In Idaho the drug warriors and the prison-industrial complex are working hand-in-hand to deliver big profits to the corporatists by maintaining one of the highest prison populations in the country. Watch the Liberty Report to see what happens to Idaho families seeking to use cannabis oil to provide relief for their very ill children. Join us with special guest Will Norman Grigg.
In Idaho the drug warriors and the prison-industrial complex are working hand-in-hand to deliver big profits to the corporatists by maintaining one of the highest prison populations in the country. Watch the Liberty Report to see what happens to Idaho families seeking to use cannabis oil to provide relief for their very ill children. Join us with special guest Will Norman Grigg.
In Idaho the drug warriors and the prison-industrial complex are working hand-in-hand to deliver big profits to the corporatists by maintaining one of the highest prison populations in the country. Watch the Liberty Report to see what happens to Idaho families seeking to use cannabis oil to provide relief for their very ill children. Join us with special guest Will Norman Grigg.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
Today, with me is Daniel McAdams, who's the Executive Director of the Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
He is also the co-host of this program.
Daniel, good to see you again today.
Thank you.
Good to be here.
You know, today we have a special program.
We have a special guest with us today.
He's a friend of ours as well as a friend of Liberty and has written a lot about this.
He's a real specialist on civil liberties and the drug war and what's going on.
And his name is Will Grigg.
And Will, I'd like to welcome you to the program.
Dr. Paul, it's an honor to be with you.
Thank you so much.
Dream, one reason why we wanted you on the program, Will, is that on the Institute site, we put your recent article dealing with the prison-industrial complex, which is pretty fascinating because I think a lot of people know about what's going on, but I myself didn't realize quite how big this is and how bad it is.
And you've done a lot of research on this, and some people might even be shocked that there's a problem in the great state of Idaho with this issue.
Tell us a little bit about this article that you've recently written.
Idaho is a very thinly populated state, and it has a reputation for being socially conservative and liberty-minded.
But we have, in proportionate terms, a larger prison population than most states in the Union.
And owing to some of the eccentricities in our system of probation and parole, it's not uncommon to see people serve up to 200% of their prescribed terms for various offenses, most of which have nothing to do with crimes against persons and property.
And many of them, of course, are a product of this pernicious exercise called the War on Drugs, especially the effort to prohibit the possession and use of marijuana.
Idaho has perhaps the most draconian anti-marijuana laws in the country.
There was a roster published last week of states that would be the least likely to decriminalize marijuana, and I believe Idaho was at or near the top of that list.
And the article that I just wrote deals with a proposed piece of legislation that was vetoed last week by Governor Butch Otter, a Republican, self-styled libertarian, ironically enough, that would have provided an affirmative defense for people who possess a form of marijuana derivative called CBD.
It's cannabis oil extract.
It has almost an immeasurably small element of THC.
That's the psychoactive component of marijuana.
You're not going to get high by using CBD, but it can palliate the symptoms of Dravitz syndrome, which is a severe and intractable form of epilepsy to which children are susceptible, which leaves them prone to seizures that are terrifying that eventually can prove fatal.
This measure was called Alexis's Law after Alexis Carey.
She's a 10-year-old girl who's afflicted with Dravitz syndrome.
Her mother is a healthcare professional.
I believe both of her parents are.
She wants to use CBD.
The mother of Alexis, in any case, wants to use CBD to treat these seizures on the part of this 10-year-old girl.
In order to do so, she'd have to import her from out of state, thereby running the risk of being arrested and prosecuted for marijuana possession, which could lead, as you know, Dr. Paul, to the forfeiture of their property and their wealth and their assets.
And so this bill would not have decriminalized possession of use of CBD, but it would have provided an affirmative defense in court so that they would have a fighting chance to prevail if they were prosecuted under Idaho's marijuana laws.
The legislature here in the state of Idaho a year ago passed a memorial, a resolution saying that they would never decriminalize marijuana for any reason.
