BUSTED: AMERICA'S WAR ON MARIJUANA

Written and Produced by Elena Mannes

INDIANA ARCHITECT: My concept of the penalties, the whole time I was
involved with growing marijuana, was, you know, "Gosh, I could get caught
and spend a year in prison." I mean, we were particularly naive about what
the final result could be. [Busted - Federal sentence: 20 years]

CRAIG RALSTIN, Indiana State Police: There are people that are growing it
for money, but they're criminals just like any other criminal.

WILL FOSTER: I lived a pretty decent life. I worked every day. I paid my
taxes. You know, I didn't go out and hurt nobody. I didn't rob nobody. I
didn't know that cultivation carried 2 to life, no. [Busted - State
sentence: 93 years]

ANDREA STRONG: They said, "Well he can't have bond. He's facing a life
sentence." And my mom says, "Well who did he kill?" You know, "Did he rape
somebody? Did he molest some child? What did he do?" He was accused of
being the middleman in a marijuana conspiracy. He connected the buyer and
the grower. [Busted - Life sentence, Leavenworth]

STEVE WHITE: I think it's a dangerous drug. I don't think it does any good,
period.

1st DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENT: Chimney on this house here. You can see a
little bit of heat coming out of it, a little animal standing there in the
back yard.

NARRATOR: In the night sky over Indianapolis, the hunt is on: drug
enforcement agents scanning a neighborhood for evidence of marijuana.

2nd DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENT: Hello!

1st DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENT: That don't look quite right. Yeah, a patio,
patio door, window. Window's been covered over. Looks a little odd.

NARRATOR: The infrared camera could reveal a marijuana-growing operation
inside any one of these houses. Infrared detects heat, which can indicate a
"grow room" using a lot of lights.

2nd DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENT: The foundation certainly is warm.

1st DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENT: That's what I was going to say. That
foundation's hotter than fire.

2nd DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENT: Yeah.

1st DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENT: That's the only thing I see real unusual.

NARRATOR: This kind of marijuana search is happening all over America. The
war on marijuana has become a battle fought not only overseas, but on home
turf.

3rd DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENT: We've got a search warrant. The targets are two
white males-

STEVE WHITE: This is a law-and-order part of the country. Law enforcement's
held in probably higher esteem here than any place I've ever been.

NARRATOR: For many years, Steve White ran Indiana's war on marijuana as an
agent with the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA is spending
over $13 million a year to fund state cannabis eradication programs.

STEVE WHITE: We were one of the first 20 states to do it, and there hadn't
been an organized effort, I don't think, against marijuana in the U.S.
since the late 1930s.

NARRATOR: White recently retired from active duty with the DEA and now
teaches undercover police techniques. He went along with us on a typical
arrest to show us the world of marijuana law enforcement.

1st DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENT: Search warrant! Please open the door.

2nd DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENT: I'll get this side door here.

1st DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENT: Police! Search warrant!

2nd DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENT: You have the right to remain silent. Anything
you say can be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an
attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be [unintelligible]
for you. You understand you're under arrest?

SUSPECT: Yes, sir.

NARRATOR: For this arrest in Bloomington, Indiana, an informant had tipped
agents off to an indoor marijuana grow room. It was allegedly run by a
business school student and his roommate in the back of their house.

STEVE WHITE: This is their growing room, and the first thing that you can
see on these plants is that they've been topped, or the flowering tops, in
other words, have been pruned off the colis of the plant. This is fairly
typical. They've got three lights here, the smaller plants over there,
larger ones coming up here.

I think a lot of people that grow actually grow so that they don't have to
go out and buy dope. But the down side and reverse side of that is, some
time along the line, they say, "Gee, I've spent this much on equipment and
this much on fertilizer. Why don't I grow a little more and sell it and pay
for that?" And then that's when they come into my clutches.

[to suspect] Would you hazard a guess as to what a pound of that stuff
would be worth on the market?

SUSPECT: I wouldn't know.

STEVE WHITE: If I said $2,000 to $5,000, could that be in the range?

SUSPECT: That would be about right, I guess- guessing.

