TRANSCRIPT: "THE INDICTMENT OF PROHIBITION PANEL" continued from part 1

Blair Anderson:

Panelists, It is a given that the WOD is an unmitigated failure, the
evidence for the large part, exonerative. The reform focus however seems to
be very USA centric, and this is of concern when the implications are global.

USA reform initiatives appear to be blinkered - while I agree with CAF's
approach "one neighborhood at a time... diamonds in the backyard.."
approach, the crux of the WOD is embodied in the Single Convention.

The Single Convention is the sharp end of the stick. It has no basis in
public health (Ottawa Charter) and is an abuse of reason.

Chicken and Eggs come to mind.. but with reform in the wind in EU, GB, NZ
etc. It seems that the Single Convention needs revisiting "urgently". I
respectfully ask the panelists to comment.

Judge James P. Gray:

The "Single Convention" is the concept of "federalization" gone wild, and
wildly wrong. Unfortunately, our federal government has not only been
successful in pre-empting the individual states from addressing the
"domestic" needs of its citizens, it has also been successful in
pre-empting other sovereign countries from addressing the domestic needs of
its citizens. Except for the Netherlands, who are pragmatic: they simply
ignore it.

Yes, individual countries should unilaterally withdraw from this
convention, and I believe they are starting to do so.

Notice that those radical countries Canada and Great Britain have virtually
re-opened the hemp market, while our DEA is making noises about banning
hemp food.

Reason is starting to prevail, and people around the world are beginning to
laugh at us.

Eugene Oscapella:

Re: Revisiting the Single Convention

We are often told that we must pursue our current prohibitionist policies
because international treaties require us to do so. However, there are
several responses to this:

1. Each of the drug control treaties has a clause allowing countries
to withdraw from the treaty. Admittedly, there would be political pressure
against such a withdrawal, but the technical language of the treaties
allows this.

2. We also need to look at the impact of human rights treaties on the drug
control treaties. Some people argue that since human rights are truly the
foundation of international law, human rights should take precedence over
the provisions of treaties such as the drug control treaties if there is a
conflict. For example, if a drug control treaty contains measures that
would violate fundamental human rights norms, can we not rely on the
international law of human rights to override or "trump" the drug control
treaties?

3. The drug control treaties may not be as restrictive as supporters
of prohibition argue. Thus, even if we adhere to the treaties in the short
term, there may be considerable room for maneuver within them.

4. And, of course, a cynic might add that countries only obey the
treaties that they want to obey and often simply ignore others. I do not
favor this as a solution, since it tends to make a mockery of international
law, but it is a reality of international relations.

Dean Becker:

Question for Indictment of Prohibition Panelists

As I read the American papers, watch American TV and tune into the
discourse of citizens of the US, I never hear a word about the huge changes
occurring in the UK, Canada, Australia, S. America, all over Europe and
elsewhere that are changing their drug policy from one of incarceration to
one of harm reduction, legalization and decriminalization.

However, if one reads the foreign papers one sees that educated, civilized
people all over this planet see the folly that is the US drug war and are
making logical and appropriate changes to end the decades old war on their
own citizens.

In corresponding with Nol van Schaik, who along with Colin Davies run the
new cannabis cafe in the UK, "The Dutch Experience", I learn they are
offering themselves for arrest, citizens by the score, MEP's from the UK
and Italy offer themselves for arrest as well and many more citizens and
MEP's are scheduled over the next few weeks to go this route of non-violent
protest.

Capt Sternn, I believe that the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the US
Constitution will play an increasingly large role in legal decisions. If
one considers the fact that alcohol could not be made illegal without a
constitutional amendment (the 18th), how could these other drugs? Of
course, it began incrementally, with the Harrison Act and its "revenue"
provisions. But the commence clause and other justifications for the War on
Drugs I think will be re-examined, and the more extreme the actions of the
federal government (such as in effect voiding the medical marijuana
initiatives, asset forfeitures, prohibition of hemp and hemp products,
etc., the earlier we will see this reassessment.

Eugene Oscapella:

Capt Sternn Re: Constitutionality of federal drug laws

I cannot speak about the constitutionality of U.S. drug laws, but there
have been some successful challenges to Canadian drug laws on
constitutional grounds (all laws on illegal drugs in Canada are federal;
there are no state laws governing illegal drugs). Mandatory minimum
penalties for importing drugs were declared unconstitutional many years
ago. Both courts of first instance and appellate courts have held that
provisions prohibiting marijuana for medical purposes are unconstitutional.
This led the federal government to develop medical marijuana regulations,
which came into force last July.

The Supreme Court of Canada will hear an appeal, likely within the next few
months, challenging the constitutionality of Canada's cannabis laws.
Therefore, even if our government is totally intransigent, there is some
hope springing from within the legal system itself.

