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Jan. 23, 1997 - Art Bell
02:33:23
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Chris Conrad - Hemp & Marijuana Advocate
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Welcome to Artwell, somewhere in time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM from January 23rd, 1997.
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you good evening, good morning, as the case may be across this great land.
We're in the age of Aquarius, they say, as of 9.35 this morning, Eastern Time.
It's great to be with you.
I'm Art Bell from the Hawaiian and Tunisian island chains in the west all the way eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S.
Virgin Islands, south into South America, north to the pole.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
And we're going to do something a little different.
Well, we always do that, I guess, don't we?
As you know, California and Arizona passed initiatives Allowing for the medicinal use of a substance known as marijuana.
Ah, hemp.
Whatever all other names exist for it.
And there have been many.
Mary Jane.
Ah, that was another one.
This morning we are going to try and find out what we can really find out about marijuana.
Chris Conrad is my guest.
He is founder and global, get that, global operations director of the Business Alliance for Commerce and Hemp.
A director of the Family Council on Drug Awareness, and a board member of the Hemp Industries Association.
He is the designing curator of the International Hash Marijuana Hemp Museum, located in Amsterdam, Holland, where he researched cannabis culture.
He is art director for the Human Rights 95, a cross-reviews of the drug war exhibit.
He has been qualified as an expert witness on industrial hemp and hemp seed in a Superior Court of California case.
He founded the American Hemp Council in 1989.
Holy Mackerel was chief proponent of both the 1992-94 California Hemp Initiatives.
So he was behind this.
Portrayed Johnny Marijuana Seed in the PBS program in the 90s segment.
M-Show number one.
He is an acknowledged expert on a broad spectrum of industrial, ecological, and social uses of cannabis hemp.
He is a popular and entertaining guest speaker on interview and call-in programs as well as college campuses.
So, he's been on Larry King, he's been on, well, he's been just about everywhere.
He is Chris Conrad, and the subject is hemp, and in a few moments, we're going to find out what we can about him
you're listening to Art Bells Somewhere in Time Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from
January 23rd, 1997.
Alright.
Now, to Chris Conrad, who's going to tell us about marijuana, and try and separate truth from myth.
And there is an awful lot of myth surrounding marijuana, has been for a long time.
Chris, are you there?
Hi, Sir Amart.
Good morning.
Good evening.
Well, whatever it is.
Wherever you are.
Yeah, that's right, wherever you are.
How long have you been involved with marijuana?
Well, I got involved with the Cannabis Reform Movement about the end of 1988 and really started becoming active in 1989.
That's when I formed the Business Alliance for Commerce and Hemp and started just taking it on as more of a life calling at that point.
Actually, one of the things about this art, what got me involved with it is that I was involved with the search for alternative energy sources.
And so I had long thought that there must be a way that we could produce energy without having to rely upon foreign oil and use our farms to do that.
But I could never identify a farm crop that would be able to produce the amount of biomass that would be sufficient to meet America's energy needs.
It was in 1989 that I found out about hemp producing about 10 tons per acre which converts
to a very substantial amount of biomass fuel.
Then of course I found out that hemp was illegal because marijuana was illegal and the two
were lumped together.
That's really what started me down this path.
I didn't come into it from the idea of doing something about marijuana.
I actually came into it from another point of view of trying to improve the environment.
When did marijuana, I want to know the history of marijuana legally.
When did we decide that marijuana was a dangerous drug?
Well, the earliest laws that dealt with it really came up at the beginning of this century, about, I think, in 1913, California, or it could have been 1916, I don't remember the exact date, but from a federal level it was in 1937 that the Marijuana Tax Act was passed in Congress, and there were two things that were very heavily stressed during the hearings.
One is that that law would not stop farmers from going hemp, and the other was that it would not prevent doctors from prescribing medical marijuana.
And in retrospect it appeared quite clear that it was in fact engineered to outlaw the industrial uses of the hemp plant and that the medical patients were just considered expendable and that the way that they were doing it was by tying it to the jazz phenomenon was the main thing that they were going after.
It was a way of closing down jazz clubs.
Are you serious?
That's why they passed a law against it?
Wait a minute.
They had speakeasies, right?
During prohibition.
Right.
As a result of that, the prohibition on alcohol, there was a big increase in jazz clubs like
down Central Street in Los Angeles and in New York, the Harlem Renaissance was based
around jazz clubs where you couldn't get alcohol but there were people smoking marijuana.
So in other words, in the middle of prohibition, it was an extension in a way of prohibition
then.
The other factor that really determined this was that there was a plan to take $200,000
out of the law enforcement budget which had been previously used against alcohol.
When that cut came on, what actually happened was there was a meeting between people in
the treasury department, the DuPont company, some timber companies, and the Bureau of Narcotics.
They decided to, because it suited everyone's purposes, to put the cannabis plant in under
a controlled drug.
But they couldn't really succeed with that because the farmers called hemp, hemp was
a standard farm crop, and in the medical community cannabis was being used in something that
had been a...
thirty several products the medicines on the market that had cannabis in them
and so they had to come up with a way of getting it for everybody
in that quick advantage and so they came up with the word marijuana
which almost no one had ever heard of that even the people who smoked it called it reefer
they didn't call it marijuana. Marijuana, alright well whatever the name is
is it a narcotic?
the problem that we hit there is the way they changed the definitions
Technically, it is not.
A narcotic is supposed to be a drug that causes narcosis, meaning that it knocks you out.
Right.
And marijuana doesn't do that.
The real narcotics are the opiates.
But what they did is they made a legal definition of narcotics that if it's in Schedule 1 or 2, that it's considered narcotic.
And so then they just arbitrarily stuck marijuana in the narcotics category.
But from a scientific viewpoint, no, it is not.
It is not.
A narcotic, as in a pain pill, for example?
Well, narcotics are not just pain pills.
Narcosis means that you're in a death-like sleep.
So for it to be scientifically a narcotic, that means it's supposed to knock you out completely, so you can't be woken up.
And marijuana doesn't do that.
Well... Morphine will do that.
Morphine might do it, yes, but there are an awful lot of in-between things, the Percotin class.
Right.
Those are narcotics, aren't they?
Well, the problem again is that the definition of the word narcotic has been grossly changed by the lawmakers in this country, so the scientific definition isn't applied the way it used to be.
Alright.
So, that's how it...
Well, I guess, was there more to it yet?
In other words, why it was made illegal?
We've got paper.
I know hemp can be used for paper.
Right, and that's why the news media, particularly the Hearst newspaper chain, started promoting all these stories about the dangers of marijuana.
Because they had the timber resources and the paper-making resources that hemp was challenging.
Is that a problem today?
In a converse way.
For them, in other words, if hemp was legal today, would they have a big money problem?
I don't really think so.
I think it's going the other way, in fact.
International paper is looking into hemp.
There's going to be an international conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, and international paper, the people who make masonite, amongst other things, is going to be there because there's a global fiber shortage right now.
And so hemp is really part of the solution.
What it did was it allowed the logging industry really basically to have windfall profits
because there was no alternative fiber available on the market for 50, 60 years there that
was able to produce the kind of quantities that timber could.
And so really it was the logging companies that made that profit.
But of course again, the newspaper chain that Hearst ran owned that logging company and
had the forestry, I don't know about the word rights, but they had the permits from the
federal government to do a lot of logging on national forest land and so forth.
So they basically used that to profit here and now we're in the other situation with
the fiber shortage and farmers can't grow hemp to meet that need so they're in the other
situation.
The price of pulp for paper went up 40% in 1994.
And it's continued to rise since then.
you How many fewer trees, if hemp was in full production for whatever use we wanted to use it for, including paper, how much of the forest, how many trees would be saved?
Well, let's see.
I think that an acre of hemp roughly equates to about 14 trees.
14 trees.
Right, but now you do that on an annual basis.
Say trees take, the fastest growing trees that we have now take 8 years to grow.
And for real sustainable forestry it's estimated at 20 years to grow it.
And nature of course trees grow for hundreds of years.
So you know if you do that on an annualized basis that you see that you reach an acre
of hemp is really over a period of time going to save acres and acres of forest land.
Basically, the federal government in 1916 did a study at that very point, and they found that each acre of hemp, on a sustainable, continuous basis, produces as much fiber as 4.1 acres of forest land.
Holy mackerel!
Somebody sent me an article a few years ago, and it was from the Wall Street Journal, and it estimated that if hemp was in full production, marijuana sold and taxed, the income to the federal government would be in the range of about a half a trillion dollars a year.
That's 500 billion dollars.
That's a lot of money.
You're talking about the industrial hemp side of that?
Yes.
I think that sounds a little high to me.
I anticipate that you would get about that much of gross profits out of it for the United States alone.
Now, if you're globalizing it, then you could be correct, but I would anticipate you'd get about $500 million a year.
off of uh... just developing hamper as more or less what it
i don't think it's going to quit quite get the hit a trillion dollar industry
in this country with for at least twenty years can you uh... legalize
for uses like paper and the rest of it without addressing the marijuana question
interestingly enough that's exactly what the european community has done
In Europe, farmers get about 425 US dollars per acre as a subsidy to grow hemp.
And France is a very good example.
They have very rigid anti-marijuana laws, but they are also one of the largest hemp producers in Europe.
And for a long time, they had almost a virtual monopoly over hemp.
And some people think that that's one of the reasons that they have such strong anti-marijuana laws,
is that it gave them this undue advantage in the fiber market by controlling the supply of hemp.
Well, this is going to seem like a silly question to you, but one of the arguments made by, perhaps the ill-informed,
is that if you allow hemp to be grown for other purposes, people will be smoking shrips and paper and...
all this sort of thing. Wouldn't it happen?
Well, it's pretty unlikely.
Actually, if anything, I think that what might more likely happen is that you might have some people who would be selling phony marijuana, you know, hemp that looks like marijuana but it doesn't get you high.
You probably have a lot of people who would try marijuana and think, it didn't get me high, and in reality they would have been sold some bad stuff, some industrial hemp.
I would think so.
Even if they would start smoking their shirts in their newspapers and stuff, they wouldn't
get high from it, so eventually they would get tired of it, I think.
Very quickly.
Yeah, I would think so.
In fact, there's an interesting situation in Canada where a drug enforcement expert
has said that he has detected cannabinoids in hemp shirts, and so therefore he wants
them considered a dangerous narcotic.
Really?
That brings us back to the thing about what is a narcotic?
How does a shirt be a narcotic?
They're just extending these definitions beyond the scope of reason into the absurd.
So then what kind of progress are we actually making toward, I haven't even started on the
issue of marijuana yet, but with regard to hemp for commercial use, is there progress
being made?
well um... there was a federal report to congress done in nineteen ninety-two
about the library of congress and they said that uh... the main barrier to
happening is the fact that the federal government uh... is not going to be going to oppose it
and sure enough since then they've been uh... number built introduced in the d
has always come out against it however i would think we've made quite a bit of progress
and i'll just put it like in nineteen ninety one the first modern industrial
hemp bill with play before the new york legislature uh... it never got out of
committee in nineteen ninety two they attempted again and it didn't get a gun
committee But then in 1995 we had a bill in Colorado that went forward and it went to a conservative committee and it lost by only one vote.
Then last year we had four states introduce hemp bills.
The one in Colorado made it through all but one vote of making it clear out.
The Vermont approved a research project to see about restoring hemp to that state.
Hawaii approved a project.
Now they don't allow it for cultivation, but they approved the project.
And Missouri didn't get all the way through the committees.
It made it through several committees, but didn't make it all the way through the legislature.
So in the period since 91 we've gone from not being able to get more than one vote in a committee to two states adopting research policies and two states that probably will.
We're anticipating about ten states to have legislation about hemp this year coming up.
There's also some native people who are looking at doing it on sovereign tribal land and in Europe there's Quite a large amount of improvement.
Germany has started growing hemp again.
Holland has increased its hemp output.
France and Spain have both increased theirs.
Italy is beginning to grow hemp again.
And also, there's a lot of international support for, and nationally, the National Farm Federation, I believe.
I may not be saying the name of it right.
Federation, or National Farm Bureau, I believe it's called.
The Kentucky Farm Bureau has endorsed hemp.
Colorado Farm Bureau has endorsed hemp.
And the Kentucky tobacco growers are apparently now supporting hemp, although I haven't gotten
the official document on that.
I've only gotten secondhand reports.
There's an awful lot of it growing there now, isn't there?
Yeah, and in fact, that's one of the logical things is that the tobacco industry gives
us a model of how we could really put some good controls over the positive and the negative.
There have been mistakes made in the way that tobacco has been regulated that we can learn
from.
But there's also some very positive things that have happened there in order to keep
anyone from getting too much monopoly over tobacco.
For example, in Kentucky particularly, farmers are allocated a certain amount, like one acre
or two acres each, that they're allowed to grow.
And that way it supports the small farmers.
Hang tight.
We'll be right back to you.
without making them into tobacco barons and converting their whole farms into tobacco,
we can maybe do something similar to that with marijuana if we get to that point.
As far as hemp is concerned, though, you're going to want to grow a lot of it.
All right, Chris. Hang tight. We'll be right back to you.
This is a big subject, and there's a lot of truths to be uncovered.
If you'll just stay tuned, you'll listen to Art Bell somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 23rd 1997
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Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired on January 23, 1997.
Exactly what it is.
Chris Conrad is my guest.
He knows about hemp and marijuana.
And if you want to know the truth, stick around.
Oh!
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 23rd, 1997.
