 Kevin Bjornsson, is that the way it's pronounced? Yeah, we'll speak on the origins of the common law Or the common law origins of law that is one of his pet projects Kevin has been an activist libertarian for a great many years as a matter of fact he was a member of the the organization that preceded ISIL that existed for about one year the Association of Racial Individualist which was created in 1968 and later became SIL which is basically our organization and He's been an active active and libertarian party and libertarian circles in the United States And this as I say is one of his pet projects the study of common law So Kevin are you ready to proceed? Yes Yes, I'll be talking on the natural origins of common law now the common law is not Exactly up to libertarian standards, but it's leading a heavily in that direction Now of course intellectual ideas rarely exist in a vacuum that I admit that Or acknowledge would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to a Frederick Basiat and iron round and the Austrian school of economics Now it's my intention here to give a brief overview of natural law Common law As well as Admiralty and other statutory laws now the I will be Going by my outline here, but but many most of my comments or a lot of my comments will be extemporaneous So feel free to interject your own questions or comments During the speech. I hope to also save a few minutes at the end where we can have an interchange of ideas Now I think that the law can be divided into two broad categories Natural law and positive law Okay, what is the definition of natural law? That branch of ethics happened to do with human justice Which provides an objective standard for evaluating human actions involving force against other humans Now this theory has been around for a long time. That's a great archer and philosopher Cicero speaking right After the golden age of Rome and when it was starting to degenerate into an empire stated that True law is right reason Conformable to nature universal unchangeable eternal whose prohibitions restrain us from evil This law cannot be contradicted by any other law and is not liable other to derogation or abrogation Neither the Senate nor the people can give us any dispensation for not obeying this universal law of justice It needs no other Expositor and interpreter than our own conscience is not one thing at Rome and another at Athens one thing today and another tomorrow But in all times in nations this universal law must forever reign Eternal and imperishable list this guy was born about a hundred years before Christ Then of course with the Caesars came in and corrupted realm to the point where it became an empire Now the other type of okay Let's pause there and that's let's assume that there is no natural law. Well, then what we are left with is a very Insubstantial grounds for challenging any the type of government The opposite theory is the consequentialist or utilitarian theory now the Austrian critique of this is that all values are subjective and therefore We have no way of Defining what the greatest good is but even if we accept that there are objective values or objective goods And let's say we define this as gross national product for example We have a tremendous problem of measurement scientific measurement improving that in each individual instance this particular government action resulted in Certain amount of growth for instance You can you can say that there is a good economy, but in a tracing cause in effect It becomes very very difficult. I think it's much better that if we follow the rules of common law as a body then of course The economy will prosper and people will be happy Now the opposite type of law is positive law now what I mean by that is not positive in the sense of good If I may make an analogy to logical positivism Now that's that's the school of thought that which says that there's no really objective standards of reality that all we can do is talk about language and AJ air was one of the biggest positors of that So in the similar vein legal positive isn't positivism Maintains that there is no objective standard that applies to government statutes or decisions now Typically when we think of government, we're thinking of nowadays in the 20th century thinking of statues because that's how most things are done and Ability lies one type of of statute Now what Ability lies is the law of the sea And the opposite type is the law of the land Now we now common law has been called the law of the land because and during the medieval ages that most of the government decisions had to do with ownership of land and prior to that First since the Hadrian the great the the Roman emperor State that Rome is where the Roman army is they had no real concept of land sovereignty as such Now also the common law had to do with the rights of people when they were we're on the land and So this was this was this why it's called Lot the law the land now the I'll get more into Admiralty law later on Common law is a is a hybrid it has natural origins in a sense that it grew out of custom It also is natural in the sense that There are rational principles that have been used to change it This gets us into equity law but basically it's It's expressed often through judicial decisions either Which came to be written there weren't always written down no and the old and in the past In the past started out as just verbal Actually, these things started out as customs