SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Beat the Prosecution, presented by Northern Virginia Criminal Defense and DUI lawyer Jonathan Katz, where we regularly present you with information and ideas for beating your prosecution as best as possible. Nothing on any of our media sources, such as our podcast or website, is legal advice. John Katz only provides legal advice to current clients or for individuals who have arranged a consultation. And now your host, John Katz.

SPEAKER_02 0:32

Hello, everybody. This is John Katz of the Beat the Prosecution. I'm a criminal defense and DUI defense lawyer here in Fairfax, Northern Virginia. I am absolutely delighted to have today's guest. His name is Ethan Nadelman, talking to us from wherever he's talked to us from. I first learned about him through his drug reform work. I guess I first learned about him in the early 1990s. I'm really interested in learning about what made him go full force into that. Because with me, it was the drug war that helped guide me from switching from corporate law into doing criminal defense. He was involved with uh starting the Linda Smith Center, however you pronounce that, and which I guess merged into the Drug Policy Foundation and became the drug uh uh drug policy alliance. He has been a very important part of drug reform to help counter this insane drug war that we have in the U.S. and perhaps to say the insane drug wars around the world. He has told me he's not going to be able to talk to me much about uh tips for what to do in court, but I don't think that's necessarily true because when he talks about how it is much better to have drug reform rather than just throw people away and uh and and lock the key, lock the door, uh that relates to negotiating case. That relates to talking to judges and jurors, that relates to sentencing. With that, Ethan, please introduce yourself. Please tell me if I had anything mispronounced or missaid so far, and where are you talking to us from?

SPEAKER_01 2:08

Sure. Well, good to meet you, John. And I was impressed that you got the name of the Lindismith Center correct, which was the name of my organization in the late 90s. Yeah, so Ethan Adelman, and I was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and I've been living back here for the last 30 odd years. Um, and my background basically is uh, you know, uh grew born in the city, grew up in Westchester, uh, got a lot of degrees, became a professor at Princeton in the late 80s, early 90s, and at a moment when the war on drugs was at its most hysterical peak, what I would oftentimes call like McCarthyism on steroids in the late 1980s, uh, I wrote a few articles that attracted major attention, had a few 15 minutes of fame, basically becoming a leading critic of the drug war, oftentimes called an out and out legalizer, which was partially true, but not fully. And one thing led to another. Uh, in the summer '92, I happened to get a phone call from a guy named George Soros inviting me to lunch, and it turned out he was interested in the war on drugs. We hit it off. I left Princeton, started up my organization in '94, first as part of his Open Society Institute, and then built it up into something called the Drug Policy Alliance, and that became the leading organization advocating for drug policy reform, not just in the U.S. but around the world. Um, and I should say when I talk about drug policy reform, talking about three major areas. The first was ending the prohibition of marijuana, first for medical purposes, and then more broadly. The second was ending the role of the war on drugs and mass incarceration. And the third was treating drug use and addiction as a health issue, not a criminal issue, a harm reduction, needle exchange, overdose prevention, honest drug education, things like that. Play a leading role in most of the ballot initiatives to change marijuana laws and to provide for treatment instead of incarceration, and also to challenge the civil acid forfeiture laws. We had quite a number of victories in those areas. 2017, I stopped, stepped down, stopped running my organization, and I basically play the role as kind of the leading movement elder these days, advising young people and mentoring and so on. And you are on the board of one of the uh marijuana companies? That's right. And so about um, I mean, I waited a good six years after stepping down because I didn't want to be seen as somebody who had, you know, advocated for ending marijuana prohibition and then just decided to cash in as soon as I stopped. But six years later, I got a call from the head of one of the companies that I had met years before, uh Green Thumb Industries. Uh GTI had a guy named Ben Kovler. And so I've been on the board of GTI um ever since. What's the difference? But I should say I'm an individu I'm Green Thumb Industries. I'm on the I'm on the board, but I'm an independent board member. I don't speak for them, I don't represent them, um, but I am proud to be associated with them.

SPEAKER_02 5:02

What does GTI do?

SPEAKER_01 5:05

Um well basically they um cultivate and produce and sell marijuana products in about 14 states around the country, um, including New York and a range of the others. Um and uh, you know, so they are probably one of the three or four biggest marijuana companies in the U.S. and undoubtedly the best run.

SPEAKER_02 5:28

I have heard you speak live at least twice, and I would like you to give insight if you've had any uh acting or public speaking training because you're very captivating as a speaker. The first time I think I heard you speak live was around 1999 or 2000 at the normal conference in DC. And at one point you said, I haven't tried that substance, and you paused for a few seconds yet, and the the audience was in hysterics. And as an aside, there was this guy who kept coming up to me each day, and he said, Have you been to my hospitality suite yet? Have you been to my hospitality suite? So I decided to check it out. I had a feeling I would smell some heavy marijuana smoke there. I'm probably one of the few uh non-marijuana smokers who has advocated marijuana legalization, for instance. And I get out of the elevator of the hotel and I was almost blown right back into the elevator by the stench of the marijuana, the hospitality suite, uh, five doors down.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

Well, I'll tell you, John, I mean, I did regard it um as a measure of sort of a sense of professional obligation uh to at least try most of the drugs that were illicit, so to know what I was talking about. Um, so I have tried quite a lot of illicit substances over the years. And fortunately, I've never had anything in the way of an addictive personality, and I've always been very careful in my own personal drug use. In terms of speaking training, I never took a single class or anything. I think I am primarily the beneficiary of having, as my father, my father was a rabbi, and he was a very gifted um rabbi and sermonizer and teacher who um was a congregational rabbi and eventually became the head of the Reconstructionist movement for a number of years in Judaism. So I think I really absorbed it all from him.