Capt. Stern:

Thanks for the reply E. Oscapella. I understand that a country is not bound
by the international treaties on drug control if it violates the country's
constitution. It would seem to me that it would violate the US constitution
if any, considering that our constitutional republic is all about
individual liberty and that it in no way grants the federal government the
power to ban any substance.

Mary Jane Flores:

Hi, good to have you all here. What do you think about the continuous
arguments that some on this forum have had over which arguments are
effective and which are not? There are some of us who would go as far as
comparing the drug war to genocide and the Holocaust. There are others that
are more moderate and who chastise those who would even mention such talk.
How should the moderates respond to these accusations? How should the more
radical elements respond to such criticism?

Judge James P. Gray:

Ms. Flores, In this drug reform movement, I believe that all of us should
be careful not to exaggerate or overstate. The true facts alone are enough,
and credibility is critical.

Even though one could find some comparisons with other calamities, we don't
really have to do so. The drug war facts, unvarnished and conservatively
stated, will get the job done.

Jerryt9:

Once the relative harmlessness of marijuana has been accepted, and the laws
against its production, sale, possession and use have been repealed, then
those who are in prison for violation of those laws will justifiably seek
pardon and release.

My proposal is the total reversal of the current policy which denies those
people the blessings of federal financial assistance for education. I
propose that the best idea is to offer those freed prisoners a form of
assistance very similar to the G. I. Bill of Rights that followed WWII.

Dumping thousands of untrained, unskilled, uneducated people into the labor
market would be disastrous. Sending them to universities or vocational
schools for four years would prepare them to be productive members of
society. Their higher earnings due to education would cause them to pay
larger amounts of income tax.

I am interested in your comments on this radical proposal. Thank you.

Catherine Austin Fitts:

Jerry: I could not agree with you more.

In 1996, GAO said that the annual all in cost of one person in prison was
$154,000. That does not include the cost of moving that person's kids into
social services or foster care.

My estimate for a woman in HUD housing on food stamps and welfare was
$55,000 and up in 1996.

With an education managed on a performance based basis, those costs turn
into positive cash flow from taxes paid by a working person.

Indeed, the data servicing company we were building in 1996 got shut down
as a result of the targeting by the DOJ. The business plan however got
moved to DOJ's private company UniCorp...who is now marketing data
servicing to federal agencies from prison labor.

Our model...your model.. as a positive return on investment to taxpayers.
The WOD model has a highly negative return on investment to taxpayers.

You are right. But that type of education is bad for the ongoing illegal
businesses of a generation of accumulated narco dollars.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/june96/ets_wp.html New Skills, Business
Bring New Hope to D.C. Complex Computer Training Puts Residents in Charge
By Susan Levine Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, June 17 1996; Page A01
The Washington Post

The business started less than a year ago, and so, of course, most
everything in the modest office of Edgewood Technology Services Inc. looks
new: the eight Compaq computers, nine black and faux-wood desks, cabinets,
printers and other accouterments that define many small companies.

It takes only one step out ETS's front door, though, to realize how
different this company is. The door opens onto the long, drab, ground-floor
hallway of a Northeast Washington apartment building, part of a subsidized
housing complex where drug dealing, shootings, even slayings are not uncommon.

The nine employees of ETS know the dangers of the neighborhood because, for
nearly all of them, this place is home. One woman has lived at the complex
on welfare, another on food stamps. Others have worked -- as a nightclub
bouncer, a cook-cashier, a part-timer at the nearby Safeway.

But now, after crash courses in computer operations and entrepreneurship,
they find themselves running a business. Once-marginal futures suddenly
hold the promise of careers in data processing.

"I have proven something to myself," said Jacques Johnson, 23. "What we're
doing is real, a real business. It's not a game."

The arrival of high-technology jobs there is not happenstance but the
result of an unusual partnership between a downtown Washington investment
firm and a California entertainment company. They have risked more than $1
million on the idea that the personal computer is to the global economy
what the drill press was to the industrial giants of the mid-century -- a
sophisticated tool that has become simple enough for many semiskilled
workers to operate.

The strategy is simple: Go into an inner-city neighborhood, intensively
train a group of people, then harness their new skills to provide
high-quality data management at low prices. The added twist? Give the new
workers a personal financial stake through stock ownership.

ETS employee Sirletha Gaither is passionate when she explains why she is
sure it will succeed. "Because we're hungry -- for power, for a chance to
have things everyone else takes for granted," she said.