So in that sense it can be said to be natural because it involved a spontaneous order of various societies now a hoganist origins of the common law defines it as English common law as A body of general rules prescribing social conduct enforced by the ordinary royal courts and Characterized by the development of its own principles and actual legal controversies But a procedure of trial by jury and the doctrine of the supremacy of law Now there's another good book in this area by Sir Henry Sumner main published originally in England in 1861 called ancient law now he considers more than in terms of the Roman law Which English borrowed considerably from now back then it was called the law of the nations Which is not to be confused international law, but the law of the nations back then the only nations that they were Familiar this is like in the you know early days of the Roman Republic they were several Roman nations or jurisdictions and What was in common with all of them was called the common law now the reason this came about is not through serum abstract philosophy of let's let's have something to common, but foreigners who are often wealthy and trading with the Italians would often want to use the law system for lawsuits of Regaining property or whatever and of course they did not want to use the legal systems of the foreigners where they came from Nor could they used whatever law was happened to be in that particular jurisdiction So they are extracted from all the Roman jurisdictions the common characteristics So I think in a sense this is scientific It's like an experiment if you put I would say that virtually every society every human society certain common things are illegal Private murder private theft Rape etc. No matter what society they all have these things in common not just Roman societies But I would say this is worldwide The big exception comes about if you're a government official then somehow it's okay to do that So now I do have an academic knowledge of these topics. I'm also speaking from experience I am a victim of the application of aberrant law as well as the criminal statutes regarding Marijuana and these all contradict natural law and common law I may explain how this came about now. I'm the owner of hydro tech since 1981 I Manufacture and retail lighting fixtures for indoor plant growth now This is quite common in Europe northern Europe where the climate is not good for outdoor growing people are using high-precious sodium lights and greenhouses The United States is a Lot of the people who use these lights are growing marijuana Or actually you can about sativa the English call it hemp Now I also saw hydroponic supplies Now what's happening here with me is that my inventory Now you talk about Hornberger saying it's a child by jury. Well not always Doesn't always happen that way October 26th at 10 a.m. In the morning. I was awoken by a federal marshal and The marshals and the DEA officials were there was about a dozen of them I held me prisoner while they hauled away all the inventory of my store This is prior to any hearing in which I knew anything about I was given no prior notice of this no chance to contest it The first thing I heard about it was when they were right there hauling everything away They had a big couple of big trucks all my inventory was wiped out what they could haul away The bank account was frozen My tracks were almost seized but they made a mistake in the paperwork and forgot to include them They were included in that I had two stars when in Oregon they were included there But the trucks had to be in Seattle at the time for some reason the house was not seized I think because The owner of the house that I was buying it from was little old lady Quite wealthy and they didn't want to upset her. She was politically I guess sacrosanct So I was able to sell the house before they could put any leans on it. I Guess because this is a part of a nationwide operation. They were obviously busy bear a government beer casp being incompetent as kind of like the Duncurt where the Hitler was overconfident didn't want to use his panzers and let the British escape and Instead of wiping them out. Well, they didn't quite finish the job I was able to restart my business by selling my house and I reinvested the money in inventory and built it back up again but of course I was deprived of due process now Almost three years later. I was charged criminally with conspiracy to grow marijuana and Money laundering and the money laundering was the most serious charge carrying 20 years And it was rose in the fact that some of my customers Were growing marijuana and they paid me money to buy the equipment. So me receiving the money from the customers in their interpretation is laundering money, so And the only proof that they had that I even knew was for marijuana I had him sign a statement saying it wasn't for marijuana, but but I did it smoke a joint with them So this was the only proof that I knew it was for marijuana There's a lot of people who were smoking who not are necessarily growing Now the what happened was they bought $50,000 worth of equipment and shipped it off to Arizona The person who received the equipment was freaked out and never actually grew anything with it But we can still conspired to do it And because of the large number of equipment they calculated 5,000 plants and they multiplied of 5,000 times this grid formula that comes out to be quite a number of years