every forty two seconds someone is arrested for can no patient should suffer needlessly without it and no patient should ever go to jail for following the advice of a doctor join it and learn more about the exciting science of medical marijuana welcome to see him m n j t v m can waltz executive director of the coalition for medical marijuana new jersey i'm here in the princeton community t v studios today with jim miller co founder of the coalition for medical marijuana new jersey and with dana beal from new york city there has been an activist for marijuana reform for that if i would be remiss if i didn't give you the shotgun version which is when sheryl lee creates cheryl miller the mother of medical marijuana in new jersey when she had lost two children and a third was severely addicted and it appeared like he would follow i knew dana for three years then and i knew about i became dana knew where coral could go into the netherlands we went through everything we needed to got him there and back and he never used drugs again to the point that he was in pain sometimes because he would refuse to use opiates so basically if not for dana beal cheryl little lost her third child she would we do not support drug prohibition in general but different drugs are different and if you or i an opiate user and you're using street heroin that chances that you will overdose and pass away some time during your twenty career twenty year career as i heroin addict or about fifty percent you know so you know general consensus of people who use opiates or cannabis for pain is that cannabis does not entail the complications opiates  been put on their doctor by their doctors on opiates for pain it doesn't turn out to work for them but when they discover that cannabis does work they still have this heroin habit you know there's this opiate habit and they often can use ibogaine to get off the opiates so they can stabilize themselves on campus but again is not currently allowed for treatment in the united states it's a schedule one substance considered as dangerous as marijuana and heroin and but it is it's not scheduled in other parts of the world so as a people just go to go to mexico i walton taking ibogaine and it really needs to be given under medical supervision so is extremely unfair the doctors can't give it because you know yourself as some people were ordering it off the internet taking it home talking about where you go when you take a big dose right in a short period time he needed a big earth yeah he needed a big dose because basically we just finished  much take enough to get rid of the withdrawal which is an effect equivalent they found the study to doing a big dose of methadone to get rid of withdrawal and the difference methadone wears off after forty eight hours they hear back in withdrawal and with i've again the anti creating anti woodrow effect does not wear off and it's amazing but the problem is that you know there's risk because of that big dose and it would be safer to give a low dose over a long period of time under a physician's supervision and we can't do that in this country and that's extremely unfair because now we've found out that ibogaine is extremely  about the same effect as a cup of coffee so there's absolutely no risk no trip to both and no no heart problem because you're not getting to a level where you can trigger a that something and we have a fellow that was a friend of paul krassner sue signed up had a typical parkinson's and after twenty eight days he could button a shirt again you can use a knife and a fork and there's nothing that does that there just you know here we have a heroin crisis crisis is so bad that paula page and where is this every day we have to take we have to like stop marijuana because marijuana sends the wrong signal to kids that drugs all right and so they're actually withholding something that has been proven in the medical marijuana states to lead to a twenty to twenty five percent it doesn't make sense we have a petition in front of the department of health right now to add marijuana as a hope to add opiate use disorder as a qualifying condition for marijuana their regulators and so you know get any hope that that that will pass and we'll be making some steps but as far as i know there are no efforts right now to to add ibogaine or to remove i became from a schedule one status if there are any it's for any work well i'm talking to these people from the american crowd of association but enacted because of the key two problems right there spice you know and they ended up banning every think they ended up banning i am again so we objected and we were able to get put on hold for almost a month but then they went ahead and put into effect anyway so this thing that with the big victory for kratom isn't really a victory if you look at the fine print it's just on hold and they can come in later and they're going to study it a while longer but mild stimulant and stead of a depressant so you can't have respiratory collapse can't help overdose and there are a c everybody is different that's that's the thing and some people don't need medical marijuana some people are them to solve their addiction problems here in the united states we're told everything's on the table in the war against addiction and overuse and abuse of opiates but as long as these things are not on the table it's nowhere near there's only two things methadone or suboxone and both of them are extremely extremely hard to quit much harder than heroin and so that's what i hear i had one of your vents early in may i forget which one i talked to a man who talked about being using methadone for thirty years of being a methadone addict for thirty years and i caught me by surprise that you know it be a controlled addict i mean it doesn't make sense when you have something that's not addictive that might be an exit drugs that is kind of this in one nine hundred ninety seven you know jim just reminded me of the circumstances of the day giuliani decided to completely ban us from our traditional meeting place in washington square park and try to we really terminate a parade that had been going on for twenty six years so after six months i got together with the john holmstrom of high times and we put an and you know the first saturday of may just like in ann arbor they have the hash haitian they're always the first saturday of april because april fools first of all falls on weekdays most of t and you know the first day of may would be on a weekday so we would try to get the first saturday it's also in new york the first usually the first time you have good stable weather because you know it it rains an april and you know so you want to you want to have a nice summer day and people come out so we've done it and we've had very big events and then we had some small events and went at one period where we had a split you know between the old fashioned let's go back to the way it used to be legalization of marijuana