The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW Legal Contradictions Threaten Drug War on Marijuana

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

It would be the ultimate irony if the most authoritarian politician of our lifetime ended federal prohibition of marijuana as a political gimmick. The issue is bigger than the drug — nullification, prohibition, corruption, and an out of control bureaucracy.  Biden wants to pander by legalizing, but the DEA bureaucratic empire defies the states, the Congress, the President, and of course the Constitution — to continue to classify marijuana as a Class 1 (no medical use) drug.Marty Gottesfeld, substack.com/MartyG joins and also looks at another private wilderness therapy program, this one in NC, where children have died along with allegations of sexual abuseFind out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

All right. Joining us now is Marty Gottesfeld. And I was just talking to him during the break. So glad that he's out of prison. And I'm glad that he's out of prison. I just, it bothers me so much to see innocent people imprisoned. And especially if it's over political issues,

they are given the worst of treatment. And so Marty had a very tough time. So did his wife, put into a communications management unit. We've talked about that quite a bit. But Marty has a real heart for injustice, a real heart for kids who have been abused by the system. And we've got an article from his substack about that as well but i wanted to begin with an article that marty's got about the dea and what is happening in this biden administration

with the dea again the substack is marty g m-a-r-t-y-g uh you can find him at um on substack thank you for joining us marty no problem thank you having me. Always good to have you on. Let's talk about what's going on with the Biden administration and the war on drugs. Here we are, 50 some odd years into the war on drugs, we've seen this thing, this football kicked back and forth. What's going on now with the Biden administration and the DEA head? So Biden has actually tried to initiate the process to reclassify cannabis under the federal drug laws uh to move it from where it is now which is a scheduled one substance which means that as far as the government is concerned it has no accepted medicinal value and a very high potential for abuse right and that's the way it's been classified my entire life going back as far back

as the controlled substances act exists yeah and it's it's pretty ridiculous i mean i think everyone there's a huge uh majority of americans now uh that transcends every demographic group um that understands that you know cannabis does not have a you know as high of potential for abuse as say heroin which is also in the same classification right now in Schedule 1. And that does have some accepted medicinal uses. Veterans groups, for instance, are saying that, you know, this is something that a lot of veterans need. And they've written and lobbied to get it reclassified. So Biden started that process several years ago.

It had to go through um a lot of different rings this is something congress could do in a vote yeah overnight if it weren't and we've had i remember a couple years ago uh before when when trump was president i remember yeah and congressman standing up and saying this is ridiculous to say that has no medicinal use we know that it does have medicinal use when i was in texas david simpson who was a really honest conservative uh he was the guy who introduced the bill to stop the tsa when they started initiating the naked body scanners and the and the pat downs and stuff he said you're not going to do that to kids and then they came back and said well if you shut that down we're going to turn texas into a no-fly

zone or whatever but he introduced that a couple of times the first time as soon as he introduced that he got a unanimous approval in the house and so then they shut it down in the senate with a guy who was lieutenant governor uh a previous cia uh official right who who shut that down but uh they know uh you know uh he i mentioned that because uh even though he's very conservative and a Christian, he had a couple of people that was in his jurisdiction who had children who were vaccine injured, interestingly enough. And they had uncontrollable seizures. And these two families had gone to Colorado where it was legal and treated their kids. But he said they can be jailed for this and so he fought and won to get an exception in texas to say that um you know they would give a medical exception uh to marijuana for

people who had that particular condition where they you know had these uncontrollable seizures that was the only thing that they found that worked with these kids and it did work with them and so they made that exception and yet in te Texas, marijuana is still like a class one drug. It's like the most dangerous drug, even though they acknowledged that it has a medical use. They still won't take it off of schedule one. And you got what is it? Thirty five states or something now have medical marijuana and all the rest. So it's obviously got medical uses.

And yet they keep it there at Schedule 1. Yeah. And so, and there's something they really cannot do, like to be in Schedule 1 under the law as it's written, you know, if they want to amend the law, they can amend the law, but as it's written to be in Schedule 1, it has to have no accepted medicinal value and it has to have a high potential for abuse. like i said heroin for instance is in schedule one right um as a schedule one substance it cannot be lawfully prescribed by any physician in the country now we're talking federal law and there are there is now a conflict between this federal law and many states laws where the states some of them have legalized it