If I were found guilty Now sit up with about 18 counts and the problem with going to trial of that number one They'd seized on my inventory. So I had no money to pay for attorneys number two because of the large number of counts if I were found guilty of even one of them it Would have the same effect as if I'd been found guilty of all of them because the standard approved for Sentencing is less than standard approved for conviction So if the judge thinks there's probable cause to believe I was guilty even though the jury found me not guilty They could sentence me as if I had been found guilty So in effect this surprised me of the right to trial by jury or the trial becomes a sham They say well you can have your trial afterwards and of course After after after This thing is all over with After we seed your inventory, then you can have your trial, but if you try to get your inventory back Then you have to waive your fifth amendment rights because You have to testify at the civil trial and if you don't testify You lose automatically so Anything if they gain to the civil procedure they can use against me they could have used against me later criminally Now because it a mess up in their paperwork I had a very good case to get the inventory back because of the delay. So I filed a motion Called a latches motion which had to pay you several thousand dollars I've spent approximately a quarter million dollars to attorneys by the way over the years We filed a motion to return the inventory which had a very good chance of succeeding The next day I was charged criminally But a problem now what this does it has the effect of putting the civil case on hold until after the criminal trial So the judge said well, we'll deal with this after your trial Well, I need the money I needed the money before the trial pay for the attorneys and Because of the risk of being found guilty of even one one charge What'll happen a lot of times the juries will not realize this they will not realize the rules at sentencing They will find you guilty of one charge Figuring that they're going easy on you Then once the judge gets a whole of it He seduces you as if you've been found guilty of all the charges and you can't tell the jury this in trial and if I had Not I pled guilty to about half the counts in order to get a deal whereby I would be eligible for probation. I'm still awaiting sentencing if I hadn't taken the deal They would have kept me in Jail and tell my trial. I almost certainly would have been found guilty. You have at least one of the charges and In all likelihood it would have one up serving serving 18 years in prison Federal prison by the way, the drug war is so epidemic in the United States They're building one prison per month and it's barely keeping pace with the new influx of prisoners By the way in a sidebar in this IRS thing I haven't filed since 79 the reason that they were not going after me in the IRS thing is I had a low standard of living and incomplete Paperwork and I wasn't filing and you can only get away with that if yourself employed The employee if you're an employee you have to file because the employer will do it for you if you don't it's called a w2 So that's the best way if you don't want to file an income tax become self-employed and live like a like a month Or a popper any of it Okay, now a little background in this this war on drugs Originally most of the drugs were imported in the United States Even marijuana which is bulky or cannabis sativa I should say Then the president Nixon about 1970 started stepping up the border searches And as a consequence is a consequence of that many people grew the cannabis outdoors in the United States Well then with the aerial surveillance that a lot of people moved indoors So they bought artificial lights and grew indoors now a lot of people grow vegetables herbs and flowers indoors as well But somehow it's supposed to be my government says it's my responsibility to screen out those customers somehow through ESP or whatever I suppose to sell only to people that are growing herbs or legal herbs and vegetables However, the lights don't discriminate. There's no they will grow anything you put underneath them Now This the seizure was justified by the admiralty laws now What is the admiralty laws the law of the high seas and it was Got its biggest application in warfare What would happen since England be it for instance England be a war with Spain and they would want to Seize all the shipping that was going to Spain and not having enough Ships of war they would commission Privateers like Sir Francis Drake to seize the goods and the high seas So it was mainly used if a warfare it was also used for salvage of sunken ships and Because of this they had something called in ram proceedings. That means that you could that the Emitter ship or whatever it is could be considered in default Because the owner was either in a different country that wish they were at war and couldn't be brought to the proceedings Or the owner was not known because the ship was sunk Now it was an action against the property not against the owner of the property It goes back the historically to the duo dend of the medieval days where for instance if a cart acts were to accidentally Go down a hill and kill somebody The you would be forfeited to the king Now later on the British crown tried to expand that type of forfeiture and in in a 1673 decision the High Court of England limited this type of