NARRATOR: This suspect was one of about 3,000 people arrested for marijuana
offenses in Indiana last year. The state's cannabis eradication program now
makes more marijuana arrests than any state in the nation. During the
summer and early fall, when the corn is high, the drug enforcement team
heads out to make its own harvest.

DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENT: I think we may have some [unintelligible] marijuana
plants back in the center of this cornfield.

NARRATOR: Any one of these corn rows may hide thousands of dollars worth of
marijuana.

CRAIG RALSTIN, Indiana State Police: I've been spotting marijuana as a
pilot with the state police for about 19 years. I think it's one of the
most important jobs that we could be doing because I know what the effect
of the marijuana is on our young people in our society.

NARRATOR: An estimated 10 to 30 million Americans use marijuana, and as
much half of all the marijuana used in America is now home grown.

CRAIG RALSTIN: We'll use fixed-wings and helicopters and trained spotters,
and we'll find where people are either preparing their grows or suspicious
areas that look like somebody's cut an area out of a field. And once we
find the plant from the air, we'll direct our ground guys, and they'll go
back in and either cut it or pull the plants out.

That's a pretty nice plant.

ARMY OFFICER: Yeah.

CRAIG RALSTIN: You can see the growers started this one indoors some place
in a cup, and brought them and transplanted them back out here. That's kind
of the thing that we run into. We're always trying to keep up with the
growers and try to get them before they get them out.

DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENT: Are these your fields here?

MAN: Right. Yes.

DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENT: Okay, we got some marijuana out of this one and
this one, both.

ARMY OFFICER: He contacted me.

DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENT: Okay. Okay, good enough.

ARMY OFFICER: He's the one that told me.

WOMAN: You know, it really makes me mad that people can come into your
field and do that, you know, and they don't have to do any work.

MAN: And they make more money, you know, than I will-

WOMAN: They pull out your corn plants.

MAN: -for the whole crop, you know? But the cows ate it all last time,
except one plant.

MIKE GAYER, Indiana State Police: Unfortunately, every day that we fly, we
find cultivated marijuana. There is not a day that goes by that we go out
in this aircraft that we do not find cultivated marijuana plants. There's
that much in the state of Indiana.

RALPH WEISHEIT: "The marijuana basket of America" would probably be a good
description of the central part of the U.S. Marijuana is grown in every
state of the U.S., so it is a national phenomenon, but it seems
particularly prevalent in the Midwest.

NARRATOR: Ralph Weisheit, a professor of criminal justice at Illinois State
University, has done extensive research on the domestic marijuana industry.

RALPH WEISHEIT: We have to make guesses about how much marijuana is growing
because it is an illegal crop, but it is easily the biggest cash crop. Some
people have said it goes into the billions. The value is far higher,
probably double the value of corn. You also have in the Midwest a fair
amount of marijuana that's already growing wild that was planted during the
Second World War.

NARRATOR: The federal government actually gave farmers the seeds because
hemp from the marijuana plant was needed to make rope after supplies from
Asia were cut off.

MIKE GAYER, Indiana State Police: It was good in the '40s. It's bad in the
'90s.

DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENT: The government paid them to grow it, and now the
government is paying us to take it away.

RALPH WEISHEIT: Certainly, of all the illegal drugs, there's been no drug
about which the government has had more mixed feelings. Marijuana has had a
somewhat different role than other drugs. It has had a mystical sort of
atmosphere about it for some and it's been the embodiment of evil for others.

1st WOMAN: It doesn't do anything good for you.

1st MAN: It's very bad for you.

2nd MAN: It's a mild relaxant.

3rd MAN: This is a nice drug. It doesn't have a hangover. You don't become
aggressive and belligerent.

4th MAN: It is dangerous.

2nd WOMAN: Changes your mind.

5th MAN: It affects short-term memory.

3rd WOMAN: Paranoia.

6th MAN: Killing brain cells.

4th WOMAN: There's a reason why it's illegal.

7th MAN: I'm not sure I understand how you make a plant illegal.

RALPH WEISHEIT: I find that some law enforcement officials believe it is a
drug, and a drug is a drug, and so harsh penalties should go with that, if
we have harsh penalties for other drugs. I have found others who see
marijuana as completely different from cocaine or heroin, and really
believe that we've gone far too far along in our handling of the drug
through the criminal process.