for recreational use meaning that under state law you can you know possess a you know a significant quantity of it and and not be not run afoul of state law for any reason um and more states have classified it for medical use where you get a doctor's recommendation they can't call a prescription because the prescription system is federal is controlled by the dea a doctor has to have a DEA credential to prescribe narcotic drugs but anyway Biden initiated this process many years ago it had to go through all these bureaucratic hoops because Congress can't you know can't seem to get anything done on this ever I mean the house passed something a few years ago but it's something Congress could have done overnight at any time it something Congress could have done overnight. At any time it wanted to, could have done it overnight, passed a bill that says we're moving cannabis from schedule one to schedule three, or we're just declassifying it entirely. But Congress

has been unwilling to do that. So to his credit, and that's not something you hear me say about Biden very often, but to his credit, he initiated this process and had to go through the federal health and human services department they conducted a review they said for the first time we find that there are accepted medical medical uses and we find there has a low potential for abuse or at least much lower than the other drugs at schedule one they made that formal recommendation to move cannabis from schedule one to schedule three now at schedule three it could be lawfully prescribed right at schedule three you potentially have imports and exports

and interstate commerce right because that the feds to control that they have jurisdiction over that right so right now even if it's legal in your state you can't go to canada and bring some home with you because that would be interstate commerce you You'd be coming in, there'd be a customs issue, right? If you try to bring this stuff into or out of the country. So HHS made this recommendation in the end or middle or early August of last year. And DEA has said, well, these things can take up to six months once we get the recommendation for us to make an action. It's now been seven months.

And it looks to me like the DEA is just kind of dragging its feet, hoping that there will be, you know, a change in November, a change in political circumstances, and they can get away without having to actually, you know, make this change that 70% plus of the country and the president wants there's a heck of a lot of political pressure right now on dea uh biden and harris both tweeted at 4 20 p.m on april 20th uh about cannabis and its classification uh like i said veterans groups have gotten involved there's six or seven governors who are applying political pressure and there's a bunch of congressmen and senators who are also applying pressure at the end of of the day, though, DEA does not want to do this. Among other things, it would mean a lower budget for DEA, right?

Right now they get money to control this substance, you know, as an illegal thing. And, you know, they're looking at their budget and they're saying, do we really want to have one less thing in our, you know, super criminal jurisdiction that we can use for budgetary reasons? You know, local cops, they get grants from the DEA for all kinds of things, right? thing in our you know super criminal jurisdiction that we can use for budgetary reasons you know local cops they get grants from the dea for all kinds of things right so there's there's a you know political will on one side and there's uh bureaucracy and and budget concerns on the other and it just looks like you know what is it going to take to break this law jam yeah it's kind of

interesting when you look at this and say what is their motivation here you know clearly uh biden and lala harris uh want to she she made a career basically of busting people and she yeah she claimed that unkind yeah she's unkind to say the least yeah about cannabis she was a prosecutor in california oh yeah yeah she was very unkind and then as a politician she's trying to pretend that you know yeah i remember listening to some group and i forget the exact exact quote, but she's listening to some group when I was in college and smoking joints or something like that. And it's like, well, that's amazing hypocrisy. But of course, you're also lying because that group didn't exist when you were in high school or college or whatever. You know, I mean, there's this kind of virtue signaling the fact that they would tweet this out at 4.20 a.m. or p.m. or whatever. 4.20 p.m.

Yeah. 4.20. Yeah. And like Obama's biography, his autobiography, he makes clear that he was habitual cannabis user. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, he hasn't. I knew he was smoking something.

Maybe, you know, he's a political home. There's no issue there. I don't know. But, you know, you look at this, and this is purely a political move that they're doing there. And the bureaucracy, though, is fighting against this. So these politicians are out there doing it. But the bureaucracy is fighting fighting this because, again, it's their money and their power. And they don't really care what the law is.

And they don't really care if what they're prohibiting is medically useful or not. When you look at the other aspects of this, look at Jeff Sessions and how he responded to this stuff. He desperately wanted to enforce this, but you had all these states passing these laws and nullifying this unconstitutional prohibition because all of the drug prohibition is unconstitutional, right? I agree. Yeah, I mean mean we go back

why do we have to have the 18th amendment well to prohibit alcohol uh they had a 21st amendment to make it legal again but now they don't pay any attention at all to the constitution nobody would have done that if it wasn't necessary that's a lot of trouble to go through to amend the constitution and now you're both houses and three-quarters of the state legislatures that's right and so now you've got a you've got a government that doesn't care a whit about the Constitution. And you've got a Congress that doesn't care about passing laws. They kick everything to the bureaucracy. So now what you've got is the real power structure, which is the bureaucracy, fighting the politicians there about this stuff.

