Take a Stand Paper-Write a 1,400- to 1,750-word paper
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transcript_drugs.docx1
I believe we've come to a time when the American people are willing to make it clear that illegal drug and alcohol use will no longer be tolerated, a timewhen we will take those steps necessary to rid America of this deeply disruptive and corrosive evil. So, starting today, Nancy's crusade to deprive the drug peddlers and suppliers of their customers becomes America's crusade. If we're to defeat this enemy, we've got to do it as one people, together, united in purpose and committed to victory. And victory in this case is a drug-free generation.
It's very much like a war. We impose casualties and we take casualties.
It has a very high price. And there are winners and there are losers. Right now, the losers are the American people.
We imprison at rates greater than any other country in the world except perhaps for Russia.We imprison a higher percentage of our black people than South Africa did during apartheid.
But it's a big business. It's the third-largest growth industry in the United States of America. Criminal justice. Private corrections has become viewed as a growth industry, so that it has been a very good area to invest in.
The incarceration rate for women has gone up exponentially.
Why?
Because of drug enforcement.
One of our papers is titled, "Entrepreneurial Police," precisely because we think that they're trying to make money.
These officers that you see out here, and our narcotics people, are not shown in our city budget at all. They're totally self-funded.
We have tens of thousands of people in this country who make their living as informants. We ask children to inform on their parents.
I think that what we see is not a war on drugs, it's a war on poor people with drug involvement.
Ready for training.
It is too much of a money-maker. It's making everyone too much money. It's making all the municipalities and government money. It's a self-perpetuating war, a never-ending war. What do you mean, self-perpetuating?
Well, it's self-perpetuating in a number of ways, and one is that, in a real war, it's the military that is in fact taking the casualties. In this war, the people conducting the war, the police, the prosecutors, the courts, never suffer the consequences. They aren't taking the casualties, it’s the general public which is taking casualties. And the police and the prosecutors are only benefiting in the war, in the sense that they get greater budgets.
Well, we're going to look over here. See these three-- burnt out areas? These three, they're vacant apartments. What they're doing in this area is, they sit right here on one of these porches. As you can see, all the bushes in the trees is blocking the view from us to see them. And what we do is we walk up to the location from the rear, and we have a scout car come from the front. And what happens is, as soon as they see the scout car, they turn around and run to the rear, and they run into us. So, that's how we catch them now.
This is one of the drug dealers that are usually in this area. He always hangs around here. He don't live on the street.
Who, the guy walking there?
This guy walking right here. He doesn't live on thisstreet. And every time that we come over here on narcotics complaints, we've been getting complaints about him. We were thinking about investigating him.
There is research that shows that if you have more, for example, cocaine arrests, you end up having greater budgets. Because they're public servants, they don't put aside their self-interest in that way. And indeed, they can be quite committed to the whole enterprise. They can be convinced, for example, that drugs are a terrible thing, and they find it very easy to increase the allocation on that, even though if it were a level playing field, the public would be better served with a different allocation of resources.
Could you say it's easier to pick up a coke dealer on the corner of the streets than a burglar?
Much easier. And we did our first study on drug arrests in this state. One person in the Department of Corrections said the police can go out on the street and pick up 600 drug users in a night, and then with some bitterness said, and we have to deal with them in the morning.
Every day, we did some type of operation, be it push-off, be it a drug raid, be it just running in there and arresting them, finding the narcotics and weapons. And now the word is on the street, don’t go there, the police is there. So, we kind of took back that apartment.
Took it back.
Took it back, which means we took it from the drug dealers. Now we are trying to make it safer. People are not financially well-off.
Low-income areas, single-family-- single home families.
And we're trying to make this area better for them to live, because to me, even though you may not have all the money, we are definitely trying to make this area safer. They don't have to live in a crime-infested drug-infested area.
It goes beyond that, as well. In 1984, the Federal Crime Bill contained a section which changed the incentives that police face in the war on drugs. The asset forfeiture section of that crime bill focused only on drug crime. And it said that police at the state and local level who cooperate with federal agencies in drug investigations would share in the assets ceased-- money, cars, airplanes, boats, those sorts of things. This changed the incentives for local police in many states, because their local or state laws allocated those funds to the general fund or education funds or something like that. Now the police could keep them.
And then the Department of Justice, who administers the program, went a step further and said that they would adopt local seizures as if they were a part of a cooperative effort. And so all local seizures actually could be then diverted back to the police rather than going to where state law said they should go. And as a consequence of that, there's been a dramatic increase in seizures.
And what I want to show y'all is, vehicles that we seize on the push-off for customers coming to buy narcotics. And we would meet, posing as a drug dealer. We seize these cars under campaign push-off. Right, that's a nice probably '98 or '99 Dodge Intrepid. The Taurus on the end is pretty new, it's probably about '98 or '99. So, we get any range from brand-new vehicles at a high value to low-end vehicles with dents and rust, with no hubcaps and no locks.
We do is go undercover as dealers. And the operation is set up-- basically we start by going into a location where the narcotics are being sold. We arrest the drug dealers, identify them, arrest them, and we cover their narcotics and charge them with the crime. Once we remove them away from that location, we take over the location as if we are the drug dealers at that particular time.Once we're there, and posing as the drug dealers in plain clothes and with no type of police around or no physical markings, the users come up to us and try to purchase narcotics.
What we do is we sell them fake narcotics. We use the same packaging that the drug dealers use, but we put soap. We usually cut up soap and put it inside the same packaging they use, as well as--they use a small envelope for heroin, usually. And what we do is put powder, flour, something to that effect, some white substance, inside it to make them believe that it's heroin. And we can usually get some grass or oregano for marijuana, to pose as marijuana. And once they walk up to usand us money for the fake narcotics, then we charge them with attempt to purchase narcotics from an undercover police officer.
Their vehicle then is subject to forfeiture under the push-off campaign.
They get arrested. And they get charged with a misdemeanor, attempting to purchase narcotics from an undercover police officer. From that point, they go through the court process and usually get more probation and rehabilitation and fines and costs. So, then the courts and the city make money off the fines and the cost that they have to pay.
The level of seizure activity in the United States has exploded since 1984.
It has exploded.
And you don't have to even be proven guilty. This is the beautiful part. Because it's a civil-- the legal fiction is that the car committed the crime. For example, if you sell or buy some cocaine from your car, the fiction is that the car committed the crime. Consequently, you don't even have to arrest the person. You can just take their car. We have seen films where they literally will stop somebody on an interstate highway, for example, get permission to search the car. They will find $800, and no drugs. And they'll say, well, we're going to seize this $800 because we believe it may have been related to a drug deal. And then the persons are allowed to go on with a receipt, and the police take the $800.