So it's a species of miracle that the legislature finally enacted this measure, and then Butch Otter vetoed it about a week ago.
In doing so, he restored the status quo ante, or he preserved it, under which people can be prosecuted and sent to prison, enlarging this prison industrial complex simply for obtaining CBD for the purpose of treating their children who suffer from epilepsy or cancer or any one of a number of other disorders.
Did the governor make any statement when he vetoed it?
Do you think he understands that this is not a narcotic that people use to get high?
What was any rationale given for his veto?
Butch Otter likes to pose and preen as a champion of the 10th Amendment and federalism.
And he just recently indicated that he was willing to spend millions of dollars in order to fight Supreme Court, not Supreme Court decisions yet, but federal court decisions with respect to the issue called same-sex marriage.
And yet in this veto message, he said that it is improper for the state legislature here in Idaho to be defying the federal government's anti-marijuana laws.
And this is interesting here in Idaho because those laws, as you probably are aware, are actually an outgrowth of a UN treaty, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which was propounded by the UN in 1961.
So you've got the federal government effectively enforcing this UN treaty.
You've got the head of the UN Drug Agency threatening Colorado and Washington for decriminalizing recreational use of marijuana in defiance of what the UN calls our international obligations.
You've got Butch Otter playing to a constituency here in Idaho that properly hates the UN and all of its works and pomps and looks upon the federal government with proper hostility.
Yet this supposed champion of federalism last week vetoed this measure, invoking our supposed obligations under federal law.
And the other thing he said is that we have to wait for the FDA to approve the use of CBD, which is being patented by a government-favored corporation.
And this is a really good example of how the economics of prohibition works.
Prohibition, I believe, is the process of cartelizing the prohibited substance.
You cannot fully suppress it.
But what you can do is you can enforce regulatory capture on the part of people who are favored by government.
Corporate interests who are favored by government will end up having a hostage market, and the regulatory agencies will enforce their monopoly on the formerly prohibited substance.
And they will do so with the threat of incarceration and ultimately, of course, annihilation, physical annihilation, if you resist vehemently enough.
You know, you mentioned so clearly the chaos and the conflict of an understanding within the state.
But just think of this thing nationally.
I mean, we have half of the state said, oh, well, you can do it for recreational reasoning, no big deal.
You never go to prison, and we're not going to throw the book at you.
And then somebody in another state, like Idaho and other places, that they have legitimate desires to help some children and help people with seizures, and they throw the book at them and put them in prison.
It just seems like it's such chaos.
But I blame this so often of a poor understanding about what liberty is all about and why we should have a right to our lives and be responsible for our lives.
And therefore, we all who are in this education business have a long way to go to straighten this mess out.
It, of course, is a facet of self-ownership, the right to use marijuana for any purpose that you would deem suitable.
I don't use marijuana.
I wouldn't recognize it if I were in its presence, quite frankly.
But in the property rights analysis here, your right to property begins with the management of your own physical person.
And if you were the property of the state, the state could tell you what you could or could not consume.
Most people understand this.
I believe Butch Otter understands this, but for reasons of cynical political advantage, I believe he's ignoring this principle.
And Dr. Paul, when you talk about the chaos here, I believe it was in Nebraska that the conservative Republican Attorney General was invoking U.N. treaties in seeking to sue the state of Colorado over their latitudinarian law on marijuana use, saying that that had an impact on what was going on in the state of Nebraska.
Idaho is situated here owing to the way that the highways are laid out.
We're situated here in such a way that the state police and the prosecutors will enjoy a huge windfall as long as prohibition continues because they can seize people on the highways, search their vehicles, and if they find evidence that they're involved in the trafficking or use of marijuana, they can confiscate the cars and the property and anything that they can lay their hands on.
That's one of the big drivers here is the fact that they still have a rationale to plunder people who come through the state of Idaho, either coming out of Washington or coming up from Colorado.
