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September 22, 2003

Host: Michael Grant
Topics:
· Anti-tobacco programs successful in Arizona;
· One group's efforts to legalize all drugs;
· ASU studies domestic violence;
· Profiles of success: Ben Miranda
In-Studio Guests:
Catherine Eden, Director, Arizona Department of Health Services;
Jack Cole, speaker for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). LEAP advocates legalizing all drugs.
David Wells, senior lecturer, Arizona State University

>> Michael: Tonight on "Horizon," Arizona one of four states to see a significant drop in the number of smokers. An organization wants to legalize all drugs. Lawmaker Ben Miranda featured in our profile of success. And a study of domestic violence yields surprising results. Good evening, I'm Michael Grant. Antitobacco programs apparently successful in our state. Arizona one of four states with the best success in reducing cigarette purchases between 1990 and 2000. Also with assistance from the counties Arizona can boast more and more state high school and middle school students are avoiding tobacco. The Arizona student health survey administered by the Arizona Department of Health Services. Its director Catherine Eden joins us now to talk about the results. Cathy, those were two different studies that I just referred to. There was a national one that came out about the same time as the local. Catherine Eden: Right. Which make us feel very good that both studies said the same thing.

>> Michael: Now, it was tied to the 1990 to 2000 time frame, if I recall correctly, it being the other one. The one that focused on high school and middle school students here came from 2000 forward?

>> Catherine: Correct, 2002, 2003.

>> Michael: Give me some idea of how it was -- how was this study conducted.

>> Catherine: 40 schools, 40 high schools and 40 middle schools, and it is like we do most surveys in the world, what have you been doing and we find kids are as honest with us as adults are, and the results are showing that kids are making the right choices, and they're cutting down on their smoking.

>> Michael: Give me some of the key findings.

>>Catherine: Let me give you -- make sure I remember these all exactly right. In the high school there was a 37% drop among kids that -- reduced in smoking, 37%, and when we talk overall in the last couple years, it's been almost a 58% overall in terms of smoking coming down. But it is -- so the results are, making sure I'm getting this --

>> Michael: Middle schools --

>>Catherine: Estimated 8.7% of middle schools students reported smoking, and that is down from 22%. So from 22% to 8.7%.

>> Michael: I'm not sure that I understood this one too well. It said the Arizona high school lifetime smoking rate is 56%, which was down 13% from 2000. I didn't track the lifetime smoking rate. What --

>> Cahterine: You know what that means, any time in your lifetime have you had a cigarette. So we're talking high school kids and say, did you ever smoke? So that's what lifetime means.

>> Michael: So in other words, we were down 13% from anybody who had just even smoked one cigarette at one point in time.

>> Exactly.

>> Catherine: Michael: Unfortunately this also is consistent with national statistics, too... teenage girls, however, the rate seems to be increasing.

>> Catherine: Right. Michael, looks like it's increasing. It is increasing but it's coming up to the level of boys. Boys is coming down girls are going up a little bit. They're even now. We used to always say the boys were much higher but they're about even now, and we were talking and we're not sure exactly the reason, the rebellion and all those sort of issues but what we're trying to do rather than analyze it so much is we're trying to go after the girls and we've gone to the mercury and they're helping us, so we have a campaign right now going called it's a girl thing, and the attitude we're taking is called inhale life, and so we're not being critical, just saying we want you to inhale as much of life as you can, and so sports, athletics, and sports is so much better for kids, girls, than it was in my age group and so we're trying to make sure girls want to do as much sports, athletics and see -- good image -- body images, athletes, as professional athletes. And we got the perfect example right here and -- so it's called it's a girl thing, inhale life.

>> Michael: Fairly major shift in advertising strategy or not? I mean, it's been gradually evolving over, what, we're shoving almost 10 years of this campaign --

>> Catherine: We are. '95 we got started in '95. At first we used to show drastic things, call STOMAS, people having tracheotomies and showed drastic things, people leaving tapes after they died and that kind of stuff. So now we are -- and what we want to do is shock people, I think, is what we were trying to do. Now with a we're trying to say is the attitude is just inhale life, try to make as many positive choices as possible. So we're not negative. Not trying to tell hysterical stories right now. We went through different stages where we went pregnant women are always a group we're going after, so we're -- that's still a concentration. Young people just about the time they're making big decisions in their life, marriage, finishing college, that's a sensitive age. The young, of course, we're trying to get at. And that's what these are, because we found -- on almost all the surveys we've done through the entire time since '95, smokers tell us they got started before they were 18. So that's always been a target group we try to get them before they start.