which actually we're not involved down and so there was this their idea of what it was versus you know more up to date kind of harm reduction oriented stuff with  and clean needles and we finally did manage to reunite the two severed halves of the parade for a couple of years had a couple good years in the ninety's but then giuliani came down like a ton of bricks and our solution was to take it global because we had the internet and actually the for first million marijuana march was in ninety eight but that was calling for a global om demonstration and in ninety nine we had thirty six cities and then it went up to ninety cities and i want to hundred ninety cities i think that topped out of around three hundred twelve before we started having problems with the u p a building and didn't have as much you know we thought fought a revolution in this country right to establish a bill of rights and to have the freest country in the world and now because of this  they have more freedom under the queen of england because they have had the cannabis festival with a hundred thousand people on klov accommodate their ugly no problems what is your problem rudy giuliani  programs and in this upcoming election we're looking at another the possibility of another five states legalizing marijuana and several more states passing medical marijuana laws i believe there are nine altogether you know  coming in this upcoming election so you know it's it's certainly is a burgeoning industry and you know there certainly is money to be made although you know not everyone is in it for the money of course but  and you know that obviously the goal now is legalization across the country and this is one of the things that you're working at now with and instead you're marching around the country with a fifty foot joint yeah so we of course richard nixon when confronted with the results of the schaefer commission report which he had pledged to follow they had put they passed the controlled substances act and they so w e don't know what to do with this marijuana thing will temporarily put it in schedule one wealthy seventy they came back with a recommendation to legalize small amounts for adult use and he said for the american people will never stand for this and whether it was in reality with horses he already had in his mind the southern strategy and to have the southern strategy work you need something called bass and course aeration or the new jim crow and of course the center point of the mass of course ration is putting marijuana and heroin in the same schedule because as ehrlichman said we knew that marijuana stain of heroin right and you know pull in the black people because you know i'll tell you what happened when nixon got in the first thing that happened was they had something called operation intercept i don't really remember that but they really stopped all the mexican pot coming in and then they do kind of accidentally all of sudden the ghettos were flooded with heroin which was coming from vietnam and supporting a secret army of twenty thousand people who weren't supposed to be there because we neutralize laos right and the whole thing was paid for by dumping heroin in american inner cities so this is a completely illegal army in a completely illegal war that nixon was prosecuting pai with completely illegal air when and and you know we brought it up in seventy two but like i guess mcgovern was really a little bit afraid to follow it up because you know just talking about classified stuff if you're talking up getting rid of dicks and they ended up sending a lot of dixon's people to prison we were wow ft with the controlled substances act and the war on drugs and we've been stuck with that ever since so we're asking since it was a completely do and that's to take marijuana out of the schedule altogether it should not be schedule one or five it shouldn't even be in the water you know like if they want to have a s marijuana they can but marijuana has does not have the one thing that you really need a high potential for abuse because no matter how much marijuana you smoke you can't hurt yourself that's what i've heard hundred million people to prison most of them black most of them you know to appease those trump voters you know that you know you know surfacing the d n a has established these criteria that make it impossible for a plant like marijuana to come out of this out of the we need so we really need to reexamine the criteria on it with the users and congress because congress passed that law you know congress has to revisit this right and and and create some kind of mechanism to look at actual potential for abuse rather than the da simply stamping it with high potential for abuse because these three things right that are vital for dealing with the opiate crisis i became marijuana cr none of them have a high potential for abuse so they shouldn't have to be in a schedule where even need excepted safe use in treatment to get them out of the shows the giant joint is juxtaposed with the big fifteen for the fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage and so we have succeeded in mainstreaming the demand to discussion of cannabis this was literally the black lives matter demonstration they brought those kids in they bussed event from ferguson and they marched all the way around the campus with changing the platforms of the democratic committee to  find a path to legalization and i think this path has kind of begun to be strewn with the states that legalize marijuana and if we get more states i think that you're going to find support in the in  to washington i know that's what they're saying and you know apparently thirty five percent of the country is voting on one where the other will be more because in two states apparently nadelmann where they were trying to figure out where to put the money they have the most effect you know and they are saying well looks like arkansas is going to make it so let's put some extra money in massachusetts and i was from of course he's you know one of the new really  really powerhouse leaders of the cannabis movement are in here but he doesn't seem to he doesn't seem to have a plan on the what to do next though i'm a little bit worried and i said wall should we go to chappaqua the few days after the election just to show up downtown with a giant joint we don't have to go to her house you know just you know show up in the middle of town of the giant joint and he said now we give or give work with the cure is not wars and you're you're half a century of marijuana activism and you know we here at the coalition for medical marijuana jersey really want to salute you and we want to thank you for your your work in harm reduction and for all that you're doing for to bring about a more rational policy in drug drug policy and in the united states so thank you very much dana for coming in thank you thanks for being on c n n j t v for 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