So how can they prove that it's drug money?
They don't have to. You have to prove that it's not. Because it's a civil, not a criminal, proceeding, the standard burden of proof is reversed in America.In a criminal proceeding, you're innocent until proven guilty. In a civil proceeding, it's the other way around. You're guilty until you can prove you're innocent. And so, it seems to me the real problem is not in the police behavior, but the way the law was structured.
You only take the car? Can you also take their clothes?
Oh, yes, we can also seize their jewelry, all the money in their pockets, jewelry from head to toe including earrings. Even the-- maybe one or two people may have a 14-karat gold tooth in their mouth. We can take the tooth out of their mouth and seize that 14-karat gold tooth. Any expensive belts, shoes, jackets, you name it. Anything that's worth any value, we can actually seize.
And you really do that.
And we do do it. Yes. We have no problem doing it.
There was a very nice ranch in southern California. And the police decided to raid it because they suspected that there were marijuana plants on the property. So, they went and made a raid. And the owner of the property tried to defend his property by using a gun. Allegedly he did not know who was coming on his property.
They broke in the front door.
And they killed him. And so, the owner of the property was killed. And there was a subsequent investigation because of the murder of this citizen. And they found no marijuana plants on the property. And the subsequent investigation clearly stated that apparently, the police decided that this was a very nice valuable piece of property, and they thought they could seize it and get a couple of million dollars. They asked for the assessed value-- or they got an assessed on the value of the property before the raid. So clearly there's an indication that they intended to seize it because it was a valuable piece of property.
For a few marijuana plants.
So, has it become an industry?
[OVERLAPPING VOICES] In one of our major citieson the west coast, there's basically a marijuana squad. And their job is to try to root out marijuana use and marijuana growing in their particular county. And their task is to pay their own way with asset forfeiture. They're not getting funds from the city, or the county. All their money has to come from asset forfeiture. It's a very strong incentive to keep your job.
Once every three months, we hold a public auction and we sell the stuff, and then with the money that we get, that we sell it, goes back into the unit to buy raid vests, new weapons, new radios. So, we're basically working off the drug dealers' money.
Right, they send us to schools.
in an indirect way, the drug dealers purchased everything in this office. When we seize the money, we in turn spend it to fight narcotics, such as maybe buying us vehicles, police cars, radios, send us to training. So, the drug dealer's basically financing our own operation.
It's a way of funding.
Right, it's a way of funding--
It's the best way of funding.
--the city, it comes out of their budget.
The city's saving money, but yet we're get the state of our equipment at their price. So everybody's happy.
This is one item that we took recently.
The car.
Yes.
So, you're using them for your team.
Yes. It's now used for response teams. What happened was, there was a drug dealer that took the money that he made from selling drugs, and bought this vehicle. He didn't have a viable source of income. He had no job. He received no federal monies. So, he could not explain to a judge how he had the money to buy this vehicle. This vehicle is about $40,000 American. Well, this guy has no income coming in, so there was no way that he could prove-- so through asset forfeiture, we were able to take this vehicle.
Is it a way of funding your team?
Yes, sir, that's exactly what it is. Most of the funding-- and you'll find not only in our agencies, but most local law enforcement agencies, most of their funding will come from the items that they seize. Ours, actually, is totally self-funded. Because these officers that you see out here, and our narcotics people, are not shown in our city budget at all. They're totally self-funded.
Totally self-totally.
Totally self-funded, yes, sir.
So, that must be quite a lot of money.
Yes, sir. Yes, sir. It is.
So, you're doing well.
We're doing well.
Did you get a shotgun on the side of ya?
I heard his gun. I didn't hear a call of "gun." I didn't hear that.
Another aspect of that-- we've created incentives for citizens to inform on each other. And any time large amounts of cash are used, the government wants to know about it. There was an individual--this was in Dallas, Texas-- he was going to Las Vegas. He was going to gamble. He had $10,000 incash. He paid for his airline ticket with cash. Theairline representative called the police, and said, someone just bought a ticket with cash, a lot of cash. They came down and seized it. He gets a reward.
It turns out the individual was not a drug dealer. He was taking cash to gamble with. But his cash was seized, and the individual got a reward for--
How do you mean, to get a reward? He's a part of the system.
Yes. In this case, the airline employee actually gets a cash reward for informing the agents that are in the airport that a ticket has been paid in cash. But in the airlines, I think it's DEA that's actually doing it. And you can have regulation like that, that setup a reward structure. The legislature wouldn't create something like that, per se. The laws would allow for that and then this becomes an administrative arrangement. There are administrative guidelines that say, this is how you do these things. And they would simply tell airline employees that, you too can have an incentive to fight the war on drugs.
Doesn't that pose the danger that agencies will go just for the money?
Yes, it does, and that's where you have to be careful. You have to show that your investigation is such that-- you don't want to look like you're sitting there letting these people continue to traffic narcotics just so you can get a certain amount of money. What you want to do is show that you have an investigation that, because of means or because of reasons outside of wanting to get money, that's why you're using this asset forfeiture. Not strictly for money. Or not strictly for cars or for houses. Don't sit and wait because you know he's going to buy a new Lexus or Mercedes.If you can show that you're waiting to go after himbecause you're trying to get the big man, or his boss, or a group of individuals. Yes. But asset forfeiture has to be used very, very carefully. Don't let it be a tool strictly for gaining money or assets for your department.
Does it happen, you think?
I'm sure that it does, sir. I'm sure that it does. It has not happened in our department. It has not happened in any agency that we've ever worked with. But you do read sometimes in law enforcement and judicial journals that it has happened, and they are challenged in court and sometimes upheld.
Because it's tempting, it seems to me.
It is very tempting.
So, what we need to do first is identify the buildings and/or single-unit dwellings that we want to target in this. They're supposed to be staying in a pink house on the north side of Cameron, between Brooks and Oakland. North side, about mid-block.
Right. Because I saw him there last week.
Right. That's where your CI was staying. The new one you got. She was staying there for a while, she was telling me about it. And that's something we'd send a CI, not a UC, till we find--
We also got information-- you got it when you were in ATF, but I just got it again. Teddy McNichol's selling guns out of the party store.
Oh, yeah.