Oh!
you you
All right, back now to Chris Conrad in San Francisco, East Bay of San Francisco.
And Chris, aside from paper, clothing, you mentioned fuel.
And I know you've got a book called Hemp Lifeline to the Future.
Right.
How can we use hemp for fuel?
Well, there's a lot of new processes.
Speaking of my book, I just double checked on that figure you asked about saving trees, and I misspoke myself.
One ton of hemp saves about 12 mature trees.
So you get about 5 tons of talc per acre, that's about 60 trees, and then over 4 years that means you're saving the equivalent of about 240 trees for each acre of hemp that you dedicate to cultivation like that.
Based on our current production, what does that mean, really, per year, tree-wise?
Any idea?
In terms of how many trees there are per acre of forest, I'm sorry you got me on that one.
It would be a bunch.
Yeah, but it adds up.
I mean, if you take, when it comes to 240 trees, you can see that it's going to add up rather quickly.
Rather quickly.
Back to the fuel question, though, one of the things that I don't think is very likely is that I don't think we're really going to get too much of dedicated mass acreage of hemp that's produced just for fuel.
And the reason for that, Art, is because the fiber is so valuable that it would be a waste.
Take the fiber out of the crop and then you'll still have a lot of, it's called wood actually, but it's the epithet part of the plant, and that would be what they would convert into fuel.
With this variety of technologies that are available now, we're able to use plant matter and convert it into virtually any form of fuel, meaning in addition to methanol, which people think of normally, there's a process called pyrolysis that you could use that would, you could use the hemp wood to produce pellets, then they could also be used to
create charcoal in place of coal, except without the sulfur, so it's a cleaner...
Well, you're saying it would be economically less feasible than continuing with either
oil or other alternative methods.
It would be that valuable?
It would be more valuable than what we have going now.
One of the main issues here is that we wouldn't have to go to war in the Persian Gulf or whatever
to protect the hemp fields growing in America.
And you wouldn't have a target for military attacks because what would be the point of bombing a field of hemp?
So essentially you would save a lot of money that's currently used to clean up oil spills, that's used to repair damage to the environment, that's used for exploration for fuels, that's used for transporting all these fuels.
And a lot of this stuff is basically being subsidized by the taxpayers without really knowing it.
But if you had it the other situation, where hemp is being grown here in this country, we could set up pyrolytic conversion stations that would make liquid fuels, solid fuels.
They could use that to burn to produce electricity, so you have your electrical fuels.
You'd have all the energy that you would really need, basically, that could be produced here in this country.
Particularly if you add to that the about 30% energy waste that we have right now in our current systems.
Uh, and cogeneration on top of that, giving us another 5% or so.
You've got plenty of energy that would be possible to have.
It's just having the national willpower to go ahead and do that.
And I think that the people of America would be more interested in it, but we've got this problem of powerful interests that are working behind the scenes in the government.
And that really became clear when the voters passed the medical initiatives here in Arizona.
I know it's a different topic, but I think that that's the kind of problem we're really up against.
Well, I know that a lot of people are going to sit out there and they're going to say, boy, this sounds good, you know, paper, clothing, maybe even fuel, all these uses.
But this guy, Conrad, all he wants to do is smoke pot.
Come on, let's get to it.
He wants to smoke pot.
These uses are just sort of aside.
bar way of of uh... getting to be able to smoke pot how do you answer that
well you're not going to be able to smoke this industrial hemp so it really is an argument
it doesn't hold up very well at all well then why is it holding up legally
uh... that's a really good question It really has to do with the series of legal fictions.
If you look at the Constitution, you don't see anything in there that gives the federal government the right to prohibit farmers from growing crops like hemp.
And in fact, the signers of the Constitution were primarily hemp farmers.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, uh...
uh...
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 23, 1997.
Hear me now.
We've got Chris Conrad, and he's here talking about hemp and marijuana.
He is Founder and Global Operations Director of the Business Alliance for Commerce in Hemp, or BOC.
Director of the Family Council on Drug Awareness and a board member of the Hemp Industries Association.
He has testified to lawmakers, He's talked to courts.
He's been involved in this movement for a very long time.
So if you want to know the truth about him and marijuana, not the myth, not the bill of goods you've been sold so many years, but the truth, stick around.
And by the way, if you have questions, we will be getting the lines open.
As a matter of fact, I'm going to open an anti-marijuana line.
I may even open two of them.
And we'll take on the issue head on.
We'll do that as the program progresses.
Stay right where you are.
Marijuana.
Interesting topic.
Hemp.
Fascinating topic.
Now we take you back to the night of January 23rd, 1997.
Now we take you back to the night of January 23, 1997 on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Chris, the U.S. Constitution was written on hemp paper.
Chris, the U.S. Constitution was written on hemp paper.
Well, yes indeed.
The original draft was.
The version that's now on display is on parchment, which is made out of animal hide.
But the versions that were circulated and originally signed were on paper made of hemp, as was about 97% of the paper, I believe it was, at that time.
In those days, when hemp was being produced, commercially used, how much was being smoked?
Do you know?
That's an interesting point because there was a misunderstanding that was going on.
In the United States, not very much, basically.
There's a chance that some slaves were using some of the cannabis because it was very popular as an African cultural tradition.
But the Europeans thought that you could only get the effects off of cannabis that was grown in India.
So they would make the resident into Charas or Hashish and then bring that over.
And so it was really relatively rare that people had access to that.
But at the meantime, this is also subject to quite a bit of debate.
There are some people who really believe that our founding fathers were smoking a lot of cannabis.
I haven't seen any documentation that really supports that, nor anything that really disproves it.
But my indication is that probably amongst the slaves, there was a lot more being smoked than there was amongst the slave owners.
When then in America did the smoking of cannabis become popular?
Well, there was a discovery by a British surgeon who went to India in the 1840s who came over and when he did his work in India he found all these medical benefits of cannabis so he reported it to the British Medical Associations and Societies That was later on worked its way into America.
Around the 1850s or so we had cannabis coming into this country.
When it really became popularized was after 1876 because at the Centennial Exposition
they had a Turkish booth, I believe it was Turkish, where they had hashish smoking was
one of the things that people went in.
If you have been to a world fair you know what it is like.
They had one of these and you went into the Turkish booth and you got echelon pillows
and smoked hashish out of giant water pipes, which was quite a popular phenomenon.
From there on it became rather popularized, again with the idea that it only came from
India.
But meantime we definitely had the jazz scene and the Mexican-Americans that were smoking
the herb.
So around the turn of the century that was beginning to be popularized and then it became
very popular once alcohol was prohibited.
Alright, and recall for me the year it became no longer legal.
1937.
1937.
The 2nd of January, the 1st, 1937.
1937. 1937. The 2nd of January, the 1st, 1937. So in other words, basically from 1876 through 1937, cannabis was legal.
Yes, definitely.
Um...
But those were the good old days.
Now, there weren't a lot of random murders.
The crime rate was much lower per capita.
Things were not awful.
Brains were not totally fried.
I mean, that's a lot of years, 1876, 1937.
Right, and in fact when they had the hearings for the Marijuana Tax Act, one of the things that was quite conspicuous is that no one from the Department of Health came forward to say that marijuana was a risk.
from the Department of Agriculture came forward and said that they were having a problem with
cannabis being stolen from fields.
And no one came from the Children's Department and in fact the American Medical Association
which testified against making cannabis illegal pointed out all these facts.
That the only people who were against it were a couple of newspaper headlines and the Department
of Narcotics, Bureau of Narcotics were the only people who were in favor of that law
when it was introduced.
And one other point that you really...
really is worth mentioning here is that at the time, one of the big reasons why Harry
Anslinger was saying we need to make it illegal, he said, oh, it's becoming a big problem,
60,000 Americans smoke marijuana. Well, now that it's been illegal for 60 years, they're
saying 60 to 75 million Americans smoke marijuana. So making it illegal had just the opposite
Alright, here's the facts.
Uh, Art, please ask your guest if the DuPont company was responsible for the laws against marijuana in, uh, the 30s.
I've heard that after DuPont discovered synthetic nylon, he went to the U.S.
government to keep marijuana from being illegal.
I'm not clear as to why one man could prohibit the use of marijuana so he alone could prosper from his invention and prohibit the many benefits of marijuana.
Uh, true?
I would say the DuPont Company was really one of the prime movers on this whole thing because in fact the groundwork for making hemp illegal, one of the things the Federal Bureau of Narcotics did was they went through and convinced companies that they could use nylon which was patented the same year that hemp was made illegal in place of And they also convinced these companies that they could use
synthetics instead of hemp pulp for making plastics.
In fact, one of the big things that happened in the 1930s was the development of these
organic plastics and hemp was the primary source of the raw material.
I've pondered it.
Forget marijuana for a second.
against this bill, one was offered to Congress, in fact, and the group that benefited the most probably
was DuPont, ultimately.
Here's a question for you to ponder, I've pondered it.
Forget marijuana for a second.
If there was a substance, let's say, invented today that produced an acute state of euphoria
with zero downside, no after effects, no lung problems, nothing to be discussed at all
in terms of a downside, simply produced a euphoric state, do you believe that in today's atmosphere
it would be made illegal?
AYUE.
We have laws right now that cover things that have never been invented yet.
They have the designer drugs law, and so the way things are currently set up, any drug that is an alkaloid or a relation to an existing illegal drug is automatically illegal.
Automatically illegal.
Yeah.
So in other words, the idea is they want no artificial euphoric states, period.
Yeah, but in another sense, we have this scheduling process where drugs are scheduled according to their relative dangers.
The only problem is that the federal government never has to prove any of the dangers.
So like Schedule 1 drugs, where marijuana is listed, which prevents doctors from prescribing
it federally, there are supposed to be three tests for that.
It's supposed to be subject to abuse, it's supposed to have no known medical utility,
and not be accepted by the medical community.
In the case of cannabis, what does abuse mean?
I mean, they haven't really demonstrated there's any major abuse issue there, except that they say if it's illegal and you use it, that's abuse.
Well, you know, that's the Catch-22 definition.
Alright, let's actually talk about the up and downside of marijuana.
If I were to ask you to list the up and downsides of the use of marijuana, forget the medicinal value, just the use of it, what are the up and downsides?
Well, that's certainly a personal kind of a question to each individual and we're... Give me general answers.
Well, in general, I would say that one of the real upsides has to do with that it creates a sense of community amongst people who use it, and it reduces a lot of the stress and tension which can often lead to violent behavior.
For example, in the 19th century, it was recommended to reduce spousal abuse.
Abusive husbands told their wives to give them hashish instead of alcohol.
No kidding?
Yeah, no kidding, excuse me.
On the downside of it, I would think that maybe the biggest downside of getting arrested is the big downside, of course.
No, that one aside, are there real downsides?
What about damage to the lungs, for example?
It is per puff more, or harsher, is it not, than tobacco?
In one section of your lung it is but in other parts of your lung it's not and in fact it actually helps people with asthma because it expands the capillaries.
It's a little bronchia that absorb oxygen to the lung.
It does have a downside as far as affecting the large part of the lung and that's where they come up with these figures claiming that marijuana is more harmful than tobacco.
But if you look at it objectively, you see that there's never been one single cancer which has demonstrably been linked to the use of marijuana.
And believe me, if there had been one, we'd certainly have heard a lot about it by now.
So, you know, when you've got, you know, hundreds of thousands of people dying from tobacco and nobody dying from cannabis, you know, you can say, well, maybe it's a little tougher on some parts of the lung, but overall, it doesn't seem to be having as much of an effect.
I think that as far as the negative that I encounter perhaps amongst people has to do with perhaps maybe a little on the forgetfulness side or that some people I would say that they become overly reliant upon it to maintain their mood sometimes.
And that could be good or bad.
I mean, some people, you know, I know people who are depressive, for example.
Again, now this is a medical situation, where it's important for them to be able to keep their mood at a stable point.
Manic depression, particularly, it mellows out their depressive periods, and at the same time, when they get hyperactive, it keeps them in more of a middle ground.
What about paranoid states?
There are people who smoke marijuana and claim it induces a paranoia.
It does for some people.
There's no question about that.
In fact, one of the things about the THC pills that are available by prescription under the name of Marinol or Dronabinol is that they don't have any CBD.
CBD is an anxiolytic drug, meaning it reduces anxiety, and so natural marijuana is less likely to cause anxiety and paranoia than CBD.
The more high THC people get the more likely they are to have those kinds of effects.
It's hard to gauge in a certain way Art because how much of that paranoia has to do with secret
police and if you get a problem you are afraid to call the police because they might find
your marijuana and so forth.
So there are some other psychological factors that make it a little difficult to gauge.
But I do know that I've seen myself people who have gotten into a situation where they
start being really paranoid about things around them.
Actually what's more common is when people eat a lot of it because they can't gauge it
If you're smoking it, it takes 15 seconds to feel the effect from when you inhale it till you feel the effect.
And so if you take it up to where you're enjoying it, then you can tell.
And when you start getting paranoid, you can tell that too.
If you eat it, it takes up to an hour to feel the effect.
So in other words, you might eat too much and an hour will go by and boy, you're really blasted.
Exactly.
And at that point, you might even be able to eat enough to where you start having hallucinations and so forth.
It's very rare.
I mean, I'm not trying to make anybody nervous about that as an apprentice, but it is to say I've seen a lot of people that particularly they go to Holland, they go to the coffee shops, they smoke some craps, and then they see these bonbons.
Bonbons?
You mean you can get it in bonbons?
