04/07/09 – Kevin Zeese – The Scott Horton Show

And when I get so homesick, I think I'm going insane.
I travel back to Texas in a low-flying plane.
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I wasn't really homesick until I had to change planes at Dallas-Fort Worth.
And I was like, oh, man, I'm almost home.
My aunt and uncle live down the street.
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And our drug war story continues today with one of the most terrible dictators of the 20th century, Nelson Rockefeller.
And a great article by Kevin Zeese at Op-Ed News called Escaping the Nixon Drug War Quagmire.
He is executive director of Fresh Air Clean Politics and president of Common Sense for Drug Policy.
Welcome back to the show, Kevin.
How are you doing?
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
Good to hear from you again.
Well, this is just a great article that you wrote here.
And I guess if you can maybe just start with backing me up a little bit here, what role did Nelson Rockefeller play in the American drug war?
I know that you'll talk about the Rockefeller drug laws in New York, but I think he played a wider role in the federal drug war as well.
Isn't that right?
Well, the major reason why he did the Rockefeller drug laws was because he was perceived as being this kind of soft liberal Republican from the Northeast.
And he needed to fight in the Republican Party to be president.
He put a lot of his money into presidential campaigns in 1960, 1964, 1968, and became vice president in 1974.
And in 1968, of course, Richard Nixon declared the modern war on drugs.
And so Nelson Rockefeller, needing to kind of balance that, pushed for some really tough, tough sentencing laws in New York.
And they were the toughest laws in the country at the time, and they stayed the toughest for a long time.
I think Michigan finally passed a law that was tougher, but not for many years later.
And essentially, 56 grams of possession of anything was treated like second-degree murder.
So that was a pretty hefty, hefty offense.
And it's amazing how long it took for New York and for the country, really, to face up to this problem.
In fact, the Rockefeller drug laws became a model for mandatory minimum sentencing nationwide that were put in place in the United States in the 1980s.
When Joe Biden, in fact, was chairman of the Judiciary Committee, he's now, of course, vice president.
He was a drug war hawk, and he kind of followed the Rockefeller drug law model and made it a national policy.
And that's one reason why the United States has, with 5% of the world's population, has 25% of the world's prisoners.
It's a pretty embarrassing state of affairs for the land of the free to have one out of four of the world's prisoners.
Yeah, 2 million people, plus I guess 2.3 I saw last, or something like that.
7 million people, if you include everybody on parole or probation, paying monthly rent on their freedom, and having to go through all the different hoops that are, of course, designed to trap you into continuing to be on probation longer, going back to jail time after time.
The whole thing's this giant racket.
Well, when you think of the probation, parole, and incarceration number, you're talking about one out of 31 Americans being under court's revision in some way.
One out of 31?
Isn't that incredible?
Oh, that's because everyone in America is just a beast, right?
And we need this, or else we'll all just be tearing each other's eyes out.
I think that's, you know, it really, you know, it makes us, calling ourselves land of the free a joke.
I mean, these are police state types of numbers, when you have that kind of monitoring.
That's the aggressive monitoring.
One out of 31 people who are actually under court's revision, of course, is all sorts of other monitoring that goes on.
You know, whether it's video surveillance or, you know, other police activities and undercover cops doing A, B, and C.
I mean, that's one thing with the drug laws.
You know, when you talk about drug laws, you're talking about something that people want to do.
When someone buys drugs from somebody else, they want to buy those drugs.
When somebody sells drugs to somebody else, they want to sell those drugs.
So these are two, usually adults, agreeing with each other that they want to do this, and the only way for the law enforcement to get into it is to get into that deal.
And that means undercover.
That means informants.
That means a very slippery slope toward a non-land of the free type of police state tactic.
Well, and we can break that down, too.
I'd like to start with all the different kind of mini-patriot acts that the drug war inspired, not just the Rockefeller mandatory sentencing and all that kind of thing, but, you know, like the ability of the FBI to just look at your bank account without having an official investigation into you or any probable cause to do so.
Those kinds of mini-patriot acts were going on for years and years.
All the precedence for the war on terror.
Whoa, you got a phone problem there?
No, not at all.
Is that me?
I have no problem.
Oh, well, I don't know what happened to that terrible audio.
Maybe it was on my end there.
I'll blame AT&T or maybe that was the National Security Agency tapping.