application now this limitation was upheld the United States until about 1871 in which in ram Ability forfeiture decisions were okayed if there was a war and this was in reference to the civil war Now you might think it's strange. They're applying Ability law on the land But what happened was originally canals of Ability law applied to canals Then when roads were built it was can roads were considered like canals and then just kind of gradually expanded to to the point where The law of the seas is now being used on the land it was expanded during the prohibition of alcohol, but You could not seize the entire estate only this still or that portion of this state Which was used in the manufacture of illegal marijuana or illegal Alcohol Nowadays if they find one Cannabis seed on a boat for example the entire boat can be seized and in fact one time they even seized DEA seized a US government research vessel And they had to return it because the government of course One branch did it one hand sitting from the other hand. There was no net gain to the government. So they let it go well What is this now common law there were other prohibitions in the common law the Magna Carta article 39 prohibited the Seizure of a person's means of making a living a farmer could not have his plow stolen And a merchant could not have his merchandise seized There was also something called a 1166 and a size of novel to seen if for instance Somebody seized your your land and you sued to return it you were your land was returned to you Pending the result of the trial Also How it was pointing out that there was a criminal seizure But only after conviction so there were ways the traditional limitations were eroded gradually in the United States I'm in particular now the ancient law There was no very little statues as we know them today There were fines for criminal will be now called criminal violations. There were simply fines and What would happen two parties would have a dispute and the government would be a referee So it isn't the case of the government versus a person. It's two people arguing and the government settling it There were in some cases Legislatures what we would call legislatures, but they didn't enact statutes with very rare exceptions The for instance the truth the ancient Scandinavians had something called the folk moot Which was the village would elect somebody to go to the Assembly of a hundred villages and so on out the lines at a point where they had They elected the king so the legislature was seen as a way of electing the king and the reason that it was done This way as opposed to direct election is that in those days that didn't have adequate communications They didn't know who this distant person was they had to elect of local people that they were familiar with So what is natural law? Well, Blackstone was a famous jurist pointed out that the earth and all things therein With the general property of mankind from the immediate gift of the creator But a law of nature and reason he who first began to use it acquired them and in them a kind of Transient property that lasted so long as he was using it when mankind increased in numbers It became necessary to entertain conceptions more of more permanent domain Now this is a flaw, but useful analogy or point that with the development of agriculture became necessary to Define property in a more permanent sense Now Sir Henry Sundermain Being of the 19th century was very into evolution and it was against the notion that anything good can come from from the past Everything is getting better and better every day in every way and he's saying that there was no state of nature Well, I acknowledge the state of nature as painted by Rizzo and Locke and Blackstone was was simplified But the point is now that there was necessarily a garden of Eden or an ideal state to which we were trying to return but that If you go back far enough there what we find there was no government. Well, but people still had rights So it's a way of proving that rights exist independently and and preceded government and the purpose of government originally was to protect those rights now if we Even if we accept the evolutionary hypothesis and say that it was as interpreted by Maine and Say that but there was no state of nature that there was a maybe even the war of all against all as Hobbes stated I still think we have a second ground for for brooding for believing in natural law That there's something called a law of equity and this comes from the Greeks And we'll talk more about that later now the next step after the ancient the state of nature begins to the Tribal chiefs and this evolved into or clan chiefs and this evolved into a chief of the whole Tribe which began to be known as kings. This was the so-called heroic age and what would happen was the Greeks I had a something called the Themis and this later evolved into the concept of the goddess of justice and There was something called themis these and there was judgments that just existed out there And then the person making the judgments just pulled them in the spiritual dimension and rendered these judgments to people coming before him And it was considered a divine inspiration. There was no statues as such the only the only statutes were In Rome for instance in the ancient Rome the only statues were if they were like an individual committed a crime against the state Oh, by the way, the state of nature is not a state in the sense of