You know, I ran into that CI that we used for a while there, and no upon speaking to it, it told me that they're selling Saturday Night Specials out of there for $100, $150. And I know the ATF had it because I talked to Big Manny about it, a longtime ago. So maybe we can try to do something with that.
Also, I'm hearing that the stores are getting stolen merchandise, and what people are doing is buying the merchandise with food stamps. So, they bring their food stamps and they buy a VCR or TV from the stores. As well as their narcotics. And a lot of times it may be a little extra money.
With US currency, it'd be $10, with food stamps it may be $15 for a $10 ride as well as those electronic items.
We'll notify the Secret Service on that.
We could actually-- if we handle that ourselves, some way or another, we could actually almost forfeit the whole business, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] the proceeds they have.
Yeah, you could do an omnibus. It's not an asset forfeiture, it'd be an omnibus forfeiture.
What it's done is create incentives to go after bigfish, if you can catch them. But that's very difficult to do. But it also has created incentives to go after the little fish who you can catch relatively easily. And so, it turns out that most seizures, the vast majority of seizures, are small.
How many arrests do you make a year?
Yearly, I would say probably-- those that we can take to court and those cases that we get convictions on, probably in the area of about 5,000.
That many.
Yes, sir.
Just in your police department. Yes, just in our city. Yes, sir.
Hello, this is the Fortune Society. How may I help you?
The Fortune Society is an organization that's been around for 31 years, that serves the needs of people coming out of prison and does advocacy and community education on criminal justice
issues. We see about 2,000 people a year coming out of prison and work with them to help rebuild their lives.
So, you've been doing this for 31 years. So, you must have a clear picture of what the war on drugs is doing.
I think that what we see is not a war on drugs. It's a war on poor people with drug involvement. And the casualties are terrible. The United States is engaged in an experiment of wholesale incarceration that is having a multi-generational impact, and I think we're barely beginning to see the damage that it's doing. We have a two-tier system in this country in dealing with substance abuse. If you're white and a child of privilege, you’re likely to end up in drug treatment if you have a drug problem. If you're poor and a person of color, you're likely to end up incarcerated. And it's a very, very vivid division.
What we've seen is an escalation in incarceration rates. And we've seen incarceration being used at such a level of intrusion that it is, in some communities, the dominant cultural force in the lives of young people growing up. We've seen the prison system and the jail system in this country expand to the point where in California, they now spend more on the prison system piece alone of their criminal justice system-- they now spend more on that than they do on education.
They sit between these abandoned houses—like this is a good one, right here. They sit between here, as you can see. They're not sitting here any longer because with our efforts of coming by here every single day, letting them know that we know they're selling drugs and attempting to arrest them and catch their narcotics. Then with it, they tend to stay out of the area. And this is another street that was quiet. If you came here this summer, you would have seen people all up and down this street, all day and night, selling on bikes, anywhere from the age of eight, nine, ten, to 30 years old plus, selling.
We see people coming through the Fortune Society all the time who have committed a drug crime with a fairly small amount of drugs. Possession, sale. And they're serving years and years and years. As the state gets tougher and the sentences get tougher and the room to get out on parole gets eliminated, people are doing longer and longer sentences on these drug charges.
What you see standing on the corner are more the-- what we call runners. They sell, they do the dirty work. They may get, what, $500, $600 a day for selling dope all day. But to a 16-year-old kid, $500 or $600 is quite a bit.
They usually get $20 to every $100 they sell on a job working narcotics. If someone may know them, they may get $30, but that's kind of pushing it. Usually to every $100 of narcotics they sell, they get $20 to $30 out of that as their fee for selling it. So, the lower-level drug dealers that are on the front lines, they get arrested the most, they get into all the street crime the most, as well as they don't make too much money-- and those are the ones that it's usually the people and the
citizens are complaining about.
And the prison sentence has increased over the last five years.
How long?
It depends on how much drugs. If you're talking about a sizable quantity, it could be five to—it could be 15 to life.
Without parole.
Without parole. And now we're getting away from the 15 to life, and we're talking about cutting the bottom out and having people do fixed sentences. California led the way in what we call the "three strikes" law. Three felonies and you're in--
For life.
For natural life. The felonies sometimes are not big at all. It could be possession of drugs. It could be one vial of crack. That's a felony. He can do natural life for that vial of crack because of his prior record.
NPF, sir.
He turned around [INTERPOSING VOICES] –flee this way which is typical of someone that has narcotics, trying to get away from us. So, we followed him. By the time, we got up to him, to stop him, he'd dropped the narcotics to the ground, which is a pack of crack cocaine. So now he's begging us to not take him to jail, and he's trying to say he lives here, but we know this is a narcotic location, and he does not.
Are you going to arrest him?
Yes, we're going arrest him for it. One pack of crack in the state of Michigan constitutes a felony. Repeat [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE].
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
OK. 4-10. Also, you see the money he has here. All this money, once we have this pack of crack cocaine, is subject to forfeiture now. So, all his money could be forfeit-- [INTERPOSING VOICES] which is roughly-- $30, $35, $40, maybe $50-some. Which is forfeit. Whether he had $2 or $200 or$2,000 plus, you can take it under this one pack of suspected crack cocaine that we found on him.
It is so easy to get another low-level drug dealer to replace one when we take them away. So, you go as low as, now, eight, nine and selling.
Do you sometimes pity them?
Pity them?
Those very low-down--
No, not at all.
They're the ones that make our job the most difficult. Because they're the ones, like he said, that the citizens complain about. They're the most visible. If you drive down the street, you aren't going to see the high-level drug dealer. And if you do, he's not causing problems. He's very low-key.
The racial impact of this is profound. A program in Washington called The Sentencing Project did a study a number of years ago, What they saw was that one out of four young black men in their high teens and low 20s, one of four young black men were either in criminal justice custody, in prison, or under criminal justice supervision at any point in time. So today, one in four. This isn't over the span of a year, this isn't over the span of a lifetime. This is at any one time. One in four. They did the same study again. They updated it. The statistics were now one in three. Their prediction is that if things continue as they are, by the turn of the century, it'll be one in two. The damage that it does to a community to have so many of its young people socialized in the prison system is beyond measure.
How many people do you have to transport?
Just one subject, ma'am.
[INAUDIBLE].
I don't know if most of you were brought up in this area.
I was.
And I was.
Don't you come into a situation where you suddenly have to arrest somebody that you might have known from--
Yes, all the time.