>> Michael: Any ability, attempt to try to quantify -- I would assume that the increases in the cost of cigarettes impacts some. Can we quantify some?

>> Catherine: Some is the kids we're talking about because they have the least amount of expendable income, and so that's where we're -- that's why we think -- this is one of the good reasons we think that -- that's why we're doing the survey of of high school and middle kids, we think that's who got hit the hardest on that increase.

>> Michael: Catherine Eden thank you very much for the information.

>> Catherine: Always good to see you, Michael. Thank you.

>> Michael: In a 1999 drug sting in the small Texas panhandle town of Tulia, 46 residents, 39 of whom are African-American, were arrested. Later incarcerated solely on the testimony of a single undercover officer. Vast majority of those put in jail are now free after efforts by the Texas governor who said they had been victims of a miscarriage of justice. Just one example of how the drug laws and their application are being questioned by a growing number of people.

>>Jack Cole: We had no idea whatsoever of how to fight a war on drugs, and neither did our bosses. But one thing our bosses did know, they knew how to keep this federal cash cow being milked in their own barn yard. To keep this money coming in. And in order to do that, they had to show that the war on drugs was indeed necessary, more than necessary, absolute necessity.

>> Reporter: Jack Cole is describing his experience as a narcotics cop in the early '70s when the war on drugs was new. Speaking at this class for the school of justice studies at ASU, Cole explains the reality of undercover.

>> Jack: If I was targeting against this gentleman, my job then is to do whatever is necessary to become your best friend. Your closest confidant so I betray you and send you to jail.

>> Reporter: Cole is a speaker for law enforcement against prohibition or leap. Leap advocates legalizing all drugs. Members of the organization who are or have been connected in someway to law enforcement believe that the war on drugs is a failure. They believe the money used to wage the war on drugs could be better spent and that the current penalties for drug offenders are unrealistic.

>> Jack: Because we have a saying at leap, you can get over an you a Dicktion, even if it's in hard drugs, you can get over an addiction. You will never get over a conviction. That will track you every day for the rest your life and some of you know very easily how it will track you because if you're in school, if you're caught with so much as one marijuana cigarette, you can never again, thanks to the higher education act of three years ago, never again apply for a loan or a grant to continue your higher education. It's over for you. You're done. But if you murder someone or rape someone, you can, which caused our director for Canada, pretty smart guy, Walter McKay, to sort of jokingly, half jokingly say, I guess the message we're trying to send it's okay to murder and rape, just don't smoke a joint afterwards.

>> Reporter: Leap advocates a four step solution to the drug problem. First, legalize all drugs. Second, have the federal drug produce and control the quality of the drugs. Third, have the government distribute free maintenance doses of any drugs to any adults who choose to continue to use them. And fourth, reallocating the money saved to programs for treating addictions and working to convince others not to use drugs. Cole says school children report it's easier to buy illegal drugs than it is to buy cigarettes or alcohol. He says the international trade in illicit drugs generates $400 billion annually. Meanwhile, a prison economy has been created which has encouraged the incarceration of minorities out of proportion to minority drug use in the population. Cole says institutionalized racism is reflected in our drug laws. After years personally fighting the war on drugs, Cole and his colleagues at leap conclude appear new way of looking at the problem would save money and lives.

>> Michael: Jack Cole joins us now on the set to tell us why he thinks the war on drugs is a complete failure. By the way, "Horizon" contacted quite a few law enforcement entities in the area to take the side opposing jack, but all declined. Jack, they didn't want to show up. How --

>> Jack Cole: That's not unusual. That happens rather regularly for us.

>> Michael: How do you move from a long career as a narcotics cop to a group that advocates legalizing all drugs?