A cruder, I guess a cruder organization tapping in the line there.
They can just flip a switch.
In fact, before the 9-11, the war on terror, the major cause of erosion of civil liberties in the United States was the war on drugs.
We used to call it the drug exception to the Bill of Rights.
Whenever a case would go to the U.S. Supreme Court on a search warrant issue or a wiretapping issue or on bail or, you know, any of these constitutional rights that, you know, the war on drugs butts up against, the drug war exception to the Bill of Rights would result in an erosion of freedom.
And so we were really moving very quickly eroding the power of the Constitution to protect individual rights before 9-11, and it did lay the groundwork for a lot of the even more extreme policies we've seen since the war on terror began.
So it's been a very long erosion, and if we really wanted to reinstate the Constitution, we would have a very different country than we have today.
We'd have a lot of work to do to undo all the knots that were made in the name of the war on drugs and the war on terror.
You know, another one of those aspects is the militarization of not just federal police but local police where, I guess, I forgot who wrote the great article, M16s for Mayberry, and how basically just every police department, 18,000 different police departments in this country, are now all militarized against drug users in their own little communities as though it really is a war.
No, no question about it.
The militarization of law enforcement has been a very quick development.
In the 1970s, no police force had a paramilitary unit.
Now over 90% of police have paramilitary units.
And you know, the most common use of a SWAT team, a paramilitary unit, it's not a hostage takeover.
Of course, there's so few hostage things.
It's not terrorism.
Of course, there's so few terrorism things.
But the most common use of a SWAT team is to serve a drug search warrant.
You know, so it really is a very strange system.
And now we see on the Mexican border, you know, the president is talking about sending National Guard troops to the border.
Well, President Obama should look at the history of the use of National Guard and military on the border.
It goes back to President Nixon who militarized the border with a program called Operation Intercept where he searched one out of three cars crossing the border.
The result was that the marijuana and heroin distributors switched to airplanes and boats and commerce and people.
And so there was actually a glut of heroin and marijuana that followed that militarization.
You can look at President Reagan who actually used the U.S. military to try to intercept marijuana shipments coming in from Colombia.
And the result of, you know, catching boats and slow planes that were dropping off the L's of marijuana into the water.
And the result of that was the Colombians switched to cocaine, which was smaller and easier to hide.
And the military wasn't as good at getting it.
And so it resulted in the cocaine decade of the 1980s as a result of the use of the military.
Or you can look at President Clinton who used the Marines on the border, just as Obama started to do with the National Guard.
And he stopped that program when a Marine killed a high school student, Ezequiel Hernandez, in the town of Redford, Texas.
And the kid was, you know, the pride and joy of this small community.
He had just come back from his driver's education class.
He was out doing the job he had, which was herding the goats for the cheese co-op for the town.
And the Marines shot and killed him.
And that was the end of the use of the Marines.
And now we have Obama following that path.
And who knows what unintended consequence, what unintended horror, will come out of the use of the National Guard.
And he is not, instead Obama is not confronting the real issue, which is that prohibition breeds this kind of crime and violence.
What we're seeing in Mexico is not violence caused by people being high on heroin or cocaine.
It's people fighting for turf.
It's prohibition trade violence.
We saw it during the alcohol prohibition era.
We're seeing it again in Mexico.
We saw it in American cities in the 1980s.
There's still a lot of violence in many American cities.
And so, you know, this is, if we want to reduce violence, the end, the result, what we should be talking about is how prohibition and using that approach to dealing with a health problem results in violence.
Well, and, you know, I think there's a great way to teach that lesson about how it's just impossible.
There is no, I think, I forget if it was in your article or another one I was reading very recently, said, okay, so how do we define, how do you win the war on drugs?
What, one day we're going to have a real drug-free America?
What a joke.
Nobody really believes that.
And I have a great kind of bipartisan way to explain the thing.
I hope to the left and the right in black markets and all the crime that comes with them is for right-wingers who are for gun rights and liberals who are against them, look at what would happen if we outlawed guns in this country.
Left-wingers, what would happen is exactly what happens when you outlaw drugs is you turn the market over to criminals, and then we'll still have guns everywhere, but then only the government and the criminals will have them, and no more law-abiding gun dealer folk for someone like you to go down and buy a way to protect yourself from.
