Focus 580; Why Our Drug Laws have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs

In this hour of Focus 580, we'll be talking about drug policy here in the United States with someone who has been a rather vocal critic of the war on drugs. His name is James Gray and he has judge of the Superior Court in Orange County in Southern California. He's the author of a book that we'll be talking about and certainly he's done a lot of interviews and has written about this elsewhere, but if you're interested in reading some of his thinking, just in one book between two covers, you can look for this one. It's titled, Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed And What We Can Do About It, it's published by the Temple University Press, available in paperback, so it's not terribly expensive, it should be available in bookstore. We'll talk about some of the ideas in the book, and of course welcome whatever questions folks have. Just a little bit more in terms of background, of our guest, Judge Gray has served as former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles. He also was a criminal defense attorney as a member of the Judge Adjutant General Corps in the Navy. In 1998 he made an unsuccessful run for Congress as a Republican against Bob Dornan, and as I mentioned has talked a lot about issues of drug policy on a great

many radio and TV shows and many forums on this subject around the country. He's joining us this morning by telephone and as we talk, your questions and comments are certainly welcome. All we ask those people just try to be brief, so we can get in as many people as want to be a part of the conversation and keep things moving along. Anybody's welcome to call. Here in Champaign-Urbana, 333-9455, toll-free: 800-222-9455. Judge Gray, hello. - Well good morning David, it's nice to be with you. - Well we appreciate very much you giving us some of your time. In the introduction to the book, you write that the War on Drugs is about lots of things but only rarely is it really about drugs. If it is only rarely about drugs, what is it mostly about? - Well regretfully David, it's about money. I think most of our politicians understand and a lot of people that this war is not winnable but it's eminently fundable and people are addicted to the drug war funding

which is a regretful thing to have to say but I think it's true. - Well and we're talking about the money that goes into mostly into law enforcement, into corrections, things like that. - Well that's right, it's basically a runaway freight train of federal funding. All of our federal agencies are getting extra money to fund the war on drugs and they're addicted to the money. It's not just the obvious ones like the Department of State and Bureau of Customs and DEA and all of the military, but it's even the smaller ones like the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, all of these organizations are simply addicted to that extra funding and it's a terrible thing to see. - I think that what this says is and my feeling is that you would agree with this, that our approach to the problem of drug abuse has been mostly approaching it as a law enforcement problem and that's not to say that that's not a dimension of this but there are some people

who would argue that it would be more profitable if we approach this as a public health problem and yet we seem to put very little in the way of resources and emphasis on that aspect and treat it more as a moral issue really than as a public health issue and my suspicion is that you would say as long as we continue to do it like that then we're not going to make much progress. - Well there are numbers of distinctions to make. First of all, I think we all are familiar with this actor Robert Downey, Jr. who truly has a drug problem and I would tell people and I think that they would agree that it makes as much sense to put Robert Downey, Jr. in jail for his drug abuse as it would have to put Betty Ford in jail for her alcohol abuse. There really isn't any difference. The secret though is to hold people accountable for their actions, to hold them accountable for what they do and if Robert Downey, Jr. or Betty Ford drive a motor vehicle under the influence of any of these mind-altering substances they should be held accountable and put into jail and coerced into treatment in the rest, but otherwise it really is a medical problem.

It is not a criminal justice problem or at least shouldn't be. And we also, David, need to keep in mind the distinction between drug problems on the one hand and we certainly have them and drug prohibition problems on the other and we are manufacturing those by the ton. For example, this shooting down of that missionary plane in Peru is not a drug problem at all, it is a drug prohibition problem because of the money, because of the drug money this is what we are ending up doing and we have already corrupted the entire government of Colombia and Peru and Bolivia and we are awfully close to the government of Mexico because of drug money and it doesn't have anything to do with drugs. These are things to take into account as well. - Well I think in the same way that you would argue that for example a crime that is associated with drug use -- that is if people are drug dependent and they have to commit crime in order to buy drugs -- that that again is not really a drug problem, it is a drug prohibition problem.