government. It's just a condition of nature I might say okay now the the the Homer says that the each judgments came first and then Then customs developed out of them However, these judgments did not exist in a vacuum that there was a vast oral tradition The Bible for instance originally it came from oral tradition a lot of the homework homers epics were originally oral Involving Right-brain activity, you know people would chant songs and poems around the campfire It was passed on stories and legends were passed on like this So I think it's we have to say that the custom preceded the judgments and the judgments were simply confirming the customs Even though there was some innovation The next step is that a lot of times the king might be weak or senile or something and What you had is an aristocracy of knowledge that kind of took the place of the king this is at a stage when the laws were still unwritten and Most people didn't know what all the laws were because they couldn't travel and So the the people who could do that Oftentimes became judges a later case law was was written down Eventually it was codified for instance the original Constitution of Rome was called the law of 12 tables And it was actual 12 brass plates upon which the rights of people were written down These do not exist anymore is speculated that you know one of the sacking's of Rome They were stolen or perhaps the one of the first emperors of Rome destroyed it But it was the Constitution of Rome and was was based on a custom or a spontaneous order now Rome degenerated into an empire and Then it it fell and then we had the feudalism which is a transition to the modern era the modern era being of course classical liberalism The declaration of independence which of these rights are from nature and nature's God the Bill of Rights which were to Firm the rights of the individuals Which was how the federalist got the Constitution approved by promising a bill of rights now if This common law is based on customer and how does progress occur? Well, there's the law of equity which was based on right reason symmetry simplicity Equality this is where we get the idea of the French and Americans of all manner created equal Equal in the sense of they had equal rights because we're all humans They also had the case of the Just simply the conscience of the judge or in England the Kings Court the Kings conscience conscience whatever in Rome this was came the this theory of equity came from the Greeks and It was applied To these customary laws in order to simplify them now The John Locke and later a theorist borrowed from these ideas considerably the 20th century What we have is a reversion back to the Empire America is now an empire If things are done by executive order bureaucratic regulations for instance the IRS can Simply passive can simply put out a regulation There's a specific statute which says that every IRS regulation has the force of a statute So basically we were back to the government by fiat You know be bureaucrats or executives or whatever and this is being used more and more in the Warren drugs And is being used to bludgeon the individual rights So you have any questions or comments you may certainly Start in on Yes, sir. Oh Yeah, but the Homestead Act was really derived from the Blackstone's conception of Mixing your person's labor with Unowned land This goes back to the state of nature theories where you're in a state of nature that land is not claimed You make your labor with it and you acquire Rights to it. Oh, yeah, that's that's definitely Still going on or we should be anyway. Yeah Yeah, that's a good point. It's very good point I'm not as familiar with the original prescription against a heroin and cocaine and around 1910 or 11 but in the case of marijuana the first anti cannabis act was passed in 1937 and it was a tax act so that It was upheld as being constitutional because it was now prohibiting the cannabis. It was simply so-called simply taxing it well the subsequent to that There has been no serious Challenged to the cannabis laws that have been able to make their way in the court system There's an unwritten rule in the federal courts that as the government always wins and the people who try to challenge it had been squashed and There's it is unconstitutional. There's no question about it. I think that The people who are enforcing these laws the drug enforcement agents the Supreme Court justices and the executives Are in violation of the Constitution they're in violation of natural law and should be held accountable as an individuals And of course with that were to happen there wouldn't be enough lampposts in Washington DC to take care of all of them Go ahead. I think as citizens certainly not as libertarians But as citizens people get confused about drug enforcement thinking it affects someone else and it doesn't it affects all of us The example is my brother-in-law who owned a very large boat that he kept at Puget Sound His neighbor's boat was seized after a raid and one Marijuana cigarette was found in the pocket of a crewman's jacket. So, you know an innocent owner lost his boat My brother-in-law realized that that kind of liability was not worth the investment that he had in the boat And he sold the boat. I wonder how many other potential boat owners And I know it certainly affected aircraft small aircraft have made the decision not to purchase equipment like that because they have no Recourse if exactly so it