You can get it in bonbons, and cookies, and all sorts of things like that.
But somebody who's already high, then they buy one of those bonbons, and then it tastes good, so they buy another one.
I see.
Now they've got a lot, and the next thing they know, they're sitting there, and they can't get up.
You know, and it's not going to hurt them, but they're just going to be sitting there for a while.
Well, there are people that, even without the THC content, get put into altered states by bonbons.
Right.
I do want to get the audience involved here shortly.
What we haven't touched on at all, though, is the hemp seed nutrition aspect, and I think this is... Well, wait, wait, wait, wait.
I want to touch on Arizona, California, just past this measure.
The whole world seems like it's tumbling in.
The federal government immediately said, I think Barry McCaffrey said, the voters We're asleep at the switch in California and Arizona when they voted for these initiatives.
And it seems to me that's one of the worst statements I've ever heard from a public official.
Asleep at the switch.
In other words, they did not know what they were doing.
How do you react to that?
I would say Medical Marijuana got 4,800,000 votes.
Barry McCaffrey got zero votes.
I think it's an insult to the voters, essentially.
very good to have regarded zero vote i think it's insult to the voters essentially what happened
here it was that
the opponent of the committee came in with horrendous lies about the uh...
intention and about the effect of this initiative proposition two fifteen
and i would think including barry mccaffrey himself he came out here he
said that if this initiative is is pat
that's the effectively legalizes marijuana in california that wasn't true
what he said it He knew it wasn't true, at least I have to think it, unless
he didn't read the law at all, that he knew it wasn't true and yet he came out here
and lied to the voters.
The voters saw through it and they made a good judgment, which was to pass this initiative.
The opposition raised all sorts of specters.
One of the things that's of the greatest concern to me, Art, is that when I hear Barry McCaffrey
or the Partnership for a Drug-Free America or the DEA or any of these guys, Shalala and
Dan Arino, they're saying that this is a message to young people, that they're worried about
what kind of a message this is to young people.
One thing is that, what's their message?
That no matter what the voters do, the government's going to keep doing what it wants to?
That's not a very good message.
The reason that I've always been in favor of decriminalization or legalization of marijuana
It's because of the message to the youngsters.
And what scares me to death is we're telling them marijuana is terrible.
It's right in there with crack cocaine and heroin and all the rest of them.
And they say it is a stepping stone.
Well, you're damn right it is.
The way they've got it right now, it certainly is.
Because the children try marijuana and they say, oh gee, They lied to me.
It isn't this horrible thing.
I'm not suddenly dependent.
They lied, they lied, they lied.
And then somebody lays out a line of cocaine for them, and lie one leads to the cocaine up the nose, because they're going to figure they're being lied to all along.
So yeah, it is a stepping stone.
By not telling the truth, we are allowing them to move on.
Do you agree with that?
Well, I think that you're very close to hitting it right on the head with that one, Art, and this whole thing of creating self-fulfilling prophecies for young people, it's like if you tell a young person, if you smoke marijuana, you're going to get lazy, and then they smoke marijuana, well, what are they going to think?
Oh, I'm just going to lay here now, you know?
So you give them these bad images, you tell them if you smoke marijuana, you're going to go on to hard drugs, then that's what they think they should do.
You really have to give them more positive images of what's possible.
One of the most dangerous false and mixed messages I've heard that came from Barry McCaffrey
was that he said that on national television, he said that medical marijuana, he's against
it because if it's medicalized, that that will give young people the message that marijuana
is good for you.
Then he said, it's not true because it's a Schedule 1 drug.
Then he said, on the other hand, cocaine and methamphetamine are Schedule 2 drugs.
Because they have medical use.
Now, what kind of message is he putting out to young people?
I think we need to hold these guys accountable.
How strong really is the case, Chris, for medicinal use of marijuana?
For what conditions and what does it really do?
It depends how broadly you want to use it.
One of the things that was the case in California, at least, and I haven't read all the language in Arizona, but the law in California said it's for people with serious conditions.
Now, we've got 5,000 years of medical books saying that marijuana is good for different conditions.
That even includes, by the way, runny nose in India and in China.
You may have heard people say cotton mouth, it dries out their mouth.
Oh yes.
Okay, well it dries up your whole sinus system.
If someone has a runny nose, a few puffs of marijuana inhaled through the nose, it dries it right up.
Now that isn't really a serious condition, but it's a medical use for it.
On the other hand, when you're talking about people with AIDS, cancer, that are using it as an adjunct for another treatment where it can keep them from starving to death, Alright, I do want to talk about that.
Hold on.
Just hold it right there, Chris.
Chris Conrad is my guest.
And when he comes back in a moment, we're going to talk about the very serious uses of marijuana.
Uh, AIDS patients, cancer, that sort of thing, glaucoma.
Uh, we will talk about that, and we'll try to pin down whether it really is so.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 23, 1997.
This is a teaser for the upcoming season.
Thanks for watching.
This is a teaser for the upcoming season.
This is a teaser for the upcoming season.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from January 23rd, 1997.
It is and my guest is Chris Conrad.
We're talking about marijuana.
Hot.
Mary Jane.
I want to go through all the names there really are for this thing.
If you want to know the truth, stick around.
If you want to hear the arguments, stick around.
As I said, I'm going to reserve one line away for people who are anti-marijuana, who take the position that it causes people to be crazed, commit murders, rapes, bank robberies, or you just generally oppose it for one reason or another.
That way we'll get both sides.
We'll get both sides.
I'm, tonight, featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 23rd, 1997.
Thanks for watching.
All right, here we go again with Chris Conrad.
Chris, how many deaths every year are associated, do you know offhand, with alcohol?
With alcohol, I believe it's about 100,000.
Let me get this number for you.
That would be 150,000.
150,000.
But that doesn't include highway deaths and... Oh, that doesn't even include drunk driving?
No.
No, that has to do with a physiological problem.
Cirrhosis of the liver.
Okay, great.
What about cigarettes?
350 to 450,000.
What about marijuana?
Uh, zero.
Excuse me?
Zero.
There's not any recorded deaths from consuming marijuana.
And now I'm waiting for someone to call in and say, well, what about that train wreck?
Yeah, what about that train wreck?
That train wreck was actually caused by two electrical malfunctions that occurred.
One was a switch and the other one was a signal, both of which malfunctioned prior to that.
In addition to the fact that there were people who had smoked marijuana and there was someone who was alcohol intoxicated and so forth, there were a lot of other problems on there.
But one of the interesting things about this whole issue is that once the fact that two people had smoked marijuana was uncovered, it's like they stopped the investigation of all these other problems that had occurred.
And so I think that we, someone needs to be held accountable for that too, that instead of following through and, you know, whether those guys had been high on marijuana or not, the light would have still been out on the signal, the switch still would have been jammed, and so, you know, that's, it's been more of a cover-up on part of the government in order to be an anti-marijuana campaign.
They ignored the real problem.
How many people died in that train wreck?
Uh, sixteen.
Sixty.
Sixteen, one-sixteen.
Sixteen, I'm sorry.
So even if we were to attribute all of those deaths to marijuana it would still be a
hundred and fifty thousand for alcohol
four hundred thousand for cigarettes and sixteen for marijuana
right kind of puts it in perspective yet uh... all right now the medical benefits uh... i would
really do want to know about that that the reason i passed the initiatives
really as i understood it were for people with uh...
terminal Cancer, not necessarily terminal, but for treatment of... You know, the... Serious is the word that we use.
Serious.
Oh, that was the word.
Serious.
Right.
Alright.
AIDS.
What does it really do?
The effects of cannabis should be broken into three categories.
The first is the physical effects, and then there's the neurological effects, and then there's the effects of smoking.
Now, the negative effects we talked about on the lungs, that's strictly from smoking.
If you eat it, you don't get any of those.
So, looking at the way that cannabis itself functions, you've got the physical and the neurological.
On the physical point of view, it dries and drains the system.
It flushes the human anatomy, for one example.
What that means is, in addition to what we talked about, drying out your sinuses, drying out your mouth,
it also reduces the... it dries out your eyes.
Glaucoma is a leading cause of blindness.
It is caused by a buildup of too much liquid in your eyes, too much pressure.
Really?
And so, what happens, they have medicines that try to, there's little ducts that are supposed to be draining your eye, and they're not functioning properly in glaucoma.
So, we use medicines to try to open those ducts.
We use surgery to try to open those ducts.
Some of them work, some of them don't work.
There's all sorts of side effects.
You can go blind from the surgery.
Marijuana does something completely different.
It reduces the moisture in your eye.
I would have to put the appetite stimulation in the neurological category now because we haven't found a physical trigger yet.
And that's for people who have...
I would have to put the appetite stimulation in the neurological category now
because we haven't found a physical trigger rate yet.
Is that the actual benefit for AIDS patients who are thinning away?
That and the other thing is it's very good for pain control and for depression.
And when you're diagnosed with a terminal illness, people tend to get depressed, so it's good for that.
But as far as the overall physical thing, you're right.
When people contract AIDS or cancer, and particularly when they start undergoing chemotherapy
or radiation therapy, they lose their appetite, they become nauseous, as a result they lose weight,
and then the body doesn't have the physical resources to combat the illness anymore.
And so what cannabis does is it stimulates the appetite, it controls the vomiting, controls the nausea,
allows people to eat again, and even to enjoy eating again, which is quite an important thing for a lot of people
at this condition, and that allows them to put on the weight
that they then can use for their body to combat the illness.
Alright, a lot of doctors will say, baloney, this is all baloney, that you can take pills, synthesized marijuana does exactly the same thing.
True or false?
False.
The pill that they're talking about is the THC pill.
It will get you high like marijuana does, and it will also help to control the nausea like marijuana does.
It does not stimulate the appetite.
And the other problem is that if you take a pill and then you throw up, That pill's not going to help you anymore.
If you smoke marijuana, even if you do throw up, it's still in your bloodstream.
It's a much more efficient way of getting the benefits of cannabis.
Smoking it is more efficient than eating it.
I mentioned before, because of the time and the dosage questions, but in addition to that, in the case of someone who's having a lot of vomiting, you don't throw up once you smoke it.
You know, I'll bet you, had the question, the ballot question been, do you think people dying of cancer or AIDS should be able to get any damn drug they want, the answer would have still been yes.
What do you think?
Well, I think that the Arizona bill shows that you're completely right about that, Art, because that bill didn't just limit itself to marijuana, it was all Schedule I drugs.
Um, so there's, you know, that's much broader than what happened in California.
The Arizona bill was structured around the idea that our law enforcement is supposed to be directed at violent crime.
Right.
And the doctors and patients are not violent criminals.
So there were two parts of it.
The first part had to deal with allowing patients and doctors to use schedule one drugs, which includes marijuana.
The second part had to do with freeing non-violent drug offenders in order to allow police to
concentrate their resources on violent criminals.
As I mentioned already, a third of all state prisoners are in there for minor drug offenses
and two-thirds of all federal prisoners are in there for minor drug offenses.
Blocking those people up isn't making the streets any safer.
We need to get the violent criminals off the streets.
And that was one of the major...
That's why Barry Goldwater and all these other conservatives came forward in support of Proposition
So I think you're completely right.
I think that the public understands that someday one of us is going to possibly have a terminal condition.
That's right.
And we're not going to want our doctor to say, well, you know, the best thing for you is marijuana, but I can't tell you that.
So here's a hundred dollars worth of pills that you can take that may or may not work, but they'll give you strange side effects.
All right.
Other people will say this was just a foot in the door toward the eventual legalization of marijuana, period.
Would you agree with that?
I would say that... If you're being bluntly honest?
Well, bluntly honest, I would hope that it is.
Realistically, there's no reason to think that it would have to be like that at all.
You know, morphine is the Schedule 1 drug... I mean, excuse me, Schedule 2 drug.
It can be prescribed, but it's not legal.
So, you know, there's no reason to think that that is the case.
I personally have never been... seen the material that convinced me that making marijuana illegal has helped anything, or that going to prison is better for a person than smoking marijuana.
And particularly the argument that's been put forward that somehow, uh, this is to protect families that we have marijuana illegal.
Well, if you take the breadwinner of the family and you lock him away, you take the family car, you take the family house, you take all the bank accounts, you put the kids in foster care, how does that benefit the family again?
Somebody's gonna have to, if they're one of the anti-marijuana people, is gonna have to explain to me why that helps, because I don't see it.
Is that typical of what occurs when somebody's caught with a substantial amount of marijuana?
The scariest thing of all art is that it's completely arbitrary.
It depends on what the prosecutor decides to charge you with.
For example, if you get caught with two ounces of marijuana in California, one ounce is just a ticketable offense.
If you have two ounces, they can say it's for your personal use, then it's a misdemeanor.
If you have two ounces, they say intent to sell.
then you can lose everything. If they say you're part of a conspiracy, then you can be charged with the guy who drove
the boat from Columbia up here.
You might be charged with 14 tons of marijuana for your two ounces. And in that case, then they can really destroy your
life.
So that allows it to be political?
Correct.
And in fact, uh, there's a lot of evidence that's emerged that during the Nixon administration particularly, that the, uh, the reason that, you know, that he had a presidential commission look at the subject and they came out in favor of legalizing marijuana for adults.
But Nixon didn't follow up on that.
And there's actually more and more evidence has come up in the past few years that part of that was because this was a way of arresting the peace protesters against the war in Vietnam.
Yes.
And in one particular case in May of I believe it was 1971 they rounded up 8,000 demonstrators in Washington DC and held them throughout the weekend of a national protest over marijuana and basically that was just to get them out of the protest.