>>Jack Cole: Through education and learning. Learning from 33 years of the war on drugs, and in 33 years we spent over half a trillion dollars on that war, and it's been a total failure. We've arrested 1.6 million people every year since the year 2000, and you just heard me talking about how quickly our prison population has grown. All these lives we're destroying. But the kicker to this is with all that hard work, all the money spent, all the lives destroyed, drugs are cheaper, they're more potent and they're easier to get today than they were 33 years ago when I started buying them undercover on the streets of New Jersey. That's a failed policy.

>> Michael: Those sound like good intellectual reasons for it. I guess what I was probing for it, was there anything more personal in your experience that led you to some -- what was that?

>> Jack: Yes, sir. Over a thousand people went to jail as a direct result of what I did out there, and I can't tell you how many of those people were just good kids who were just dipping into drugs, who if I hadn't come on the scene and intervened would have had a perfectly good life. But I know your audience can think, I'm sure, of people they know who have used drugs when they were young, put the drugs behind them and gone on to have a good life. You can do that as long as you don't get arrested. And if you can't think -- if they can't think of anybody personally, I could certainly mention a few people in public office, you know. We have presidents and vice-presidents and speakers of the house and the line --

>> Michael: Who may or may not have inhaled.

>> Jack: Exactly. But if that person -- if when bill Clinton didn't inhale that cigarette, if he would have had -- handed the joint to me next, I would have acted like I inhaled it, I would have knocked the flame off of it, stuck it in my pocket, submitted it as evidence and about a month later the police would have kicked his door down, drug him out in chains because he committed -- he would have committed a felony by just passing that marijuana cigarette. That is a distribution of a controlled dangerous substance. It's the same thing as if he would have given me heroin.

>> Michael: Jack, we're talking about some pretty dangerous stuff. Why do we have to go the full 9 yards to legalizing drugs. Why not, for example, shift our orientation? Why not keep it illegal but go more to a, all right, we're going to focus on distribution instead of the user?

>> Jack: Good questions. The reason we think we should legalize all drugs is because you cannot control or regulate anything that's illegal. That's why it's easier for kids to buy illicit drugs than it is to buy beer and cigarettes, because beer and cigarettes are legal commodities that the people who sell them are licensed to sell them and they know if they sell them to a child we'll pull their license. Okay? Do you think you can do that down on the street with the drug dealer? He only wants to see one thing, show me the money. Once he sees that money, it doesn't matter if that child is 4 years old, they're getting the drugs because we've got recorded cases of that. We can stop that stuff if we end drug prohibition, just like when we ended alcohol prohibition. Okay? That's not to say that drugs are good. Nobody at leap thinks drugs are good. Nobody wants to see one more drug user. But we think we'll see less if we end drug prohibition.

>> Michael: But here's the argument on the other side... even if you don't want to send the message and I believe you and I believe there's a lot of people in good faith who make this argument who obviously don't want to encourage anybody to take drugs, however, don't you send a message by legalizing that it's okay?

>> Jack: Look at the message we're sending now. The message we're sending now is use and die. You know, aids and hepatitis are rampant in this country and fully 50% of all the new cases of aids and hepatitis can be traced directly back to sharing needles. So if we had legalized drugs where we could give people needles to use for this stuff, they wouldn't have to die. We have people dieing from overdoses of heroin everywhere, not like it was when we started this war in 1970, and they don't have to die. The reason they're dieing is they get what's called a hotshot. They don't know the potency of the drug they're shooting. If they did, they wouldn't have to die.

>> Michael: Jack, as you know we use our criminal code to send oftentimes moral and other messages, and if all of a sudden you legalize or decriminalize drugs, aren't you -- isn't the country sending a message that says, hey, it's okay?

>> Jack: Are you saying do I think that we'd become a nation of drugged out zombies? I don't think so. You know, we didn't even have illegal drugs in this country until 1914 with the Harrison antidrug act. Didn't have any illegal drug in the country. We got through the first 200 years pretty well, I think and that if we look around the world, there's other countries that are doing much better jobs than we are doing, and the reason is they care about the people. They're interested in giving people hope for the future. If you give people hope for the future, we maintain they'll leave the drugs behind.

>> Michael: What country does this best -- or countries does this best?