does affect the people who make boats the people who make airplanes It's spreading out all over the country and its effects are really insidious Yeah, and they're attending to the government so incompetent. They're trying to force the business owners the property owners Into a position of doing their dirty work for them. I mean the business man already is collecting Taxes and isn't paid for it. He has to do it. It's called withholding now We're also expected to be social workers and now we have to Be be responsible for the end use of the product that we're selling and the use of the property that we may own In fact, somebody just been the paper on the way out flying out here that this fellow is from Saudi Arabia And was married to an American woman had had kids and everything and was in America to buy a truck And he had to drive in Houston with cash because he wanted a special customized truck And he had it when we wanted to bring cash because he wasn't sure they would take out of state check So he brings $12,000 was pulled over for speeding and then his money was seized saying it was for drug money Okay Well, I want to say seize it then you have the burden of proof Shifts then you have to prove to your innocent. Well, how do you prove a negative? How do you prove it wasn't for drugs and see all they have to do to say that there was probable cause to seize it or Even if there wasn't probable cause that in reality, but if they had reason to believe there was probable cause They can seize it and then the burden of proof then shifts There's been numerous examples of people Person Mexican-American to having bringing cash to buy nursery plants for his business and then also small nursery growers use cash And his money was seized and he's he's having trouble now and you wind up spending more an attorney fees than what it's worth I've spent a lot of money a lot of money on attorneys and It's really There's no way you can come on ahead of that and you don't get those that money back usually. Yeah, go ahead Yes as an extension of this same use of illegitimate authority recently participated in a massive rally in Santa Fe, New Mexico by the holistic and alternative medicine people You may be familiar with the case of this Washington physician Oh, yeah, I know whose clinic was raided He just happened to be a libertarian that may or may not have had something to do with it But at gunpoint they knocked on they broke down his doors and he they terrorized his 21-person staff and his patients and confiscated all of his vitamins and herbs and Medicine and his records and his computers Right to this day not none of that has been returned and he has not been really charged with anything to my knowledge, right? Right that the history of that case is that That L tryptophan is a natural product It's in found in milk and it has therapeutic or nutritional uses It also has a mild stimulating effect or a euphoric effect if you take it straight now If it's refined it can also be used as a mind-altering substance if you know how to refine it Which is very few people do But the I there was one bash in Japan that was contaminated and they made the the DEA made the whole thing illegal L tryptophan and they seized his Immutary of L tryptophan a couple years ago even though it had been certified by the Mayo Clinic is being free of this contaminant and For instance, he does a lot of injectable Vitamins while the vitamin B as made in the United States has artificial preservatives in it So it's not really safe to inject it So he had to buy some from West Germany and they said he was smuggling the drug the vitamin B And because it was not did not have an English label on it well You know if the US government can't afford to hire some German speaking people they shouldn't be going around Seizing their inventory Then what happens they seize everything and then you're deprived of your means of making a living or you're crippled And that means you have less money to pay attorneys. You're less able to fight it and most people just cave in Yeah, go ahead, Mary. Just a quick comment As far as you reminded me that people aren't charged with this the Pittsburgh press did a study and found that 80% of the people Who had seizures were never charged with a crime Yeah, it's a way of getting money it goes back to the old piracy era where you just take somebody's Property now it should be remembered that cannabis a TVa was routinely prescribed in the 19th century and the early 20th century for for menstrual cramps for headaches Etc. Etc. And you can imagine what would happen to the sales of aspirin and other pharmaceutical products Now the other thing is it has industrial uses for instance the original Levi's were made with with hemp Which is the fiber of the plant and of course hemp is much Stronger than cotton and the original Levi's really show that the two donkeys pulling it apart what you did that with cotton it would just rip and It's just amazing how the this Just as hemp was about to become more commercially viable with a new technique new processing machinery and About the same time that DuPont came out with artificial rayon and synthetic fibers. It's just amazing How you have the prohibition of alcohol ends we have a bunch of unemployed bureaucrats hemp was starting to come into its own at the same time that these these artificial fibers were coming about and Hurst the newspaper chain had vast timber holdings which would be devalued