NARRATOR: More Americans use marijuana than all other illegal drugs
combined and are spending an estimated $7 billion a year to buy it on the
black market. It's believed that more than two million Americans grow
marijuana themselves, either for personal use or to sell it.

NARRATOR: ["Sea of Green" video] Hello, and welcome to the Sea of Green.
Follow the simple instructions and soon you will begin your harvest.

NARRATOR: Lessons on how to set up a grow room are readily available on
videotape and in magazines. "High Times," founded in 1974, now has a
circulation of a quarter million readers. Even the Internet has marijuana
Web sites with discussion about softening the laws and the experience of
other countries with decriminalization.

The mass media treats marijuana with a mixture of alarm and laughter.

1st ACTOR: ["Home Improvement"] It's not oregano.

2nd ACTOR: Tarragon?

1st ACTOR: This is marijuana.

2nd ACTOR: Jill cooks with marijuana?

NARRATOR: Popular culture sends a mixed message, and for many marijuana
growers, the temptation to defy the law seems to outweigh the risk of
arrest. Doug Keenan, who lives in a quiet middle-class neighborhood of
Indianapolis, was even willing to go public and show us his grow room, dug
deep underground so the infrared cameras won't detect it.

DOUG KEENAN: The humming that you hear is the ballast, which is driving the
light here. Most all of this equipment can be bought at any hardware store.
Once you've decided that you're going to be consuming it pretty regularly,
then you come up with, "Well, I'm going to need a steady supply." Simple
reason is you've got something that's priced more than gold. If you're
going to smoke a lot of it, you can't afford to buy it out on the black
market.

NARRATOR: Over the last two decades, the potency of marijuana on the market
has increased and the price has skyrocketed. In the early 1980s, an ounce
of commercial grade sold for about $40. Today an ounce costs up to $400- in
fact, a price higher than gold, which now sells for around $300 dollars an
ounce.

DOUG KEENAN: I will be growing as long as I am free to do so- "free" being
that nobody's put a ball and chain around my ankle. You have to realize
that your liberty is at risk every minute of every day.

NARRATOR: So why go public and take the chance of arrest?

DOUG KEENAN: It's a delicate trade-off, but in my mind- you know, a lot of
people have asked me why be an activist at all. The alternative is, if I
don't, you're going to have a police state in another 30 years. And this is
basically a right of consumption. I have the right to grow and consume
anything that God gives me the seed and the ground to grow it in.

NARRATOR: So far, Keenan's grow room has escaped detection by Indiana's
drug enforcement team. But often, growers who think they're operating free
and clear for years are actually the targets of long investigations that do
end in arrest.

INDIANA ARCHITECT: I got a 20-year prison sentence and I was just totally
devastated. I think we were all particularly naive about what the final
result could be.

NARRATOR: This Indiana architect and his brother, an attorney, used this
farm to grow large amounts of marijuana, which they sold commercially. They
were arrested by Steve White after a five-year investigation.

STEVE WHITE: The farmer that owned this property had run into some
financial difficulties. And he was a client of the attorney, and when the
attorney's brother called him and wanted to expand the operation, this came
to mind.

NARRATOR: The architect doesn't want his identity revealed.

INDIANA ARCHITECT: The farmer didn't hesitate at all. He had very few
alternatives to be able to make the money that was going to be needed to
save his farm. And this was in the early '80s, when all the farms in
America were really in a big financial crisis. We grew there for a couple
of years, and the first year we grew 50 pounds, and at that time it was
worth about $100,000.

STEVE WHITE: They were the all-American boys. They loved their children.
They loved their parents. So, you know, how do I characterize them? Smart.
Nice. They broke the law. And they knew better. The people of Indiana will
not tolerate this type of behavior. Why should we say it's okay for a guy
to make a million dollars raising marijuana? Marijuana's the threshold
drug. It's the drug that most children, kids start out with.

NARRATOR: In a community like Warsaw, Indiana, marijuana is not only
growing in the cornfields, it's being traded in the halls of the high school.

1st GIRL: You can see when people's doing it at school, the smell of it at
school.

INTERVIEWER: You can smell it at school?

1st GIRL: Oh, yeah. Some people do it in the bathroom.

1st BOY: The bathroom's bad.