That's the sort of thing that happens right here in Payote County all the time.
I'm living right in the hotspot here for that type of road piracy.
You know, it's interesting you talk about the prison industrial complex in your article, and I think your article captures a lot of these issues very well.
And I was looking before we spoke today about some statistics on this, the privatization of prisons.
And it's amazing if you look at a 700% spike in the U.S. prison population in the last few decades, 1,600% growth in the private prison industry.
And the other thing that I think is probably even more key than that is I noticed that the top three private prisons have spent $45 million on campaign donations and lobbying, I think, in the past few years.
So this is an industry that carries a lot of weight.
And it's an industry that makes nothing but misery.
One of the things you talk about here in the realm of what is called private imprisonment, private incarceration, is what you described, Daniel, as an iron triangle here in terms of the way that the lobbying works out and the way that profits are privatized here and costs are socialized.
But you're not talking about private prisons.
You're talking about corporatist prisons where people are making private profits out of a public function that really has no place in a free society.
And here in Idaho, we had a huge controversy with the prison in CUNA that was operated by the Corrections Corporation of America out of Nashville.
And it was such a stygian pit of abuse and despair that eventually the federal government imposed a consent decree on the prison, and the state took over management of that prison.
And the person who's managing that prison and other prisons here in the state of Idaho, Josh Taywald, is a protege of Butch Otter, who really, under Idaho law, should be on the other side of the prison bars because he had three DUIs, and that's an aggregate felony here in the state of Idaho.
But of course, in his case, he was abusing a drug that is legal and taxed by the state, unlike the people who would use this innocuous marijuana derivative to treat their sick children.
And people of that description might wind up as part of the human inventory being managed by Josh Taywald here in the Idaho prison system.
You know, your article was a little bit disappointing to me because all of a sudden I realized how great our task is because I believe in education and eventually education will be transmitted into better laws.
I knew your government, know your governor, and he spoke well of civil liberties and actually did pretty darn well on the Patriot Act and I believe voted against it.
So here he's well educated, knows about it, he gets in a position and then he fades away.
So it's so disappointing that you didn't have better results out there.
But there was another case this week that caught my attention.
This is a Kansas mother who was using marijuana for one of her diseases.
And the kid was at one of these drug education courses at school.
He says, oh, my mother uses this for her sickness.
You know, within hours, I guess, the kid was taken by, you know, the Child Protective Service.
And I keep thinking of, you know, one of the major conflicts in the drug wars is asset forfeiture.
But I think there's children forfeiture.
You know, they come and they take the kids.
Where's the due process?
This should wake people up.
Children Forfeiture00:01:42
And I hope it does.
In spite of my disappointment with what's happening in Idaho, I still think that if people know about these atrocious cases, they should wake up and come to our position.
I would hope so, too.
And what we're dealing with here is a dying superstition that has to be reinforced through the exceptionally vicious application of state power.
And I think that they've lost the argument, they've lost public sentiment on the issue.
All that they have left in their toolkit is terror, which ultimately that's all that's in the toolkit of the people who act in the name of this fiction called the state have to begin with.
Okay, Will, we have to close right now, but I know you have a website, and I know you have several books out, probably working on more, and you continue to write these great articles.
But let the audience know, you know, how they can reach you and get to your website.
I appreciate that, Dr. Paul.
My chief outlet is my blog, Pro Libertate, and the web address is freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And there are links at the bottom of every essay that will take the reader to my weekly podcast, which is called the Freedom Zealot Podcast.
And there's also information there about my book projects and everything else that I'm doing.
Freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Well, that's great.
And keep up the good work.
I know it's tedious, and I'd like to see results faster.
But actually, when I visit the college campuses, I turn out to be an optimist because a lot of the young people are joining us.
It's those old guys who seem to fade on us at times.
But anyway, you keep up the good work, and thank you very much for being with us today.