SPEAKER_02 7:11

Because, yeah, well, that's great, because the other example was a few years later, it was probably around uh 2003 or so. You were speaking at the University of Maryland, probably at the Students for Sensible Drug Policy got something together, and maybe the uh the campus uh normal group or both, and you were just you were just so emphatic. We are not gonna give in, we're not gonna do this, we're gonna do this and that. And how much of that is just the New Yorker and New York?

SPEAKER_01 7:36

Well, John, I'll tell you, you know, part of the nature of the work I did, and also having been a professor, and also of having had my my father as a rabbi, was I, you know, what what I learned really from my dad, I think, was that he had a gift. Um, in his congregation, he would have people who had barely graduated high school, and he would have members of the congregation who were fellow rabbis who did not at the time have a congregational post, or he would have professors from Columbia and other universities. And he had a gift for speaking in a way that was neither over the head of the less educated, nor sort of too simplified for the most sophisticated. And I think I kind of intuited or absorbed that way of being able to speak to you know an audience that could be incredibly varied. Now that said, you know, sometimes the nature of the job, if I was at a normal conference or a students for sensible drug policy conference, or certainly my own organization, Drug Policy Alliance, was in good part to give inspirational speeches, ones that would mobilize people and make them feel good, especially in the really darkest days of the war on drugs. But the other part of it was I would sometimes be speaking to academic associations or doing grand rounds at hospitals or bar association meetings or, you know, law enforcement groups or the Council on Foreign Relations, establishment organizations, the Brookings Institution. So it really was a matter of learning to speak, always never saying one thing in one place that would contradict what I was saying in another place, but being able to present it in a way that was appropriate for that audience. The other thing I should say is it's never been in my nature to simply just throw out the red meat to the kind of audiences of, you know, the sympathizers, people already with me, you know, preaching to the converted. You know, I like to preach. Um, but the idea was not just to mobilize, it was also to challenge people, to put them into their places where they become uncomfortable. If I was speaking to an audience that was just interested in legalizing marijuana and wanted to just be condemning all the other drug users, I would challenge them on that. If I was speaking to an audience of African Americans, of black people who were mobilized because of the racial injustice of the drug war, I would speak to that, but then I take them to places where they were less comfortable around the realities of drug use and around harm reduction and things like that. So I think that combining of the sort of inspirational with the educational of taking people into their, you know, putting them into the place where they felt great and then taking them out of their comfort zone, it's something I did as a professor. And I can and I did it also in terms of becoming a you know a leading drug policy reform advocate.

SPEAKER_02 10:20

Have you always been that optimistic? Have you ever felt that there are dark were dark places you were in? And have you ever felt low about, you know, the craziness of uh the political world, the the the drug oppression?

SPEAKER_01 10:33

Well, you know, I'll tell you, it's um, I mean, back in the late 80s when I was getting started into the 90s, I mean, the war on drugs was essentially a monolith and it was hysterical and it was terrible. I mean, to see America's prison population grow from 500,000 in 1980 to 2.3 million in the early 2000s, to see us become the largest incarcerator, both in absolute numbers and per capita, you know, really the largest in the history of any democracy, and at numbers that approached the Soviet gulags of the mid-20th century. I mean, so you know, the it was dark days, but you felt like you were starting from nowhere and it was building and building and building. I think if I get there were the moments of despondency happened in moments like in the early 2000s, where after a whole number of victories with ballot initiatives and other areas where all of a sudden things got pushed backward. Same thing happened a bit again in the you know around 2008, 2009. I think the hardest time now, truthfully, is you know, it's today. I mean, on the one hand, I'm working on a memoir that's my major, major focus about my life in activism. And it's a kind of the history of the movement as seen from my perspective. Um, but it's also living in this era of really gross polarization and people being so so compartmentalized. And and um, I think that what I'm seeing now, and also, you know, we're also drug policy reform, it's moving forward on the cannabis front and moving forward in a very dramatic way in the psychedelics front, but in other areas, it's not moving forward with the same momentum either domestically or internationally. And so I'd say that combination of drug policy reform being stalled in certain areas, especially with incarceration and harm reduction. And on the other hand, the kind of bigger issues that are confronting my own country, our own country, as well as the world right now, I think, I think this is really probably the moments where um, you know, where I do despair a bit. I'm also aware that, you know, I devoted much of my professional life, my in fact, all of my professional life to this cause. I'm proud of the progress we made. I mean, to some extent, you know, if you would imagine 25, 30 years ago that marijuana would now be a legal industry over half the states, and it would be tens of billions in, you know, in tax revenue and a half a million legal jobs, and marijuana arrests cut down from 800,000 to 200,000 a year, and you know, the gangsters no longer making the same kind of, you know, I mean, it's not all pretty and beautiful, and there's still lots to be done. But I mean, that's quite that that I feel very, very proud of. The fact that million people have locked up on drug charges has dropped from a half a million plus to maybe, you know, 300,000 plus, I feel proud of that. The fact that harm reduction has become institutionalized to some extent in my own country and elsewhere, especially given the overdose issue, I feel proud about that. But then you see, you know, how much more work is to be done. And I, you know, even from the get-go, and maybe the speech you heard me give at normal or at SSDP, I would talk about this being a multi-generational movement and myself being somewhat in the first generation and handing off the batons to following generations. Well, it was all part of the plan, all part of my understanding. I knew this was going to take time. I would analogize what we were doing to the movements for gay rights and civil rights and women's rights, and even the movement to abolish slavery in the slave trade. Those were all multi-generational movements. And some of them still have quite a ways to go. Um, but it still can be dispiriting to see things when they get stalled as they are now.