And I know exactly it's the money as well as the bureaucratic power because you look at civil asset forfeiture. One of the things that Jeff Sessions was doing was telling cops in states like California where they had legalized it, you go ahead and treat it as if it's illegal and steal from people and we'll split the loot with you. You can get 80% of it. We'll take 20% cut. Yeah, I remember that.

Yeah. loot with you uh you can get 80 of it will take 20 cut yeah i remember that yeah and so you got the sheriff's department in san bernardino actually doing armored car robberies they did three robberies it got over a million the first time and then they got wise to them and the third time they didn't get anything but they caught them on tape talking about how they were just going to steal this money and so you know it's our cops, prohibition is turning our cops into highway robbers, literal thieves. It's being incentivized by the federal government. This is the issue. You know, I've talked to so many people over the years about this, and I don't, I'm not interested in marijuana any more than I'm interested in an mRNA shot. But, you know, I'm also not

interested in locking people up and most of the people who have been locked up in the war on drugs it's been over marijuana and so there's a huge uh constituency there for this in terms of the prison industry so the prison industry is pushing it you got the bureaucracy you got the dea pushing it because they don't want to lose one of their biggest um you know uh things that are out there that's that's why they're empire building i think yeah and on the other side you have biden and harris who are underwater with young voters yeah right young voters have largely tuned them out they've got an election coming up in november they're thinking gee what's a nice issue with you know a broad

majority that without you know a lot of downside to it that we can use to engage with young voters. They've identified this issue. And so they're, they're getting noisy about it, but now the monster that they both helped create, right. Is no longer on their leash, right. They don't, it's off the leash. And the question again is what is it going to take to break this bureaucratic logjam? And my positive is that, right, and I'll say, you know, it's the same thing as when Trump was in office. When Trump was in office and this issue came up, right, I said, if he changes the cannabis classification,

it will be the only thing anyone remembers about his presence. No one will remember Mueller. No one will remember, like, any of the smear campaigns, any of the headlines. No one will remember Stormy Daniels. It'll be the only thing anyone remembers.

He was the president who got this done. And I think that's just as true for Biden. If he gets this done, no one's going to remember Hunter or the laptop, right, or Kamala Harris or any of her faux pas or whatever. This will be the only, 30 years from now, this will be the only thing anyone remembers about the Biden administration. Yeah, I'm afraid you're right. They're all going to get away with the vaccine and lockdown stuff.

Nobody remembers that now or wants to remember it from either one of them. I'm afraid you're right. But, you know, that's the thing that really is ironic about it. We talked about how Lala Harris was so authoritarian as a prosecuting attorney with all this stuff. And yet I can't think of anybody in my life in politics that has been more adamantly opposed to the bill of rights and individual liberty than, than Joe Biden. And so for him to be remembered for something like this would truly be the supreme irony.

I've told many times about how with Clarence Thomas, his big opposite, they wanted him to come after clarence thomas with the anita hill uh accusations right of sexual harassment and stuff which was nothing compared to what we're seeing now but uh he didn't do that they were very upset with him his big beef with clarence thomas was that clarence thomas talked about natural law and about individual rights and he hated that, and he hated that. He's always hated that. He's always been proud of his assault weapon ban pushes and all the rest of the stuff. And most of the things that are there in terms of mandatory minimums and real abuses inside of this drug war came from Joe Biden.

He was the one who was pushing that. He was the one who was pushing civil asset forfeiture. So it truly would be the supreme irony for him to be remembered as the one who legalized marijuana. Yeah. And, you know, Biden and Clinton, you know, helped pass the, it's called the AEDPA. And it's, it's the federal law that makes it really hard for people to get federal habeas relief. There are a lot of innocent people in prison right now that that cannot get back in the court because of this law that that biden and clinton passed in the 90s and there's a misperception well it must have been you know the gop that passed that law and actually no it was democrats there they passed that law yeah yeah

he was pushing a lot of these really authoritarian measures that came in the reagan administration he was clamoring for credit and deservedly so of these authoritarian measures you know going back even into the 1980s so it truly would be amazing to see to see that happen yeah so i have a petition up and there's an article in my sub stack it's uh not the most recent thing now but it's a little bit further down and you know my posit is that you know this the head of the deA right now, this Miss Ann Milgram, she should either reclassify cannabis or resign. And Biden should either, you know, give her a call and tell her to do the right thing or he should fire her. And, you know, Biden probably doesn't want to seem very much like Trump. Right.