Let me tell you a little story, maybe you can tell me what happened.
I was working for KENI in Anchorage, Alaska many, many years ago, and I was the guy who ripped a bulletin off the wire up there that said the Alaskan Supreme Court had just decriminalized marijuana Two ounces or less is what I'm recalling. I'm not sure of
the details.
And you could actually grow it in Alaska. And this lasted for a period of time.
And I can't remember how long because I left.
But for a period of time in Alaska, it was virtually legal to grow and to smoke.
Right. That was in 1976, Alaska versus Raven, commonly known as the Raven decision.
What they said there was that because the Alaska state constitution includes the right
to privacy, that the government doesn't have any business looking into your house to see
if you have marijuana or not, or if you're smoking marijuana in your home, that that
was protected under the right to privacy.
That remained the case until 1990, I believe it was.
It could have been 1992, but I think it was 1990.
There was a referendum in the state, which I believe was 54% in favor of that, that recriminalized
it.
However, two years later, went back to the court process and the court said, guess what?
The Constitution is still the same.
You still have the right to privacy, and so it's unenforceable.
So what the police have done in lieu of that, rather than agreeing with obeying the Constitution, they've come up with what they call knock and talk, which is where they go to someone's house, they knock on the door, they try to invite them in, and then they look around.
Right.
Would it be alright if we come in?
And a lot of people have no idea they have the right to say, well actually, no.
no exactly and in fact i've been very good legal section division is that you
threshold what you step outside your house in your public dedicated to
protecting a a beer in hand uh... the police came to the door he was in his house you
know and they said probably step outside he stepped outside the arrested him
for uh... having a beer in public public intoxication right now he stayed in the
house then he wouldn't be able to be arrested for that and also he could have kept
the police from All right, what's going on now in California?
Since the passage of this initiative, the federal government huffed and puffed and then seemed to back away a little bit.
Sorry about the huffing and puffing.
But they did, right?
So what is the current status?
What's going on?
Well, what's going on is that there's a group of physicians who have sued the federal government.
One of the things that you'll notice, Art, is that the feds made a lot of noise, but they didn't go to court to challenge this, because they had no legal standing.
Right.
And so instead they decided to use threats and intimidation.
Well, there's a group of doctors and patients who have sued the federal government now, arguing that this violates a doctor's First Amendment right to free speech.
To the extent that the federal government can say you can't prescribe marijuana because we have federal regulations of what prescriptions are, but they can't tell you and me when we're talking to each other what we're allowed to say to each other.
And so the California law is written to accept a recommendation rather than a prescription because we were aware at this very point.
and so i when the feds came in and they said you know we are all
will go out to doctors who make this recommendation then that created the opportunity for a patient on
freedom of speech is civil liberty suit on the part of the uh... medical
consumer assistance of course in other words at some point somebody's gonna get arrested for marijuana
and i'm gonna say i'm smoking this on recommendation of doctor so-and-so
and then it's going to head to the courts right right uh...
where do you think it's going to go and how's it going to end up
well it's going to depend upon that doctor's recommendation If the doctor comes in and says that they did recommend it, then it would be up to the jury, and I think the juries are going to be pretty broad-minded, to tell you the truth.
I don't think that they're going to see this as having to be last resort or a near-death situation, because people don't really see that much of a danger caused by marijuana and I think
rightfully that that is the case.
So I think it's going to be expanded when those cases arrive.
What's the real problem we have right now is that it does require a specific doctor's
recommendation since the drug czar has made his threat and the Attorney General has made
her threat, doctors are afraid to give that recommendation.
So what you're really going to have is a patient who has AIDS or cancer or glaucoma for example
growing their own marijuana, their doctor won't recommend it but they know it will help
them so they're going to grow it anyway and then when it goes to court then the question
is going to be you don't have a doctor's recommendation.
Now will the jury be allowed to hear the testimony about that glaucoma or are they not going
That's made the Massachusetts situation interesting.
The legislature there is proposing a state certification of certain conditions.
Like, if you have glaucoma, you can get certified with the state of Massachusetts that you have glaucoma.
Just because you have a condition that marijuana is known to benefit, then you would be exempt from the marijuana laws.
However, that hasn't been passed or anything.
This is in the discussion stage.
What's going on here in California, back to this, is that we have new legislation that's been introduced to the state legislature that tightens up some of the loose areas, the language of the initiative.
For example, the phrase, it says a physician's recommendation.
Well, during the campaign, our opponents were saying, well, physician, that could be a chiropractor, that could be a veterinarian.
You know, of course, that's absurd.
You're not going to get a veterinarian to prescribe marijuana for your condition.
So, it was really a silly argument.
However, we have a definition of what a physician is in the state commercial code.
And so, the legislation that's going in before the state legislature was going to specify that in compliance with the The most exciting positive sign, I think, is the decision to allow the Cannabis Buyers Club in San Francisco to reopen.
So there's a little clean up that's going on.
A lot of it's going to be happening in the courts though.
The most exciting positive sign, I think, is the decision to allow the Cannabis Buyers Club
in San Francisco to reopen.
Because- Any idea how the street cops are being instructed right now?
I don't know statewide.
Actually, I do know the state police.
One of the things that the Attorney General has said is that when they apprehend people with marijuana, that they have to make inquiries about medical conditions, and that they also, when they are monitoring buyers clubs, which are locally sanctioned sources or outlets of marijuana operations, That one of the things that you're supposed to keep track of is if there are people under the age of 18 who are going in and getting cannabis, that they should consider taking action against those clubs rather than ones where there are 18 and above clientele.
There's also getting to be more and more clubs that are getting local recognition in order to identify the patients.
But that's not going to totally work because the law doesn't say you have to belong to
a buyers club.
Alright, yeah, I wanted to ask, if you're standing behind the counter in one of these
buyers clubs and somebody comes in obviously of legal age, what do they have to produce
to be able to buy?
Anything at all?
The way that the clubs that I've been visiting and talking to the people that are working
is that they require you to come in with a doctor's diagnosis and preferably a written
recommendation.
If they won't give you a written recommendation, then the person behind who is issuing the photo ID card will then look up the doctor's name in the registry of doctors.
You can't just go in and give your friend's name and say, hey, you know, when they call, tell them you're a doctor.
No.
No.
They look you up in a registry of doctors, or they look up the physician there, and then they call the physician, and then the physician, if they give an oral recommendation over the telephone to the Buyer's Club, then the patient will be issued a photo identification.
That's becoming more or less standard at the moment, it looks like.
But it could be done on diagnosis only.
They could come in prove their HIV positive or they're presently being treated with chemotherapy or glaucoma or how many different things and get issued an ID based on that short of a physician recommendation because you're not going to get those.
Actually, this is really the big problem, is that because the law requires a physician's recommendation, there are thousands of patients who were, before the election, were getting marijuana from these clubs simply because they had a condition, like AIDS, most commonly in San Francisco, I guess, and AIDS and cancer are the two biggest groups that are using this medicine right now.
But since the election, because of that specific requirement for a physician's recommendation,
the clubs are having to turn away a lot more people than they actually were before.
It was an unfortunate aspect of the language that it actually had, well it wasn't intended
to have a converse effect, but when the federal government threatened to all these doctors,
a lot of doctors have in fact rescinded their recommendations.
And worst of all, Art, is the doctors who are dealing with the really, um, people in the worst condition.
You know, like if you're a doctor who has patients who you have to prescribe morphine to.
Right.
Now, and then you tell them, well, they're trying to... Chris, they're afraid of that.
Listen, hold on.
We're at the top of the hour.
We'll be right back and we will open the lines.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from January 23rd, 1997.
This is a presentation of the Coast to Coast AM concert.
Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired on January 23, 1997.
We are talking about marijuana with Chris Conrad.
Him.
Marijuana.
Chris Conrad is Founder and Global Operations Director of the Business Alliance for Commerce in him.
Or BOC.
D-A-C-H.
Director of the Family Council on Drug Awareness.
And a board member of the Hemp Industries Association.
He is the design and curator of the International Hash Marijuana Hemp Museum located in Amsterdam, Holland.
And we're going to find out how much he had to do with Prop 215 in a moment.
I haven't actually asked that yet.
And then we're going to go to the telephone.
So if you have questions, and I know you do, because the lines have been in gridlock for some time now, uh... warm-up your
auto dialer and come on in the twenty third nineteen ninety seven
on art bell somewhere in time We are going to proceed to phone calls in just a second.
Back now to Chris Conrad.
Chris?
Yes?
I have one other question for you, and then we're going to go to the phones, if that's alright with you.
My pleasure.
I asked you about Alaska, and you said that the change in the law there Was based on privacy rights in the Alaskan Constitution, correct?
That's correct.
Does the Alaskan Constitution have privacy rights that exceed those that we perceive to be inherent in the Fourth Amendment of the U.S.
Constitution?
Yes, because they have explicit, as you mentioned, we're more or less dealing with an implicit situation where it's quite clear to a lot of us that our founders of this nation had the intention that privacy be respected at a very high level, but they didn't really say it outright.
They just put certain restrictions on what the government can do, whereas in Alaska, they specifically said privacy is a right, and so they have much stronger protection there.
Okay.
All right, to the phones.
On our anti-marijuana line, you're on the air with Chris Conrad.
Hi.
Hello.
Where are you?
I'm in Santa Monica.
All right.
In California.
Yes, sir.
How are you doing?
Fine.
Good.
I caught you as I was driving home tonight.
I have a girlfriend that passed away unfortunately May 1st at a cancer patient in John Wayne Cancer Institute.
Right.
And, um, you know, she had the pot pills, I guess, Chris, is that what you would call them, the pot pills?
Well, THC pills, Marinol.
THC, so it is a pill that's out there, isn't it?
That's correct.
Yeah, and is that something that doctors can prescribe?
Yes, it is.
Okay, well, you know, it didn't work for her.
And I presume it didn't work for most people.
Well, you're not making an anti-marijuana case.
You're making a pro-marijuana case.
You're, um... No, I'm not making a pro-marijuana case.
Well, you really are.
Uh, isn't he, Chris?
Because, uh, that is your argument.
Actually, yes, because this is one of our points, is that that pill only contains one out of 60 medically active compounds, whereas the herb itself contains 60.
Yeah, but Chris, you know what though?
The federal government has picked out one compound and said this is medicine and the
rest are not.
But reality shows us, there's research that's been done in Czechoslovakia and the European
countries showing that another compound, cannabidiol or CBD, actually is more helpful for some
of these conditions such as pain.
Yeah, but Chris, you know what though?
Tell me.
Whether or not you're smoking pot or taking the pill, it really doesn't help if you've
that cancer or you have AIDS.
How do you know that, sir?
I mean, what are you basing that on?
Well, I'm basing it on a true life story.
No, you're basing it on your girlfriend, sir, who didn't smoke.
You said she didn't smoke, she took the pills.
Well, she did take the pills and they didn't work and then she smoked and that didn't work either.
Ah.
The only thing that worked was morphine.
Ah.
Was she using it for pain or for her appetite or for rest?
What exactly was she trying to achieve?
She was trying to achieve, I guess, you know, peace of mind before she really got bad.
But only the morphine really worked when it really got bad.
And so what I'm trying to say is, I mean, it's kind of like a placebo, isn't it?
Whether or not it's a pill or even smoking the pot, that's not correcting the problem.
It's not even going to...
Good.
Alright, that's a fair question.
The placebo effect.
How much good medical documentation is there for the benefits, or is it a grey area, Chris?
Well, there's a couple of things I need to preface this with.
One, is that it's not a cure, it's a treatment for symptoms normally.
It doesn't, even glaucoma, it doesn't cure it, it's just a temporary relief from the symptoms of it.
The same is true for cancer and for everything.
It's a temporary thing.
Now, the other thing is that not all medicines work for everybody, no matter what.
That's right.
And so the fact that one patient, it works for one patient and not for another,
that's fairly normal for any medicine.
Now, as far as the placebo effect is concerned, that's something that there's a little,
there is some validity to that, that marijuana may have some placebo effects,
but at the same time, there's a lot of documentation.
There's at least 60 human studies that have been done.
There were over 100 medical reports filed in the 19th century.
There have been 12,000 studies, they say, done on marijuana in this century, mostly looking for harmful effects and, in fact, finding quite a few beneficial ones.
one of the more recent ones that was approved by the government
and mind you that the government has been blocking a lot of this research
in 1988 the Vinci Guerra report which was published in the New York Medical Review
you find that they worked with patients and they found that smoking marijuana was more
effective than marijuana and they did that with tests where they used placebo marijuana
and regular marijuana placebo marijuana is where they take the cannabinoids or at least
the THC out of it so it still has the same effect of smoking it still has the same effect
of taste the same smell etc so that the patient would if it's a placebo they can't tell the
difference and they still found that there were beneficial effects in that case so I
would say that your girlfriend it sounds like she was just one of the unfortunate ones that
it didn't happen to work for and it doesn't work for everybody another issue here though
is that certain kinds of marijuana work better for certain kinds of conditions and you know
I said there are these 60 different medicines that are all in there the ratio of those medicines
to each other is called a cannabinoid profile that's critical to whether the cannabis works
for your problems or not for example if you're trying to use it because you can't sleep or
because you're in pain you probably want something with more CBD in it if you're using it because
you're depressed or because of your glaucoma you probably want something with more THC
the way the law is set up now we don't know what's in any of them
alright let's address physical and psychological dependence is there physical dependence on
marijuana it does not fit the classical definition of addiction because there are no withdrawal
You don't need to increase your dosage to continue to use it and so forth.