SPEAKER_02 14:09

I appreciate your sharing that with me. I remember going to an ACLU uh uh gathering in DC during my first summer after law school, and I walked up to the uh leader, I think it was of the Northern Virginia ACLU, and I said, you know, how do you how do you arrange to just keep going and and and fighting this fight when there's all this bad stuff going on? I started ticking off things that Ed Meese was doing and all that other stuff. This was back in 1987, and he said the right thing, which a the Amnesty International automatically has been saying for decades, which is you know, you know, light the candle in darkness. He said, I refuse to be pessimistic. I mean it might sound overly, overly uh simplistic, but I mean that's the way to go. I mean, what are the ways to go?

SPEAKER_01 14:57

I mean, I I can tell you, in fact, by chance, um, I just caught up yesterday with a dear friend of mine, Ira Glasser, who was the head of the ACLU from 1978 to 2001, and then was my board chair all of the years that I ran Drug Policy Alliance from 2000 till 2017. And yes, he was very much about the importance of running. You know, this is not a sprint, this is a marathon. You know, it was about the line that, you know, Martin Luther King adapted from the old abolitionist leaders about, you know, the the moral arc of the universe being long but bending in the right direction. Um, so you always have to do those things. You always, you know, have to retain that element of optimism and of hope and of believing in the better sides of human nature. I mean, that's what this fight was about for. I mean, for me, you know, look, I would say this is about freedom. It was about the fight for freedom and liberty and justice and compassion and health and common sense and human rights. Those are the good values. And to me, those were values that were not just part of the progressive movement, which made up the bigger share of the movement. Those were also movements that could be found at the core of many of the strands of conservatism in this country as well. It's why some of my earliest allies were people like Milton Friedman and William Buckley. I didn't agree with them on much, but God knows that these guys turned out to be important allies, as were other people on the right side and the Republican side for many, many years. Um, you know, so I think these are fundamental values we're fighting for. And it's why when I looked at the leaders of the gay rights movement and the women's rights movement, the civil rights movement, and you know, and the abolitionist leaders, you know, those were the inspirational forces for me and the ones that I sort of in a grandiose kind of way modeled myself after.

SPEAKER_02 16:46

Now, your, I don't know if your Wikipedia biography is completely correct. Is it true that you got some sort of security clearance uh doing some sort of project of the State Department in the 1980s?

SPEAKER_01 16:58

That's very true, John. You know, I decided, you know, in my college and early graduate school years at Harvard and London and elsewhere, I uh focused on Middle East politics. And I began to burn out on that in the early 80s, and thank God I did. And a friend pointed out to me that I'd always been interested in drugs and drug policy and the deviant side of things. And one of my major aspirations when I entered graduate school at Harvard was to try to get as many of my classmates high as possible. Um, so I launched into the area, but one of my advisors was Phil Hyman, who had been the head of the criminal division in the of the Justice Department in the Carter administration, and then was briefly the Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton, uh in the in the, I'm sorry, in the Carter administration, and then the deputy director of the Justice Department briefly under Jan Areno, under Bill Clinton, and he encouraged me to write a dissertation on the internationalization of criminal law enforcement, which was 40 years ago, was just really beginning to blow up. And so I did that, and as part of my research, uh one of the people I talked to said, if you really want to know what's going on, you got to work on the inside. So I managed to get myself a security clearance and went to work in the State Department's Narcotics Bureau, writing a classified report on drug-related money laundering. And uh, this was 1984-85, and uh spending the nights going through all the files in the State Department. And uh uh yeah, so I had that security clearance. I wrote the classified report. Um, and that was also a time when I went to 19 different countries in Latin America and Europe interviewing DEA and FBI and customs and CIA and local uh intelligence enforcement agents around the world to find out how they dealt with crime when it crossed international borders. I the book I produced out of that is called Cops Across Borders, and I think it's still the leading book on the internationalization of criminal law enforcement, even though it's quite dated. Were you already against the drug wars at that time? I was. I knew this was it. A fool's errand from the time I started college in 1975. I knew it was ridiculous when I first started getting high as a freshman at McGill University and wondering why people were getting busted for this. Um, you know, I it took more study and research to understand why the war on why it wasn't just the war on marijuana, that even the war on other drugs made no sense. And although I never became a kind of libertarian-minded legalizer who believed that all drugs should simply be available in the way that Milton Friedman would have advocated, I did come to believe that we should reduce the role of criminalization and the criminal justice system in drug policy as much as possible without inviting increases in drug abuse. And I believe that even at the point where I was working in the State Department's Narcotics Bureau back in 84-85.

SPEAKER_02 19:49

This guy, Phil, you're talking about, does he spell spell his last name? H-E-Y-M-A-N? M-A-N-N. Yeah, I think I heard him talk before. Okay. Now, did you ever deal with Lester Grinspoon when he was over at Harvard?

SPEAKER_01 20:04

I mean, Lester was a friend. Um, I mean, Lester and I met. I remember going to visit him in 1987, just as I was finishing my dissertation on the internationalization of criminal law enforcement and beginning to enter the nascent drug policy reform world. And then he and I served on the advisory board of Drug Policy Foundation. We were allies. I am today in touch with his son Peter Grinspoon, who has been writing a lot on uh on drugs and addiction and such. Uh Lester really played a pivotal role, both in offering a lot of the books and in his role with normal. I mean, he was really one of the um he and Norman Zinberg were the two great figures at Harvard Medical School, um, really challenging conventional thinking in this area. And then Lester himself became something of an activist.