Considerably if hemp became more commercially viable then all of a sudden we had this this reefer madness scare Which would result in the 1937 passing of the tax act Well, and then we had a brief respite in World War two where it was the government Department of Agriculture encouraged its growth for cordage and ropes and then after the 50s that kind of died everybody kind of forgot about except for a few jazz musicians and then when middle-class kids started smoking marijuana in the 60s there was just a big hysteria and You know many of these anti-drug commercials that you see on billboards and television in the United States are plundered by the alcohol and tobacco companies and You can just imagine now their their motive. Yeah Well, I think maybe our only hope is the absurdity to which these drug enforcement officers take this in southeastern Idaho There was a local local drug officer whose department salary and expenses depended upon the receipts of seizure Properties that had been seized and he was running out of money. So he had 27 indictments before County judge to refurnish his his department budget and the judge realized that that was the reason none of these indictments had any clear justification and he not only refused to hear the indictments, but You know used what influence he had to make sure that this in drug enforcement officer was fired So I mean they they become so blatant about their activity that the seizure of property is really for their own personal benefit Yeah, the judges are beginning to most of our you know appointed not elected But still even the judges are becoming upset with this But there's not much they can do about it because they want to get promoted and the source of the executive branch does the promotions And those are the exceptions when they start Limiting it the rule is that they just do more and more and it's just getting our it's getting quite crazy Yeah, Mary just another quick comment. It's not only in the drug area There was a lady who had was Was thought to have stolen five hundred dollars of UPS packages and they seized her home and her cars And she's now started an organization in the United States called fear to try to you know Get this stuff stopped so it's not even in drug enforcement anymore. It's basically anything Yeah, and the reason the police are now that interested in going after I think all the drugs should be legal because the problems of hard Drugs are mostly associated with the illegality the price being higher necessitating theft and disputes over over drug deals etc, but Even so I mean I think it's kind of interesting to note that the police are not as likely to go after a crack Theater because it usually does not own a house and Has no real property they like to go after cannabis growers because the people are growing in their in their houses Typically that they may own those houses can be can be seized you can be thrown out of your your you can be homeless Become homeless because you want to grow your own pot Yeah another comment on that I own some property and the poor side of town But I had gotten back on land contract and we were trying to clean it up We had drug dealers making deals in the yard and of course they were also destroying the property So we called the police and told them about this hoping they at least remove them They said no we can't do that because any one of your tenants could claim they invited them there And we couldn't do anything so we're not going to bother so what you're saying about how they go after people with money It's definitely true Yeah, there's something called weed and seed program, which is a pilot program in Seattle where they're trying to federalize the street level dealing of crap of these cracks and What happens is they have something called drug free zones Where it's within a certain number of distant feet of a school or a playground that the clients and penalties are all doubled Well in the central city because of the density of the buildings most of the areas in a central city are in drug free zones So what happens is when you when you federalize these crimes you have an enormous number of poor typically black street dealers We did not have the money to pay for attorneys and they're just rounded up in these massive raids and It's going to start Flames of prisons at a much faster rate and what happens is When the prisons are at capacity these are very expensive it costs about $30,000 a year to maintain somebody in their prison They're talking about military camps. So military camps abandoned military bases are not secure facilities And they start these are jacking the penalties up for instance. I know a person who Let a friend of his use his phone and the guy used the phone to make a drug deal for cocaine They both had to be Colombians. He got 21 years for conspiracy Someone in other instance where somebody driving a car and somebody's doing a drug deal on the backseat and a different language That he can't even understand But because he was facilitating said to be facilitating the deal because he was driving around in the car That he he got charged If you just see some activity or 10th of direct sales going and you're supposed to report him What's going to happen is the prisons are going to get full up and more and more people are going to escape from them Right now in the city of Portland or the federal district of Portland the people because they have is like a zero-tallage policy there