Well in many ways, although again if anyone is going to burglarize your house or your car that is a crime no matter if they are getting the money to buy a new stereo or buy drugs. But you bring those problem drug users into our courts and they will find their way in there and if they have a drug problem then we can coerce them into treatment and we do that pretty effectively. But people that just go home at night and decide to take a mind altering substance like many of us do, for example, a glass of wine you know as long as they then just go to sleep and don't cause anybody any trouble, we have proved I think beyond any reasonable person's dispute that we cannot keep them from doing it except by things that work, which are drug education and drug treatment. We are making vast progress with regard to cigarettes because of education but not by making tobacco illegal, that would be an absolute catastrophe. So these are things just to keep in mind because we probably couldn't do it any worse than we are today under our war on drugs. - It brings to mind several years ago I interviewed someone who wrote a book looking at the history of drug use in the United States, particularly up until you know say the middle

part of the 1900s or a little bit earlier. When you look at that period where a lot of the drugs that are today illegal were legal and where we actually had the first, perhaps the first big drug problem in this country, before we come to the either to the '60s with recreational drug use or to the '80s with crack. And what it's interesting to note is that there was a lot of drug use, a lot of substance abuse, and that then we went into a period where it declined and it didn't decline because we decided to make it illegal and it didn't decline because we started arresting a lot of people. It substantially declined because society got together and decided that it wasn't that level of drug use was not a good thing, and one wonders now even though we say we're having a war on drugs and we have extra police and we're locking up a lot of people whether in fact the societal attitudes toward drug use that underlie all of this really line

up with what... with the kind of lip service we give to the idea that drugs are bad and if you use drugs you're bad and if you do that then we're going to put you in jail. - Well that's exactly right. In fact you've mentioned my book I talk about just that very thing. In our country we went through the 1800s, yes these drugs were available and some people used them. Some, by the way, the Civil War soldiers from the north, they had of course amputations in the rest and they were... became addicted to morphine because they didn't know it was that addictive. We also had a rather substantial problem with people that were taking these snake oils, these elixirs, that sort of thing, the patent medicines until 1906 when we passed the Federal Pure Food and Drug Act which basically didn't prohibit any of these substances but as you say it required truth in advertising. You had to put on the label what was contained therein and boy as soon as people saw that it contained 50% cocaine they stopped using it.

So education makes a huge difference. But making these drugs so lucrative, so incredibly expensive and profitable has certainly backfired on us. You cannot keep people from selling small amounts of drugs for large amounts of money and those amounts of money have corrupted entire institutions, certainly numbers of people, both public officials and private folks, as well as entire governments worldwide. - We have several callers, we have someone on a car phone so we'll get to them first and that's line number two. Hello. - Hi. I just would like to make three comments briefly. The first one is a little bit facetious though it's a real quote. When Keith Richards was arrested in, I think it was Montreal, for having heroin and he was released, they asked him whether he had a problem with drugs and he said, "I don't have a problem with drugs but police have a problem with drugs," and that's been in regard to whether the use of drugs is a law enforcement issue.

The second comment I want to make is a point that I think you've already raised and that is when people are talking about drugs in terms of, "It's a bad thing, how do we deal with this bad thing," I think there's a basic ethical issue that people tend to miss and that is that the decision of a person what to do with their own body and with their own mind is a decision that they have the right to make. Nobody would say that, well very few people would say, that if drunk driving is a problem we should outlaw alcohol. But people will say well you need to outlaw drugs because it affects society, and this concept that one can't distinguish between criminalizing an effect on society like crime, and criminalizing something which in and of itself is not an act against society... that distinction needs to be made. And the third point of one who made is simply that there was a poll in USA

Today yesterday and it said that 45% of the population believes in creationism, and I would just say that when I find that we have a society that consists of such a high percentage of people who don't accept any kind of sound rational reasoning and that that society is led by a population of individuals who simply call them politicians and I don't think and just anymore about that except that they're not the kind of people who lead us as much as... I won't say any more about that. I don't see that we have any way to get out of this. I just really am very depressed about the whole attitude that people have that they have the right to tell people what they should do with themselves and I'm very concerned that the treating of a drug problem even as a medical rather than a legal problem is a major problem because we've changed the definition of addiction, to when we call something

an addiction, what we're saying is that person has no control so we don't have to worry about whether that person has the right to do something because they're now a patient of ours and we can do what we think is best for them. And I'm very concerned shifting from a legal question to a medical question doesn't help. - Well, the caller has raised several interesting points, Judge Gray, you want to respond to some... - Well, yes indeed, with regard to the first issue: accountability is the key. We must hold people accountable for their actions and I just mentioned Robert Downey, Jr., Betty Ford, and I could add a person to that, to Daryl Strawberry, for a long time and we all know he's a very gifted professional baseball player and he has a drug problem. But then he drove under the influence of I think it was cocaine and was put in jail, and you know what I say to that? You know, that's good. If they're going to go out and violate the laws regardless of these... their medical status