SPEAKER_02 20:53

So uh Lester told the fascinating story how he tried marijuana because he was opposed to it. And someone said, well, you know, to not be disingenuous about it, you should try it. But once he tried it, he turned around and thought and decided, hey, this is some good uh this is a good uh product here.

SPEAKER_01 21:09

Well, you know, there was another part of Lester's story. He has he has four or five sons, and one of his sons, um, as a teenager developed a bad cancer. And um, you know, it became evident. People told him and his wife that they marijuana might help his son deal with the nausea attended to chemotherapy. And I think eventually, with his wife Betty pressing him, um, he went along with that and he actually saw the how the cat medical, you know, marijuana proved medically valuable for his son, who ultimately died of that cancer, but who eased his suffering. So there were both sides, both the ones, the one part of it, John, that you mentioned, as well as that other very tragic but you know important element.

SPEAKER_02 21:51

That one I didn't know. So did the was there something that drew the line at Harvard to uh to tolerate or accept Leicester if they did, uh, versus Including out Timothy Leary and Richard Albert, also later named Ram Doss, where uh Leary and Albert were turning people on to acid, but it doesn't sound like uh Lester was doing anything like marijuana himself.

SPEAKER_01 22:13

With Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. And Richard Alpert, who then became Ram Doss and then became a friend of mine and ultimately joined the honorary board of the Drug Policy Alliance, together with people like George Schultz and you know Frank Carlucci and Walter Cronkite, but I had Ramdoss on there as well. But I think part of what happened with Learn Alpert was that they sort of evolved from being serious researchers into being a bit of advocates and gurus for this. So I think the evolution in their role and self-identification was part of what got them booted from Harvard. In the case of Lester Grimspoon, he long believed that the reason he never became a full professor at Harvard Medical School was because of the controversial positions he took, especially on drug policy. And that embittered him quite a bit, actually. Um he also started, I think, the Harvard Health Letter, a mental health letter. So he did things that were incredibly beneficial for the medical school there, but believed that the controversy he generated was actually held against him. He never went out, you know, really crossed the lines in the way that Lyra and Alpert did, but um he was not quite as cautious as Norman Zinberg, his um fellow Harvard Medical School professor, who was tenured. And I mean, I think Lester was tenured as well, but never got the full press pressorship.

SPEAKER_02 23:30

I didn't know that Lester got that kind of potential actual backlash. So, well, let's talk about other people. Were there other have there been other people on the drug reform movement who've also uh put themselves in the line and uh and um and and faced some uh adverse consequences for that from their employers, for instance?

SPEAKER_01 23:48

Well, I mean, the most significant one was, I mean, the first prominent academic in American history challenged conventional thinking, both about drugs and addiction and about drug policy, was a professor at Indiana University named Alfred Lindesmith. And he, in fact, you know, um, was targeted by Harry Anslinger, the founding director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and head of it for over three decades. He was targeted, he was persecuted, they did go after him. He never lost his position, but it was in fact uh a major issue. Um, so he was one prominent one. I never felt that it cost me in my years at Princeton. Um, I mean, my colleagues in the politics department in the Woodrow Wilson School would tell me that, Ethan, don't think that all this work on drug policy reform and all your publications in foreign policy and public interest and even in science magazine are going to get you tenure. We're interested in your contribution to the discipline of political science, which I didn't care all that much about. But I don't think it really the controversy really hurt me. Um and as for others, I'm sure there are others that paid a price, um, but not in, you know, not, I don't think, at least in academia. The ones who really paid the price, you know, were the people who put their neck out. It was the physicians recommending medical marijuana and getting persecuted and prosecuted by state police agencies and by the DEA. Um, it was physicians who were prescribing pain medication. And sometimes, you know, if you're somebody with a history of opioid addiction and then you have a real pain episode involving serious stuff like anybody else, it's almost impossible to find a physician who will prescribe opioids as your pain medicine if you've had an history of opioid addiction. And there were some very brave physicians who land themselves getting persecuted and prosecuted by the DEA as a result. So there have been people, you know, with advanced degrees and professional careers. I should say the same thing happened earlier in the 20th century. You know, I mean, there was a whole history of people being prescribed morphine, um, you know, you know, on a maintenance basis, leading responsible lives and doing very well. And then all of a sudden being told you can no longer treat these patients the way you were. And there were some unscrupulous doctors who were, you know, prosecuted with reasonable grounds, but there were others who were just doing the Lord's work in helping people deal with their pain. And they too got swept up in some of these drug wars.

SPEAKER_02 26:17

I was at the uh drug policy, I guess, I guess it was called the Drug Policy Foundation of the early 90s. I was at their conference in DC in 1991 or 92, and Milton Friedman just brought out the uh uh the message playing and well for the right wingers, uh the conservatives, which is he's he said uh aptly that the uh the drug war is one of the uh biggest socialist enterprises there is.