1st GIRL: We just got caught, like, two weeks ago. There was, like, five
girls that got caught doing it.

2nd GIRL: That was, like, the second week of school.

3rd GIRL: You can't hide it. I mean, you see somebody walking up and down
the street, all you have to do is ask them and they can give it to you.
They'll sell it right there to you, on the spot.

INTERVIEWER: All of you know somebody you could go probably call right now?

STUDENTS: Yeah. Yeah.

2nd BOY: The guys- well, if you don't do it, they call you wimps and all
kinds of things, and just try to put you down and get you to do it and
finally snap.

PAUL CROUSORE, Principal, Warsaw High School: We had indicators that we're
having problem with drugs in the building. We had a drug sweep back a few
years ago, where we actually had the police come in and dogs and we
searched, and we arrested 17 students.

NARRATOR: The Warsaw high school has begun testing its athletes for drugs.
A student who tests positive for marijuana is suspended from competition
for a year.

DAVE FULKERSON, Athletic Director, Warsaw High School: The kids have to
realize there are rules that they must go by. And that's- you know, our
society is made up of rules. The one thing that the general public fails to
realize, that it's in violation of the law. It's against the state law. You
can be arrested. You can be sent to jail.

2nd BOY: If they get caught, they go on probation. Even when they're on
probation- I had a friend and- they break probation.

1st GIRL: Sometimes when people get caught, they finally realize that
they're doing something wrong and they quit. But then, on the other hand,
there's some people that are just, like, "Oh, that's okay. I'll just go out
and- once I get free I'll go out and do it again."

NARRATOR: Many drug counselors consider marijuana to be a gateway drug that
could lead to the use of harder drugs.

BRET RICHARDSON: [to class] Name one of the gateway drugs. Joe?

1st PUPIL: Marijuana.

BRET RICHARDSON: Marijuana. Give me another one. Caitlin?

2nd PUPIL: Beer, wine.

NARRATOR: Lee Ann Richardson and her husband, Bret, of the Warsaw, Indiana
Police Department, work for the D.A.R.E. program - Drug Abuse Resistance
Education. D.A.R.E. uses local police officers to teach drug education in
the schools.

3rd PUPIL: Hi, Caitlin. Would you like to have some marijuana with me?

2nd PUPIL: No.

3rd PUPIL: How come?

2nd PUPIL: It'll make me sick. Oh, I've got to go work on that homework.

3rd PUPIL: Fine.

BRET RICHARDSON: Cut. Well done! But what if they say, "Why not?" What if
they start to tease you? Think about three reasons why you don't want to
use drugs.

1st BOY: I really didn't know much about marijuana. I didn't know what
harmful effects it can do on your life and stuff like that. I mean, it's
really nice to know now. And I made the decision not to do marijuana or any
drug.

2nd BOY: It just- like, it can hurt you, and it kills you and stuff if you
do too much of it.

GIRL: Well before I- before Officer Richardson came in this year, I was,
like, "What's so wrong about it? It just grows." But now I know what the
harmful effects are and I know that I will never, ever do it.

NARRATOR: The actual effects of marijuana on people who use it have been
the subject of scientific study, but the results have not served to settle
the debate about its dangers.

Dr. CHARLES SCHUSTER: Marijuana has very profound affects, particularly
when it's smoked, and the most important thing about it is that it's
immediate.

NARRATOR: Dr. Charles Schuster, a psychopharmacologist at the Wayne State
University School of Medicine, also headed the National Institute of Drug
Abuse during the drug crackdown in the 1980s. He's been researching
marijuana for more than 30 years.

Dr. CHARLES SCHUSTER: It's a powerful drug and it has powerful effects on
mood, powerful effects on your ability to perform skilled activities,
powerful effects on cognition and powerful effects on your heart- huge
increases in heart rate, for example, when you smoke it. It's a powerful
drug and we can't dismiss that.

There are many differences between heroin, cocaine, and marijuana, on the
other hand. Number one, marijuana, unlike heroin and cocaine, has never
been associated with acute overdosage death. To the best of my knowledge,
no one has died because they've smoked too much marijuana. Clearly, people
die from overdoses of cocaine and of heroin.

Number two, I think that although marijuana can produce dependence and
addiction, the likelihood of that occurring in people is much less than
with drugs such as cocaine and heroin.