on these drugs, they should be held accountable and I think that the caller would agree with that. But the trick is again, the secret is, to hold people accountable for what they do, not for what they put into their bodies. Otherwise... you know, I don't smoke cigarettes. I think it's a very dangerous thing to do and your body doesn't forget. That's the same thing with basically any of these drugs without medical supervision. So we must focus on education, we must focus on individual responsibility, and let people know that there are there are results, there are repercussions for what we do, and our body will do that. It's socially a bad thing to do or harmful or certainly unpleasant, and that if you do these things it isn't just a criminal justice sanction. Criminal justice sanction hasn't worked because of the prohibition has resulted in such an incredible market, but there are other sanctions and that's what we're facing with cigarettes: not by making the substance illegal, but by in effect changing social mores and showing people by education that medically it's just a harmful thing

to do. Otherwise I tell your caller, he said, and I wrote it down, "There's no way to get out of this and I'm depressed," well there is a way to get out of this and the way it is basically what we're doing now David, we're showing people that it's okay to talk about this issue and as soon as we legitimize the discussion, I absolutely guarantee you and everyone else listening that we will change away from our failed drug policy. The only reason we're staying here now is an absolute fear by people to discuss this issue because it connotes, it, it seems to imply that we don't care about our children, we don't care if people take drugs and none of that is true. But we can do it better, in fact in my view, we couldn't do it any worse than we are now. - We are talking this morning in this part of Focus 580 with James Gray, he is judge of the superior court in Orange County in southern California and as you can tell if you've been listening for a little while, he's certainly is a vocal critic of American drug policy. He's appeared on many radio and TV shows to talk about it and also has authored a book, and if you're interested in reading more on the topic you can look for

this book it's titled Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed And What We Can Do About It, it's published by the Temple University Press. And we have other callers and we'd welcome others, if you have questions, comments all you need to do is call us here in Champaign- Urbana 333-9455. We also have a toll free line good anywhere that you can hear us around Illinois, Indiana, any place the signal will travel: that's 800-222-9455. - David, may I add two quick points? - Yes, sir. - Number one is that the full title of the book, and I know it's a long title, is a judicial indictment of the war on drugs. It's not just me as a judge that's talking about it, we quote about forty other judges from around the country based upon their experience etcetera. The second is it's kind of like a homecoming for me. I love Wisconsin, in fact for a while owned a little cabin on a lake up by Ole Lake near Webster and well I think that Wisconsin is a great place and Madison is a wonderful place to be, so you'll be commended on your choice

of places to live. Well, we're a little far south of that but I know we do have people listening... we actually have from time to time heard from callers in Milwaukee so we know that we've got people up there who could be listening. Well, let's go on here we have a caller, the next one is Belgium, line number one. - Yes sir. I would like to point out that your interviewee there is absolutely right in the problem is with profits, but we have to also look at the profits in drugs stem across a whole area here. A lot of attorneys make a lot of money defending and prosecuting drug cases. It's not just the federal government that's putting money into this process, you suck it all out of our entire economy by, you know, we have to, you know, the person who gets arrested has to get an attorney, a lot of judges are in there. Half the people in jail right now have some kind of drug connection, have been involved in some way in drugs. And as soon as you push a person into jail because

of this drug problem, all you've done is just taught him a better way to be a criminal, because all he sees is criminals in, or she or whatever, and you got prostitution that's involved with this. It's just if we don't get away from this criminal aspect of drugs, we're never going to win. We have to handle it much more in a way, just like you say, a medical problem. You're absolutely right in that a person who is drinking and driving, smoking and driving, injecting and driving, whatever we want to deal with: that's not good, I'm not trying to do that. But this money that we are putting towards this war on drugs... we could go buy all the drugs in the world and give them away and I think we'd probably better off in our actual society as far as the problems we're causing in our entire society. - Well, I expect Judge Gray would agree with you. - Yeah, you certainly convinced me. David, he, Belgium is absolutely right. I mentioned the government and that is certainly I think the reason why this is continuing on. I called it the "runaway freight train of federal money" and it is, but also you know