And for right-wingers, you've got to understand, as much as you know that's true, the same thing applies for drugs.
If you outlaw drugs, you just turn them over to criminals.
It's the same as if you outlaw prostitution or gambling.
You only make a market black.
You don't get rid of it.
You make it a giant crime-infested nightmare just like prohibition, just like the whole country learned the lesson of prohibition of alcohol.
Yeah, we wish the country learned that lesson and is not repeating it now.
Unfortunately, it seems to be repeated, and what you see with the prohibition of drugs is that the people in charge are the gangs and the distributors who are acting illegally, who are acting for profit.
And what also happens, you see, is the drug is getting more and more pure and more and more potent because higher potency, higher purity means higher profits and easier to smuggle.
And the goal of drug dealers who are trying to break the law is not to get caught.
So something small like crack is much better than something powdered like cocaine.
Higher quality marijuana is better than lower quality marijuana.
If you can transport less of it and make a bigger profit, that's better.
So it actually pushes us toward more and more potent, more and more pure drugs, and that's a danger.
But sadly, some people really do believe that we can have a drug-free America.
In fact, the United Nations put out a policy 10 years ago that they're just revising now, and the name of the policy was a drug-free world by 2008.
That was the name of the policy.
That was the goal of the policy, to create a drug-free world by 2008.
That's so funny.
You know, I just saw the recent Futurama where Richard Nixon, who was responsible for so much of this as the president of the world, and they were talking, oh, Fry almost got killed by the suicide booth, and it said, you know, ACME suicide booth since 2008.
And I thought, yeah, that sounds about right.
Well, I think that's a really good person to bring up right now, because with the Rockefeller drug laws, you have to remember the political context.
Nelson Rockefeller was battling with Richard Nixon for leadership of the party to try to get the presidential nomination.
Nixon won by being in part tough on drugs and declaring the war on drugs in 1968.
And what happened during Nixon's administration that was so important was that a national commission on marijuana and drug abuse issued a report.
And this was not a commission that favored legalization from the outset.
The head of the commission was Governor Raymond Schaefer of Pennsylvania, whose claim to fame in the drug field before being made head of this commission by Richard Nixon was that he believed that if you took LSD and looked at the sun, you would go blind.
So that qualified him to be the chairman of the commission.
But after a couple of years of research and talking to experts and reviewing the literature, they actually came to a very sensible conclusion.
They recommended that a hard drug be treated as a public health issue, recommended that marijuana possession and personal cultivation, as well as nonprofit transfer, be decriminalized and not be a criminal offense.
Very sensible policy recommendations, and they documented why it made sense.
The problem was we had Richard Nixon as president.
If you go to our website, CSDP for Common Sense Drug Policy, CSDP.org, you can see the transcripts of the White House tapes from that time period.
And President Nixon just showed his anti-Semitism, his racism, his anti-elite educated people.
When that commission report came down, I think he said something along the lines of to Bob Haldeman, Jesus Christ, Bob, what's the matter with those Jews?
I think it's all because they're all psychiatrists and how he's opposed to what happened.
And in the end, Nixon upped the ante on the drug war.
Rather than following the advice of the commissioners, he actually increased enforcement.
We saw marijuana arrests increase 100,000 in one year after it was recommended that it no longer be a crime.
And now we're up to about 800,000 marijuana arrests a year, still 90% for possession.
What makes the story really interesting is at the same time that the U.S. government had this national commission, the Dutch also had a national commission.
And the Dutch, unlike Nixon, followed the advice of their experts.
And they put in place a public health-based approach to drug policy.
They moved toward allowing the sale of marijuana to people as young as 16 years old.
And the result has been, after all these decades of these two governments going in totally different directions, the Dutch have one-half the marijuana use rate that we have in the United States.
They have one-third the heroin use rate, one-quarter the cocaine use rate, and one-seventh the number of people incarcerated, all per capita, all based on per person in the population.
So they've had a successful policy that's reduced HIV, prison, and drug abuse.
And we've had a very unsuccessful policy that's spread HIV through sharing dirty needles that has created a gigantic prison population, probably one of the biggest in world history, and a very extensive policy that's not working.
And we have high levels of drug use.
We have high levels of emergency remissions, high levels of overdose deaths.
We have a policy that has totally failed.