SPEAKER_01 26:43

I'll tell you a funny story. Um back around in the well, a little background. So 1996, I think I mentioned earlier I played a key role, I mean, you know, in in putting together the funding for the first medical marijuana initiative in California in 1996, Prop 215, which was the first one, the first major victory where I would say the nascent drug policy reform movement showed we could play ball in the big leagues of American politics. And I went on from there. Then we then we came back in 98 and 2000, and we did the same medical marijuana, we did medical marijuana initiatives in Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and Maine. We did treatment instead of incarceration initiatives, we did asset civil asset forfeiture reform initiatives, all that sort of thing. But anyway, after we won that ballot initiative in 1996, all of a sudden the major editorial writers, Senator Orin Hatch and Senator Joe Biden, attacking George Soros and me, you know, that we were just doing this because we want to legalize all drugs and give drugs to kids. And so I went to see George and he says, What's your next move? And I said, I'll tell you what our next move is. I want you to make a very public commitment of $1 million to support needle exchange programs around the United States to reduce the spread of HIVAIDS. And he said, Why? And I said, Because that's a way of showing that this is not about legalizing all drugs, it's not about giving drugs to kids. This is about a public health harm reduction approach to dealing with drug policy, right? And so George says to me, okay, well, I have a new board now, and you got to pitch it to them. So months later, I go up to his home and his brand new board. It's you know, seven or eight, you know, white male liberal academics, and one black woman, Lonnie Ghineer. I don't know if you remember the name, Lonnie Ghineer. Lonnie Gneer's.

SPEAKER_02 28:24

I remember she was she was the candidate, what, for the had the civil rights division of the Justice Department?

SPEAKER_01 28:29

Exactly. And the right wingers went after her because of a few radical things she had said um in her younger years and her academic writing. And even though she'd been personal friends and law school classmates with uh, I think Bill and Hillary, um, he basically let her go. And so anyway, I pitched this to them, and Lonnie was the one person who was going, I don't know, why this needle exchange thing? Why don't you focus on the mass incarceration piece? And my response was, Lonnie, at this point, we got no traction. You know, this is early '97 on changing the, you know, the the criminal justice laws. We're just getting going, but we could really save a lot of lives with the needle exchange money. And so I persuaded her to come around. And then she said, you know, Ethan, while you're at it, why don't you take that op-ed that Milton Freeman just published? I can't remember if it's the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, I mean, and send that to leading black clergymen and politicians around the country. Because when Milton, I mean, he and I became a little bit friendly. He ultimately wrote me letters for tenure, and you know, he thought I was too moderate. Um, you know, he I was, you know, in my more incrementalist and moderate approach. But the fact is, when he spoke to this issue, whatever you may think about him on the bigger economic issues and his free market stuff and his associations with some of the more sordid governments like the Pinochet government in Chile, I gotta tell you, on this issue, he wrote with a true moral force. It wasn't the cold-hearted libertarian, it was the moral libertarian speaking to the moral injustice of the war on drugs.

SPEAKER_02 30:04

And then I saw uh I spoke to one or two of the clergy over at that uh Drug Policy Foundation conference in the early 90s, heard him speak. And that made perfect sense about why a lot of the uh people of the cloth were in favor of drug decriminalization, uh, which is to not have the uh unnecessary suffering of people just being locked up and warehoused in prison for a long decades and decades.

SPEAKER_01 30:28

I mean, I'll tell you, uh, you know, when I started my organization, I was trying to get a whole bunch of other organizations started, including professional organizations of doctors and cops and clergy and stuff, et cetera, against the drug war. And there was a wonderful clergy guy, a Baptist minister named Howard Moody, head of Judson Memorial Church in New York, and just a gutsy, courageous guy who had been at the forefront of a lot of things. And I corralled him to start, you know, an organization called Religious Leaders for Justing Compassionate Drug Policy. And he pulled in, you know, Jews and various Christians, and maybe even a Muslim leader on this thing. It never got a lot of traction. Um, and he eventually handed off the baton to a wonderful minister from Nashville, Tennessee, Edwin Sanders. Um, but I'll tell you, when you look at the clergy, it's worth remembering. Remember the name Chuck Colson, the guy who worked with Nixon and went to a jail because of some of the Watergate corruption? But he kind of found Guy behind bars and he came out. And one of the things he did, I mean, he would hold these clergy, you know, these breakfasts for clergymen and sort of Republicans, but he got the issue of justice reform going among conservative clergy in America.

SPEAKER_02 31:41

I didn't know that.

SPEAKER_01 31:42

Um yeah, and in fact, he then found a guy, a Republican politician, Pat Nolan, um, who had gone to prison, and he got Pat Nolan to head up the justice arm of his organization. And you know, conservative clergy began to play a role, I think, already already in the early 2000s, pushing for some measure of criminal justice reform. Initially, they were focused on the safest part of criminal justice reform, which was re-entry, allowing people to serve their time to re-enter society as, you know, as equal citizens. But eventually they became a little more ambitious in pointing out that these mass incarceration policies were just unjust, that mandatory minimums were the wrong thing to do. So they played an important role in moving some of the more right-wing congressional and state Republican leaders to begin to embrace criminal justice reform maybe 10, 15 years ago.

SPEAKER_02 32:35

This is a good point then for us to talk about how some of the things you've been doing and talking about does relate to us being able to persuade as criminal defense lawyers in court. Now, next week, I don't know if you ever heard of uh Joe Margulis, who's a political science professor up in Cornell. He's going to be joining me next week about his upcoming book where he talks about there is no other, there is just us. And so I'm I'd like you to talk a little more about how to uh how to connect, relate to with and persuade those we initially see as the other. Like for me, when I'm dealing with uh a judge or prosecutor who seems to have ice in their veins. And on top of that, uh, well, there's just this optimism you you have. So please tell me, at what point in your life, let's start with that. At what point in your life were you able to uh uh crack up people, make them laugh hysterically, and be upbeat? I mean, has it always been like that, other than when you've felt a little down about it?