>> Jack: Switzerland is a good one to point out. Switzerland started a program seven years you aking where they treat heroin users by giving them government heroin, free heroin. They're allowed to come into a medical situation, a clinic, and shoot up up to three times a day using government heroin under medical supervision with social workers there, job specialisists there. These people see them three times a day. They become their friends very quickly. When you have somebody that's a friend, it's very easy to try to start convincing them that, well, you know, you're getting your life back together, wouldn't you like to go back to work? A tremendous amount of them are now full-time employed. But the pry crime rate dropped 60%. Aids and hepatitis dropped to the lowest per capita rate in all of Europe as a result of this program. But the biggest thing, the biggest thing, was these people had hope for the future and they discovered after three years in the program 22% of those people quit using free heroin. They gave it up because they had their lives back.

>> Michael: Still indicates, though, that 4 out of 5 were still using it.

>> Jack: But here f we get 5% that come through any of the rehab programs that we get, we think we're doing a good job. 22% quit using. Do we want to send a message or do we want to really change things? I want to change things. I want less drug users. I want less drug addicted people.

>> Michael: All right. Jack Cole, thank you very much for joining us.

>> Thank you very much.

>> Michael: Profiles of success is Valle Del Sol's annual fund-raiser to benefit essential community programs and services. Ten honorees were given Hispanic leadership awards this year. 12 news' Kent Dana tells us about one recipient, Ben Miranda, who is no stranger to getting involved. Miranda grew up as a migrant farm worker moving state to state, school to school. That experience drives him to do for others.

>> Part of that comes from -- motivation comes from obviously growing up as a farm worker. Number two is the fact I've benefitted from a lot of people that have encouraged me. Also I've done a lot of coaching when growing up. >> Reporter: One of the walls in Ben's law firm is covered with one of the hundreds of teams he has supported.

>> I believe sports builds character and I believe strongly in investing in young people.

>> His mom instilled that same belief when raising her 11 children.

>> She always felt education was extremely important and felt that her role was to support us.

>> Reporter: But Ben ice higher education was interrupted by the Vietnam War where he earned the bronze star. In 1988, 17 years later, I think.

>> Reporter: He was involved in the farm worker labor movement. One of his mentors we are Cesar Chavez.

>> I was there at his attorney and in the event we needed to bail him out. I've taken on some issues and I'm proud of the position I have taken.

>> Reporter: His biggest legal case was about a 13-year-old girl who died after delays in receiving medical treatment.

>> The changes that Zamora case has brought more than important than anything else, it's brought translation services now to the majority of hospitals.

>> Reporter: Speaking up for others has carried Ben into politics.

>> We are asking -- it's come naturally to me, because I frankly feel like I have very little to lose. The people that are really losing are the people that are unspoken for in the legislative process.

>> Reporter: And that has brought him even more recognition. But that's not what drives him.

>> I want to make sure that my kids are proud, that my kids are able to say, yeah, that's my father.

>> Michael: Domestic violence is, of course, a pervasive problem. Research into causes and effects made more difficult by the frequently private nature of that offense. That fact, however, didn't deter students at ASU who set out to review domestic violence prosecutions in our state. Joining me now to talk about that research and tell us about the results is David wells. David, good to see you.

>> David Wells: Thank you for having me.

>> Michael: Tell me what you did just to try to assemble the data, you and your students. What did you look at?

>> David: In this case we got the data from the Department of Public Safety. We didn't have to create our own survey or anything like that and we have a database that runs from January 1st 2000 through the end of 2002. So three calendar years of all the arrest for crimes that may have a domestic violence designation with them, meaning domestic violence might be involved with them.

>> Michael: That obviously is going to be sweeping a larger universe than cases actually where domestic violence is involved, assault, for example, you wouldn't know if it was domestic violence or it was a street assault?

>> David: Right. That's one of the most common crimes in the database. We had 260,000 charges that were brought against individuals, and about a third of them were designate as domestic violence and two-thirds were not. Assault was one of the most common ones that was in that database.

>> Michael: Because this was Department of Public Safety, this obviously is gathering data from throughout the state?

>> David: Yeah, these are police records from all counties in the whole state. So we've got everybody who has been arrested for three years.

>> Michael: All right, now, with a variety of different offenses involved that might or might not be domestic violence, how did you go through the process of getting down to what cases in fact were domestic violence?