And President Obama, who's come in saying he wants to follow the science, he wants to follow the research, he wants to base policy on fact and not fiction, needs a total reevaluation of this policy.
This is one of the most obviously failed policies we've had since the era of Nixon.
And it's time for us to break out of the Nixon drug war quagmire.
Yeah, well, you know, and the funny thing is it's incredibly brave of you to say so, Kevin Zeese.
In this society, in fact, my previous guest, I brought up legalizing cocaine, and he went, whoa, whoa, whoa, what you're saying is you have to legalize heroin.
Look at what we're doing.
We're spreading AIDS around.
You've got people overdosing and dying because they can't bet correctly on the purity of the junk that they're doing.
Is this what we want to do to our addicts?
What are we doing to ourselves here?
And yet nobody's brave enough to say that except you, apparently.
Well, that's not just me.
There's a lot of people working into drug policy reforms, a lot of great organizations doing really excellent work.
And the people want to get involved in drug policy reform, they should go to CSDP.org, and you'll find links to all sorts of drug policy groups, both locally and nationally, you can get involved with.
I would say this, though, about hard drugs.
There are experiments around the world dealing with heroin, particularly, where legal supplies are allowed, where an addict goes to a clinic, purchases the heroin at legal prices, not illegal prices, so it's like one one-hundredth of the price of the black market or the underground market, purchases the heroin and uses the heroin at the clinic.
And Switzerland was the country that really pushed this issue forward first, and what they found was that it had some surprising effects.
First off, it reduced crime by 50 percent for those who were involved in the program.
Their crime just dropped because they no longer had to steal or prostitute or sell drugs to pay for their own habit.
They could buy it for one one-hundredth of the cost and a legal source.
Secondly, there were no overdose deaths.
Third, there was no spread of HIV.
Fourth, these people started to build their lives up.
They were able to get housing, they were able to get jobs, they were able to build relations with their family.
And the biggest surprise was, about a year after people got in this program, many of them wanted to stop using heroin.
Even though they had a legal supply, they were ready to stop, because heroin had been a crutch for all sorts of problems in their life.
And if they could solve the problems of employment and family and housing and begin to build their life back up, they didn't need heroin as much.
And so the Swiss now have this program, they've had it now for about more than ten years, and they call it heroin-assisted treatment, because by providing heroin legally to addicts, you help them get their life straight, and then you can provide them the services to break their heroin addiction.
It's quite a remarkable thing.
It's now being duplicated in other countries around the world.
It's time for the United States, especially in cities like Baltimore and San Francisco, that have multi-generational heroin addiction problems, to start some experiments on this, some pilot programs, so we can see if this works.
I know it will work, and if we do some pilot programs, we'll see it works, and people will get more comfortable with it, because it's a win-win-win for everybody.
Not just for the addict, it reduces criminality, it reduces crime against property and people, it reduces the spread of disease, it just has so many positive effects on the cities where it's being used, that it makes no sense for us to continue to do the same thing we've always done, which results in high levels of crime, high levels of disease, high levels of overdose, high levels of emergency room mentions, no real positive benefits from our current approach.
We can actually reduce heroin use and reduce the problems of heroin use if we take this approach.
And I imagine we can do the same with cocaine if we start those kind of experiments as well.
Well, and I know people who had cocaine problems and were forced by the state to go into mandated rehab and so forth, and they almost, in fact, in one case, I think, my friend probably stayed a cokehead longer, just kind of to defy them, and he finally gave it up on his own when he decided he wanted to give it up on his own, and then he did.
You know, it's been more than a year now, in fact, that my friend is clean, and it's because he chose to decide to not be a cokehead anymore, that's all.
One of the great scams, I think, of our treatment approach is that the vast majority of people who go into drug treatment are forced to go into drug treatment by courts and by police, and to me that makes absolutely no sense.
That's no way to give out a health service, to provide a health service.
It makes much more sense to make treatment widely available, on request, easily and affordable.
If we did that, we would do more to reduce crime and drug abuse than all the drug courts and all the police arrests combined.
Putting the emphasis on making treatment widely available to addicts is part of a public health approach, and there's a number of details we can go into about that, but just as a general matter, let's make treatment available on request before we start to coerce people into treatment.
The other thing that's good about that is it forces the treatment industry to provide a service that people want.