When we think about social policies and a lot of other things, we have to
realize that the public health dangers associated with illicit drugs
depends upon the illicit drug we're talking about. With marijuana, I think
that we're talking about a lesser evil than we are when we're talking about
cocaine and heroin, but that doesn't mean that it isn't an evil.
[www.pbs.org: More on marijuana in the body]

Dr. DAVID MUSTO: Marijuana's an excellent example of how we have shifted
our views on a substance. You have these enormous shifts and, really,
research takes place against these larger attitudes, and it's also
interpreted in these larger attitudes.

NARRATOR: Dr. David Musto, of Yale University, has devoted years of study
to the history of America's drug policies and attitudes toward marijuana in
particular.

Dr. DAVID MUSTO: Marijuana started to come into the United States in the
1920s, along with Mexican immigrants. Then, in the 1930s, when the Great
Depression hit, these people became a feared surplus in our country, and
they were thought to take marijuana, go into town on the weekend and create
mayhem. Now, that's very close to the general attitude toward marijuana in
the 1930s. It was thought to be a cause of crime and a cause of senseless
violence.

The head of the narcotics bureau from 1930 to 1962, Harry J. Anslinger,
decided he had to fight marijuana really in the media. He tried to describe
marijuana in so repulsive and terrible terms that people wouldn't even be
tempted to try it. In the 1960s, the use of marijuana was symbolic of the
counterculture, of the anti-Vietnam war battles. It became something that,
if you used, you used it almost ritually, as joining a large group of
people who had similar points of view and similar attitudes, let's say, to
authority and to the government and so on.

NARRATOR: In the early 1970s, the Shafer Commission was ordered by Congress
to consider marijuana and the drug abuse laws.

Dr. DAVID MUSTO: They came out with the conclusion that marijuana should be
decriminalized. That is, small amounts for personal use might be fined,
like you might get a ticket. And this was very upsetting to President
Nixon. President Nixon, I think, of all of our Presidents was the one most
viscerally opposed to drugs.

Then in the Carter Administration, I think it was in 1978, all the heads of
the agencies came before Congress and asked for the decriminalization of
marijuana of up to one ounce. And it was quite interesting. There was quite
a backlash to this. You had the parents' movement formed.

PARENT: -that if I became involved and other parents became involved now
maybe this problem would not touch- that the evil fingers of drugs would
not lay their hands on the shoulders of my little boy.

Dr. DAVID MUSTO: And they created quite a reaction and defeated some people
who were running for Congress and had favored decriminalization. So you
move right from the Carter administration into the Reagan administration,
which was very anti-drug and anti-marijuana.

Pres. RONALD REAGAN: The American people want their government to get tough
and to go on the offensive, and that's exactly what we intend, with more
ferocity than ever before.

Dr. DAVID MUSTO: The Republicans and Democrats, seeing this as a
tremendous, dangerous issue, vied with one another as to all the ways that
they were going to help control drugs.

NARRATOR: One of those drugs was cocaine, which was causing widespread
concern. Coke sales were rapidly spreading from the cities to the suburbs,
and the 1986 death of basketball star Len Bias, blamed on crack cocaine,
put even more pressure on lawmakers.

In 1986 President Reagan signed the Anti Drug Abuse Act, which ordered
mandatory minimum sentences with no parole for all illegal drugs. The
federal penalties were set according to the amount of the drug involved,
equating marijuana plants with gram weights of other drugs. For example,
100 plants is considered comparable to 5 grams of crack cocaine. The
mandatory minimum sentence for 100 plants of marijuana is 5 years; for 1000
plants, 10 years.

INDIANA ARCHITECT: I was one of the lucky ones. Because my crime had taken
place in the early '80s meant that I was going to be sentenced under the
old law, what's now called the old law. And the new law, which came into
effect in 1987, has got mandatory minimum sentencing.

NARRATOR: The Indiana architect was released after serving 5 years of his
20-year sentence. Now anyone convicted on the same federal charges would
not be allowed parole. The mandatory minimum sentencing ordered by the new
law also prevents judges from giving a lesser penalty.

(Continued in Part 2) http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v98.n412.a01.html

Checked-by: Richard Lake