So it doesn't fit in the classical symptoms of addiction.
and in fact it's not physically addictive.
What we run into is what they call the psychological addiction.
And that's so nebulous it's really hard to say.
I know, personally I know there's some people who use too much of it and it's somewhat detrimental
in their lives.
It's relatively, as if they were drinking more alcohol or something, it's not that bad, but it is still too much.
And so, you know, I can't give it any kind of a carte blanche.
All right, so psychological addiction, perhaps to the degree that a guy who's at work all day,
he's had a stressful day, comes home, has a martini.
You might do it every day, just as a part of your normal life, which in fact, when they talk about psychological addiction, they say that if you do it every day, that means you're psychologically addicted.
Well, I brush my teeth every day, so what is that exactly saying?
It's kind of a nebulous thing, but for individuals, if they find it's interfering with their life, then definitely they should cut back.
What I really find, Art, though, is that There are people who, if their life is out of control, it's very convenient to use marijuana as an excuse or as a scapegoat.
Like, oh, my kid was doing good in school and then he started smoking marijuana and started having problems.
Well, chances are your kid was having problems and then maybe they started smoking marijuana or maybe there's no relationship at all, but it's not really fair to, particularly for your own self, to say, well, marijuana messed up my life.
In an ideal world, Chris, would you have marijuana laws similar to alcohol laws, in other words, not dispensed to underage?
My personal view is that we should have about an 18-year age of consent on it, and part of that actually, Art, is that I think whatever age you set, there's going to be a little trickle down.
There are some people who are not going to be quite that age who are going to look like it, people who sneak into shows.
I think we have to keep it old enough that even the trickle down is still going to be post-puberty.
I'm really against adolescents and people going through puberty using cannabis.
I don't think that they're psychologically prepared for it.
May I ask this, Chris?
What about this, you know, people who smoke marijuana say, alright, music is better, food
is better, sex is better, and on and on and on.
In other words, experiences are enhanced.
Is there any actual evidence, uh, documentable evidence to prove that really is true?
Or is it a, is it all a mirage?
Well, now we're to the question about the psychological effects of cannabis.
What I would say is that there have not been any clinical studies that I know that have dealt with the mechanism.
However, we have medical literature going back.
to the Vedas of Hinduism.
There are some of those that talk about the wonders of cannabis
for increasing men's virility and women's sexuality and so forth.
So it's been known for a long time that it has these effects.
But as far as actual clinical studies that really show how that works
or to demonstrate it, I haven't seen those yet.
There was a study where they found that young men who had smoked marijuana had a temporary reduction in their sperm count.
That was played up to a big extent, almost to the extent of making it sound like people might become sterile from smoking marijuana, which was not at all close to being true.
But one of the things that that same study showed with the decline was that people who
continued to smoke marijuana or who did not, within 60 days the sperm count was back to
normal and that their ability to be sexually stimulated was the same whether they were
high or not.
One of the things that falls into that category has to do with the enhanced blood flow that
comes from smoking of cannabis.
A lot of our sexual stimulation is actually caused by that blood flow.
There is a physiologically demonstrable reason as to why people might become more sexually
excited.
However, when they have done the studies with animals, they find that they have the same
physiological response but yet their sexuality does not increase.
There is obviously some kind of psychological, sensual, intercommunicative aspect of cannabis
that seems to be inherent to people and does not apply across the board to other animals.
Wild Card Line, you are on the air with Chris Conrad.
Hi, where are you placed?
I am in Missoula, Montana.
And Chris, real informative, it is real good to hear that there is so much information
on the positive side.
I wanted to ask.
How, in your findings of what it does and everything, I'm sure that you've been out there in the streets a little bit.
You're probably a smoker yourself.
I'm a 13-year smoker of marijuana for both social and medical reasons.
Did you ever find any connection, maybe, between the drugs coming into the country and maybe the police force, a little cahoots there, money-wise?
Well, if you want to get into that, you should probably read The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia to find out how the military was involved in transporting heroin to this country.
And I think it's really ironic that you have somebody like Oliver North, who has been, actually he's under indictment in Costa Rica.
Wait, is it Costa Rica?
No, maybe it is Costa Rica.
I have to look at my map here.
But anyway, he's under indictment in Central America because of his involvement with smuggling tons of cocaine.
Yes, it is Costa Rica.
The Senate of Costa Rica had hearings, and they found that he and a number of other people involved in the Iran-Contra affair actually were involved with cocaine smuggling into the United States, and he hasn't been brought up on any charges, and yet some guy on the street who's giving marijuana to sick people is subject to going to prison for years and years.
Well, I don't think, though, that it's restricted to one political side of the spectrum, because look at all the questions surrounding Nina.
Right.
No, I absolutely agree with you, Art.
Unfortunately, this is not part of an issue here.
Both parties are up their necks in the special interest in this dirty dealing that's been going around, and there's plenty of blame to go around.
I think there's plenty of cred to go around for heroic people who are willing to risk their own liberty in order to help out sick and dying people like the medical buyers clubs around the country.
All right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Chris Conrad.
Where are you, please?
I'm in New Orleans.
Yes, sir.
Uh, how you doing, Chris?
Alright!
I'm glad there's somebody out there like you.
Well, I hope you pick up a copy of my books, Hemp for Health and Hemp for the Lifeline of the Future, and spread them around.
Is there any place around New Orleans locally that, uh...
That's a really good point.
Chris, you're talking to literally every state in the union, not just Louisiana, but all of them.
And a lot of them are looking at California and Arizona, and they're asking, I'm sure, what can we do in our state?
What can they do?
Well, as far as I know, Vermont, excuse me, New Hampshire is the only state that's actually got legalization, or actually, legalization is a tricky word.
We're talking about age of consent, okay?
So, please understand, I'm not talking about adolescence again.
That's the only state that I know of that's moving ahead with decriminalization for adults of marijuana.
At the same time, we've got about 10 or 11 states that have decriminalization, which includes California, meaning that It's a ticket offense, it's not a prison offense.
There are, as I said, four states that introduced temp legislation last year.
We're expecting about ten to do it this year.
The medical marijuana issue seems to be breaking out all over, as we said, Massachusetts.
It's going to be debated in Virginia, because they have a medical marijuana bill that some politicians are trying to rescind, similarly with Ohio.
Alright, so what do you advise this fellow in Louisiana?
Well, what I would advise is that you need to be going through your state legislature yourself and talking to the legislatures, finding out who it is that would be interested and from what angle.
We haven't found a wild card, if you don't mind my using the word art, a wild card that everybody agrees with.
In certain parts of the country, the agricultural issue, the pesticides issue, stuff like that makes hemp very compelling.
Other parts of the country, medical marijuana is.
You know, it took me by surprise, personally, that in Arizona, the big question was violent crime versus non-violent crime.
I mean, non-violent offenses, should I say.
Well, that's one big issue.
What about the farming issue?
We're being heard through a lot of the farm country.
If hemp was legal to grow, how much of a benefit for farmers would there be?
It would be staggering.
In fact, during World War II, the federal government had about a million acres of hemp grown by farmers.
It produced and distributed a film called Hemp for Victory that was shown all over the country to farmers to encourage them to grow hemp.
It even had a program where 4-H club members were encouraged to grow one or two acres of
hemp as a project, which was then shifted and sent over to the mostly military application.
There was about 50 mills that were set up around the country.
The federal government prepared and gave people loans for equipment to process the hemp.
The mills that were run, in addition to producing jobs and textiles and so forth at the local
community level, they also were able to power themselves up with the leftover bits of wood,
or as they call it, the inner part of the hemp stalk away from the fiber, in order to
run it and then sell energy back to the utility companies.
Hemp doesn't require pesticides or herbicides or nearly as much, as I say, of chemical fertilizers.
Because it's such a hardy, rugged plant.
Part of it has to do with this resin that it produces, which has the cannabinoids in it.
Whether it's THC or low THC, apparently insects don't like it that much.
And it also filters out ultraviolet.
All right.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Chris Conrad.
Hi.
Hello.
All right.
Hello, Mr. Conrad.
Hello.
May I have one question and a comment?
All right.
Where are you, sir?
This is Ralph from Browning, Montana.
All right.
My first question was about, say if weed was legalized and sold like Marlboro cigarettes, would the government regulate the THC like they're doing with the nicotine?
Well, that's a good question.
There's all this big argument about nicotine levels being manipulated by tobacco companies.
What about THC levels in a legal environment?
Actually, that's a very good question.
During the 1970s, there was a lot of speculation that the federal government would authorize certain lower THC kinds of cannabis to be available and keep higher THC forms off the market.
And, of course, they didn't do that at all.
They kept the blanket approach.
A lot of the modern thinking that we're hearing, though, is that the higher THC is probably better because you don't want people to smoke so much.
You know, it's actually the smoke is where the So, in other words, if they get high by taking one puff or two puffs, they're not doing very much damage to their lungs, but they're achieving the blissful results of marijuana.
Right.
And then you get to, like, industrial hemp, which at .3% THC, you might have to smoke a kilo of.
And, you know, to get high, first off, you couldn't even physically do that.
But second off, even if you did, just think of all that particulate matter you're getting into your lungs.
An entire shirt or a pair of pants or something.
Right, exactly.
Alright, on our anti-marijuana line, you're on the air with Chris Conrad.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
This is Kelly from Chico, California.
You oppose the use of marijuana, Kelly?
I do.
I'm an alcohol and drug counselor.
One of the things that I think has been failed to be mentioned is the physiological effects.
All right, look, we'll cover that.
Can you afford to hold on?
I'm sorry, we're at a break here at the bottom of the hour.
All right, good.
We'll bring you both back right after the bottom of the hour.
Chris Conrad is my guest.
We're discussing hemp, marijuana, Mary Jane.
We'll have to come up with all the names.
We'll be right back.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 23rd 1997
She has only whispers of some quiet conversations She's coming in from the defense
Moonlit wings reflect the stars that...
...are close at hand Why don't you ask him if he's going to stay?
Why don't you ask him if he's going to let me be?
Why don't you tell me what's going on?
Why don't you tell me?
You're listening to Art Bells Somewhere In Time Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 23, 1997.
It certainly is, and I'm Art Bell.
My guest is Chris Conrad.
we are having a discussion about marijuana.
Sound of explosion.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 23, 1997.
Sound of explosion.
Sound of wind.
Back to where we go, Chris Conrad and my caller on line one.
Caller, go ahead.
Yeah, Art, the point that I wanted to speak to is what marijuana smoking does to the brain.
Alright.
The norepinephrine, the serotonin, and the dopamine that we're just starting to fine-tune and find out about, there's a good 150 more of those Alright, that's a fair question.
neurotransmitters that we have no idea what they even do, but we know that they're strongly
connected to mood.
When you smoke marijuana, have you ever seen what that looks like through an MRI imaging
machine?
It looks like the 4th of July.
Alright, that's a fair question.
The effect on the brain, Chris, how much do we know and how much don't we know?
Well, there's always room for more research on these kind of things.
One of the things we know is that it doesn't affect those dopamine receptors and so forth.
Some of the things he was talking about, it has some effect on, but primarily you've got these specialized receptors in the brain that are clustered in certain areas, such as the area dealing with emotion and there's some into memory areas and so forth, and it seems to be, and movement, movement is an important one.
So when people smoke marijuana, for example, it's good for problems like epilepsy or convulsive problems and things like that, and multiple sclerosis, where people are having a problem with spasticity or ataxia.
For example, spasticity is an involuntary movement of a muscle, and ataxia is where you can't move even when you want to.
And cannabis seems to allow the neurological transmission of data to be more effective.
Now, there was one study that was done by Dr. Robert Heath in Florida
that alleged to find damage caused by marijuana.
However, the research that was done was done in such a bad way.
There was contamination, there was bias, there was damage that was attributable to known causes that he tried to blame on the marijuana.
It's been fairly well discredited.
There hasn't been any data that really shows any serious harm whatsoever from it.
Now if you're talking about not liking the mood that it puts people in, I really can't go anywhere with that.
It's up to you whether you like your mood or not.
Well, Chris, you mentioned memory and motor activity.
There's much more.
It's hallucinogenic.
So we know that it affects the auditory part of the brain, the upper right and left lobes, the back part, the visual perception in the back of the brain.
Of course, it affects the memory.
But I think the problem that we're starting to run into is an exhaustion of these brain amines and these neurotransmitters.
After a long extended period of use, our brain no longer is able to effectively reproduce the neurotransmitters of serotonin and norepinephrine.
and we find that we have a reduction in that and that's directly altered to our mood and
I think that's probably where amotivational syndrome eventually sets in.
Now I've spent a lot of time smoking an awful lot of weed and hung out a lot with the grateful
dead and I think after 5 or 10 years you may not experience the amotivational syndrome
right up front but after a while when these natural chemicals start exhausting themselves
that you just basically become fried.
Now, have you ever met anybody that smoked a lot of marijuana after many years, and they just seem to have that amotivational fried syndrome?
The fried syndrome.
I suppose you can abuse anything, Chris.
Well, there's an assumption being made here that no one who smokes marijuana is amotivated,
which I don't buy.
Personally, I think watching television probably amotivates people more than anything else.
Having the drug czar take away people's election results makes people not want to vote.
So there are some things that are motivationally problematic that don't have anything to do
with marijuana.
But in terms of what you're talking about there, yeah, it affects people's sound receptors.
