into effect on Saturday, and they joined one, two, three, four, five, six, seven other states that are allowing hemp production.
And what this does, it doesn't stop the federal government from enforcing its hemp ban, but the ugly truth is as far as the federal government goes is they don't have the resources or the manpower to go into these states and stop farmers from growing this plant.
And every state where we've seen the states take down their barriers to growing hemp, we've seen people start growing hemp.
There's been actual crops that have been harvested in Colorado and in Vermont and in some of these other states.
And what I guarantee you we're going to see is we're going to see these states.
They're going to begin developing these markets.
People are going to begin manufacturing the various products with them, and other states are going to look and say, hey, look what North Dakota is doing.
Look what Tennessee is doing.
Look what South Carolina is doing.
They're over here, and they're growing this plant and making these products, and we should join them.
And I guarantee you within five years the federal hemp ban, even if it's still on the books, is not going to exist in practice, and that's a good thing because this is something that these farmers need.
Like I said, I'm here in Kentucky, and the crackdown on tobacco has just devastated the agricultural industry in this state.
Hemp would be a perfect thing to fill that void.
It grows anywhere.
And pot is already the largest cash crop in Kentucky, so you might as well grow hemp.
Well, absolutely, and that's another thing that's been essentially nullified.
The federal government continues to insist that it's going to ban marijuana, and now we have more than 20 states with medical marijuana legalized.
And then we've got good old Colorado and Washington and Alaska that are allowing it for recreational use and maybe Oregon too.
This is great.
The federal government should not be dictating these things to the people of the state.
People in Colorado want legalized marijuana.
Who is some dude in D.C. to say they can't?
And you know what?
If logging and chemical interests can get hemp banned way back in the 30s and all that under President for Life Roosevelt and all that, there are a lot more wide and varied special interests who could profit and benefit from industrial hemp.
I mean you talk about farmers.
I don't even think of some old man in a straw hat.
I just think of Archer Daniels Midland and Monsanto and just think of all the billions of dollars they could be making, the thousands of dollars it would take for them to spend on lobbying in order to make millions and even billions on the trade, the open market trade in industrial hemp products.
So that's who you need to get on board right there, and you're done really.
Absolutely.
So that's another law that went into effect on Saturday, and then let's talk about spying for just a minute while we close out.
Also in North Dakota and I believe Minnesota is where the license plate reader law passed and went into effect in the North Dakota law restricting drone surveillance went into effect.
And these don't directly impact the federal government.
You may say, hey, what difference does it make to the federal government whether or not North Dakota allows drone surveillance?
Well, the fact of the matter is with both the drones and these license plate readers, the federal government funds them at the state level, and then they tap into the information that they gather.
And you got these huge databases that the DEA and all of these other alphabet agencies in D.C. are creating using data that's gathered by the states, using the equipment that the federal government is paying for.
So if you want to attack the surveillance state, you've got to also attack what's going on at your state and local level.
So every state that limits the use of drones and that limits the use of these license plate readers, that limits the amount of information that's available for the federal government to tap in and track you all around the country.
And that ought to really offend people's sensibilities too.
Like out of all the Snowden revelations, the one that they're keeping all of our cell phone location data forever, in other words, tracking every living room we've been in, every car we've ridden in, and who else was in it too for years going back.
I mean this is the ultimate violation of privacy, the license plate readers along the very same lines, highly objectionable, should be to anyone.
Absolutely, and a website, one of the techie websites, and I can't remember off the top of my head which one it was, but they actually did an experiment where they tracked this guy's cell phone.
He let them do it, and they went in and got all of his location.
You could tell so much about this guy's life, what political interest he has, where he goes to church, whether or not he's on medication, so many things that you can deduce just from knowing where people go.
Absolutely, you want to talk about violation of privacy, and the federal government is taking this stuff and just storing it away forever.
So by limiting it at the state level by saying, you know what?
We're only going to allow it to be collected with a warrant.
You're not allowed to store it.
By putting any limits at all, you're keeping that out of the hands of the federal surveillance state, and it's an indirect way to attack something that's going on at the federal level.
And like I said earlier when we were talking, the limits on drones has really grown.
A lot of states finally say, you know what?
We've got to do something about this drone surveillance, or you're going to have the dude in Kentucky just shot the one down that was over his house.
It's another solution.
Well, a couple of missing children stories and that kind of thing, and they'll just have predators and reapers over every major city in America for too long.
Well, then again, like you say, regular folk, actual people, other than just special interest groups, actual people can have a lot more effect at the state level.
I think you guys are proving that all the time than most of us on the outs of the political class would possibly imagine.
So real progress, as you're saying, is being made.
I don't mean to sound like such a downer, and I'm keeping you into the break here, but I got to get at least one minute from you, if I could, please, about the off-now progress in the campaign against the National Security Agency.
Well, like I said, part of what we're doing at off-now doesn't involve these local initiatives, and that's where we've seen the most success.
We had two of the off-now bills that would actually limit the resources to the NSA itself, make it out of at least one house at a state level.
That was in Maine and in Montana this year, and then we had I think 15 bills that were introduced that either made it out of committees or that didn't make it through a house or didn't even make it out of committee.
So some people might look at that and be discouraged.
Some encouraged simply by the fact that, hey, who would have ever thought we're going to have a movement where we're going to turn off resources to NSA?
We're not going to give up.
We're going to keep pressing it.
We're going to keep pressing it in Utah.
We're looking at some things that we can actually do at the local level in Bluffdale, Utah as a way to get around some of the resistance that we're finding at the state level.
There are ways for people to engage against these things.
We have to be creative, and we have to be persistent with it because I tell you what.
We have learned without a doubt the powers that be, the law enforcement lobbies, all of these people.
Whenever we try to do this, they're going to come out strong against us, so we need people to support this movement.
We need people to keep bugging and pestering their state lawmakers and saying we want to limit the surveillance state by taking action at our state level, and you can do that over at offnow.org.
Just head over there.
There's some ways you can join and get involved, and we can beat back this surveillance state.
Awesome.
All right, everybody.
That's Mike Meharry.
You can tell why he is communications director at the Tenth Amendment Center.
That's tenthamendmentcenter.com and offnow.org.
Thanks very much for your time again, Mike.
Good talking to you.
Thanks for having me always, man.
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