the prison, prison guards unions, the prison construction group, politicians who get elected by talking tough, certainly attorneys, certainly people that sell burglar alarm equipment and the rest. [inaudible] is an enormous agency pushing this because they're addicted to that money. You know, as I say in my book and I believe it, that asking people like this, that have a profit motive to continue with the war on drugs, asking them if we should change is like asking a barber if you need a haircut. Of course you need a haircut, because then I have made money in that haircut, sure. - You make money selling the police cars and police guns and police... - All connected. - But everything! It goes clear through our economy. - Well, it does. However I must state that I am not in fear from my job as a judge. We have plenty of things to do. We're not going to fire police officers, we're basically not going to close down all of our prisons. We just will... we're misspending the money, we need to address other society's problems that that are not being addressed by this. You know, and keep in mind

when we finally came to our senses and repealed alcohol prohibition, crime went down in our country by sixty percent within the first year, and that is that's violent crime: you know, robberies, rapes, murders, that sort of thing. I'm absolutely convinced, in fact in my book I guarantee, that we will have a drop in crime by at least thirty-five percent after the first year and it'll probably be more than that, so it's all connected, we again just have to legitimize the discussion, and as soon as the voters tell the politicians that they're in favor of change, believe me the politicians will be out in front. - I applaud you, sir. All right, well thank you. Let's talk again with another caller, this next person is in Taylorville, line number four, hello. - Yes I'm reminded of Mr. Mencken's, one of my favorite creatures, remark, referring to Puritanism, he characterized your average Puritan as "the fella who's haunted by the dread fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time." I frankly think that... let's take the demon, well actually

the demonizeed weed marijuana, which I think is probably less physically and psychically injurious then either alcohol or common tobacco, and yet they've been putting people in the slam for extensive periods for the possession of small amounts of this stuff. I agree with you about the people involved in accidents, well they they should be dealt with the same way, naturally as people doing alcohol or whatever. But I really think that there's a kind of almost pathological -- our drug laws are not just moronic and mean-spirited, there's a definitely a pathological element to them and I think it's nowhere more evident in, for example, the radio commercials that you hear encouraging kids to just say no, etcetera. This quiz show, a thing that the most appalling little number: you've got this kid

who seems like a moron and he's asked questions like, what is his name, what, you know, simplistic questions and he can't answer them. Ergo, marijuana makes you moronic. I think it's easier being a moron if you're already one. Santayana's wonderful observation, it's his most famous one I think, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Prohibition failed and I agree with you absolutely, this drug war is nothing more or less than lunacy, and I I see it as a representative of a kind of a strain in the American character. There's really kind of a willingness to go all the way with the right-wing ideology. If we continue in this direction, I foresee in another generation or two Big

Brother will be much more cozy with us inside our head. - Well, Judge Gray, I imagine again well, let's say, you would substantially be in agreement with the... - Indeed. There's a lot to talk about. You know we are defining victory, literally in the war on drugs, as simply slowing down the pace of defeat. Nobody is saying we're going to win this thing. We had our Congress in 1988 I believe, pass some form of resolution saying we were going to be a drug free country by 1995. I mean that sort of thing is just, talk about lunacy or or moronics, that's where we are. But your your caller mentioned Lincoln and he's certainly right but there are lots of very bright people many of whom are extremely conservative like I am, that talk the same way. George Schultz, former secretary of state from Ronald Reagan's era; Milton Friedman is no man's liberal, Walter Cronkite Albert Einstein: all of these folks... we're not hurting for very bright people saying

the same thing as your caller. When he gets to marijuana, you know there's something that we should all focus on, this is a no brainer that all of us can help with: the president the United States could change this entire medical marijuana problem and just make it go away by changing marijuana from a schedule one drug which means it has no viable medical usage at all, which is silly, to a schedule two drug which means yes it has some medical benefit but it could be abused. Well, okay. Cocaine is a schedule two drug right this minute so all the president has to do by a stroke of a pen is to sign this legislation or actually mandate because he has the authority to change it from a schedule one drug to a schedule two drug. Well presidents in the past have delegated that authority to a member of their government. To whom? The head of the DEA, a police officer. Well that's stupid too. If you're going to delegate it at all, delegate to the Surgeon General. This is a medical decision and as soon as people just stand up and say, "Well, let's worry about these other drugs later, but Mr. President, make marijuana a schedule two drug and allow