People think the music sounds better sometimes.
You're talking about the Grateful Dead.
People that I know seem to like it better when they're stoned than when they're straight.
You know, I can't really criticize them for that.
You know, that's just the way they feel.
Or people who smoke marijuana and then food tastes better to them, maybe you don't like that, but you know, I don't really see... How is sending anybody to prison helping any of that?
How is the laws against marijuana helping any of that?
Alright, we'll let that hang in the air.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Chris Conrad.
Hi.
Yes, hi.
Where are you, sir?
Madison, Wisconsin.
Okay.
My question to Chris was that, you know, this is such an interesting and amazing plant.
What are the uses that it could be a substitute for paper, you know, rather than the deforestation and the landfill use with wood being, you know, we're cutting up trees.
And also I've heard something like it could be used for fuel.
I guess my question to you then is, Is all this being held back industrially because of maybe, you know, messing up the economy with all the different industries out there?
Actually, basically anything that's made out of timber, fossil fuels, or cotton can be made just as efficiently.
It's often of a higher quality and usually with less environmental harm by using hemp, plus producing more raw material per acre.
So there's a lot of good solid reasons of why it should be available.
As best as I can tell, the main thing holding it back is the DEA's power over classification.
Because they don't make the distinction between industrial hemp and marijuana that gets people high.
they have this arbitrary absolute control over those scheduling
and they have a process they're supposed to go through as i mentioned earlier to define what goes into what
category but they don't follow their own process it's like we signed a treaty, the
single convention treaty on narcotic drugs in nineteen sixty eight
that treaty states that the united states will provide and maintain the availability
of marijuana for medical purposes the united states has never made that treaty
uh... all of these medical arguments aside is it simply time
that the united states had a grown-up national dialogue on whether or not to legalize marijuana
you I would say that that is the fundamental thing that has been lacking, and it was deliberately contrived by the Reagan administration to cut off the discussion of it, and actually a lot of research data was deliberately destroyed by the government during that time period, and so we're continuing to suffer from that.
The point of the whole thing is that this country is a democracy that's supposed to be based upon the sharing, the equal sharing of ideas, wherein informed voters are able to make decisions.
That's one of the things that's been very hard to have in this country.
When we finally did have it, the voters decided that medical marijuana at least should be available, and then we have the federal government come in and say, well they were hoodwinked.
Well, that's bloody Sleep with the switch. These are the Rockies you're on
there with Chris Conrad. Hello Hello, this is Michelle from Orlando
Orlando, Florida. Oh, yeah, and I would like to inform your guests that I am a
glaucoma casualty and I believe that if I had been given
at least an
experimental Basis marijuana. I probably wouldn't be blind today because
I have you know a lot of complications with my eyes and
You know to eye operations and you know, I just believe that it could all be prevented
I mean, I know that you can't really cure glaucoma, but you can sure reduce its effects on the optic nerve
if you've got something that will remove the fluid from the eye.
And these drugs that they give us, the eye drops, you know, you have to take more and more and more of those
to get the same effect.
And yet I'm hearing that with marijuana, that isn't the case.
Is that true, Chris?
With regard to, say, reducing the liquid in the eye, which is a problem, I guess, with glaucoma, is there increased dosage required to achieve the same effect, or is it level?
No, it's the same amount.
Cannabis acts as a diuretic.
It causes people to urinate, and so it draws moisture from throughout the body, the mouth, the eyes, the mucous membranes, and it doesn't require more and more.
It's kind of an unexplained process as to how it causes this to happen, but it's definitely true what you're saying.
Interestingly enough, in Florida there are I believe two glaucoma patients out of the
eight people who get legal medical marijuana provided free from the United States federal
government.
Two of them in Florida have a medical use for glaucoma.
One of them is Elvie Musica who is a good friend of mine.
Another case is Robert Randall who was in Washington, D.C.
when it happened.
And in his case it's been documented very clearly that he was expected to go blind within
six months in the 1970s.
I believe in 1976 he got arrested for growing his own marijuana because he found the halo
effect that indicates the high pressure in the eyes.
When he smoked marijuana that went away.
And so he started growing his own and he got arrested for it.
They anticipated he would be blind in six months but because he's been on this program
of using it regularly, 20 years later he still has his eyesight.
Elvie Musica thinks her eyesight is even better.
But most importantly to me from what your story is, where I feel it the most myself,
is you're saying you didn't even get a chance to find out if it worked or not.
My dad died of cancer.
He was under morphine.
He wanted to try marijuana to see if it would help some of the insomnia, the irritation, the discomfort, the pain, the loss of appetite, etc.
And he couldn't ever use it.
And that to me is almost like the worst of all.
Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't work, but at least people should get a chance to find out is that what motivates you
it has nothing to do with it is no doubt in fact uh... you were talking about my involvement with
the proposition to fifteen yes he has a point of view as well
as i said i got involved with the movement
primarily out of an environmental interest an economic interest in restoring industrial hap
um...
during the course of the of course i learned a lot of things that i had known
before about the medical utility about the social aspect and even religious
uses of cannabis which is a whole nother show in itself practically but nonetheless
you know to be in that situation of having my father there you know dying wanting to try the marijuana
his doctor wouldn't even acknowledge it at all he was afraid to do it because he
didn't want to get in trouble and didn't want you know he thought
I saw the story of a doctor not very long ago who was prescribing drugs for people who were dying, and basically he was doing what we were talking about earlier.
it's very hard on me. Look, I know the DEA is a kind of a terrorist organization for
doctors in the sense that they monitor even the normal drugs. I saw the story of a doctor
not very long ago who was prescribing drugs for people who were dying and basically he
was doing what we were talking about earlier. If they wanted something, he gave it to them.
Big deal.
The people are dying.
They know what their level of tolerance is, and what they need to prevent pain, so he gave it to them.
DEA came in, goodbye license.
Not, uh, not, uh, uh, an unusual story.
Was this at Dr. Boone, Virginia?
Yeah, that's right.
Right, and again, this is a case where a lot of doctors are afraid to prescribe heavy medications because they don't want their license to be scrutinized and perhaps told.
So then you find a few doctors like this guy, whose name I don't remember by the way, who are willing to take the chance and they get targeted by the federal government.
So now my understanding is there's something like two to four hundred patients that he has that no longer have access to pain medication?
That's correct.
Several of them have committed suicide.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Chris Conrad.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
Hi, Chris.
Hi.
So, Art, I am so glad you're having this show.
Back in 89, I heard Chris Conrad on the radio station that I now produce radio shows for.
And I heard this information and it just totally changed my life.
My partner and I have produced hundreds of hours of programming about hemp.
One of the subjects that hasn't got mentioned yet, though, Chris wanted to talk about it, was the hemp seed.
I happen to know the researcher, Dr. Roberta Hamilton, who is a biochemist from UCLA,
who was doing a research project to find the most nutritious food on the planet.
It just turned out to be the hemp seed.
This is a woman that's a grandmother in her 70s, and she has been speaking out a lot about the nutritional
value because it is the perfect balance.
When we're talking about diseases with immune system deficiencies, like AIDS, like cancer,
the chemotherapy kills their immune systems.
Eating this seed or taking the oil can rebuild our immune systems.
I call it preventative medicine.
Are you aware of that, Chris?
Yeah, and I was trying to work it in a couple of times myself.
This is she who remembers.
Yes, this is she who remembers.
I thought I recognized your voice.
In fact, the hemp seed contains the essential fatty acids that help with the immunological system in this ratio that's the closest to our human anatomy of any other seed out there.
So, it's in a proportion that works the best for people.
It also has something in it called Ediston that helps the digestion process.
Plus, it lubricates the bowels and improves bowel movements, etc.
You can't even make this stuff up, you know?
It's like, the more we have researched it, the more amazing it becomes.
In fact, jumping away from the hemp seed for a moment, Mercedes-Benz, the company that owns that, is now planning on using hemp fiber for their cars because they found it's better than fiberglass.
You know?
I mean, the things that we're coming up with about hemp are things that, at one point, I would have written off as being jokes, but now, as time goes by, the scientific data comes in, and it's more and more impressive.
Alright, if I'm a scientist, and I want to study, I want to get a grant, and I want to study hemp, somehow or another, and I want to, I want to come up with a, I'm sort of predetermining that I'm going to get a negative result, something the government can depend on to continue this war on drugs, war on marijuana, am I likely to get funded?
If you promise to get negative results, very likely, yes.
And if I just want to do independent research, they're going to be afraid of the result?
They're not going to fund me?
That's about right.
There's Dr. Abrams here in California.
To put three years in a row, he's put proposals before the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Food and Drug Administration.
He's gotten his protocols approved, but the government won't release the marijuana.
He needs like one ounce of marijuana to do this study.
Sure, brother.
price is $500 and he spent over $15,000 doing the paperwork to get the permission for $500
worth of marijuana and the feds still won't release it to him.
Another interesting twist here though is that a lot of researchers still change the thrust
of their research in order to make it sound negative, in order to get continuous funding.
And what I'm thinking about specifically is there's a study that was done on migraine
headaches in marijuana.
Well, throughout history, we know that marijuana has been used for migraine headaches, to treat it.
Well, they did a study where they found that marijuana smoking was keeping people from having migraine headaches.
Then when they took away the marijuana, the migraine headaches came back.
So they said it gave people migraine headaches?
Exactly.
They said that the withdrawal symptom of marijuana is that it causes migraine headaches.
I see.
Anti-marijuana line, you're on the air with Chris Conrad.
Hi.
Hi.
Where are you, sir?
I'm in Central Nebraska.
Alright.
My name is Monty and I'm a police officer.
I've been for 27 years.
Alright.
Go ahead.
A couple of questions for a gentleman is... Chris Conrad.
Chris Conrad.
Okay.
Chris, a couple of questions for you here.
Sure, Monty.
You say that the DEA has classified marijuana as a narcotic.
No.
As a Schedule 1 narcotic.
A Schedule 1 narcotic.
Okay.
In all the seminars and training sessions and everything that I've gone to in Nebraska, I realize we're somewhat isolated from the rest of the country, but I've never read or heard it classified as narcotic.
It's considered a controlled substance.
And I agree with you, a narcotic is a substance that does induce narcosis.
And it's never been presented to me in that manner.
Well, that's reassuring to me.
One of the reasons that they classified it as a narcotic was because there was a Federal Bureau of Narcotics that was in charge of it.
When they did the reclassifications in 1970 or 71, I believe it actually happened, that they approved it, they changed it to a class of hallucinogens and that's why they put it in Schedule 1.
Officer, if you go to a domestic dispute, you go to somebody's house, you get inside, you see a joint laying on a coffee table or something, What do you do?
I do what I have to.
I issue a citation if there's less than an ounce in the house in Nebraska.
We issue simply a citation to appear in court.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Same way with paraphernalia, which is a citation to appear in court.
I wanted to get a little further into this background on hemp.
You stated that the people who signed the constitution and so forth stated that hemp
should be considered to be necessary for security of this country.
Well essentially at that time that was true because hemp was used in the making of ropes
and it was needed for the rigging of ships and for securing cargoes, you know, both on land and sea.
That's about all they had at that time except for jute and flax and the marijuana plants, seeing as at times can be seen growing as high as 15 feet, would have the longest fiber, therefore it was the most efficient.
That's not necessarily true at this time.
I mean, there's no longer that big a need for a natural.
Officer, and Chris, we're at the top of the hour.
Officer, do you want to hang in there?
Well, I would, but I'm supposed to be out patrolling.
I just had a few comments.
I see.
Alright, well, you have made them, so when we get back from the news, Chris, you can hang on.
Yeah, I certainly can.
May I make one more comment, please?
Uh, not enough time unless you want to hang on.
Uh, I guess I'll just hang on.
Alright, hanging you are then, as we all are.
I'm Art Bell.
Well I think it's time to get ready To realize just what I have found, I have given
I have found, I have found, I have found I have found, I have found, I have found
I have found, I have found, I have found You're listening to Art Battle Somewhere in Time on Premier
Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from January 23, 1997.
My guest is Chris Conrad.
1997.
My guest is Chris Conrad.
We are discussing marijuana.
It is a full national radio discussion on marijuana.
Rational, I hope.
And we've got an officer on the line in Nebraska.
And so, back to Chris Conrad and the officer in Nebraska.
Officer, sorry to hold you over.
No choice.
I work by the clock.
Okay, I understand that.
Go ahead.
Another point I'd like to make is, as you know, the teen use of marijuana in this country has reached almost an explosive state.
That means we've got a lot more teen drivers that are smoking marijuana.
These kids aren't going to be smoking that marijuana at home.
They're going to be out on the road or somebody's house or something like that on the way back.
Do you feel that a person who's driving under the influence of marijuana is not an impaired driver and therefore a danger to the public?
Well, should I address your first series of questions first, or should I address this?
However you like.
Okay, let me just start with this one, because this is on the table.
First off, I do not endorse adolescent or teenage use of marijuana, so please don't misconstrue anything I'm saying.
Okay, fine.
Now, if you look at the statistics about what's going on, first off, marijuana hasn't been legalized and yet teenage use has gone up.
So therefore, keeping it illegal has not kept the use down.
Second off, teenage marijuana use is at a very high level right now.
What else has happened?
The relevant issue here is that teenage fatalities have gone down, teenage involvement in violent
crimes has gone down, teenage arrests for drug offenses have gone up, teenage student
SAT scores have gone up.