So he's probably very leery of firing somebody. But if he's serious about November and he's serious about young voters you know this might be something that needs to happen you know the head of the dea might have to go and someone new might have to come in uh who's a little less beholden right to these uh consent bureaucratic constituencies to get this done yeah he's going to get the college vote he's gonna he's gonna he's gonna forgive their debt and tell them you know forget about the debt just kick back and smoke a joint there you go well i forget this thing hasn't really worked out for him and you know so even though he announces that everyone's looking at the courts right and it's like is he gonna get that done by november you know this he can actually get done by november

we should call it the hunter act or something you know forget about hunter act yeah or or you know the hunter drug memorial act or something like that uh or i mean the camera thing i thought you meant the the uh the debt relief or we could call this whole thing the milgram experiment since that's the yeah it's her name yeah are we going to go with uh argument from authority you know regardless of what the law says we're going to just go with Milgram and the Milgram experiment, I guess, is what's going to happen with it. So you got a petition up to start to move some of this back. And again, that is one of the key issues of the war on drugs. It's been one of the key things that they focused on because it was the most widely used.

And so that is a key that's such a power struggle there uh with the dea they do not want to give that up uh that is a real linchpin of their power and uh that's what's going on with all this stuff as as hypocritical and ridiculous and as illegal and unconstitutional as all this stuff, it's just about the raw exercise of power, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And now it's, you know, Biden's asking an agency to give up its own power. And there's, you know, conservative strife about it.

And we'll see what they do. Yeah. I think that, you know, this lady might have to go. She's been a federal prosecutor before she's you know but even before she took over the dea she's deeply connected to this um this bureaucratic mechanism that has long relied on the absolute federal prohibition of cannabis and she might be too connected there to do the right thing here and if so she should resign yeah yeah i know these these agencies they are so jealous of their power uh i mean that'd be like asking the EPA to stop regulating exhaust emissions or something.

They're not going to do that. She's got her own emissions that she wants to regulate, you know, from the pot. Talk about this other article that you just put up today, something that is happening in North Carolina. We've talked about similar things out West about kids being abused and some youth programs. And now this one is in North Carolina. What's going on there? Program is called Trails Carolina.

It's been controversial for years. There was a fatality about a decade ago. A kid ran away. There was a massive search effort. They didn't find him for four or five days when they did find him unfortunately uh he was dead he had broken his hip fallen into a stream and died of hypothermia this is a place where there are allegations of sexual abuse and allegations that staff covered up the sexual abuse instead of going to uh authorities right and saying hey

we've got a kid who's claiming you know there was an incident here which they're required to do by state law right these kids allege that their therapists and other people at these programs uh blamed them for you know their own instances of sexual assault or being assaulted and and covered up to authorities and then uh tragically a little while ago a couple months ago another kid who had just been sent to the program a 12 year old boy from new york um he passed away within 24 hours of arriving at this program and when the police and authorities got there he didn't have on any pants or underwear and the staff were all like we don't know how that happened. And the kid's dead and he's not here to tell us what happened, which is sadly what... In these programs, I mean, I've been doing this work, advocacy and journalism for a long,

long time. These kinds of deaths are really, really common. It's really, really messed up just how common this is. And nothing ever seems to change in an overall systemic kind of way. Although I think the survivor movement is finally starting to hit kind of critical mass. You've got like Paris Hilton out there now advocating, right, and getting laws passed. She was just in California and she helped get something passed in Utah. So I think maybe we're about to see something change.

But this program is called Trails Carolina. There's a petition to Roy Cooper and the Carolina Department of Health and Human Services to shut down this program. There's hundreds of signatures on this petition. The DHHS, after this last fatality, they did pull all the kids from this program, start the process to revoke its license. They fined the program $18,000. These are big things you don't usually see happen yeah with a program like this that 10 years ago you probably wouldn't have seen how give us give us the big picture of this i mean these are these are kids uh why are they at these programs it's not a summer camp right yeah no it's what they call wilderness therapy program um some kids get sent away for like really trifling things like, you know, staying out

late, smoking some cannabis, drinking beers, right? The parents kind of overreact a bit and send them to a place like this. Some kids do have very serious emotional or psychiatric issues, but they still don't belong in an environment like this. They belong, you know, in an environment with better qualified people. this is a type of you know supposed therapy they call wilderness therapy uh they send these kids to these these really rural areas the idea i suppose behind it is that by having to focus on like the bare minimums on like starting a fire cooking food like all that the other problems are supposed to kind of like fall away right by reducing everything to like its most basic uh basic elements i'm not saying that you know that there's no potential merit to that idea but

there's not the way that these people do it yeah right and what we've heard it's whenever you've got any kind of a youth program like that it's going to be a magnet for bad people pedophiles and things they know why i you know this is an opportunity if i can you know fool them i can get involved in this program and then hey we're way out in the middle of nowhere out in the woods and it just gives so many different opportunities to this but you know that's that's the situation we have with pretty much all these things and yet these programs are have a lot of money involved in them and that's one of the reasons why i guess paris hilton was involved in one of these and why she's testifying about it right yeah i Yeah. I mean, this program charged,

