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March 23, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
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Health Ranger interview with former FBI Dale Carson Part 2 - protecting your rights Feb 2012
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Hello and welcome everybody.
This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger with naturalnews.com and today we have a special guest that we are interviewing about the war on drugs in America and specifically how the current structure of that war on drugs has failed.
It has filled our prisons with many people who are otherwise law-abiding citizens in society.
Is there a better solution?
Could we have a better way to treat people who suffer from real drug addictions but can still function?
And what about the law enforcement burden that this war on drugs places on our men and women in blue who are already short on resources to get their jobs done chasing real bad guys?
So today to join us and discuss this highly contentious issue is none other than Dale Carson.
He is the author of Arrest Proof Yourself, a fantastic book that every American should read, I believe.
You can check it out on Amazon.com and other locations.
He practices law as a defense attorney and And handle some other cases as well with his partners, and you'll find his law website at DaleCarsonLaw.com.
Thank you, Dale, for joining me today.
It's good to have you back on.
It's my pleasure.
Well, let's start with what you think about the current war on drugs.
You mention in your book that you disagree with some of the approach that's currently being undertaken.
I think you describe it as a failed system or a broken system.
I'm not sure what words you use, but go ahead.
Get into your view on how it's working or not working.
Well, I think it really is a failed system.
We have plowed great deals of money and human resources into eradication of something, quite frankly, that can't be eradicated.
Adults make their own choices of free will, and when they engage in activity like this that's been criminalized, it's a shame that they do this, but when they do it in a way that gets them arrested, they become a statistic.
It ruins their lives and the lives of many other people.
And it becomes a profit center for law enforcement.
And I'll explain what I mean by that in a moment.
But I want to say from a health perspective, and I think you'll probably agree with me here, any chemical that you use to modify your perception of reality is something that's not good.
Right.
I would agree.
We all need to learn to live with our lives the way they are.
Certainly, this is a health channel.
I'm a practicing vegan, and I believe that that's the real solution to those kinds of problems, and I wouldn't want to find chemicals that are foreign to the natural environment in my system.
Yeah, real quick, you're into juicing and health foods, and I forgot to mention, you're also an ex-FBI agent, and you served many years as active duty law enforcement in Miami, so I want people to know that you have real street cred on these issues.
Well, thank you for that, Annette.
And I frankly believe that, as I mentioned, we spend too much time and energy on trying to interdict and stop these narcotics.
Now, the problem is really not the narcotics from my perspective.
It is that the profitability in the sale of narcotics is destabilizing politics, is destabilizing, well, Mexico is an example, and it destabilizes communities.
where those people engage in shootings or turf wars, things of that nature, obviously that's something where we all have an interest and we need to prohibit it.
And I think law enforcement's current posture is if we can eliminate narcotics, we'll eliminate all those problems.
I don't subscribe to that view.
Frankly, I believe that we're always going to have trouble like this and that what we need to do is focus on the major suppliers, the major people, and what we have done in law enforcement because it's so easy to do.
It's to arrest all the minor players.
And again, officers who are officers want to be detectives to make that transfer.
You've got to make a plenitude of arrests.
Arresting narcotics, low-level narcotics people, is easy to do.
You get statistical accomplishments with the least amount of energy.
Whereas trying to put some major supplier in jail can take years.
You may have no arrests during the year, and you look like a bozo in the eyes of your other law enforcement officers.
But law enforcement needs to mature so that they realize that arresting these low-level people really should be a health problem and not a criminal problem.
For example, I represent individuals charged with cocaine possession, and the state, after one or two arrests, wants them to spend 15 months in prison.
And after spending 15 months in prison, I can assure you, you will come out of that, even though you may be 28 years old, you'll come out a different person.
So there really is no strong intervention effort because law enforcement is in the position of arresting people.
The state attorney's office is in the position of putting them behind bars.
This is key.
Let's say you take an otherwise honest citizen who smokes a little weed on the side, they get busted, they go to prison, they come out as a hardened criminal.
It's like getting a PhD in how to be a thug, how to be a criminal, and then their arrest record means they can't get a regular job anymore, so now they're working low-wage, typical labor jobs where they're probably working with other criminals.
So now society has, in a sense, encouraged them to stay a criminal or even become a worse criminal.
Well, I think part of that's true.
I think that we keep more people in custody than any other country in the world.
And that's shameful.
We can do way better than that.
And arresting people, again, for minor offenses is just pointless.
Now, there has been some latitude given to marijuana possession.
I mean, under 20 grams really is a misdemeanor.
Over 20 is a felony.
It's not often prosecuted heavily anymore.
But even so, for me, the use of marijuana, again, is a mechanism for changing who you really are.
If you've got a problem with your environment where you're not happy enough, you need to look to something else.