medical doctors to prescribe it and then if they abuse that then hold them accountable. So all of these things can be done; we will do them, I promise. The first step is again just to do what we're doing now and legitimize the discussion. After that everything will follow. - We're just a little bit past the midpoint here. I should introduce again our guest. James Gray is judge of the superior court in Orange County in southern California. He's also been a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles and he's the author of this book that I mentioned, "Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed And What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs. It's published by Temple University Press, and questions, comments welcome. 333- WILL, toll free, 800-222-WILL. You mentioned, Judge Gray that also there are... it's not just you, Judge James Gray, who feels this way; there are other judges who feel this way. If we really could go out and talk with judges, perhaps also prosecutors, although they may be separate, kind of a separate case, perhaps police officers

and engage people in a discussion about drug policy and if they were really being honest with us, how many of them do you think would say, yes, Judge Gray is right, the approach that we've taken, it just has failed and as long as we keep going on this way we're not going to be any more successful. Well more than half, probably a substantial majority would agree with that statement, but it depends David, whether the conversation is public or private or if I'm in a judge's elevator or the judge's lunchroom, pretty much nobody ever both voices any form of disagreement. If we were in public then you know they they speak a little differently because, you know, judges too in most places are elected officials, police officers have a very strict political problems or whatever, so we again, this is the definition of a grassroots movement. Everybody realizes that what we're doing isn't working. Just ask the question that I do: are we better off today than we were five years ago with regard to

this critical issue of drug use and abuse and all of the crime and misery that goes with it? No one will say we're in better shape today. Well if that's the case then we have no legitimate expectation of being in better shape next year than we are today unless we change our approach. So that's pretty straightforward too. The problem is that still people are hesitant to talk about this issue and that's one that the people need to stand up and voice their concern. Just allow these elected officials the legitimacy of discussing this, just of asking questions, and tell them they're not going to be booted out of office if they do. In fact they may be booted out of office if they don't and then we'll change it. - Well we have spent about half of the time here talking about what's wrong, about why, we've at least touched on a number of reasons why the drug laws have failed, but I think before we find ourselves out of time and I have some other callers and I will get back to them, I should ask you to talk a little bit more about your suggestions about doing things differently. Supposing that if I was the president I

could make you drug czar and you could be in charge of of the drug policy what would you suggest we do differently. Okay absolutely, and in my book this is the real thrust of what I'm talking about, because I bring people hope. You've seen the book David I think and you too must feel some some optimism because between the two radical extremes of the legalization of drugs, which I would never do, which basically is like aspirin that's a legalized drug, anybody without age restrictions or advertising restrictions can go and buy it at your local market. Too radical for me, I'd never do that and we never will do that, but between those two radical extremes of legalization of drugs on the one hand and zero tolerance which is what we're doing now, just incarcerating everybody, we have numbers of options. The first option which I would jump at would be if I were the federal drug czar to get the federal government out of this situation. Go back to the concept of federalism which our country was founded on, in which was what we did when we repealed alcohol prohibition. Allow each state to decide what is best for its people and then reduce the federal government simply

to allowing, to assisting each state to enforce its own chosen rules. But if I were the king of California I would probably go to two systems. The first is very straightforward: it's a medicalization program that's going on in Switzerland today. You find these heavy using addicted people and you bring them closer to medical professionals and you let the doctors prescribe their drug of choice for them, if in fact they won't take treatment. That means even you know heroin or cocaine or... in Liverpool they even allowed crack cocaine to be used but you do it under strictly medically controlled circumstances where these people don't get a high, they don't get a surge, but they also don't go through withdrawal. They just maintain them at that level. It removes them from the criminal element, it actually, they've seen that crime has gone down noticeably because they don't have to go out and commit crimes in order to get money to these drugs. Their health has increased markedly because you know you don't know what the strength is or what the purity is of today's drugs; at least they know what that is, and they've... 50 percent more of these folks are

educated, excuse me employed, so all of these things in in Switzerland are working famously well to the degree that they had a plebiscite as to whether they wanted to keep this program or not and the vote was more than 61 percent, excuse me more than 71 percent of the vote, to keep it. So the Swiss don't love their children any less than we do. They saw that this is working for hard used, hard-using addicts and they they approved it. Otherwise anything we can do to deprofitize these drugs, again recognizing the drugs are truly dangerous without any question if they're used improperly, but it's the money that's really bringing us down. So we basically have a choice of either having these drugs in our society because we can't even keep them out of prisons, how do we think we can keep them off the streets of Madison Wisconsin, so if they're going to be here anyway we can choose to have them with drug lords or without drug lords. We can strictly regulate them, control the quality, tax them, use the money for drug treatment, drug education, and somehow bring this back under the law because today we have no laws whatsoever dealing with