>> David: Well in our database there's a designation that police officers can make in their police reports or they can be corrected at the time of the charge be disposed, means they are convicted the charges are dropped or whatever, they can make a notation it's a domestic violence notation separate from the charge. You can have assault with domestic violence designation or without domestic violence designation. So we have a database that includes the charges as whether as domestic violence was associated with it or not according to police records.

>> Michael: All right. But now one of the conclusions of the research was that cases were not consistently being designated as domestic violence, right?

>> David: Yeah, the broad picture is that domestic violence isn't being considered as seriously a crime as other crimes and one of the most telltale signs of these was one of the crimes which is just a small portion of all the crimes but it's called aggravated domestic violence and you would expect that that obviously involves domestic violence. Yet we found only 60% of those cases were actually officially designated as domestic violence. The other 40% had to be domestic violence and they weren't designated. What that indicates is that there's fairly inconsistent keeping of records and if that's true for that case, we have to wonder for how many other cases are slipping through the cracks.

>> Michael: How would you be able to determine that just from reviewing the records? I mean, you just gave this 60/40 split. How did you know that the other 40 were improperly classified?

>> David: In that case, that's a charge that's only brought against in domestic violence cases. So that 100100% need to to be. The other ones we don't know. We just have a sneaking suspicion. Like custodial interference we found only 20% of the cases had domestic violence, but when we talked weak spurts, they said that doesn't make sense. It seems like there's always a relationship involved with custodial interference and there hot to be a higher rate of domestic violence. So it indicates for a number of crimes they don't seem to be consistently coded as domestic violence when they ought to be.

>> Michael: One of the other conclusions was women victims are often arrested improperly. How so?

>> Daivd: What often happens is you've got the police are coming to a house, there's an altercation going on, somebody is getting hurt, people have the right, a victim has the right to protect herself. But what the police shouldn't be doing is arresting the victim and that's doubly hurting the victim. The victim are liking for the police to -- looking for the police to help them, a difficult situation, emotional ties to the perpetrator, trying to protect their family, keep their families together and in often many cases they're getting arrested by police. We found this especially in Pima County where Tucson is. We found that the arrest rate for women was twice the state average for domestic violence offenses yet the conviction rate was half the state average which clearly indicated police in Pima County in particular are arresteding the perpetrator the victim, double victimizing the victim, and often leaving her to deal with CPS with the children.

>> Michael: Is the scenario that the officers come in, they have a fight under way, they say, okay, both of you are under arrest and we'll sort this out at the station?

>> David: That's what we heard anecdotally was happening in Pima County and we have the evidence to back it up. Pima County was the county that really stuck out as being the sore thumb on that score especially.

>> Michael: One of the other conclusions, lower conviction rates, lighter sentences associated with cases designated as domestic violence, particularly at the felony level.

>> David: Yeah. This is also very concerning. We should have evidence based prosecution in Arizona which means you don't have to have the victim totally cooperating with the police. The victim has an emotional tie with the perpetrator, and a lot of people think that therefore it's harder to prosecute but if the police are doing their job they need to file a proper police report and the evidence would lead to conviction, regardless of what the victim is doing, and what we found is that they're less likely to be convicted and in the case, even if they are convicted of say felony assault, aggravated assault, we found they were almost half as likely to go to prison if there was a domestic violence charge as if there was a domestic violence charge and prison is when they're sentenced for a year or more confinement.

>> Michael: So, for example, felony assault on the street being treated more seriously than felony assault in a domestic situation?

>> David: Right. And that's actually much worse in the home because you actually know the perpetrator. It's not just a stranger knocking you out, it's somebody you know intimately who could kill you.

>> Michael: All right, ASU Professor David wells, thank you very much. Here's what's coming up tomorrow night on "Horizon."

>> David: Legislation for undocumented immigrants, worker and civil rights, just a few of the issues on the agenda for the immigrant workers freedom right at the state capitol Tuesday. Plus, what do Arizonans think about how Governor Napolitano handled the gas crisis? The KAET/ASU poll Tuesday at 7:00 on "Horizon."

>> Michael: Wednesday we will have an updated on the regional transportation plan scheduled to be approved by MAG this week. And Friday, of course, please join us for the Journalists Roundtable. Thanks very much for being here on a Monday evening. I'm Michael Grant. Have a great one. Good night.

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