here we have a medical problem rather super rich macgyver currently occupies and he'll be stepping down consequently there's a land rush for the seat that we're running for there are six of us running obviously after you've talked to me see that i'm the proper show kind of like david letterman only instead of paul shaffer they had me and i was the band leader spitfire house and my my band was hot dog water and we were it was pretty funny and we kept it very cleanly even though we could  next thirteen years oh god i'm going to i'm going to change right how you introduced yourself when we were talking about my background we're talking about a person that was a musician ever since i was eight years old and  a professional musician for fifteen years afraid that i decided to go into computers so i put down the guitar and i picked up a computer i got my degree and i teach from the university of washington and did that as including dot be around right i'm a grandma i like so they'll be prohibition but it's the idea that the government's response to it to be to criminalize and honest here that that's something a lot of folks are taking an drugs and so forth was highly controversial not a mainstream topic was hot topic now and it's time for us to come out in the sense this is part of that we held a party like this in new york city on may first  who east coast white shoes and wall street lawyers whose i had fought for prohibition of alcohol in the first place and then by nineteen twenty seven saw that it really wasn't working very well and so those lawyers  amendment and the repeal of alcohol prohibition was not achieved through the state legislatures it was achieved by constitutional convention that's the the two ways you can ratify repeal a constitutional amendment and so it was too hot to handle for the legislatures so they voluntary claymores worked with bar associations to set up these constitutional conventions in the states to vote to repeal prohibition and then congress thirty s when andrew mellon was secretary of the treasury and was his customer and he did everything they could to protect upon his investments which meant outlined cannabis because hemp was the great competitor to of petroleum based audits so the current cannabis prohibition is based on pure economics biomass versus petroleum well look at where we've gotten with petroleum and so now we still have prohibition clear and some other leaders decided it's time to get this voluntary committee of lawyers concept running again so nine hundred ninety six elliot richardson former attorney general nick katz and back former attorney  s attorney general sam dash who was the white house the watergate counsel in the senate george taken by from a federal judge george bush no american bar association president or the founding committee for the modern voluntary committee lawyers and here we are now in seattle this is sort of the national office of the can in new york in the mid ninety's but after the work that we did with the king county bar association which we have most of your familiar what we do with  we're wasting in prison some of it and putting it into a therapeutic area community a lot more work to be done of course but it was a major step and it led other legislatures to do the same and so the voluntary committee lawyers in new york called me and they said come talk to us we want to see what you did in seattle king county and then i was hired as the executive director of voluntary committee lawyers in two thousand and two and so for the last i can't believe it's been almost a decade it's amazing we have been very quietly operating to get bar associations across the country to reach out to the medical society to bring legislators and bureaucrats and treatment professionals and and so the same type of coalition building to bring them together in their own localities so we're operating for law enforcement prosecutors absolutely it's a very has to be inclusive and so we are now actively working with the massachusetts bar association that just published a great study on  desk of every state legislator in massachusetts that's going to lead to a conference later this year with legislators there participating will go right into the place that of session and we hope that mandatory minimum sentences will be repealed in massachusetts because the bar association again will give the fringy ponytail tied i pot smokers you know i'm not one of those you know and so it's a foil in a way but to give some legitimacy to we're doing it again make the treatment that's all good but now it seems like the public is waking violence on the border in mexico and obama and the administration making some important sending some important signals tentative but you know in the right direction the budget crises and the economic collapse are clearly dictating the legislative we've got to do something and so this is the right time and the right place and so that's why we're sort of coming out now of voluntary committee of lawyers working not so quietly