The question is whether this enterprise can be profitable long-term and
replicated nationwide, as ETS's backers intend to do. Company officials
know that the proof will be in the contracts won from government or private
businesses. Although they won't open their books, they say that on the
strength of their first and only client -- the firm that created ETS -- the
new company is almost breaking even, with monthly sales of $30,000 to
$50,000. Most employees receive about $20,000 a year, plus benefits, for
creating increasingly complex

Catherine Austin Fitts:

Jerry, Problem with access to education, on line tools (essential to make
education high performance and low cost) and small business formation of
the type that we were doing, was that if everyone had illumination tools,
all the money was going to be illuminated. If all these neighborhoods were
on line and getting literate in how all the money worked, the game would be
up, no?

http://www.alliance.napawash.org/
ALLIANCE/Picases.nsf/e24ffc586e80044a852564ed006eb5be/
b48633296698045f85256474006b7680?OpenDocument#_4gk_

WHY COMPUTERS MAKE SENSE IN LOW-INCOME HOUSING

By Neal R. Peirce

WASHINGTON -- C. Austin Fitts talks a new language of "electronic swarms"
of government and civic leaders finding ways to wire low-income
neighborhoods and housing projects onto the information highway.

In her prior lives, Fitts was a Wall Street public finance whiz and chief
for a while of the Federal Housing Administration under President Bush. Now
heading Hamilton Securities, a Washington-based merchant banking firm, her
mind races to define new ways to wed technology, low-income housing, and
what she calls sustainable learning communities.

It's all highly unconventional stuff -- a jump ahead of its time. But if
you want to consider a 21st century American society that works for more
than a highly educated upper crust, check Fitts' thoughts.

A housing expert, Fitts is convinced there's sure defeat -- especially in
today's cutback-environment -- to the idea of constantly rehabilitating
low-income housing, watching it deteriorate, then spending millions to
rehab once again.

Real estate, she believes, can't have value unless the people inside it
have value. Yet if they do gain skills, they'll be able to pay higher
rents. Money will be available for preventive maintenance instead of
repeated cycles of deep decline. More diverse and less poverty-afflicted
families will be attracted.

The changing world economy destroyed many of the manual labor jobs on which
low-income people depended. But now, says Fitts, there's fresh hope. The
raw-material and capital-based economy, with its frenetic competition for
wealth in which some people and classes win, others lose, is fading.

Instead, the new economy is knowledge-based. In America and globally,
intellectual capital is the new coin of the realm. For less educated
people, that sounds scary. But, says Fitts, the costs of computers,
software, microtechnology and on-line education are plummeting. That means
low-income housing can join the cybernetic revolution. Installing
computers, terminals and cabling in assisted housing projects needn't be
prohibitively expensive.

But there's need for training, and neighborhood technology advocates and
enablers to create what Fitts calls the sustainable learning neighborhood,
a place where learning becomes a lifelong value, and the first people
trained learn to train others. Once that occurs, and neighborhood people
use electronics to break out of the isolation that plagues ghettoes and
barrios, all manner of entrepreneurial microenterprises become feasible.
Residents can be organized to do data entry and apply business programs for
large firms that would likely never dream of moving their direct operations
into parts of a city they consider dangerous and chancy.

Fitts' Hamilton Securities is doing that in a pilot project in Washington,
D.C., right now. But she sees multiple applications. For example:

"If I'm Safeway and consider a half million dollar store in the South
Bronx, that seems risky, and maybe dangerous for my employees. But if I can
fly in on-line and have my grocery orders taken by a coop of residents
who've organized their own microenterprise, then I have just one delivery
to make and can build up a presence slowly and risk-free in that
neighborhood."

Gawainekaye:

I don't mean to divert the discussion away from drug policy but perhaps
your concise insight here will help us see in a larger context the
Constitutional questions surrounding the War On (some) Drugs.

You have already seen above my citizen's understanding of why the
Controlled Substances Act is unconstitutional. But I also see a wider drift
from Constitutional government that makes me fear our republic will
gradually lose all Constitutional limits on state power. I will point out a
few examples:

1. The Controlled Substances Act as a massive increase in federal
power beyond Constitutional limits, as described above post).

2. Wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan have never
been declared by Congress. Look at how the present "war" is being used to
justify all sorts of abridged liberties and rights even without bothering
to declare the war first.

3. As a man of the left it pains me to write this, but I must be
honest. I do not see the Constitutional basis for such federal institutions
as Social Security, AFDC (recently ended by Clinton), and many other
welfare programs. Even though I support these programs and even think
Social Security should be strengthened rather than threatened, it has
always bothered me that these programs seem beyond the Constitutional
powers of Congress to create and therefore require a Constitutional
amendment. I'd like to see the Constitution amended to institute a strong
social security program, and a national health plan. But it ain't in the
Constitution we've got, is it?