SPEAKER_01 33:38

It's always been that way. I mean, my my view is a few. First of all, I have a rule for myself, which is, you know, and I would say this in the normal comments and elsewhere, that oftentimes that when you are involved in the world of activism, the people you hate the most are your fellow allies, right? Because the enemy is out there, you're not socializing with them much, right? It's your allies, the people you fight with over funding and credit and girlfriends and boyfriends and all of this sort of stuff. And and and and the rule I had was let's keep our eye on the prize and remember we're all in this together, and that human conflict is net is part of human nature. It's necessary in some level, but let's never forget that we are that we know each other because we are allies fighting for some fundamentally the same, the same basic objective. In this case, ending the war on drugs. The second part of that was my rule was there could be no more than five people in the world among my allies who I would not be on speaking terms with. And even the ones I would not be on speaking terms with, I would make sure that I could engage with them either through email or by speaking with their colleagues so we could keep the partnership going, right? That was pivotal. Now, when it came to speaking to the middle or even to the opposition, I gotta tell you, doing it with a smile and being able to joke and to show that I'm not just a hot head and a fiery person who can give inspirational speeches, but that, you know, this is on a human level. I mean, I think that's pivotal. One of the things that I would always be saying to my allies is remember, we don't win unless we persuade the ordinary parent of a teenager that what we are advocating for is more likely to help them and their kids than what the drug war types are doing, right? It's speaking to that, speaking to the mind and to the heart, the sense of compassion, right? The sense of common sense, the sense of those sorts of things. So that was pivotal. If I was going to speak to a law enforcement audience, I wanted to get them laughing and at least liking me personally, even if they were predisposed to be against most of what I was advocating for. It was about reeling people in with kind of like, well, can you agree to this? Can you agree to that? It was about using language. One of the things that really frustrated me in the last decade or so, although it's moderating now, is the extent to which so many of my allies on the left and the progressive side were so insistent on using a particular type of progressive speak, a type of progressive language. And I would say, what are you doing? We have to be appealing to the centers. We have to be appealing to people who are not ideologically opposed to us, but just need to be reeled in. Don't use your progressive speak language, speak in common sense, human terms, right? Speak in a way your grandmother could understand. It's that, those elements of communication which are absolutely central. Now, when it comes to the people about advocating for people, well, look, I mean, there's a few things. First of all, I focus on the totality of people's lives. And of course, many people involved in criminal defense already do that. You want to show that the person may be a criminal, they may have done this or that, but you know, they're still taking care of their mother who's elderly. Right. They're still making sure that their kids have food on the table. This person may be involved in some type of drug crime, but the fact of the matter is he's actually got a serious legal income as well. You know, I used to say when it came to talking to police, policer, to people involved in policing, that it's important to distinguish between the asshole drug dealer and the non-asshole drug dealer, right? You know, the the the non-asshole drug dealer, think about a guy running a bodega, right? He's got you know, he's a fixture of the community, but you know, underneath the counter, he's selling heroin to people who are local in the community, right? But he knows those people, right? He knows those people. He's providing hero, but if they weren't getting it from him, they'd be getting it from somebody else. And that might be an asshole drug dealer who does not care about the quality of his product, who does not care about the safety, does not care about them as human beings, does not care about whether the person is a pregnant woman or a kid. There's a major difference. And my view is when it came to the asshole drug dealers, fuck them. Throw the book at them. But when it comes to the non-asshole drug dealers, the ones who care, caring about the quality of your product with this whole overdose epidemic that we're just beginning to come out of now with fentanyl, these things, it makes a huge difference when you know what you are actually selling. Do you care what is in that? Do you care what it's been cut with? Do you care about its potency? Do you care about your customers? Do you care? Do you know them, right? You know, decades ago, the Rotterdam police developed something called the Rotterdam Apartment Dealer System, where they would say to drug dealers, essentially, we know who you are, okay? We want you to know the following. If all you're doing is selling drugs, including heroin cocaine, to local clientele, if you're being discreet, if we're not getting if it's indoors, right? If you're not selling to kids, you know, if we're not getting complaints from the neighbors, if nobody's dying or going to the emergency room because of stuff you're sending, you are a low priority for us. Conversely, if we hear about weapons being around, if we're getting complaints, if we're seeing people landing up in emergency rooms because of the junk you're selling, you are our number one priority. Making that fundamental distinction, looking at people as human beings and as moral human beings. And understanding, I mean, look, the job of criminal defense attorney is to defend everybody, including the asshole drug dealers, right? Um, but my view is one reason I never became a criminal defense attorney is that, you know, I I thought about becoming a criminal defense attorney, but I wasn't interested in defending really serious criminals. And I thought about becoming a prosecutor, but I didn't want to prosecute people for nonviolent drug offenses, right? So I became an activist instead. Um, but I think you sp you look at the moral qualities of somebody's life. And I think that's something that you and other criminal defense attorneys already know. I think that's really pivotal. I will say one other thing too. You know, with drug courts, you got to be careful about those. I think they're getting better. I haven't followed it closely in recent years. But oftentimes, when given an option to send uh somebody to drug court instead of incarceration, understand that oftentimes that meant taking two steps forward and three or four backward.

SPEAKER_02 40:14

Right.

SPEAKER_01 40:15

Provide an opportunity for somebody not to go to jail. But if that person wasn't really ready to quit and be abstinent and hand in clean urines and all of that, they might land up spending more time under the supervision of the criminal justice system and more time behind bars than if they'd just gone to jail in the first place. So I think we need to realize that you have to be careful that some of these intermediate options that were presented, especially in the American context, turned out to be a trap, not a deliberate trap. I think many of the judges were well-meaning, but a lot of the judges were coming from a very abstinence-only ideology. Some of the early drug court judges were themselves in 12-step programs or family members who were. And they were fully willing to accept that if you could not be abstinent, well, too bad.

SPEAKER_02 41:07

Right.