the sale or use or quality of these drugs. We try to bring them back under the law and we'll make progress. - If though you had this this legal system that would provide people who are drug-dependent with their drugs and also do some other things really try to provide education persuade them to to live their lives differently and so forth, would you not still have some kind of a black market going on, would there still be a some kind of illegal market or do you think that the the above board market would put the the black market essentially out of business? We have the ability to drive the black market out of business except for one thing. Neither I nor you I believe nor anyone else would want these drugs to be available for children so to the degree that you prescribe something, you prohibit some folks from using them then yes you're going to continue to have a black market. That is something I'm prepared to continue with, I would prosecute very strongly anyone that furnished any of these drugs to children, but otherwise maybe if we could somehow strictly control this

and regulate it so it would not be illegal for an adult to go to a government package store and buy some of these products and then hold them accountable for what they do. We're always going to have problems with these drugs, but instead of moralizing about it, let's address it as managers, like more of Western Europe is doing very successfully. But we must just take count and see what the problems are that are being inflicted upon us in this entire area, and the corruption is manifest. How much corruption can you buy for a million dollars in cash? And the answer is quite a bit. So these are all problems in the area. Shooting down the missionary plane again as I said in Peru: that's a drug prohibition problem. We can do away with that. Instead of taking all these monies and putting people in prison and spending fortunes on that, if we would spend money on senior centers and recreational boys' and girls' clubs and reduce the class size from 30 to 20. I mean the government has plenty of money; we're just misspending it on the criminal justice system. So these are all

things that we need to do. I don't have all the answers but I can certainly see that we're doing it wrong. - We have a number of callers here, we'll get as many as we can. We'll start in here with Urbana and line one, hello? - Hello, yes, oh I couldn't hear which line you were calling. - Yes, that's you. - I'm concerned, I'm a former teacher and I was working in the primary grades and in light of the comments that you've made about not giving access to children and to having people pay for, with consequences for illegal actions that they take, when I left teaching at that time I had already had several children that I know were pre-natally drug affected and it broke my heart to see how these children, no matter how hard they tried, just could not function in a normal way and it was because of the difference in their makeup because of the chemical effects that had been you know that had happened to them before they were born. What... what kinds of things have you read about, have you heard about, what kinds of suggestions do you have as far as consequences for people who

pre-natally affect their children in this way, or in any way hurt their children. How can you control that? It seems to me that that's something that would be very very difficult if not impossible to to do anything about. - Urbana, good for you. This is a critical issue that I know concerns all of us as well it should. Unfortunately you know we we can't control everything, what you can try to do is reduce it. The first thing I think you want to do is to bring these pregnant women closer to medical professionals that can help them instead of labeling them as automatic criminals and pushing them farther away. That is something that we're doing wrong today. A lot of these women basically are unable to get prenatal care because they're using cocaine. Well those are exactly the women that we want to get more prenatal care, that we want to bring closer to medical doctors. So by making them criminals and making them consort with the criminal element is going in the wrong direction. Otherwise you know, people... you you saw these these mothers that are using drugs today,

this is under our present system. It's happening even though these drugs are as illegal as we can make them. So the problem is again one of focus. No one wants -- including pregnant women! Pregnant women do not want their fetus their eventual child to be under the influence of any of these things. So they try to take all kinds of home remedies. You know, I've talked to some and they take pickle juice. Well I don't know how pickle juice is going to help any, but at least they do have the desire to have their child be medically healthy. So bring them closer to the medical professionals. But putting them in jail is just not the answer. - Thank you. - All right thank you, let's go next to Champaign and line three, hello? Yes go ahead. - Hi, I have some questions which I guess are kind of related to things you've just been mentioning. I had an experience with a friend who I consider otherwise progressive and it was about the discussion of making needles legal, be available to addicts to stem the AIDS