I think it was an average of $66,000 for an eight week stay. So it's like 790 or $795 per day. Right. So live in, you know, basically like a tent, like, you know what I mean? Like there's no real overhead here. You're out, you're out on the land. We interviewed at Marty G reportsy g reports we interviewed one of the uh one of the young women who was at this program in 2009 we're going to publish her full interview later this afternoon um we asked her how often she saw her therapist and she said once a week uh for under an hour it was basically just long enough for the therapist to tell uh each kid uh what the therapist felt the kid was doing wrong. And so you're paying $66,000 for an eight-week program where the kid gets barely any therapy.

And the whole point of the program is supposed to be therapy. And that's not what's going on. So what's going on? You've got very low overhead, very high price. Someone's pocketing a lot of money. Yeah. Wow. Wow.

And so these are people who, you know kids their parents have sent this uh with this kind of money is this just uh for the very very wealthy or is this something that's picked up by insurance companies or by uh the government program or something like that to pay for this where they go yeah so um the public education system does pay for some of these programs i don't know that there are any what are called individual education plans, IEP placements at this particular program, but certainly in other programs, you have special ed money going to them. You have courts send kids to these programs, either as part of delinquency proceedings or as part of like divorce proceedings, right? Where they say that the divorce is harmful to juniors. So we're going to send

juniors somewhere where the divorce isn't going to impact them. We see kids get sent away like that, especially when the kid could potentially testify on one parent or the other for abuse. And that parent is particularly financially powerful. We see these programs used a lot in that way. This program, I'm unaware if there's any public money going to this one. So you always have the possibility of private money that you know the family uh ponies up the money for this we've seen families put take a second mortgage on their house because they get convinced by the sales right by the sales machine these places have that this is the best place uh for their child it's the only place that's

going to be capable of uh of helping their child? And it's just, it's really, really sad. Yeah, yeah. People are trying to do an external fix for something that's deeply spiritual and internal, and they don't really understand what that issue is there. You've got a real heart for kids that have been abused and kidnapped. I mean, that was what was going on with Justina Peltier at the Boston Children's Hospital and stuff. This has been an ongoing thing that you do, and I really do appreciate that part of your heart to try to help people.

And everything that you do is really geared towards trying to help people. Even when you were in prison, you were trying to help get information out about the conditions and things that were happening there to other prisoners, to get information out about the conditions and things that were happening there to other prisoners, to get information out about people who were there. What else are you looking at? Anything else on your purview there? Well, I have my final appeal. It's called a collateral attack of my conviction that's pending before the U.S. District Court in Boston right now. I did a statistical analysis on the judicial assignments in Boston, which are supposed to be random. And I found some things in the math seems to show that these judges in the appellate court in Boston are not actually randomly assigned. At least one particular judge who affected my case was not randomly assigned. And that follows up on some work from the Wall Street Journal.

It'd be pretty scandalous. So I'm working as hard as I can to substantiate that further. And that's probably my main thing right now. Wow. Yeah. And that's the key thing. I mean, it is so important for us to understand and to see the corruption that is happening there, whether we're talking about the prison system, the justice system, what is going

on with the hospital system, because justice system, what is going on with the hospital system, because that kind of medical kidnapping that happened with Justina Peltier, we saw that in a couple of years happening to everybody, pretty much. Anybody that blew a positive PCR test or had a cold or something, they'd medically kidnap them, not allow their relatives to see them or to supervise their care or to have a say about it and they literally murdered people it truly is amazing and so um the work that you do i think is very very important and i really do appreciate you getting into the depth of that always good talking to you marty give my best to dana as well uh again people can find marty thank you people can find marty

at marty. Substack. That's where you can keep up with what he is looking at. He's always trying to expose these issues that could come and affect each and every one of us. We saw that with the medical kidnapping, of course. But, you know, anybody can get caught up as an individual in some of these scams. So thank you so much for what you do, Marty. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, David. scam so thank you so much for what you do marty i appreciate it thank you strap me david the david knight show is a critical thinking super spreader if you've been exposed to logic by listening to the David Knight show. Please do your part and try not to spread it. Financial support or simply telling others about the show causes this dangerous information to spread farther. People have to trust me. I mean, trust the science. Wear your mask.

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