SPEAKER_01 41:07

You know, and here we're saying drug addiction is a medical issue and a health issue, right? Well, this is the only medical or health issue where if you're not succeeding in treatment, the consequence is incarceration. We don't do incarceration as a result of failure of any other medical treatment. We know that adherence to, you know, staying absent from illicit drugs is almost as good or bad as adherence to taking other medications that have nothing to do with addiction, right? So I think understanding those things is important as well.

SPEAKER_02 41:37

Excellent. Now let's get back to persuasion. Very excellent points you made there. And this idea of connecting human to human is so essential to persuasion. Sometimes to remind people before I was a lawyer, before you were a cop or prosecutor, judge were human beings. Uh, that judge who's uh yelling from the bench uh was a helpless baby in diapers at one point. And I think the Jerry Falwell, uh Larry Flint example is amazing, perhaps more on the Jerry Falwell level. So one day, Jerry Falwell apparently walked into the Hustler magazine uh office, perhaps unannounced, walking by probably all the all the centerfold pictures, goes right into Larry Flint's office. And somehow they found a point of commonality to the point where, for instance, they would uh stay in touch and talk about each other's grandchildren and their efforts to lose weight. And at some point, Larry King Live had both of them on there, and I lost counting. It was at least one time, which is perhaps one time that was surprising that uh Falwell kissed uh Flint on the on the cheek, because of course Falwell was doing that because you know, uh anybody in Falwell's view is redeemable. Uh, but I think Falwell's approach is the right approach, short of kissing someone on the cheek, which is to you know, humanize the person.

SPEAKER_01 42:53

Yeah, no, I mean, I tell you, John, I mean, I mean, I never left into Falwell's office. I did go into Larry Flint's office and have a long talk with him, and I was disappointed I did not manage to secure a major contribution from him, although he was politically very much allied with us. Um, I will say, no, look, when I look at the people on the other side, I mean, there were some who were just straight out ideologues, and you know, they there was nothing really much you could talk about. But even among some of the ones who are ideologues but could be personable, you know, we could debate one another in a fierce way, but we'd still break bread afterwards.

SPEAKER_02 43:26

Right.

SPEAKER_01 43:27

You know, some of the ones whose views and values I despise, some of the people I thought had really blood on their hands. Um, you know, you still, if they if you can be personable, you still sit down, you make nice. I, you know, there was one guy, Herb Kleber, who was the depth first deputy drug czar under William Bennett, the first drug czar, uh back in the 1989, 90. Um, and and uh, you know, and he was somebody who I could appeal to to at least become an ally on little issues, right? You look at the civil asset forfeiture issue. There were right wingers who hated. Everything about drug policy reform, but on civil assets and forfeiture, because for them the rights of personal property were so paramount, they became our allies.

SPEAKER_02 44:08

There you go.

SPEAKER_01 44:09

One of the first, you know, Barry Goldwater in his last years and his institute were allies on drug policy reform. Um, Grover Norquist, right? You know, the famous, I want to make governments so small I can strangle in a bathtub, the head of Americans for tax reform, you know, I mean, hated and despised by progressives and liberals. He was a significant ally of ours on drug policy reform.

SPEAKER_02 44:31

Um I want to talk to you about uh for uh worldwide drug policy jerk. Go ahead. And it a springboard for me is when I graduated uh from law school, I went to Southeast Asia for four weeks uh before starting law school. And I had uh three defining moments, two of them which were as stupid as anything. One was I brought a suitcase of my uh Singaporean friend over there without figuring out what was inside the suitcase, because he was nice and having his family put me up for in their apartment for three nights. And I saw the machine submachine gun toting uh soldiers there realized uh this may not have been a good idea, uh, but no one asked me any questions about it. And then uh I went over the causeway by walked over the causeway by after the bus took me from Singapore into Johor Baru in uh Malaysia, and there are these uh smiling uh customs guys on the Singaporean side, and the sign behind there says something like Dada means death, because of course that was the time, and perhaps still where a certain minimum amount of marijuana or heroin on you uh guaranteed the death penalty just about. And the final stupid thing I did was uh being on a trek in the Golden Triangle over in, well, maybe it wasn't stupid, but it was risky. Uh on a trek in the Golden Triangle, and I was in the two huts that we stayed at in these different villages, one a Hmong village, another Karen village, the landlord of the hut was providing uh people in my group. There were about five of the eight people in my group, plus the tour leader. They were smoking opium, like you know, right in front of me. And you know, later I learned as a criminal defense lord, I mean, if if you're in a situation like that and the cops come and drag net arrest, you know, you can all be convicted. But with that springboard, to what extent have you been involved with uh international drug reform? And uh what's the state of that right now?