But if they're bad enough where they know you're a cop, they know you're a police officer, and they want to sell dope in your neighborhood, then they're bad enough to suffer the consequences. They’ve got to go.
But it's hard, because you might know them.
Sometimes. Then again, if they disrespect you, and they know you're a police officer, then there's no hard feelings.
Yes, that's my big thing, is respect, too. I had occasion with family members of mine, that I had to arrest and do a drug raid.
Family members.
Yes. And if they disrespect you enough to sell narcotics in your city area, knowing that you are the police and knowing what you are doing everyday, then they are subject to anything just like anybody else, and as long as you keep telling yourself that, you don't care. And you don't worry about it. And you will do exactly what you're supposed to do.
An entire generation, entire communities are being shaped by this war on drugs, and it does not happen evenly across the population. There
was a study done in New York state showing that 75% of the people of New York state prisons came from the same seven communities in New York City, the same seven poverty-stricken communities in New York City. Those are the same communities where the schools don't work,where police brutality is most a problem, where the social services don't work, where the housing stock is problematic, and where the police go to do their drug sweeps.
As you see back here, these pit bulls they have. They breed pit bulls like this to stop us and come into their home. What they do is they have the pit bulls running around inside of the dwelling, so when we make entry, it slows us down, and the pit bull tries to attack us as we enter into the dwelling.
So, what do you do, then?
We usually have to take the dog's life.
I think that what you see is good politics, that there's political benefit in looking tough on crime.There's a whole economic infrastructure built right now around prisons.
How do you mean?
Well, people talk about the prison-industrial complex, in the same way that they used to talk about the military-industrial complex. There are communities in upstate New York, where most of the prisons are, where the primary industry is being a prison guard. These are people who would have been dairy farmers a generation ago. The dairy farms are gone. Now the kids of the dairy farmers are working in prison. You've got a huge amount of industry connected to prisons. You’ve got prison construction. You've got jobs that come from running the prisons. You've got prison health care. You've got manufacturer of prison uniforms. We're even seeing industries come in and try to use prison labor as a cheap way of doing their manufacturing. But when I go to criminal justice conferences, there are vendors who have a display area, and they talk about criminal justice has a guaranteed growth industry. And it is.
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] we come to you. Bless us with your presence today. And help us, that this place, which is termed a prison will not be an institution of incarceration, but will be an institution and facility of rehabilitation. That your people who should be housed here, that they will emerge from this place better productive citizens, that their lives will be challenged and that they will be able to be good, contributing citizens to the economy and for the betterment of their general future and welfare. In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord.
I am happy to introduce to you Dr. George C. Zoley, president and chief executive officer of the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation. Wackenhut Corrections has become a leading developer of privatized correctional facilities worldwide.
It's so nice to be here finally, and see this facility in its completion after such a long process that involved state, county, and local governments, to bring this kind of project and its economic stimulus to South Bay.
This plot holds 64 inmates. This is the quiet room. When they'll be coming here, they might want to study, they want to read a book, look at TV. There will be no smoking in the quiet room at all. No smoking. They can smoke in the day room area here. This is where they'll be fed at. The cart 'll come in, they'll line up, they'll get their tray, they’ll come and sit and eat here. They can also play checkers, solitaire, chess, all right here.
This is where they'll sleep at. There is no smoking in the open bed area at all. No smoking in the bed area. The toilet is in the back. As you can see, we can see through the toilets for any activities going on in between the toilets as well as the showers. Any questions?
Excuse me? Right. They have one drawer and it's up on the bottom of each bunk. And they have their own ability to lock it, secure it. But we do have a combination to the-- at all times, we must have it. Because we can check it at any time we want. And we do.
The Wackenhut Corporation is one of the world's largest private prison development and management organizations. We are listed on the New York Stock Exchange. We have contracts and awards for 24,000 prisoners. Privatization has shown that it can provide high quality and the development of new prisons on a very cost-effective basis, quickly and very professionally.
What's also happening is that our prisons are getting more barbaric. We're going backward. TheUnited States is using what they call Maxi-Maxiprisons, which are prisons where people are locked up for 23 hours a day. Then they're let out for an hour to exercise in a small cage, and then put back in. And in fact, New York state has just invented an even worse version of that experiment. They're locking two people in a cell for 23 hours together.
They are permitted a pair of tennis shoes. They are permitted a pair of dress shoes. The dress shoes and tennis shoes get lined up, and the shower slides get lined up under the bunk neatly. We do not allow them to hang pictures on their walls. We do not allow them to alter things, tear pictures out of magazines and hang them up and place them-- place them in places we do not allow
them to hang items up to obstruct the view on the window in the door as well as the window on the wall here. We do not allow them to hang up clothes lines in their rooms.
No table and chair.
No table and chairs. This is it.
In the United States, private corrections has become viewed as a growth industry. And so ithas been a very good area to invest in, and clearly given the increasing acceptance of privatization here, the growth prospects are quite positive.
OK, come on. Off the bus.
Listen up. As you get out of the bus, there's officers standing at the left corner of the building. Single-file line. Go where you're at. What're you doing here? Seen one familiar face already. There you go. Right over this way. Yes.
But everything in your property. Everything in your pockets in your property. If you get pat-searched on the way in and you've got anything on your person, you'll hear about that one. Everything.
Wackenhut's probability is--
Since they're IPO, they are up a 135%.
From a stock market standpoint, their profit margins are in the 12% to 14% range. CCI has been a public company much longer. It went public in the mid-80's, but in the last few years, the stock has increased fivefold and their profit margins are in the 20% range. And profit margins for both companies have been expanding as their base of operations gets bigger.
Thanks, we'll meet you out at the station.
We play this game to win. All of us are going to go home alive each and every night, knowing if we're to do that--
How are you winning?
It's a slow battle, but we're taking small little bites out of the pie, and we need to start taking chunks out.
And by us taking small little pies, we're not winning.
We're not winning. It's an uphill battle and we're not really making much progress.
We used to lock up primarily a population of violent offenders. Now 60% of the people who are incarcerated are there for nonviolent offenses, most of the drug-related. Our sentences used to be much lower. What we've done is we've built an escalating system of mandatory prison sentences. So that-- we have a judge, a retired judge who was on our board, and he came to me one day distraught because he needed to sentence somebody who had committed a rape to a lighter sentence than to a repeat offender who had one vial of crack. A man who had one vial of crack because of his past record, did more prison time than somebody who committed a rape.
