Diane Goldstein, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition | Drug War Stories

When I got hired as a police officer, I was told by the police chief, "We're going to hire you despite your significant drug history." And I remember being a 21-year-old going, "I smoked pot."

Drug War Stories, Catharsis on the Mall 2015

Filmed by Kenny Reff, Evan Roberts, Bryce Montgomery
Edited by J Warner

http://leap.cc
http://catharsisonthemall.com
http://psymposia.com

Sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)
http://maps.org

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.

[00:01] And now I'm really pleased to present Diane Goldstein and the other half of my book is about Prohibition the war on drugs and she's perhaps my very favorite interview I've had of the entire thing she's a retired lieutenant and now an executive member of law enforcement against prohibition thank you honey Lex Lex was great and interviewing me and also doing the book boy it is hard looking out there and just seeing the lights so for those that don't know who leap is I'll just do a very very brief thing and then I'm going to talk about my personal epiphany which involved the death of my

[01:02] Brother and what brought me to LEAP so law enforcement against prohibition is a nonprofit organization that was set up specifically by five police officers one active duty Canadian police officer and four retired American police officers who spent a career fighting the drug war and recognized that it was the single worst policy behind slavery in America and they set out to change the Paradigm in law enforcement since 2002 we started with five police officers in 2015 we have over 5,000 current former and retired criminal justice professionals but not just in the United States but in Canada Brazil Costa Rica Germany the United Kingdom and we have branches that are spreading out across the world literally who are joining with us to

[02:02] Bring hope and message to the people that in some aspects that we've heard so I started in law enforcement 1983 I retired in 2004 at the height of the drug war that that was my law enforcement experience and one of the things that I saw in large measure because I was a child in the 1970s and in high school I smoked pot and in my high school every drug was available cocaine heroin LSD Quay ludes doors and fours and everybody smoked pot and I stopped smoking pot when I got out of high school kind of roughed around for a couple years and got hired as a police officer at age 21 and when I got hired as a police officer I was told by the police chief you know we're going to hire you despite your significant drug history and I remember being a 21 one-year-old going I smoked pot okay and

[03:04] And so even with that though is I got into law enforcement not to be a drug Warrior I got into law enforcement to really try to make a difference in my life and not just my life but it but in other people's lives in my community and I work gangs I work narcotics and the best most important four years of my career was working as a school resource officer with kids that as we as Zero Tolerance Pol policies increased during this horrible ramp up into the drug war is I saw that I no longer had discretion and that at one time when I would take kids home to their parents to deal with their issues I was now forced to arrest them and expel them out of the school and so I saw the devastation that we did on you the most important resource in our country which is our kids and so at the same time I had a brother who had a mental health history and was

[04:05] Dual diagnosed and started using drugs to self-medicate himself as a kid and so I had this dichotomy I had this parallel professional experience where I saw the failure of our policy and then I had my brother who I was very close to and I saw that he was criminalized for his drug use because of his mental health ill illness and he never received the adequate help that he did and so he had years of soety along with relapses and it led to his death and so law enforcement against prohibition truly believes that it's drug prohibition that causes the harms of drugs drug prohibition leads to death disease addiction and for us as law enforcement professionals we have lost the trust of the people that we have been sworn to serve and so we the system itself has failed you and it's

[05:06] Failed moms like de Goldsmith I currently work as a steering committee of a group of moms called moms United to end the war on drugs and it's moms it's your parents who have lost kids to the devastation of the drug war and either through death or incarceration and so I stand with deei and I stand with you to end the failure of this policy that has ruined our country and you know what Emanuel and Dan safe is right if we don't make our voices heard but if you don't make your voices heard and if your parents don't make their voices heard we're not going to do it and so leap needs your help we need you to support us in our mission to end the drug war and the you know it's really critical for me to really

[06:08] Say that part of what I do is turning grief into activism it's the loss of my brother and it's my mom lives with me when we lost my brother I saw the pain and the horrific trauma that she went through and in my last five years all the research that I've done my work in leap has led me to believe that it's going to be researchers like Dr doblin Who are going to help us blow up schedule one where all we have to do is show that there's medical efficacy for psychedelics peyote LSD we have Heron assisted treatment programs we just had a legislator out of Maryland literally is introducing an act in Maryland that would provide heroin to heroin addicts in order to save them and her own assisted treatment and so we're seeing an amazing time in

[07:08] History where we can undo the damage that we wrought the last 40 years so thank you very much I'll be at the leap Booth tomorrow if you guys are at the conference come by say hi get on our email list because we have at this point over 150,000 Community supporters not just over 5,000 cops Das and every other spectrum of the Criminal Justice System who says cops say legalize drugs ask us why