SPEAKER_01 46:22

Yeah, John. I mean, what I can say is, I mean, for me, I came to this issue initially um as a specialist in international relations. And my first article about this was published in the Journal of Foreign Policy, and I published another piece in the Journal of Foreign Affairs. So the international piece for me was really big. Um, less so for my overall organization. I was sometimes the case officer for our international work, but I've probably spoken in 50 different countries. I've testified before parliaments, uh, you know, in in a host of different countries all around the world. I've traveled all around the world, Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, um, on this issue. Um, we've helped my organization help draft legislation and laws in in a whole range of countries as well. What I can say is that, and I should say I had my own Singapore experience. I was at a conference in Malaysia, which was actually opening up a little needle exchange program and methadon program because they were freaked out about AIDS. And from there I went to Singapore and I landed up giving a talk at one of the institutes in Singapore. Only about 15, 20 people showed up. Four of them were from the Singapore Narcotics Agency. Some of the other people were the law enforcement attaches from the embassies, uh, but they were respectful. I will say that when I got home, I think I found a little piece of a joint in my bag, and just thank God that was a scary. So the stories are close like that. Um, you do have to be careful about those borders because they can screw you over. And uh God knows I have no interest in going to Russia or a whole range of other countries where these things could happen. For me, the way that Europe began to deal with drugs in the 80s and 90s, I mean, actually beginning with the Dutch coffee shop system that emerged in the late 70s, but then the whole harm reduction approach with needle exchange, safe injection sites, heroin prescription programs for illegal heroin addicts, those things were models. And these were countries that had a big problem with uh, you know, with drug addicts, you know, stealing and on the streets and all this stuff. And I think the Europeans provided a model for how to deal with these things. And so a major mission of my organization and for myself was trying to educate Americans about how we could deal with these things in ways that Europeans did. And I will say that one of the big disappointments, when you asked me, you know, what about my disappointments, is that we didn't get further. That in the midst of the overdose crisis and even before, that even when you had a half dozen countries in Europe and Canada that had heroin prescription programs that were working, saving lives, saving money, reducing crime, reducing incarceration, helping people get their lives together, that we I was never able to get that off the ground in the United States. When I look at safe injection sites today, where there's only like a few legal ones in the whole country and in New York and in Rhode Island, um, you know, those are things that basically get injecting drug users off the streets, eliminate overdose fatalities, save taxpayers money. You know, those are sorts of things that should have been basic common sense and that would have put a real dent in the overdose epidemic. So I think Europe was a real role model. Latin America was inspiring for me in part because the remarkable number of first former political leaders, including presidents, and then current political leaders who actually stood up and were willing to say the war on drugs is an utter failure, and we have to consider all options, including legalization. I got to know the presidents of Colombia and Guatemala and other countries as well as a result. There's even today something called the Global Commission on Drug Policy. People can you know look it up, and they're really doing very important work to kind of keep the dialogue and going about how drug prohibition and the war on drugs are a greater threat to the world than is drug abuse itself. When it comes to Asia, I was impressed in the way that countries both in Southeast Asia and Southwest Asia, from China and Malaysia and Vietnam and Indonesia, as well as Iran. I mean, these were countries that began to embrace harm reduction policies in the late 90s, early 2000s because they were freaked out about AIDS, and that actually did embrace some measure of harm reduction, even though their broader framework was the war on drugs. So I could find reason for optimism all around the world. Right now, things are mostly being pushed backwards. Um and I'll tell you, John, if I could, the thing I'd like to conclude with is one of the issues I've become engaged in since I stopped running Drug Policy Alliance almost a decade ago is the fight over vaping and e-cigarettes and pouches and tobacco harm reduction. Because what I see is, you know, for people who cannot quit smoking, switching to an e-cigarette reduces the harm to your body by 80 to 90 to 95 percent. Switching from stopping cigarettes and switching to a pouch, you know, the zin or on or snus or things like that, cuts the risk by 97, 98%, probably. Yet the vast majority of Americans and even doctors still think that e-cigarettes are as dangerous as real cigarettes. It's pure idiocy, it's stupidity, but that is the dominant understanding. Now, where this connects to you being in the criminal defense field is I see a growing movement to actually begin to prohibit cigarettes. You know, we've reduced smoking to now where it's barely 10% of adults, but still there's a lot of people smoking, and it's generally lower class, lower middle class, Native Americans, people with mental illness, people using illicit drugs, etc. But if we keep going to the point where we actually criminalize cigarettes, and I think we're beginning to get closer and closer to that, the public opinion polls show more and more support for actually criminalizing cigarettes. I think that we could see the emergence of a brand new war on drugs in the 21st, middle of the 21st century, where the target is not heroin, cocaine, new synthetic drugs, but it's nicotine and tobacco. And that would be like with a billion tobacco consumers around the world and a hundred million consumers of e-cigarettes and these oral things. If we head that direction, we would cut the number of people smoking, but we would land up with a war on drugs that would dwarf the war on drugs we had in the end of the 20th century and the early 21st century. So I just want to alert people to that. And if anybody thinks the war on drugs when it's directed at marijuana or psychedelics or even the other drugs is misguided, keep in mind that a war on drugs directed at tobacco and nicotine would be just as misguided, if not more so.

SPEAKER_02 52:57

Well said. I told you to be here until 6 o'clock. It's 6 o'clock. So this is your opportunity. Please tell everyone how to spell your last name. And do you have a URL or any podcast you want them to listen to? Because I don't think you've been doing any uh podcasting recently.

SPEAKER_01 53:11

Well, that's okay. Well, look, if you want to get involved, go to the organization I founded and no longer direct called Drug Policy Alliance. Um, my name is Ethan Nadleman, N-A-D-E-L-M-A-N-N. And I did have my own podcast, John, um, a few years ago called Psychoactive. I did 80 episodes in 80 weeks on all aspects of drugs and drug policy, and I think people will enjoy that a lot.

SPEAKER_02 53:35

It's still available. Thank you so much, Ethan Nadleman. You've heard from Ethan Nadleman, and this is John Katz. I'm a criminal defense and DUI defense lawyer here in Fairfax, Northern Virginia. Thank you so much and stand by.

SPEAKER_00 53:49

Thank you for listening to this latest episode from Beat the Prosecution. This is a regular podcast giving people a leg up for their criminal defense. Nothing on any of our media sources, such as our podcast or website, is legal advice. John Cass only provides legal advice to current clients or for individuals who have arranged a consultation. We welcome you to contact us via email at info at beatheprosecution.com or by calling our office at seven zero three three eight three one one zero zero. Or texting us at five seven one four zero six seven two six eight.