Nicole Richardson. She was 19 years old, 18 actually, when she fell in love with this boy who was a-- she met him in a local bar and he was sort of a small-time drug dealer. He bought and sold marijuana and then he bought and sold a little bit of LSD. And so, she fell in love with him. She went with him on a couple of the trips where he would sell LSD to someone. She'd stay in the car and he'd go into the house and do the transaction. So, she was aware of what was going on.
At some point, the undercover cops got wind of his drug dealings and set up a deal. And so, they called her house at some point in this deal to ask where to find her boyfriend because they wanted to pay him for the LSD they had bought. And so, Nicole gives the phone number of her boyfriend's house. And that one act was enough to link her into the conspiracy. And so, when they arrested everybody, they arrested her as well, and they charged her with intent to distribute LSD. And she felt that her role was so minimal that she should take her case to trial, and she'd be found innocent. But she took her case to trial and she was found guilty. And so, she got the minimum sentence that the judge had to give her, which was 10 years.
You enacted this law. How do you look back on that?
My role in writing the mandatory minimums was the worst thing that I've ever done. I have met the children and the mothers of people in prison for unjustly long sentences because of these laws. And they are just the dozens of thousands, of tens of thousands of people who are in federal prison for way too long. There's a woman who calls me from prison. She has a son who was nine years old when she went to prison. The son attempted to commit suicide. The son has run away. The son misses his mother. Think about the families that are screwed up. The kid doesn't know anything about this. The kid is being hurt.
The mother had a boyfriend who was a dope dealer. And the dope dealers said that the mother stored the drugs. She said, I didn't store drugs in my house. If there were drugs in my house, it was the boyfriend. I had nothing to It It's a woman who has no money. Her car is repossessed. She's not a dope dealer. She's struggling to take care of her kids. She lives in public housing. She has nothing. She's not a dope dealer. She's doing 235 months. She's doing almost 20 years.
Johnny Patillo. He was in college. He had been working and getting his life together, paying bills and trying to become an upstanding citizen. He was only couple credits short of finishing his college degree, when a friend of his said, would you mind mailing this package for me at the FedEx building in Los Angeles? So, he took it, he mailed the package, the package went off and he went on his merry way. He didn't get any money for this. And it turns out the package had crack cocaine in it. And so, somebody was tracking it, some undercover cops were aware of this transaction. They stopped the package. They arrested the person it was going to. They backtracked and got Johnny Patillo, because he had put his name and address and everything on it. He thought he was innocently sending a package. They arrested him, charged him with conspiracy to distribute crackcocaine. He went to trial. He lost. He got 10 years in prison.
This is the 1986 law. Almost all of this came out of our subcommittee. But the top item here, of penalties and enforcement, the Narcotics Penalties and Enforcement Act, that's the mandatory minimums. Even though it's first, it was considered last. It was considered in the last three days. It was considered without any hearings. We had no expert advice from theJustice Department, from the Bureau of Prisons, from the judiciary, from professors, from people with experience in other states, from bar associations-- nobody. There were no hearings. The thing is really being stitched together. Numbers plucked out of the air to-- and this has had more impact on federal prison population, federal drug spending, than anything. This hasty, off-the-cuff thing.
We're talking of sentences of 20 years, 30 years, 40years. There's a case I heard of, of a young college student who was involved by driving, on one occasion, his cousin 500 miles in his car. He is serving three life sentences. These sentences are mandatory. If there is evidence, and somebody's testimony is evidence-- if I come into court and say under oath, he sold five kilos of cocaine, or she drove five kilos of cocaine from Mobile to NewOrleans, it's as real as five kilos of cocaine right on the table. Just as real.
And the person who's saying that doesn't have to be police.
It doesn't have to be police. In fact, it's usually not police. It's usually a dope dealer who is getting a deal, who's getting a cut in his sentence for cooperating, for testifying against other people. Or it may just be a professional informant who is paid for getting people arrested. We have tens of thousands of people in this country who make their living as informants, giving information to the police and testifying about drug dealers.
The boyfriend, because he actually knew enough about the drug world that he had been working in, he was able to give the prosecutor, the government, names of other drug dealers, and inexchange for his testimony the prosecution said, OK, we'll just put you in prison for five years. So, she's done twice as much time as her boyfriend. He’s out. She's still in prison.
Mr. Big can get five years. Mr. Big gets the substantial assistance motion, and he can get out, five years. And other people, simply following the mandatory minimum railroad, they get 10, 20, 30 years, because all that quantity, that doesn't go away. That sits on their shoulder. The fact that the top guy pleads guilty and cooperates does not have any effect on all the lower-level people.
The Tucker family lived in Georgia and they owned a shop that sold, among other things, grow lights-- for instance, for growing orchids and flowers. And they sold the grow lights among other products that they sold at their store, but at some point, someone who they sold a grow light to was arrested for growing marijuana, using the grow light to have an indoor marijuana operation. And so, he turned them in. He said, well, I bought the grow light from the Tucker family's business. And so, then the DEA started investigating theTuckers and decided that they knowingly were selling these grow lights to people to grow marijuana. And that because they knew that they were doing that, that was enough to convict them of conspiracy with intent to distribute marijuana. And so, they ended up busting the entire family. They of course lost their shop. And they each went to prison. I think they were the two brothers and a wife. And they each got at least 10 years in prison, based on the fact that they were selling grow lights to people who may or may not have been using them to grow marijuana.
All of the federal judges in the country have adopted, in their formal meetings, resolutions condemning the mandatory sentences. One of the most conservative parts of the country is Texas, and Mississippi, Louisiana, the deep south. It's theFifth Circuit. The judges down there call the sesentences manifestly unjust. This is not the liberals from New York or Boston. This is the folks from Texas and Mississippi and Louisiana.
Right now, it seems like not very many people understand that we're throwing away the key on these nonviolent drug defendants. So, we want the message to get out there across the country, and then we also want the legislators, the people in Congress who can actually change the laws, to understand that their constituents are being affected by these ridiculous laws, and then to recognize that they don't need to send them to prison for so long, and then change the law.
How do you do this?
It's hard. We lobby. We do a lot of lobbying, and alot of public education. The lobbying literally means going to meet with a legislator, going to sit in front of him, and talk to him, and take pictures of the people who are in, prison and say, do you understand that your laws are actually sending this 19-year-old to prison for 20 years?
And do they understand?