problem and his response was just flat no, because it's illegal, and I was just terribly surprised and I've been encountering this a lot, and it's this sort of dual attitude: it's illegal and it's immoral. And I don't know how to get beyond these problems, because I don't think moralizing about it is helping and certainly the legality issue isn't either and I wonder if you had anything more to say on changing people's attitudes regarding this moralizing issue and passing judgment. And I'm not pro drugs I don't use them I don't think people should but that's, you know, that's not the point so if I'll just hang up but if you have any kind of anything more to say about how to get people past that the morality issue to sort of move in the direction that you're talking about. Thanks. - Well, good for you and a critical question. What is the moral issue here? To me the moral issue is keeping people from getting AIDS, keeping

people from getting hepatitis to the degree that we can. What is the answer? You know, the answer right now, that message that we're giving to people as a moral answer is, "Go ahead and die. We don't care if you incur AIDS, we don't care if you give AIDS to your sexual partner, if you're a woman to give it to your fetus if you're pregnant." That is not the message that we stand for. And then you can tell them, I didn't get the caller's name, but you can tell them look at Holland. Holland in about the early part of the 1990s looked around and found that eight percent of all of the people in the country that were using illegal drugs were HIV positive, and they decided that that was too much. So they employed this program of needle exchange. Needle exchange is a very basic program that simply change exchanges a dirty needle for a clean one with no money changing hands and no questions asked. Needles are very inexpensive, you know three or four cents a piece so that wasn't a problem. Holland then went out at medical clinics, bands and the rest that went out to the drug

users and had needle exchange programs and gave them some information. After three years they found out that their HIV rate among injecting drug users dropped from eight percent to four percent, and I deemed that to be a really good idea and truly a moral thing to do. And then if you want to know a crime throw them, throw these people that are they're talking this morality, this statistic. At this moment in the United States of America do you know what our HIV population percentage is of people that are HIV, that are are using injecting drugs? And the answer is that thirty five percent of all people in the United States that are injecting illicit drugs are HIV positive, and that is an absolute outrage. So and the studies show in San Francisco and in New Haven Connecticut and lots of others, that needle exchange programs are extremely helpful in reducing the HIV virus, and they have no impact at all upon increasing drug usage. So it is absolutely immoral to deprive these people of clean

needles. - We have about seven, eight minutes left in this part of Focus 580. Once again I'll introduce our guest. We're speaking with James Gray, he is judge of the Superior Court in Orange County in southern California and as you can tell a vocal critic of American drug policy. He's talked about a lot in radio and television interviews and he's also authored the book that we've mentioned titled Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed And What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs, it's published by the Temple University Press, and we have time for some other callers. We have one waiting, we'll get right to, others are welcome. The number here in Champaign-Urbana, 333- 9455 and toll free, 800-222-9455. Next caller up is Bloomington Indiana, it's line number two. Hello. - Hi I have two questions. First question it is about Mr. Gray's apparent assumption that outlawing drugs should eliminate the drug problem. Judge Gray, is there any law that has ever eliminated the crime that it outlawed? We have murder, we have

theft: they're both out... we have laws against murder and theft and yet we still have murder and we still have theft, so should we repeal the laws against murder and theft? And I have another question. - Well, let me answer that one first because nothing I meant to say in any fashion was going to imply that we're going to eliminate the drug problem. In fact I've said things directly contrary. These drugs are available, they will always be available so we shouldn't try to manage the problem instead of moralize it away. What we should do is try to reduce not only the drug problems, but the problems that will be inflicted upon us by the presence in our community which are also drug prohibition problems, but we're going to have a black market to some degree, we're always going to have drug problems and and I've never said that we would be able to eliminate them. It was Congress that said that we were going to be a drug free country by 1995 which was absolutely naive. So obviously we're going to have these problems, let's try to reduce them. - But you're still in favor of some laws against the drug traffic, certainly. - Yes. I am in favor of keeping these

drugs away from children to the maximum degree possible and let's adopt a way that will keep that from happening. Right, today however I'm sorry to say that our drug prohibition laws are recruiting our children to a lifestyle of drug use and drug selling because of the money. But otherwise we're going to have these problems. Making them illegal has exacerbated the problems, holding people accountable their actions will reduce the problems. It also will increase health and that's what I want to do and by the way we have actually inflicted upon ourselves an absolute civil liberties disaster because of the war on drugs, and those are things that we simply cannot ignore either. I keep wondering where Paul Revere is to spread the alarm about our giving away our civil liberties so much directly because of the drug problem. What was your second question? - It's about the civil liberties, second question is about the unconstitutional government seizure of property. Our Constitution guarantees that government may not seize private property without due process of law. You're a

