Drug Czar Kerlikowske on National Public Radio

Check out the thirty-minute interview with our Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske, on National Public Radio.  What’s telling to me isn’t the Drug Czar’s typical lies and spin, but that every single caller to the program but one was so intelligently disagreeing with him.  Here’s a sample:

MARY (Caller): Good afternoon. I wanted to just pass on, as someone who is a social worker, who’s in the field, I work with both the homeless population, as well as people in both active addiction and in recovery and have seen what hard drugs have done and the damage that they have done to the lives of any number of my clients. Having said that, and having seen that, I think we really must look at the way we’re handling marijuana in this country. A lot of the clients that I have dealt with, the repercussions from them have not been from the use of the drug. It has been from the illegality of the drug. It exposes them to criminal elements they wouldn’t otherwise have been around. It exposes them to harder drugs they wouldn’t ordinarily have been around. And I think if we continue to handle it the way we handle it, we’re just – we’re not going to make any progress on any of it unless we really sit back and, as a country, go, okay, what’s the primary concern here?

ERNIE (Caller): Hi. I’m an internal medicine physician, as well as a registered pharmacist in Arizona. I also perform Homeland Security exams for patients that are immigrating to the United States. We’re situated about 86 miles from the border, and I see the intersection of those three different fields. And I think personally that they should legalize drugs, all drugs, so that they can control them, tax them, provide prevention and treatment programs just like they do for alcohol, decrease the amount of home invasions across the border, as well as decrease the number of narco-trafficant death along the border, decrease the incentive for people bringing drugs across.

KATHLEEN (Caller): Thank you. Thank you for taking my call. I just wanted to say that, of course, in Colorado now we have legalized medical marijuana. It’s helping a lot of people. And it’s helping a lot of people who are selling it get jobs in this economy. But beyond that, in my personal experience, having grown up in Boulder, Colorado, in the ’70s, I have never known anyone who started smoking marijuana and then went on to harder drugs because they had started smoking marijuana. And I know that law enforcement has told us that for years, but I haven’t ever seen it.

So I really think that when we’re talking about drug laws, we need to separate marijuana from other hard drugs like cocaine and heroin, et cetera, because I don’t see that they have much of a relationship. And the students at the University of Colorado now are drinking themselves to death, and yet alcohol is legal.

ROBERTS: We also have an email from Brian in Iowa City, who says: You spoke earlier this week on Iowa Public Radio. You said that prescription drugs were the biggest drug problem in this country. The companies that make these drugs make lots of money and are allowed to advertise their products on TV. If I’m not mistaken, our country is the only country that – in the world – that allows drug companies to advertise their products on TV. Would you consider changing that? [Ed. Note: New Zealand also allows pharmaceutical ads on TV.]