No. Most of them don't know that there's not even parole in the system. The federal system abolished parole in 1986. So, when we talk about someone getting a five-year sentence or a ten-year sentence, they do that full time. Most members of Congress don't even know that. There’s a remarkable lack of knowledge about what's really going on.
Recently, just this summer, the Republican chairman of the subcommittee decided do have a hearing on DEA. And I was asked to prepare a statement for the committee. So, I wanted to see, let’s go back and see what recent oversight of DEA has been. There hadn't been any since I'd been there. In 10 years, neither the House nor the Senate had had a hearing looking at this agency, asking any kind of hard questions.
Because members of Congress want to be loved by drug enforcement. This is such a wonderful industry-- imagine if you made automobiles that never ran, that broke down, and the public kept buying them. You'd say, it isn't this a great industry? You've got to love it. Here we've got an industry that doesn't work, it doesn't serve the customers. And every year it gets more money. Look at this curve. This is from 1996 to the year 2000. This is the curve of the increase of national drug control budget spending. This is drug policies working. The industry is making more money.
All over the world, the United States is pressuring governments around drug policy. In Europe, in Australia, in the Western hemisphere, in Asia. I was a part of that. I traveled to Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Jamaica, Bolivia, with the US Congress.We met with the president of Peru, with the prime minister of Jamaica, with top government officials to pressure them to do more of what we wanted in drug policy. A drug policy which is a failed and flawed and corrupt policy. In Australia, for example, recently they have been trying to set up-- like the Swiss trial. An approach-- for heroin addicts, to make clean heroin available to addicts, to eliminate the criminality and stop the spread of disease. And the assistant Secretary of State goes down there and threatens the government of Australia, and says, look, you cannot do this. This is going to have enormous implications. We will take actions that you will not like, and it may be intrade, and it may be in other foreign policy matters. But this is unacceptable. This is Kimba's room. This is where she spent just about a year, a year and a half, before she was incarcerated. As you can see, a lot of her high school memorabiliais here. When she ran track in middle school. Her letter when she was in the band. Her pom-pom from when she was in the band.
This is our dream house. When Kimba graduated from high school, we were very focused on our careers, built our dream house, had her college tuition in the bank. We had the American dream. And then all of a sudden, it all crashed in on us. And now everything's gone.
Kimba, when she graduated from high school, she went off to college. She found a group of young ladies. And one of these young ladies introduced her to a young man named Peter Michael Hall, who was a drug dealer. At the time, she didn't know he was a drug dealer, but as time progressed, she found out he was a drug dealer. She never sold drugs. She never used drugs. She never benefited from the sale of drugs. But because of her association with him, and things like-- for example, she put an apartment in her name, a car in her name, and dropped money off at an attorney's office. She received 24 and 1/2years.
24 and 1/2?
24 and 1/2 years without the possibility of parole.
What happened to Peter Hall?
Peter Hall was murdered in Seattle, Washington.After they found out that Peter was murdered, they wouldn't release her, they wouldn't give her a bond. They told her that they we’re going to prosecute her after they found out he was murdered. Because a promise was made that, if you tell me where Peter is, we'll strike the deal and we'll let you go.
And so, when she told them, on a Monday, where Peter was, Peter was murdered the previous Saturday. And when the authorities found out he was murdered, they said no deal. We're going to prosecute you. In Kimba's case, for example, she didn't sell drugs or use drugs, like the federal prosecutors said. But the law basically says, if you aid or abet anyone in any ongoing drug enterprise, you can be and will be treated as if you were drug kingpin yourself.
So, if Peter Hall would have been still alive, she probably would have gotten a lesser sentence.
Right. She probably would have received a lesser sentence, or none at all.
Because they always wanted Peter Hall.
In a criminal drug organization, everyone who is an accomplice, everyone who participates even alittle bit, is completely responsible for the entire amount that the organization was involved in.
Perfect fit. Perfect fit. OK, can you see? Let's see. Your eyes OK? Let's go.
Kimba pled guilty. Basically, she was advised by her attorney who was a friend of the prosecutor, who-- the prosecutor was advising his friend to tell her to plead guilty and everything will be all right. She would get maybe two years at the most, maybe a year, to finish school, and she'd be out. He reneged on all his promises, the federal prosecutor.
What happened?
He just reneged on all of his promises. Because the prosecutor tricked this attorney, and made promises to him things that we’re going to transpire that never happened. And my question is, how can this go on in America, that you have federal prosecutors that make promises, that don't keep them, that are all about convictions,convictions, convictions. They don't care about justice. I don't understand how these people sleep at night.
They only want to convict.
Right. Because that's justification of budgets, how I can get more money next year, how I can get a promotion. And it perpetuates a system.
Their measure of success is, will the jury believe them, and will the judge give a long sentence to that defendant? Because that's, to the prosecutor, the measure of how important a case is.
And the judge, Judge Kellum, in his summary, said that, and I quote, it would serve no useful purpose to incarcerate Mrs. Smith, but I need to send a deterrent to the public. And he sentenced her to 24 and 1/2 years.
The real tragedy here is her son, who is Peter's son also. And she gave birth to him while she was incarcerated. And Amani is one of millions of these little guys, little girls, who are experiencing the identical same thing. And these are the kids that will grow up and, in some cases, not respect authority, hate the system, hate this country, and never get over why they incarcerated their parents, when they know that their parents didn't rob, rape, or murder anyone.
[OVERLAPPING VOICES]
They come from prison, primarily. Their mothers are incarcerated when the children are born. The children are brought here when they're two days old.
Two days.
Yes.
--but that's just on your neck. You got an undershirt on--
My hands are cold but my body's not cold. No undershirt either. I come for my mommy. I come for Daddy.
Many of the people we see are single mothers. There’s no other parent to take the children. That means the children may go to a grandparent. They may go to a relative. Sometimes the person they're going to is not in very good shape. Sometimes they're addicted. Sometimes they are in some mental health crisis. And the children have a very high likelihood of being neglected, being abused. Children who don't have that option may go into foster care. And foster care is not a place to raise a child.
OK, what's the word?
Respect.
Respect to who?
Yourself and others.
Do you believe it?
Yes.
Do you really believe it?
Yes.
So, do I.
So, do I.
OK. We're going to go from here down the hallway. Stay along the wall. Stay along the wall. Is that understood, Group A?
Yes, sir.
OK, thank you. What you need to do, fellows, is go down there to the door, stop in the middle of the floor, and don't say anything. Keep the lines straight, fellows. Thank you, Group A. Real good.