judge, I think you would say that seizing property without due process of law means in order to seize somebody's property, he has a right to have a court hearing, some type of trial or some type of hearing before the government can seize his property and yet you know very well that drug enforcement officers regularly seize vehicles they seize boats, airplanes, or they may sometimes seize money on the mere suspicion that this property may have been used in drug traffic. - You're absolutely right, this really concerns me deeply, you're talking about our asset forfeiture laws which have truly turned our entire system of justice on its head. These are outrageous, they have been modified a little bit but they're still on the books. This is a drug prohibition problem that I was mentioning before. It's the money, it is the unfortunately the various law enforcement agencies or otherwise get to keep the booty, get to keep the the profits from these seized monies and seized airplanes and the rest. I certainly favor seizing an airplane, for example, if it's used to traffic in this misery, but it should only be done to the same jury after the jury

convicts the person who's flying the airplane or whatever and then you submit the issue to the jury as to whether this airplane was used in that operation or if this gold jewelry was bought from the proceeds of it. But we have really done bad things to ourselves totally out of frustration because what we're doing isn't working, so we keep trying to find new ways of working the square peg into the round hole and it hasn't worked and we've suffered major consequences for that. - We have a couple of minutes left, I have several callers. I know we can't take them all but I want to try to get at least one more. Champaign is next in line, line number one. - Hello, yes, I'm just calling in, I've heard several comments this morning and I'm not in disagreement with the judge because it's a very complex question, but what I haven't heard spoken to is because of drug abuse, and marijuana abuse as well, the kind of heartache and difficulty that it causes to families, to kids, to marriages, to coworkers at work and it's my sense that a lot of people that are pushing for the normalizing of drugs in our society, of legalizing of them, you know want to smoke when they

want to smoke or use when they want to use and put all of us in jeopardy and I think that's a problem. Secondly we've had one of our youngsters become involved in this whole issue himself and I think the cost of money to us, the cost of heartache and disruption to our family was unbelievable and where there hadn't been a dealer there to make that drug available then that may not have happened. And I think thirdly you know you people talk about going to jail for for smoking a joint or something like that, but it's my impression that people go to jail because they're dealing in large quantities of this kind of stuff and not just for a joint. I think the answer is is prevention and it's education and I would point to Everett Coop's war, not his war but effort to begin to acquaint people with the effects of nicotine and how smoking decreased in our country and smoking among kids that... - Yeah I really,

I need to give Judge Gray a chance to respond because we're almost out of time and I think in in some respects I think you would agree with some of the things at least the caller said. Well indeed so, unfortunately he asked about 17 questions and you say we have about 30 seconds. First of all I've never favored legalization and I want people to be careful of the terms they use. Legalization means a lot different than anything I've talked about. Secondly yes we do have heartaches everywhere and that's one reason why I've had to take such a public position, because I'm a conservative person I don't use this stuff, but I've seen what these laws have required us to do. You understand that in California where we have these "three strikes and you're out" laws for and the third strike can be a nonviolent offense, we have four times more people in prison today in California on a three strikes law because of marijuana offenses than we do for robberies, rapes, and murders combined which is just absolutely outrageous. The human issue cannot be understated. You remember this actor Carroll O'Connor who lost his son to drug abuse and he made some very

accurate comments about the fact that, look, people are talking about legalizing drugs would open the floodgates to drugs have closed their eyes to what's really happening because the floodgates were opened long ago. These drugs are here, they're going to stay, we can't keep them out of prison so we certainly can't keep them off the streets of our communities. Let's try to manage this and putting people in prison for smoking marijuana is simply not the right thing to do or for using any of these other drugs as a matter of fact, unless they cause harm to the rest of people. - We... - Finally, your caller said prevention and education work. They do for non-problem users. For problem users, they'll find their way into our courts anyway so let's get at it. - We are going to have to stop, I wish we continue I'm sure we could profitably, but we're just at the end of the time. Judge Gray, to you we want to say, thanks very much for talking with us today. - It's a pleasure, I appreciate the opportunity, we need to legitimize this discussion and I think that this program has helped. -Our guest James Gray is judge of the Superior Court in Orange County in southern California. His book is Why Our Drug Laws

Have Failed and What We Can Do About It published by Temple University Press