Press enter after choosing selection

The Sun Interview With Attorneys Joseph Oteri And Martin Weinberg

The Sun Interview With Attorneys Joseph Oteri And Martin Weinberg image The Sun Interview With Attorneys Joseph Oteri And Martin Weinberg image
Parent Issue
Day
3
Month
September
Year
1976
OCR Text

Louise "Mary Hartman " Lasser 's arrest on cocaine possession charges last June helped alert middle America to the growing use of the white powder extracted from American coca leaves.
To Louise and at least several hundred thousand other Americans, cocaine is no big deal. Used in moderation, it is a non-addictive stimulant. The drug is increasingly to be found among musicians, artists, actors, tankers, business people, reporters and other social types.
At one time cocaine use was quite common. In fact, around the early 1900 's, coke was an ingredient in Coca-Cola. Then, prompted by misinformation promoted by federal narcotics police, laws were passed setting severe penalties for possession and distribution of the drug while incorrectly - and quite irrationally -placing it in the same category as heroin and addictive narcotics. Nowadays cocaine users and importers face decades in jail if caught by the relentless Drug Enforcement that is, if they can afford the superhigh black market price of the drug in the first place.
The rapid rise of cocaine use in the last decade has brought with it a growing sentiment that the laws forbidding its use must be confronted and changed. Support is also emerging from those responsible elements committed to removing all drug laws from the criminal code and treating drug users as medical patients.
Now come two Attorneys based in Boston, Joseph Oteri and Martin Weinberg, who have decided to begin the process of changing the coke laws by confronting their constitutionality head-on. Joe Oteri was the first lawyer in the U.S. to challenge the government's right to legislate against private marijuana use back in 1967. With the reefer battle now sustaining its own momentum towards decriminalization in most states, Oteri and his partner Weinberg are getting ready to put the coke laws on trial.
Since this interview was conducted, the two attorneys have found their test case in a man accused of simple coke possession. The defense will call experts on cocaine from around the nation in an attempt to convince a Massachusetts judge to throw out the coke laws on the grounds of invasion of privacy and the improper classification of a drug as a narcotic. The trial is expected to begin this October.
The SUN interview was conducted in Detroit last month by John Sinclair, Ken Kelley, Barbara Weinberg and David Fenton.

SUN: Why are you going to challenge the cocaine laws?
WEINBERG: Quite frankly, because we think it's about time we had a full review of what the hell cocaine is all about. We did this with marijuana 10 years ago, and we just feel it's time to go after the cocaine laws in the same way.
OTERI: Marty and I have come to the conclusion that the problems of cocaine are a myth which was created by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and perpetuated by a government that singles out aberrant forms of behavior for punishment. Cocaine has become one of the things that they are actually harassing people over, and we think it's time to at least educate the public to what the drug really is so they can make an intelligent decision on whether or not to use it.
WEINBERG: The other thing, really, is that it's time to get the same ball rolling that started back in the late sixties over marijuana. At this point the cocaine laws are being used as a political instrument of terror.
OTERI : Judges are imposing huge sentences for cocaine which are totally inconsistent with the severity of the drug-if you should believe it illegal and it's time to begin that historical process and challenge the law. We may not win at this particular point, but if we don't win we're sure going to educate lots of people just like in the marijuana case. You've got to start the Process of making people believe the truth about cocaine, and the end of that process is going to be decriminalization. It may not be next year, it may be five or ten years from now, but that's the way you've got to start.
That's exactly what happened with the marijuana thing- we went from the time ten or so years ago when people would get caught with a joint and they'd get sent to prison for six months, to a time now where in Massachusetts you can get caught with a truckload and it's only a misdemeanor.
SUN: Do you plan to challenge the Massachusetts law, or are you going after the federal statute?
OTERI:
Well, the big problem is that there's no way we can challenge all the laws unless we can arrange to challenge the federal statute. At this point we're still trying to figure out the best way to structure the thing- we may challenge the federal statute, which would probably make a lot more sense, but we'd have to have a client with a federal situation, and we'd have to find the right situation to construct the challenge in. Basically, the laws throughout the country afford almost the same treatment to cocaine dealers or users or possessors as is given to heroin traffickers.
WEINBERG: Federally they're both controlled substances, heroin and cocaine; cocaine is Schedule Two, heroin is Schedule One, but they're both punishable by a maximum of fifteen years imprisonment. When you add fifteen years for conspiracy and fifteen years for distribution, you have a thirty-year maximum for one real act.
SUN: Do they distinguish between amounts, or does possession of any amount of cocaine violate the statute?
WEINBERG:
No, it's any amount. It's the "intent to distribute" that's the higher form of the crime. It's a misdemeanor for straight possession of cocaine, but an "intent to distribute" could be charged if you had two grams and intended to distribute one of them to a friend. That could be seen as the higher form of the crime.
OTERI: The other thing is that they rarely prosecute anybody for straight possession -they almost always charge you with intent to distribute. Oh, they'll charge you with distribution it you're unfortunate enough to share with somebody who happened to be a cop ....
SUN: Basically, then, you didn't decide to do this just because a client came to you - you're setting out to challenge the law and then find the client.
OTERI:
That's right. That's basically what we did with the marijuana thing. We've decided that the law is wrong, we've done the study and I think that allows us to speak with a certain degree of expertise. We're convinced intellectually and morally that cocaine use shouldn't be treated as criminal conduct. Now we'll just wait until we get the right case, the right client, and we'll be prepared to go.