How many children are you talking about, nationwide?
Nationwide? Up and over 500.
Was it was a growing number over the last 10years? Has it grown?
Over the last 10 years, it's probably multiplied by tenfold.
Steve. Stand right there. Make sure your rooms is tightened up, fellows. Real good. I want to see good work. Make sure that pillow case is tucked up underneath, all, right? Let's do it right, fellows. Real good. Make sure your shoes is tightened up underneath the bed and everything. You see there's candy paper on the floor. Let's get the candy paper up. Come on. This is your room. You have to sleep in it. Let's make it right. Let's go. You’ve got two minutes.
You need foster homes, foster parents. How would you need?
Unlimited numbers.
Unlimited.
Yes. Because there's always another child.
Five seconds. All rise.
Dear Heavenly Father, we come to you today to thank you for the food we're about to receive for the health, strength, and nourishment of our bodies. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.
Amen.
If an adult is incarcerated, and has a child or two or three in the community, the odds of that child getting incarcerated go up dramatically. The support that the child would have had from that parent, both emotionally and economically, vanishes. The parent gets damaged, and then the parent comes out. We work with people who are struggling to make up for that damage, to be the parents to their kids that they didn't have the chance to be. But it's a real struggle. And it's against overwhelming odds.
And what we're seeing is an increasing rate of incarceration for women. The incarceration rate--
Is it growing?
--has gone up dramatically across the population. The incarceration rate for women has gone up exponentially.
Why?
Because of drug enforcement. Because of drug enforcement. It's drug arrests, it's arrests for drug use, it's arrests for drug sales. And before, women didn't go to prison for it. As the escalation in enforcement continues, more and more women are getting pulled into the system.
What are you going to have, honey?
[INAUDIBLE].
You don't want no salad? McNuggets? You want some bread with that, honey?
Yes, please.
You want an apple or banana?
Yes, please.
OK, down on the bottom. Get what you want.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
You want an apple or banana?
Banana.
Banana? Grab one. You want a lot?
I love it.
You do?
You love ravioli?
Nice and cheesy today. I put a lot of cheese in it for you guys.
[INAUDIBLE].
Your momma cooked ravioli? OK, real good.
[OVERLAPPING VOICES]
OK, we've got 15 minutes. Let's go, fellows. Don't eat fast, but just don't wait.
What happens with foster care kids is that at the age of 16, they age out. They can be kept as long as 18, but I still do criminal defense work, and I would see these kids who had been in foster care, and had never learned the coping skills to be able to go out on their own. And in fact, at 16 or 18, I think very few children have the ability to support themselves. And they would be given their possessions in a black garbage bag and they would be turned out on the street. And then they'd get arrested. And then they'd be in the criminal justice system. And then they'd be following the track of the parent who went ahead of them.
I'm happy because I'm going.
You're going? Where are, you going?
I'm going to my foster home. Her name is Ms.Robertson.
Have you seen her?
Yes, I've seen on my visit.
Is she a nice woman?
Yes. She has one foster children, and two kids. One of them 24, and the other one 20.
They are nice, though?
Yes. The foster kid is Lorenzo. I forgot the other two names.
That's your stuff?
Yes. I like rollerblading, a lot. I can do all kinds of tricks. I can do mostly everything.
Why did you come here?
Because-- why did I come here? I forgot. I don't know why. I forgot.
This is like snake oil. The war on drugs is like snake oil. Snake oil as an American expression for a nostrum, a medication that doesn't work.
The war on drugs is a very powerful industry. The drug testing industry is probably $1 billion-a-year industry. We have spent, just in building new prisons, $30 billion in the last 10 years. $30 billion in-- not new schools, not new hospitals, but in cells and bars and stainless steel trays and stainless steel toilets and cameras and electronic gates. This enormously expensive stuff. In California, they've built more than 20 new prisons in this period of time. They've built one public university. In California, prison guards are paid more than starting professors in the state university system in California. In California, the prison guards’ union is the biggest political contributor after the doctors. It's a major player in the political system in California. The prison guard union.
Jerry Solomon recently retired. He was a major leader in the war on drugs. He introduced legislation that everybody in the federal government would be drug tested. The president, the Chief Justice, the members of the cabinet, everybody. The people who push the mops down the hallway. Everybody's going to be-- he was Mr. War on Drugs. And his congressional district benefited by thousands of people-- that means thousands of jobs. The major form of employment in his congressional district was locking people up.
So, you take men out of a community which is already struggling, and you further weaken that community. These men-- assume for a moment that they were thieves or drug sellers. They still were fathers. They still put food on the table for their kids. They played softball. They were in the Little League-- they were in the community.
Well, the main effects of the war on drugs on health is to marginalize the drug user, to put them outside the system where they could get healthcare. So, for example, we have a project with women who are in methadone treatment. And we asked these women if they tell their doctors that they're in methadone treatment. No, they never tell them. Because when they tell the doctor that they're in methadone treatment, it means they're drug addicts. And if they're drug addicts, the doctors step back and don't want to deal with them.
Not all doctors, obviously. There are many wonderful doctors who are very compassionate and care for these patients, but most doctors are afraid of these patients. They're afraid of addiction. They have to worry that the drug addict will steal something. They have to worry that the drug addict will frighten away their other patients.
Women who use drugs who have babies, who are pregnant-- and this builds a lot of public sympathy. The image is these are women damaging their unborn babies by using drugs. The cocaine baby, the myth of the-- and most of the research now has shown that really what's much more damaging to babies than drugs is poverty. The absence of prenatal care, nutrition, housing. And of course, a woman who's a drug user, who is on the run and has an unstable life, cannot be a very good mother, cannot have a very good pregnancy. The drugs are inseparable from that pattern. But they prosecute the drugs.
You're working on a case. What case?
A case involving a woman named Cornelia Whitner. This is a woman who didn't have an easy life. When she was 14, her mother dropped dead. She then had to be raised by one of her older sisters. And in her depression and confusion, she started to use drugs. And eventually she became a young woman who was addicted and pregnant. And in the course of her whole life, she had never been offered drug treatment or had any exposure to the possibility of help for her problems. Yet when she went to the hospital and gave birth and her newborn son tested positive for cocaine, rather than being offered any kind of counseling or drug treatment, she was reported to the police by the hospital. And the police came and arrested her on charges of child abuse, on the theory that by being pregnant and addicted, she was abusing the fetal child, the unborn child.