because Oregon was considered a Risky state they were going liberal and pot in the early 70s The feds were afraid that that that it would drift in the liberal directions. They start became a targeted state They put any attorney US attorneys there who had zero tolerance So more people were charged with smaller amounts federally the federal penalties are much stiffer and the resources the federal government has Are just enormous. They have unlimited staff unlimited a budget is going to this that is running over well, what happens is That typically now of the people who are charged with the federal drug crime Only half of them are released prior to trial and of those who are released only half show up for further proceedings so this is really overloading the US Marshals office and typically they're less able now to go after bank robbers and Kidnappers because most of the federal offenses now he had about 80% of them are drug related usually a stale of drugs and So this is gonna over it's already overloading the system if the lives are not changed the US government will fall it will collapse and and Yeah, I don't know what's going to take the place of it But I think that they will have to change the laws and of course By experience we know that these things don't work and so this goes back to the natural law theory. Yeah, go ahead Yeah, I wanted to share Something I did for a few years that I would recommend others if you have the stomach for it I got a job several years ago for the Salt Lake City Police Department as a dispatcher and In that position, I took incoming calls from people who wanted to report Drug dealers prostitutes various other victimless crimes and I would take the information and throw it away That's just that's just inefficient bureaucracy. What can I say? Well, yeah, there's Salt Lake City's a city of a half a million and there is real crime there And so I would always just throw it away and I did this for over four years without getting caught They finally got me on a a drunk driver report some girl called from a convenience store saying there's a man in here He's really drunk. He's gonna get in his car and leave and I thought well You know I figured if he's so drunk he gets in a wreck will catch him and if he if he's you know It makes it home. Okay, then it's a victimless crime. So I let I just let that one slide too and they They the police a policeman finally came to the convenience store an hour later to buy some coffee and She says well took you long enough to get here I mean the man just left and all this kind of stuff and he said what are you talking about? And so they checked into it and they went back and listened to the tapes the phone conversation I said well gee I must have hit the wrong button on the computer and erased it So I didn't get in any trouble really. They just said well watch it, you know and yeah Of course once the roads are privatized the private owners would be able to establish their own regulations to a contractual relationship with the users of the road and I Certainly the curse there would be different roads and to high-risk roads and low-risk roads And I think that certainly is a serious thing to endanger life and property Under the influence of any substances. I wanted to ask Elsa. Do you have any comments about mandatory sentencing? Yeah, that's the air thing the federal judge is very upset about this Because they have very little downward discretion. They have upward discretion They can increase the sentence beyond the guidelines But it's very difficult for them to go below the guidelines and the guidelines are very very complicated formula involving the number of plants when not the weight of the product you're selling Prior convictions, there's a whole range of variables. It goes into a grid and it changes virtually every year usually gets worse Although most of these really bad laws were passed in the 80s and we're kind of reached a plateau now They're simply trying to enforce the existing laws, which are already really bad What happens is that if you have a bunch of small plants as they are rooted cuttings You may have a hundred of them Well each plant is considered to be two pounds no matter what size it is and that translates into an X number of months In my case with the 18 counts that I was hit up with I could have Served a maximum of 234 years Now I my plea bargain. I've got it down to a maximum of 113 years So I think that's a big improvement, of course In my particular case the plea bargain that I had was prior which allowed for probation But in most cases that has not happened It's a mandatory minimum and they have to do the time and There's just knowledge of this is just now hitting the streets and people are becoming more and more aware of it and they're simply Going on the land. There's simply Like me for instance, it's very unusual for a convicted felon like myself to be allowed out of the United States I had to get a federal judge to sign a minute order and to a lot of I had to pull a lot of strings believe me and I'm involved Massaging the prosecutor. I happen to have caught him in a number of procedural violations so it was kind of a Kind of twisted his arm a little bit and my Through a lot of attorney money. I was able to I Was able to get permission to leave the country, but I'm the exception most most people I Get shafted if they're a poor black or whatever, but I'm being shattered bad enough. I mean, you know, okay, enjoy