So there is no evidence whatsoever that teenagers smoking marijuana, which I don't favor, has
caused any social problem other than the fact that politicians are using it as an excuse
to continue this prohibition against cannabis, which they didn't ever justify in the first
place.
And if you could answer the question for me, officer.
If you have the choice that there is a truck driver coming towards you on the freeway,
they are either drunk or they are high on marijuana.
Sober is not an option.
But they're coming towards you and you're going towards them, which would you prefer to have a driver on?
Alcohol or on cannabis?
because we all know that death perception, time perception, and everything like that with marijuana use
is somewhat distorted.
It's still a fair question officer.
If sobriety is not an option.
If sobriety...
Well I don't see how you can...
I mean if...
I can't choose somebody who might be sober, right?
Right.
I guess I'd have to say I honestly don't know.
On that particular point.
Okay, well the Department of Transportation says that marijuana is much safer for drivers, and again, this is not my advocating that people drive, but I just think that the dangers of alcohol, which is legal, and it's illegal for teenagers, and the relative dangers of marijuana in society, they don't even really begin to compare.
Back to your first set of questions here having to do with how important is hemp now compared to what it used to be.
I think this is an example where the private sector has more of a right, I think, to make that determination.
I'm sure you're a good police officer and I'm not criticizing anyone's intentions on this, but have we stopped cutting down trees because we don't need wood and building supplies and paper anymore?
Have we stopped growing cotton that uses 17 pesticides?
We still need fiber for that.
We're not energy self-sufficient as far as I know.
I have a question, law enforcement point of view, while we've got him on the line.
Sure.
I think, Chris, you would agree, we don't want people out driving cars stoned, right?
Sure.
Alright, so if this officer stops somebody and he thinks they're under the influence of marijuana, does he have a way to find out?
I can request a urine sample on that.
It's very expensive, but it can be done.
But now that wouldn't tell you if they were high or not, because urine contains cannabinoids for... Actually, I think you'll find that the statutes in most states would simply go with the presence of the cannabinoids or the tetrahydrocannabinol within the bloodstream or the urine.
That's a really wasteful way of going about it because that means it's someone who's been exposed to cannabis or you know there's some other substances that can trigger a false positive there.
It wouldn't have any way of knowing at all if the person was high on marijuana or not in fact.
That's why what I really favor, I think that we need to have impairment testing or driving simulators in the vehicle with the officer in order to see if a person is capable of driving the vehicle.
I think that should be the real concern rather than whether they have cannabinoids in their urine.
The chances are there were probably something wrong there the officer wouldn't have stopped him to begin with.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Something else I'd like to mention.
You're talking about studies and so forth on the effects of marijuana on the human body.
I'm speaking second-handedly here when I say what I'm about to my wife's grandfather who was to me was very great man was a medical doctor and he told me that in the 30s I'm not sure the exact year but I'm sure probably somewhere around that 1937 year that you were talking the American Medical Association sent notices out to the doctors advising them to quit using what they was at that time was called cannabis indicus It was a heavy green liquid used to enhance painkillers.
And the reason that they put out with that time was that in some cases it had been found to cause softening of the brain tissue and they didn't feel that the risks were worth the benefits.
Well, I never saw that report or whatever that you're describing, so I'm again, just as second-hand as you are, I find that very doubtful.
What they did do was in about 1941, they withdrew marijuana from the National Pharmacopeia listing
of drugs, but that really had to do with the fact that between 1937 and 1941, hundreds
of doctors literally were harassed and arrested by the federal government for narcotics violations
by allowing people to use marijuana.
As far as I know, it was very much a self-defense method of keeping the doctors from losing
their license.
I'd be interested to see that though.
I mean, you know, I can't write these things off, but I haven't seen any data whatsoever
to indicate that cannabis has any tissue effect on the brain, even approaching what you're
describing.
So is there any way, Art, where if he can get some documentation on that, he can get
it to you and you forward it to me?
Well, I have a little difficulty there.
My wife's grandfather is since deceased, so I don't know where he's had his information.
Alright, officer.
Thank you.
I'll tell you what we'll do.
I'll tell you what we'll do.
I have not given you... I've got some commercials to do, because I wanted to get him back on the air.
So let me do those.
When we come back, if you have...
A phone number, Chris?
An address?
A book you want to plug?
Get it together.
We'll do that when you come back before I forget about it.
So stay right there.
we will be right back now we take you back to the night of january twenty third
nineteen ninety seven
on part of the whole somewhere in time right back now uh... to my guest
uh... chris conrad uh... chris uh... good zillion people here uh... want to
talk to you so let us proceed wildcard liner on the air with chris conrad
who is about to tell us in a moment about his book hello there
art how are you doing fine
well we look at the big picture art about you know
The Smoking Pot isn't even, nothing to really do with it.
What about all the other uses it has?
Well, we've been talking about that.
You know, I mean, if they legalized just the hemp part, the commercial use of it, it would mess up the whole economy.
You know, Dow Jones, all that.
Well, alright, that's a good question, Chris.
What about that?
The impact on our economy, forget the marijuana part of it, but just the industrial use part of it.
What would that do to our economy and to existing corporations?
Well, what it would primarily do is introduce a new domestically produced resource that would be able to supplement or replace other resources that are limited or running out, such as, we mentioned before, You're giving me the positive side.
that we would be able to increase our self-sufficiency.
Yeah, you're giving me the positive side.
What I'm asking is the negative impact on present or current industries.
Well, the only negative that comes to mind is that we lack a lot of the infrastructure that
is required to process it between the farm and the level of use.
For example, we have paper mills in this country that we need to give them pulp.
If we give them hemp stalks from a farm, that's not going to work.
So we've got a missing link in the process that's going to require investment to bring
that up to level.
But in a short term, that means that we're going to have an economic expense that's going
to take time to recap.
But in the long term, I think even that turns out to be a benefit because we develop new
technology and we will create a more sound economic infrastructure for the country.
I think where you're going to really get the hits are drug testing is going to take some
hits on this because it's just not doing anything for society.
What's your attitude about this new, they've got a brand new drug test by the way, mail it off, you know, test your children, have them pee in a little cup, seal it up, send it off to the government approved lab, and they will write back and tell you what your children are doing.
Yeah, I've heard about that.
Actually, what I've heard is that people are using that to test whether they can beat urine tests at work.
You know, I mean, you can test your urine at home and see whether whatever process you're using, like lemon juice or whatever various things people are using to try to get the THC out of the system, see how effective it is.
I think that's going to backfire really fast.
Alright, but as far as the, again, there's going to be a benefit to the commodities market.
It's going to increase the amount of overall agriculture.
It's going to increase the number of jobs, industrial hemp that is.
It's going to increase investment in research and development.
It's going to create jobs on a local level, creating the infrastructure.
There's shipping that's going to be involved.
It's pretty much overall positive.
Most of what we're talking about replacing here as a resource, Like I say, it's things that we're running out of, like timber, or things that we can't even grow very much of.
Cotton is so harmful to the environment that it was very limited of how much we can grow in this country.
And fossil fuels, of course, we import most of that.
So, as far as, you know, maybe some of these multinationals might have to concentrate more on developing a domestic operation in order to take advantage of the growth of the American economy.
The average citizen is going to definitely gain.
Alright, would you do it all at once or would you do it incrementally?
In other words, to lessen the economic downside or impact on corporations, would you incrementally allow production to begin to gear up slowly, not all at once, not just say marijuana suddenly, marijuana hemp products are all suddenly, as of this moment, legal?
What's going to happen in that regard, I think, is that we're going to have to be careful From the point of view of the farmer, if we just said throw it wide open, every farmer in America can grow as much hemp as they want.
We're not going to have the processing equipment or facilities on site and they're going to wind up with a lot of hemp that they don't have a use for immediately.
So it would have to be incrementally then?
Right.
Because as the infrastructure grows, then at that point the amount of production grows.
I think there's a real danger, you clearly and correctly pointed out, that if one part of the production process gets too far ahead it's going to throw the whole thing out of balance.
If somebody wants to get hold of you for information or get your book, what is the title of your book?
My book is currently available.
It's called Hemp, Lifeline to the Future.
That's available in various bookstores like Tower Records and Books.
Any bookstore can order it.
It's listed with the ISBN.
In March, I'm having a new book that's going to be released.
It's called Hemp for Health.
That's going to be available in health food stores and bookstores and things like that too.
So those are the two books.
For people who are interested in general information or who would like to make a donation to support some of the efforts of the Business Alliance for Commerce and Hemp, our address is P.O.
Box 71093.
71093 and that's Los Angeles, California and the zip is 90071.
Alright, any phone numbers?
Yes, we have a phone number which is area code 310-288-4152.
And when is that manned?
It's a service, so it's just a machine.
We pick it up periodically, and depending upon the volume of calls, we get back to you as soon as we can.
All right, that's Post Office Box 71093, Los Angeles, California, 90071.
3, Los Angeles, California, 90071.
Uh, the telephone number is 310-288-41...
Is it 5-2?
Correct.
And if people need more information, we'll send information about the book titles and availability also.
One other thing though, there are stores that specialize in hemp products, and the Hemp Industries Association has over 100 businesses in the United States and elsewhere, but primarily in the U.S.
that produce and provide hemp products And many of them also carry these books.
And so if people go and if you find a hemp store in your area, you can always check there
too.
And or anybody who's working with the Hemp Industries Association will have an opportunity
to get my books through them.
Are you doing this full time now or do you have another job?
Well, I do this pretty much full time between the research, the consulting, and some of
the other things that are tied in with it.
Primarily the consulting at this point, although I've been very busy researching for my new
book Hemp for Health for the past year or so.
How do you find media reaction generally?
You don't hear a lot of big national discussions like this that we're having this morning about marijuana.
Does the media shy away?
That's an interesting point because in general, it's a fine line that we're walking through here.
For example, I had some networks that I was talking to at a certain point about the industrial hemp issue, and they said, so what's the controversy?
There's no drug in it.
What's the controversy?
I went, well, it's illegal.
They said, yeah, but what's the controversy?
Also, with the medical marijuana issue, I've had people where we talk about doing a program and someone will say, well, that's a no-brainer.
Of course medical marijuana should be legal.
It's not happening, you know, except for when the people move these agendas forward themselves.
One of the things that's really been hilarious to me, though, is I did a program, for example, that was broadcast in North Dakota, and before the show, the host was telling me, oh, these guys are going to tear you apart.
You know, this is a very conservative country up here.
We really hate marijuana and all this stuff.
And then, you know, when we did the program, as it turned out, we had police officers saying that they felt that the marijuana laws were a waste of their time and resources.
We had farmers asking technical questions about it.
You know, it turned out almost nobody was against it.
Well, I sense that there's been a shift.
There's been a shift in attitude in the U.S., and that's how you got the votes in Arizona and California, and other states are going to follow.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Chris Conrad.
Hi.
Hi, good morning, Mr. Bell.
Good morning, where are you?
I'm in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Okay.
And I have a question, and it centers on the on-site testing.
And I was wondering if anybody's been developing anything similar to a breathalyzer for the law enforcement officials out there, because obviously, you know, as they do Legalized marijuana, I think the first thing they need to do before they even do that is to come up with an on-site test, because I personally don't want stoned people on the road with me, even though I agree that this should be legalized.
I don't want them on the road with me.
I don't want them working beside me.
Another thing is, too, with the on-site testing, the company that I work for now, if I get hurt at work, the first thing I have to do is take a urine test.
And I think that's kind of unfair, because if I sit around on a Saturday afternoon and contemplate my existence in the universe, and I get hurt on the following Wednesday... You're going to test positive, and they're going to throw it out, because you tested positive.
I hear you.
We'll answer that one when we come back from the break.
Sit tight, Chris.
Chris Conrad is my guest, and you're listening to a discussion nationally about marijuana.
We'll be right back.
You're listening to Art Vell's Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 23rd 1997
This is a song that I wrote in the early days of the band.
It's a song that I wrote in the early days of the band.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from January 23rd, 1997.
From the high desert to the nation, I'm Art Bell.
My guest is Chris Conrad.
We've been talking about marijuana, and it looks like it's going the whole way.
Well, I'll tell you.
You don't need far to enjoy this.
Good morning everybody.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 23, 1997.
Thanks for watching.
Alright, Chris Conrad is my guest, and Chris, let us address this.
Sitting home, on the couch, watching football, enjoying music, munching down on munchies, whatever you do when you're smoking pot.
That's one thing.
In a car, uh... under the uh... under the control or controlling an automobile uh... which could kill that something else again and even though we might argue there's more control under marijuana than there is alcohol that's still not a good argument and we don't want people on the street uh... a smoking uh... a smoking pot while they drive or under the influence of so on-site testing how do you address that and his question about fired thursday for saturday's smoking
Well, as far as the on-site testing issue is concerned, I would say that there's two aspects of that.
One is that urine testing is obviously not functional, but it is possible to do blood tests that would test whether a person is under the influence of cannabis.
Now, whether they're under the influence doesn't necessarily mean that they're impaired, though.
So I really think that the idea of using impairment testing and driver simulators is a much more effective way of telling whether a person is capable of driving or not.
It's just as likely that a person who's driving badly could be too tired, too stressed.
There's a lot of prescription drugs and non-prescription drugs.
Alright, so the answer is impairment testing, and that's logical.
What about fired Thursday for Saturday's smoke?
In other words, an accident occurs, the guy slips, he falls, whatever.
He's gotta take a urine test, it comes up positive, then he gets fired.
I think it shows the inherent problem with urine tests.
They don't tell us anything.
They don't tell us if people are capable.