And again, never offered treatment. Cornelia thought that if she pled guilty and asked for the court's mercy, if she said, please, Your Honor, help me get into an inpatient drug treatment program, that she might actually get the help she needed. And the judge looked at her and said, no, I think I'll just send you to jail. And then sentenced her to eight years in jail.
What's the role of the doctor? Because the doctor brings the baby--
Right. Well, as a result of the decision, the attorney general has declared that everyone--doctors, nurses, social workers, even the people who give out food supplements to pregnant women-- if they know that a pregnant woman is using drugs, they are mandated to report that woman as a child abuser. So, that now, it is state law for a whole range of people who should be helping women, they now-- even if she's coming in for drug treatment, even if she's coming in for food supplements, if they believe that she is using a drug, even if she's admitted it, come in for help, they must now report her as a child abuser.
Private physicians, private OB-GYNs are simply not testing their patients, because they don't want to know if they're using drugs, because they don't want to be in the position of having to turn them in. I do know there are many women who have, in fact, been reported. Some of them have been arrested since this decision, and Cornelia Whitner still sits in jail for eight years.
If I may just tell about another group of people, in a hospital that was predominantly African-American, starting in 1989, one nurse, a whitenurse, decided she was seeing a problem of cocaine abuse among the pregnant black patients she was seeing, although she saw a range of patients, and rather than attempt to set up any kind of drug treatment program or counseling, she went to the hospital lawyer and said, is there any way we can get these women arrested? And the hospital proceeded to work with the police and the solicitors, the prosecutors, and set up a policy whereby if a woman tested positive for cocaine at their hospital and was pregnant, they would take her out of that hospital in chains and shackles. Rather than give them any kind of treatment at all, they simply-- what they did was they acted as police agents from the moment these women came in. They searched them for evidence of drug use, then reported them to the police, then held them at that hospital until they could be dragged out, often in front of their older children or family members, in chains and shackles, in hospital gowns that they had bled through, taken to jail where they were never given a change of clothes, put in incredibly unsanitary conditions. For what? For giving birth despite a health problem.
Because the drug addict is a pariah in this society. The war on drugs is a war on drug users, isn't it? So even though they say that the drug user is a patient, really most of them can't get into treatment. There isn't enough treatment. More and more the treatment that they do get into is coerced treatment. It's coming from the drug courts and through the prison system. So, someone gets arrested, and they go to a judge, and the judge says, you can go to prison or you can go to drug treatment. So, I'll go to drug treatment. But more and more, the treatment becomes an arm of the criminal system. The criminal justice system, we call it. The courts. Which is really the agency of the war.
Being addicted to drugs is a terrible thing. People in my family had been addicted to drugs and have been hospitalized by it, and have had their lives detoured forever by drug abuse. The criminal justice system doesn't protect them. And it's not helping them. And it's not helping any of the people. And saying, OK, you've got this problem of addiction, let's send you to jail so you can get treatment-- that's barbaric. That's a barbaric approach.
Is there treatment available? Let me show you what the drug czar says. We are not meeting the need for treatment. Here's an estimate of the number of persons needing and receiving drug treatment for drug abuse. 1996-- total people who need treatment, 9 million. Of the class that's level two, that are most addicted, 5 million need treatment. Less than 2 million got treatment. 3.3 million untreated hardcore drug addicts in 1996.We've been fighting this war on drugs for how long? And in 1996, in the fourth year of Clinton's presidency, we have 3.3 million hardcore drug addicts who didn't get treatment. They couldn’t get treated. That's a crime.
The number of deaths has doubled since 1979. It's doubled. It's gone from 7,000 to 14,000 deaths. The price of drugs. Here's the price data, this table. Here are prices in 1981 for a pure gram of cocaine. $3,700. Down to $1,600 in 1998.
And how about purity?
Purity goes at this wholesale level from 40% to70%. This tells you traffickers are healthy. When purity goes up, that tells you traffickers are competing for quality. And when the price goes down, that's says traffickers are discounting the risks that they are facing, the risks of arrest. So every kind of way you say, are we working? We're failing. Newspaper stories-- we're winning the war on drugs, we're succeeding, it's working, we're locking these people up. This is crazy. This is a fraud. This is a lie.
Go back to Fannon Street, because that's where all the flower shops are.
I want to get a bouquet of mixed flowers, please? Can you fix me up something pretty? For my son’s grave.
That's his grave, right there.
How did he die?
He shot up with heroin with about seven other kids. And then he went to sleep, he nodded out. And they didn't get help.
Why didn't they get help?
They were afraid to get help. They thought they would be in trouble if they took him in. And I don't think that they were aware enough of how bad he was. Because by the time that-- I guess they probably sobered up and then decided that it was important enough to get help. But by then, it was way too late. They were afraid of being put in jail for being stoned. For being on drugs. They carried him around in his own jeep. They drove him around for three hours.
I went to Austin to see-- I got the addresses from the ambulance report and the hospital emergency room report. And so, I wanted to see what places they had been to. And so, I drove around and looked, and realized that from one place to the other, they had to drive right by the hospital where he died, where he was eventually pronounced dead. The same hospital-- they had to drive by it. They could have just taken him.
But they were afraid.
That's my favorite picture. I really believe that if Jared hadn't done heroin-- and I had warned him not to-- that of course, none of this would have happened. But people aren't perfect and people make mistakes. People do things that they're not supposed to do. And I don't think it should mean they have to die, and that everybody ends up either being a cop or being in prison.
It does feel like Soviet Russia. It does. We tap telephones, and the government wants more power to tap telephones. We have an army of informants providing information to the government. There are, by my estimation, perhaps 100,000 informants in the United States providing information to-- there are 50 federal agencies gathering information. Every state police agency, thousands of county sheriffs and municipal police departments, all have narcotics department. If you are a cop working on narcotics, if you don't have informants, you're nobody. You're nowhere.
So, there is constantly-- there is an enormous surveillance apparatus going on in our society around drugs. We monitor people by giving them urine tests. We ask children to inform on their parents.
Is that so?
It happens?
It does happen. It just happened here in Washington. A top official in the US Department of Energy, and his wife, a lawyer, were arrested three or four weeks ago, because their 16-year-old daughter went to the police. This kind of thing is happening. What happens to the child? The child gets taken away and put in a government protection. The man loses his job and the people are facing jail. This is a marijuana case.
Well, I wish you a happy time in the foster home.
I wish you all good luck too, on the airplane. I've never been on an airplane before.
You will, one day.