Get out of that environment if you're not happy.
To use some alternative substance to make you happy is insanity at its best.
But the system is made to digest these people on the lower level, again, because they're easier to do.
and truly it will destroy your life Once you're tagged as a criminal, the normal doors of society are not going to be open to you any longer.
And in this economy, it's a real struggle to keep and maintain work.
So we've gone just way over, and it's a point of interest here.
I was cross-trained with the DEA to be involved in narcotics.
But clearly the focus of the major DEA organizations and the FBI, to the extent that the FBI is now involved in interdiction of narcotics, is the higher-level people.
And those are the people that people go to church with, that run banks, that do the financing.
We all seem to think that it all happens in the back room of a little shady shack somewhere where guys in briefcases with $100,000 are passing it back and forth.
And although that image is partly true...
It really gets back to the community itself.
Someone in your community is financing these drug operations.
An effort in law enforcement needs to be to identify those people and take them out of the game and make sure nobody else can get into that game where they are now absent.
And that's not happening.
What's happening is we're going along.
Historically, we arrest a bunch of people.
The politicians play it up.
Well, look, we've made all of these narcotics arrests.
Gee, aren't we doing a good job?
And the answer to that is no, you're not.
And we really can't convince politicians because they are elected by people who are not fully informed, as many of your listeners are.
So that's a problem for all of us.
Well, we're also seeing the increased militarization of local police to deal with drug interdiction.
We've seen the United States, for example, run chemical spraying airborne missions in places like Ecuador.
Where coca is grown legally.
And I have consumed coca tea when I was hiking through the high-altitude Andes, and I think the stuff probably kept me going.
But that's a tea.
That's not refined cocaine.
I've never used cocaine.
I'm not a recreational drug user, and I don't advocate that just like you don't.
In fact, I don't even drink alcohol, but that's people's choice.
What I'm against is the massive criminalization when it could all be dealt with in a better way.
And you recommend, Dale, in your book, Arrest Proof Yourself, You advocate a parallel, what do you call it, a drug court system.
Absolutely.
Can you talk about that?
How does that work?
Well, the way the drug court works is it's a court, so it has some power of law, if you will, that when you're arrested and you have a problem, it helps focus your energies.
It's much like a mandatory AA or NA program.
It helps focus your energies to get off of the substance abuse, to identify reasons that you are an abuser, and to eliminate those reasons so you don't have any desire to be an abuser.
Look, as I grow older, I need all the brain cells I have, and I need to be as efficient as I can intellectually, otherwise I'm going to have problems and I don't need to disturb that with chemicals.
And so I think we all in the court system are aware that if we could have a program, a hardened program, that you could admit people into that kept them out of the criminal system, we'd all be better off.
But again, the social traction to do that, or the political traction, rather, to do that is limited.
And so people are not willing to invest that because they're just drug users.
And remember, people under arrest, criminals, are an underrepresented minority.
Why is there so much resistance across society to perceive the drug problem as a health challenge or a medical issue rather than just an outright criminal issue, especially with marijuana?
Let me answer that for you, alright?
You know, there are test kits.
That we use in law enforcement to determine what the narcotics is, right?
Yes.
And they're probably $25 a pop, right?
Yeah, like the NIC kits, N-I-K, I think.
Yeah, right, right.
And so there's a company that manufactures us, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And so that company has an interest in keeping the drug laws, right?
Of course.
And so what happens is the system becomes what I consider...
You know, evolution is an expansion where things become better.
Involution is where it becomes internally more complex.
And this is an instance of involution, really.
There are many people who become involved in the system that's profitable.
The bail bondsmen, the criminal defense lawyers, the justice system, Salvation Army who run probation.
organization that's a big money-making machine that operates off of the tragedy suffered by people who were in custody and shouldn't be or arrested and shouldn't be.
To give you an example, and this is really kind of horrifying, there's a phone in the jail.
Now, we all grew up thinking you get one phone call out of the jail, right?
Yeah.
There's a phone system in our jail here in Jacksonville, Florida, that you have to pay, or not you as the inmate, but your family, if the inmate calls the family, they pay $2, I think, and 25 cents or $2.50 for the phone call.
Really?
That's a lot of money in prison.
It is.
And about two years ago, I checked, and they made $2.5 million in one year off of that phone system.
Wow.
Now, if you need motivation...
To keep the system the way it is, I mean, there it is, all right?
So many, many, many people feed off the system, the contractors who make the jails, the people who rent the ankle monitors, the people who supply uniforms.
I mean, in a practical manner, it's a huge, huge business.
In Duval County, Jacksonville, Florida, a third of the government's budget is allocated to law enforcement, which in part includes corrections.
Wow!
So that's a huge amount.