They don't tell us if people are intoxicated.
They don't really tell us anything, except that some company just made $60 to $100 testing someone's urine, and if it comes up positive, then they make $60 to $100 to test it again.
It's grossly unfair, and in the situations we're having here with California and Arizona, where people are going to be able to use it medically, I think that there's going to be some civil cases that are going to arise out of that.
I'm surprised that there aren't more lawsuits involving false positives.
I get phone calls from people who say, oh, I never smoked marijuana, but I came up with a false positive.
What do I do?
I would think Sue would be the thing that would come to my mind, but I don't really know what the legal basis to do something like that would be.
It seems to me like accusing someone falsely, depriving them of their livelihood, without having any more evidence than a false positive on a urine test would be something that someone should be held accountable for that.
Alright, here we go again.
On our first time caller line, actually the anti-pot line, you're on the air with Chris Conrad.
Hi.
Okay, this is CJ.
You've got a great program.
I've been listening for about a year, but I want to ask you, Chris.
You've got some good facts.
You've got some good figures.
It sounds like you know what you're talking about, but I want to ask you this.
How long have you been smoking this stuff?
Well, let me see.
For quite a while.
I've been judging contests over in Holland, for example, for the past five years.
Really?
Then you know that back in the 60's when I was smoking this stuff, that when you were paying $10 for an ounce of it, which now you can pay as high as $400, the difference is the THC, the tetrahydrochloride.
When this goes on the market for medicinal purposes, after listening and listening and listening over the years here, I think it's something that would be good.
this would be used properly. But as far as your biblical verse there, that is true. But
it's not talking about the abuse that I'm trying to get you to understand. What's going
to happen here is you're going to have all these people out there that are going to be
stoned. Because that's basically what you do when you're on marijuana, you get stoned.
And when you got this guy going out there, man where was this break man? I know it was
in this car when I got in. You know, I mean the thing is that's what's going to happen
out there. I hear you where you're coming from, but we're talking, what I'm talking
about is the abuse. It's just like you got the guys in the bar selling the alcohol.
The cops are out there ready to pick you up.
Have another bar across the street or the same place that's selling that marijuana.
Everybody comes out of that thing stalling.
I got news for you.
You want to get out of the way of those stalling people because that's what happens.
It makes you hungry, horny and stupid.
Not hungry, horny and stupid.
Chris, he's, uh, one point worth discussing is, uh, legalize it, you'll have a nation full of stoned people.
It doesn't seem like, just, I don't know, I think that the people who are afraid of this think that as soon as someone smokes it, they automatically gonna, like, fall in love with it and give up everything else in life to smoke marijuana.
That just simply does not happen.
There's, uh, only a relatively small percentage of people who smoke it, uh, and enjoy it, or smoke it regularly.
Holland is an excellent example of a place where you can go to a coffee shop, as they're called, buy cannabis, you can consume it on the premises, you can take it with you.
They have actually a lower use of marijuana, particularly amongst the youth, than America does, where it's illegal.
So keeping it illegal, if anything, I kind of agree with the previous caller who said that we have a forbidden fruit sort of a syndrome there, you know?
If you make it so that it's more I think that's the most important thing.
I think that's the most important thing.
that which goes into the mouth that defiles the man is that which comes out of the mouth
that defiles the man.
That's what Jesus said.
And basically what he was saying is that you don't worry about people who are getting high
or eating things that you don't think they should be eating.
What you should do is watch what you say about other people.
And so when you make these broad, judgmental statements like that, I think that that's
where we run into more of a problem.
Alright, you said you go to Holland and judge contests.
What kind of contests do you judge?
Well, they're called cannabis cups.
They're usually grower's cups or seed lines.
There's two different categories, because the genetics of the cannabis are important for the defect, but also the grower, the cultivation process is similarly important.
And so, it's normally gauged into two categories.
And then you, from there, you judge it by virtue of how much THC, you don't measure that chemically, but just how the effect is, how much you enjoy the effect, the smell, the taste.
Is it like a wine tasting contest?
Well it's similar except in wine tasting I believe you spit it out and you don't get the effect of the alcohol whereas in cannabis cups you would normally, part of what you're checking is how do I like the effect of this marijuana.
I suppose. And so for myself, I usually prefer a nice sativa that will have a very, uh, uh,
kind of a ethereal, positive, energizing effect over an indica that will have more of a relaxation,
relaxing and sleepy effect. But somebody else may have a different taste altogether.
I suppose then if you have to spit out a seed, that's points off, huh?
Right. Yeah. Wild card line. You're on the air with Chris Conrad.
Yeah, Chris, it's really nice hearing somebody telling more of the truth and honesty within
the marijuana culture.
Well, thank God for allowing me this opportunity.
Yeah, I actually, in 1970, I graduated from high school and I smoked my first joint and
for twenty-six years I smoked pretty much daily.
It was always amazing to me that I would run out and somebody somewhere would come up with
some more and I would end up having another joint that day.
The only time within that twenty-six years that I hadn't been stoned, which I am not
stoned now, was when I would leave the country and I would never carry or smoke anything
and I would be out of the country for a month and I never felt any ill effects or anything
of the sort.
And then recently I was unemployed so I just quit.
One day I decided I have to quit because I am going to go look for another job and I
quit and I haven't smoked for three months now and have no problems relative to that
other than I have always had a back problem.
And I had back surgery 13 years ago, and that's actually why I'm up right now, because my back was hurting me, so I had to get up to take something for that, or I'd already be back asleep if I had a joint to smoke.
And the only thing I've really noticed after quitting for three months, which is the longest I've ever quit in the 26 years, is my dreams are actually better.
I remember my dreams now, where before, when I was always getting stoned before I went to sleep, I wouldn't remember my dreams.
That's the only real difference.
That really is interesting, Chris.
Have you heard other people comment that their dreams are affected one way or the other?
Absolutely, and in fact what makes that really fascinating is that your rapid eye movement has actually measured more rapid eye activity, indicating that you're dreaming more, but your recollection of the dream is less, and that's something that has not been explained satisfactorily to me yet.
Right, that's very much the way I felt, and with my back problem and stuff, in the early years before my operation I was given a lot of medication.
I was on Valium and codeine all the time, and I found I took less of that because the marijuana helped intensify what I was taking, so I wasn't using as much pharmaceuticals.
I'm sure the synergistic effect has been noted repeatedly.
Just one other thing here, did you find that when you smoked marijuana for your back pain, I don't know whether you were thinking you smoked it so you could sleep better or whether you were smoking it for the pain, but if you were using it for the pain, did you find that the pain actually went away or did it just seem less of a bother to you?
He's not here, he's already gone, but I can pick up on that, and I want to ask you this, Chris.
You know, people keep saying they use it for pain.
Marijuana intensifies most things I am told, right?
In other words, whatever.
Sex, music, whatever emotion or feeling or input you're getting, it intensifies your concentration on it.
Very often, yes.
So, with respect then to pain, Why would it not cause you to focus more on the pain that you're having?
It's not really a narcotic in the sense that it stops pain.
So in what way would it prevent pain?
I would think quite the opposite.
It would cause you to concentrate on it or feel it.
That's why it doesn't work for everybody, because for some people it does have exactly the effect you're describing, Art, of bringing people's attention to something like that, but for most people what it's been demonstrated to do is two things.
The first is it has an analgesic effect.
It's not an anesthetic.
It doesn't kill the pain, which is why I was bringing this up to the caller before.
It simply reduces the pain, but the other thing that it seems to do is it goes with irritations and with pains and with a lot of things.
It doesn't bother you as much.
You know, whether it's the traffic, you're driving and people are really good on your nerves.
I know people who smoke marijuana because it makes them You feel less upset about the traffic, and similarly, when people are in pain and they smoke marijuana, sometimes it's just like the pain doesn't really bother them as much.
They're still aware of it, but it's not the same kind of a problem.
And then on the other hand, in the cases of migraine, headache, and some congenital diseases that are very painful, it seems like it actually does take it away.
Arthritis is another example where it seems to just take it away and help people to walk, and the neurological aspect of that hasn't been adequately explained.
If traffic congestion causes one to want to smoke pot, then there must be an awful lot of stone drivers in L.A.
Actually, there's an interesting study that was done.
The Baltimore trauma study did a report that was released in 1988 that was put in the archives
of surgery and it was overall trauma, injuries and one of the things that they point out
in here was that in the vehicular accidents that they found that 16.5% had used marijuana
I believe it was, but then when they checked how many were driving they found that only
1.7% were driving.
One of the things that I can't, it appears to be that it doesn't make you want to drive.
It makes you rather do something else than drive a car.
And so marijuana smokers, they tend to feel, now this is a Department of Transportation study that was completed in Holland in 1991 and hasn't been released in the United States except for by importation of the report itself.
But what they found was that the people who smoked marijuana tended to feel like they were impaired before they actually were impaired and so they took steps such as driving more slowly and being more attentive
because they felt like they were impaired and they didn't want to take a chance.
Whereas they compared that to alcohol drinkers.
They found that the alcohol drinkers felt less impaired and they felt more like they could handle it, they could
take a risk, I can handle it.
What about actual tests? I remember when I was in high school, they had a machine
and they would test your reaction time going from the gas pedal to the brake
in an emergency situation.
There was a little meter there that would actually test.
When you compare somebody in a test of that nature, between inebriation 1.0 levels, whatever it is, and somebody stoned, What results do you get?
Any idea?
Well, they found two areas.
Overall, the person who had cannabis in their system did better.
Particularly people who were familiar with the experience.
People who had smoked it for the first time were more disoriented.
People who were regular smokers were less so.
What the areas they found that it affected were two areas.
One is tracking, which has to do with following a light that for some reason the cannabis smoker has a little, not a really significant, but a very minor slowdown in their tracking.
They also were a little less steady, not to alcohol, excuse me.
You're on the air with Chris Conrad.
everything. They weren't as straight driving down the road.
They wove a little bit. They didn't go out of the lane, but they did within the lane.
They tend to weave a little bit more. And the other one was that they didn't look at that
speedometer as much. However, they were also driving slower. So even though they weren't
looking at the speedometer, they were not speeding. They were driving better than they were
usually, in fact.
I see. All right. West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Chris Conrad. Hi.
You're on West of the Rockies.
I want to compliment you on the job you are doing.
I think that the information that you get out to the public is invaluable and you are
going to open a lot of doors and change a lot of stuff.
Really I want to ask Chris if he is aware of any studies on the psychotropic effects
of marijuana compared to Prozac or Anaphrenil for anxiety, depression, etc.
I'm aware of some of that.
I don't think I'm versed enough to just sit here and rattle off too much of that.
One of the things that I definitely do know is that there's a patient that I talked to in Iowa who was under 18 different kinds of medications and by smoking marijuana he got down to a marijuana plus three and so it's actually able to replace a lot of them, particularly things like Valium and so forth.
There's more data at the moment showing its ability to replace barbiturates and analgesics and things like Valium.
Yeah, well I certainly agree with you on that.
Another question I have is like, if I go up to Canada, I can buy certain medications that have codeine in them, and then I can bring them back to the state of Washington and these are perfectly legal drugs.
Ditto for Mexico.
If I were to go down to California because I do suffer from back pain, if I had a recommendation from a doctor there and I were to pick up the medication there, you might maybe try to address to the listening audience what ramifications that might have should you get picked up in another state with your medicine.
Well, they can be very serious, because crossing a state line with cannabis is a federal offense, and that's one thing that the Constitution does give the federal government jurisdiction over is interstate commerce, that's inter-between states.
So once you cross a state line, then you're facing a possible federal jurisdiction situation.
Oregon doesn't recognize the same law as California.
I think when you get into Washington, that's The state is citing that there was just an important Supreme Court decision that came down there, I believe, in the past couple of days recognizing the medical rights of patients in Washington.
However, you don't have the same legislative protections that we have in California now.
But basically, if you're charged with transporting or anything like that, again, my point earlier in the program, it's up to the prosecutor.
Whatever they charge you with creates a whole other dynamic.
If they charge you with possession, if they charge you with All right, look, we're coming to the end of the program.
What final statement would you like to make to everybody across country about what you're doing with marijuana?
and what they pick out that charge to let me know against you
you really you have to do a hand to get out of that point
final we're coming to the end of the program what uh...
what final statement would you like to make everybody cross-country about
what you're doing with marijuana what should happen next
i believe that what we want to achieve here is to create a consistent and
integrated process by which we restore industrial hemp for the most broad development that we possibly can
that medical marijuana becomes available with a doctor's prescription
and that we allow for an age of consent whereby persons above the age of eighteen
are not prosecuted for their own personal choice to use cannabis
presuming that they're using it in a responsible manner That's going to require action on the state level, on the federal level, and on the local level.
The local level is where you're going to have the most impact.
This is how we've done it in California, is by educating local communities to the medical importance of cannabis, working with the local communities to allow buyers clubs to open to provide cannabis to patients, and by making it so that people could see that we're talking about human beings here.
It's not a demonized It's a human being who needs something to make their life better.
They were able to elevate the consciousness of the people to where they really understand this issue in a way that all the lies and deception that were put forth to them were not enough to stop the people from doing the right thing.
There's a bill in Congress, Barney Frank has put a medical marijuana bill that needs support.
But basically we need people to become involved in all levels.
Okay, well look, we've done a little bit of that, and we are utterly out of time.
Chris Conrad, thank you very much.
We'll do it again sometime, my friend.
You've been great.
My pleasure.
Thank you for the opportunity, Art.
Take care, Chris.
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