WEINBERG: Do you realize that if they did away with all victimless crimes, we could literally free half the law enforcement and court facilities in this country to concentrate on real crime?

SUN: What do you think the toughest thing in this case will be? To convince the jury and judge to go your way?
OTERI:
Well, the first thing is that the courts have not yet established the philosophical principle that people can destroy themselves, if they so choose, after being educated by the IBM government that what they're taking may be dangerous. You know, it' you have the legal implementation of that philosophy then you've got no trouble, because you can admit that cocaine or heroin or anything else is dangerous and it still ought to be legalized because people ought to be able to do with themselves what they want to do.
So you've got to switch to the second principle, which is that cocaine is not dangerous and should not be "controlled substance." At this point the courts always pass the buck on to Congress and say, well, Congress made the law, and you've got to presume that they had all the expertise available to them. They sifted the information, they intelligently judged it and then determined that it was illegal.
That's the major stumbling block, to get a judge to take some of that massive amount of judicial power to himself and assert it in the area of overcoming drug legislation. And you know the surprising thing about that is, when you go into the history of the legislative hearings and how they went about getting the knowledge to make illegal the use of various substances, you find that these guys acted with absolutely no knowledge other than some apocryphal stories told to them by Harry Anslinger. They don't know their ass from second base when they pass these laws. But somebody tells them it's bad, and that s what happens.
It got so bad with cocaine that cocaine has actually been designated as a narcotic. Now a narcotic is a drug which induces sleep, and cocaine in fact is an amphetamine-type drug-it produces a high in a person rather than sleep-so by definition it's not what it's classified as being.
SUN: So you're going to try to change the classification at the same time?
OTERI: Absolutely.
WEINBERG: It goes beyond just the change in classification we intend to take psychiatrists, physiologists, historians, sociologists, pharmacologists, and theologians and attack the laws, not just because it should be Class Three instead of Class Two, or it should be non-narcotic instead of narcotic. We feel it just should be decriminalized, and we feel that now is the time to start. Without being terribly optimist, we do feel that we are going to ultimately prevail.
OTERI: People talk about decriminalization, and I know that's the next step, but my theory from the beginning is that drugs ought to be legal, which is a for-goodness difference. I think they ought to be legal and sold just like alcohol. Because they're drugs of choice, just like alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine. And if I want to smoke grass or snort coke, I should be allowed to go to a place, pay a reasonable price, get what I'm supposedly paying for, not get ripped off, and have the state take a substantial portion of the price in the form of taxes to pay for schools, education, and the rest of it. If we had a computer here, I could sit down and show you how, basically by legalizing grass and selling grass and taxing it, you could pay the entire school budget for the United States of America.
WEINBERG: You could bring the best Colombian Gold into the United States legally for about $15 a pound, and it sells for anywhere up to $400 on the street now. Even if you sold it for $215 a pound you're making a $200-per-year profit for the tax-payers of this country. Figure that there's 50 tons of grass per day smoked in the United States, which is probably about one-fifth of what is actually smoked. But even using those figures, you extrapolate them over a year and the amount of tax money that could be realized is simply incredible. You're only allowing people to do what they're already doing anyway.
Do you realize that if they did away with all the laws against victimless crimes, we could literally free half the law enforcement and court facilities in this country to concentrate on real crime? We might solve some murders and some bank robberies and some rapes, instead of wasting a lot of goddamn time grabbing hookers, grabbing the corner bookies, and grabbing drug users.
SUN: Until that happens, we'll all have to deal with the present laws and the various means they have of enforcing them. One of the most recent strategies of the federal government seems to be subpoenaing attorneys to appear before grand juries investigating drug traffic. Haven't you had some experience with this phenomenon?
WEINBERG:
I'll let my lawyer answer that one.
OTERI: We've been the recipients of several grand jury subpoenas in the last six months. What they're asking for, primarily, are our fee records- they want to know who pays our fees, particularly in those cases where we represent a number of defendants at once. We may represent eight of ten defendants in a conspiracy case; they're interested in our telling them which of the ten have paid our fees, and how much each has paid.
The other thing they were interested in, in the case of our Jacksonville defendants, is where our fugitive clients are.
The consequences of this course of action by the government are twofold: one, if lawyers are made to reveal the fees they are paid and by whom, there's going to be a very essential conflict between the client's Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel and the grand jury's so-called right to know. The second thing is that when we're subpoenaed in the context of the case and if the Court doesn't quash the subpoena, then we become a witness- both in the grand jury and at the trial-against our clients.
The Department of Justice can thus select which lawyers are going to represent your clients by continuing to subpoena lawyers until they get to a lawyer they don't particularly want to subpoena, because they don't mind that particular lawyer handling the case.
The frightening danger is that, historically, every society that has become more and more repressive has started out by putting the squeeze on the defense lawyers, the people who protect those who are least popular, and that is beginning to happen with this latest government strategy. Fortunately at this point we've been lucky enough to have come before a series of courageous District Court judges who have recognized the danger in the principle that the Department of Justice is suggesting, and have quashed our subpoenas: once in a tax case, and once when they wanted to know the location of a fugitive client of mine. But who knows what's going to happen when they continue to subpoena lawyers- ultimately you're going to have an appellate court decision on this very sticky question, and it could be one with devastating consequences for the integrity of the defense bar.

OTERI: You've got to start the process of making people believe the truth about cocaine, and the end of that process is going to be decriminalization.