Now, if we had that same third, and we could invest it in harvesting non-GMO crops, or we could use it for rehabilitation of people who are addicts, or we could do it in the social arena in some manner, look how much better we'd be off.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Wow.
What about, and I don't know your opinion on this, I'm going to ask, this is a wild card question, but isn't there also, aren't there also historically some corrupt departments?
I mean, Miami was famous for this in the past.
They made huge profits off of the drugs that they allowed to be imported and sold because they were black market priced.
I don't have any question that that happens.
Not too long ago, we had a sheriff north of here And another county was arrested because he took the seized narcotics and was reselling it.
So yes, that happens.
And I think here's an interesting point.
J. Edgar Hoover, who's been much maligned but was a really great guy, Didn't want the FBI to ever be involved in narcotics.
And it's interesting, his thought process about that.
He knew that there was so much money in drugs that it could easily tempt any human being to do things that they shouldn't do.
For example, being co-opted by it and working for a drug cartel when you were an FBI agent.
I mean, I can't think of anything worse.
And to back that up a little bit further, back when I was cross-trained with the DEA, if a plane flew in, if you were a pilot and you could fly a twin-engine plane, you could take that plane to Columbia, fly it back here, belly-land it in the Everglades in South Florida, and guess how much money you'd be paid for that one flight?
I don't know, six figures?
$500,000 cash.
Wow.
And it got to the point where they didn't count the money.
They simply put it in the 30-gallon garbage container and weighed it on the kind of scale that you and I would look at.
Oh, my goodness.
And they would say, here's your money.
When you're talking about numbers like that, and I'm sure it's even more today, think about that.
Could that corrupt an organization?
There's no question about it.
Well, that's one of the best arguments for decriminalization at some level, isn't it?
Because it sucks the profits out of the system, which causes, for example, Mexican drug gangs would not be able to fund themselves to the extent they do today.
It sort of lets the government tax the drugs, and it takes a lot of the profits out of the underground.
Do you agree with that assessment?
I do, I do, but I think there's more to it than just that.
If they took that money and put it into real investigative talent to identify the thieves in Washington, the thieves in the banks, if they would put it there, we'd all be so much better off, really.
Our lives would be better.
The economy would be way more sound than it is now.
We need to look at law enforcement's energy as being finite.
And so if we allocate it to doing things that don't make any sense, like the war against drugs, we're really just throwing money away.
And it's pointless to do that.
We need to reinvent ourselves when it comes to law enforcement and start focusing on the really bad people.
I recently was on TV here in Jacksonville, and we were talking about the fact that in Jacksonville, nobody in city government has been arrested recently within the last 10 or 15 years for stealing from the city of Jacksonville.
Now, what that tells you is one of two things.
Either everybody in this city is so honest and straightforward that thievery or dishonesty is not even on the menu.
It's a utopia.
It's a utopia.
Or somebody is allocating investigative resources to areas that don't contain those folks.
And I suggest to you the latter of those is the truth.
And we've got to ask ourselves, why do we do that?
And the answer is, in part, it's much easier to arrest somebody on a minor criminal charge, keeping in mind that officers want to do this because it's a sport.
I don't mean in the sense that they necessarily have fun doing it, and certainly all the players, meaning my clients, are not having any fun at it.
But what I do mean is that there's a lot of competition between young officers to be at the top of their game.
And if it's just the number of arrests, the statistical accomplishments, That creates a problem internally in law enforcement.
Right, right.
Well said.
I've got a final question for you, Dale, as we wrap this up.
The other side of this is that law enforcement is what prevents members of society from acting out their worst animalistic impulses.
And in one sense, I'm super happy that we have law enforcement on the streets.
I'm talking about local police and sheriffs, because I've seen what happens when that isn't in place, like after Hurricane Katrina, for example.
There is a lawlessness bent inside every person that can come out if they sense an opportunity.
What's your take on that?
Well, here's my take on it.
It's not law enforcement that makes you behave.
It's your mother.
Right.
It is, truly.
Now, it may be your next-door neighbor, but it's the friends, the people you care about and love and that love you that really restrict your behavior.
It's not law enforcement.
If law enforcement's got to come in and restrict your behavior, it's way, way, way too late.
Right.
Well said.
Well, Dale, I want to thank you again for joining me.
Dale Carson is the author of Arrest Proof Yourself, a highly recommended book.
I've read it.
I recommend it to every citizen, even if you're not a criminal.
This is for law-abiding citizens to know their rights, to know how the legal process works, and to know how to protect your rights and just save yourself from all the hassle of being arrested.
Dale's website for his law practice is dalecarsonlaw.com.
And you can find other interviews with Dale on tv.naturalnews.com as well as YouTube.
Dale, thank you for joining me today.
My pleasure.
Thank you so much for having me.
All right.
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