They don't get handed clients as a threat of prison, but instead they actually provide a service that pulls people in, that want to get into a treatment program, and like your friend are ready to get off of using cocaine, they can choose to do so and do it more easily if they have treatment services widely available.
But instead we pull money into police and to courts and to prisons, and it's a failed approach and a failed strategy.
Well, now are they starting to do something then in the New York legislature to get rid of the Rockefeller drug laws?
Yeah.
Last week both the House and the Senate passed a law that greatly reduced the negative impact of the Rockefeller drug laws.
They essentially gave, in many cases, they gave courts the option to deal with the treatment approach rather than a mandatory sentencing approach.
They didn't do that for all crimes, but large dealing situations continue to be facing a mandatory sentence.
They do do that with the vast majority of drug cases.
That will really free up the courts and the prisons to handle this in a more sensible way, not this kind of simplistic possess this amount of money, go to jail for this amount of time, but instead look at each individual case and recommend the kind of solution that makes more sense.
That's a benefit.
That's a step in the right direction away from this mandatory sentencing approach.
We need to trust judges more to make rational decisions.
We put them in there to look at each individual case and make decisions that make sense for that individual.
And these mandatory sentencing approaches really need to be repealed.
And sadly we can thank Joe Biden, our vice president, for mandatory sentencing on the federal level.
He led that effort.
He also led the effort to treat powder cocaine and crack cocaine differently so that has a really racially unfair impact because crack is treated so much more harshly.
And also we can thank Joe Biden for the drug czar.
So we have a, you know, in the White House, a strong drug warrior.
And that makes me a little nervous about the kind of progress we need to see in a science based, a fact based drug policy rather than a rhetoric and morality based drug policy that really doesn't work.
Well, the good thing is Joe Biden has no shame at all.
So he could turn on a dime if it was politically expedient.
I guess we can be thankful for that.
And speaking of which, what do you make of Senator Webb's proposal to create a commission or something?
It sounded pretty extensive.
He wanted to address a lot of these same issues you're talking about.
Yeah, Senator Webb is really taking great action in this.
Of course we use who the details are and there'll be a meeting later this week.
I'll be going to talk to, you know, staff about that and with a bunch of other criminal justice and drug policy reform advocates.
And, you know, it's a really a bright light right now.
And I really think that might be the way out.
A national commission that would actually look at the science, look at the research, make decisions based on facts, I think will come to the obvious solution because the facts are so much on the side of a more nonprohibition approach, a public health-based approach to dealing with drugs.
And I think Senator Webb sees the incarceration rate where we have 25 percent of the world's prisoners, the one out of 31 on probation, parole, or in prison as national embarrassments.
And I think he's – I'm really pleased he's taking action.
Of course, he'll have to get that to the Senate and have to get that through the White House.
And, you know, I'm also hopeful that the appointment that President Obama has made to the drug czar's office, the former police chief of Seattle, is also a positive sign.
Seattle is a city that's put in place a lot of positive reforms in the last decade, and Kowalski's been there for about half that time.
And he helped to put in place making marijuana the lowest enforcement priority.
He helped with allowing needle exchange and easier methadone maintenance.
And he even set up tables in the heavy drug-using areas of town that he called arrest-free zones, where people who were under arrest warrant could come and access social and health services without facing arrest.
And that worked very well as well.
So I'm hopeful that the new drug czar will be someone who will be pragmatic about trying to really solve these problems rather than, you know, playing fear rhetoric about the horrors of drug abuse.
I mean, no one is advocating drug abuse.
No one is in favor of people becoming addicted to drugs.
That's not the question.
We all want to find a sensible policy.
What we're saying is we should have followed the recommendations of the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse way back in the early 1970s, and it's time for us to update that.
Now we've had, you know, 40 years' experience, and we went through 10 years of a drug-free world now, and we've seen that none of that's going to work, and we've also seen what does work in other countries.
Now it's time for us to, you know, follow what works and not continue to do what doesn't.
Kevin Zeese, thank you so much for your time on the show today.
Thanks for having me on.
Everybody, that's Kevin Zeese from—he's the executive director of Fresh Air, Clean Politics, and president of Common Sense for Drug Policy.
His article at Op-Ed News is called Escaping the Nixon Drug War Quagmire.
This is Antiwar Radio.
We'll be right back.