4. Didn't a lot of this get fought over when FDR threatened to expand
the Supreme Court so it would accept many New Deal measures as
Constitutional? Originally rejecting all important New Deal legislation,
the Supreme Court backed down in the face of FDR's threats to pack it (at a
time when the public probably would have accepted it due to desperate
economic conditions crying out for remedy). But in the end it seems we are
left with a Constitutional interpretation so vague as to allow almost
anything if it is proposed at the right moment of social instability.

Do these above examples really show a larger drift away from Constitutional
govt. in this country, with the eroded liberties in the War On (some) Drugs
thus making only a small piece of the larger sickness of our republic? Or
have I been too pessimistic and critical and ignorant, and really our
Constitutional system is healthy and functioning? Are there legal arguments
that can be concisely stated to explain why these seeming violations of
Constitution are actually not?

I suppose there is no Constitutional essence to put under a microscope for
certainty of interpretation. It seems the Constitution is more of a loose
wrapper for an ever-changing equilibrium of elite interests and public
opinion. Public opinion is more important in interpreting the Constitution
than the Supreme Court wants us to think, is it not?

Judge James P. Gray:

gawainekaye, That was a lot of questions. There is no question that the War
on Drugs has been responsible for a greater loss of civil liberties than
anything else in the history of our country. In fact, if I were to rewrite
the chapter in my book about the loss of liberties, it would be subtitled
"Where's Paul Revere?"

But in my view, our Constitution, the greatest document of the Age of
Enlightenment, is alive and well. Yes, there have been many challenges to
it, and many people, of course, disagree on how it should be applied, but I
am optimistic that it will survive. In a lot of ways, the interpretations
of "what the constitution says," is a product of the times. In many ways
this is good, it is a living document. So it allowed some bad things to
happen: slavery, internment of people of Japanese heritage during World War
II, and many others. But ultimately, the interpretations will come around.
The problem is, in this case, how many people will die unnecessarily, or
have their lives ruined or liberties lost until that happens?

Again, this falls at our doorstep, and we have to work harder.

Gawainekaye :

Katherine Austin Fitts -

I think all four panelists did an absolutely magnificent job tonight. They
all made a number of important points, but perhaps the most important of
all was the one Judge Gray and Catherine made in a variety of different
ways, that we're all going to have to work harder. I for one have been
stimulated to do exactly that, and i just want to thank all four panelists
for taking the time to be here, and thanks also to Dean for arranging such
an excellent session.

Thanks again to all / Al Robison

Fisher240:

My questions (all related) for the panelists: For each participant: What
model of regulation do you believe would be on balance the most effective,
pragmatic, and respectful of inalienable rights to institute once zero
tolerance policies concerning certain recreational and addictive illicit
substances are removed? Do you envision separate systems to handle "soft"
and "hard" drugs? Will any particular substances, such as crack cocaine or
methamphetamine, demand individualized systems due to their highly
psychologically-addictive natures? Do you envision tightening regulations
on distribution of alcohol and tobacco products?

In summation, what is your current vision of the ideal drug policy we are
striving for? Why do you favor your model over other proposed models, and
other models in effect throughout the world? Where do we want to go, in
each of your educated opinions?

Eugene Oscapella:

fisher240

I think we need to look at each drug individually. For example, we regulate
tobacco differently than we regulate alcohol. Alcohol can be problematic if
you drive. Tobacco is generally not problematic when you drive, unless you
are distracted as you light your cigarette.

In other words, we need different regulatory regimes to address the
different concerns we may have with each particular type of drug. That is
obviously a far more complex task than simply prohibiting many drugs across
the board, but it must be done. In every case, however, given the
extraordinary harms caused by prohibition, abandoning prohibition for
adults must be at the foundation of all these measures.

Eugene Oscapella, Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy, www.cfdp.ca :

Thank you to all for your questions and for your stimulating arguments.

Best wishes from the frozen north.

Eugene Oscapella

Catherine Austin Fitts Thanks Dean, thanks all. Great stuff.

Cindy328:

Thank you everyone for a thought-provoking evening. Cindy

Richard Lake:

Thank You, Dean, for making it happen!! A big Way to Go! I know you put a
lot of time, phone calls, etc. into this. It is appreciated.

Can hardly wait to see the transcript and pass it to as many as I can!!!

Capt. Stern:

Well, Dean, I'm sold on the NYTimes forum. We've never had a panel like
this at CNN. Actually, we never had a panel at all. Thanks for putting it
together.

Gawainekaye:

Your insights and knowledge are gratefully appreciated. Your work on this
issue is truly inspirational and beneficial! Please drop in on us here from
time to time! We'd love to continue, I am sure! Good Night.

Dean Becker:

I want to thank these fine panelists: Milton Friedman, Judge Gray,
Catherine Austin Fitts and Eugene Oscapella.

I have a lot more to digest, but I'm sure I'll be thinking about this for a
long time to come. Thank you panelists and participants. WOW!