The Daily Bell: Judge Jim Gray on Drug Prohibition, Marijuana Legalization and LEAP

Anthony Wile sat down with the Libertarian Party’s Vice-Presidential Candidate of 2012, retired Judge Jim Gray, and has provided this interview. It begins with a fairly thorough biographical piece, which the reader can find here .

They begin by talking about the War on Drugs:

Daily Bell: Thanks for taking time to talk with us today. Let’s start with some personal questions and discussion of libertarian principles as related to the US justice system, then talk more specifically about your participation with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) and the War on Drugs. Can you give us some background on yourself, how you came to be the 2012 Libertarian candidate for US vice president and how you became a speaker for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition?

Jim Gray: I graduated from UCLA and then was in the Peace Corps in Costa Rica for two years in physical education, probably brushing my teeth in front of more elementary school classes than anyone in the Guinness Book of Records. I still view myself as being in the Peace Corps. I still try to make the system work and make things change so that they work better. I was in law school then at USC and was immediately being drafted. I received my 1-A classification, back in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War, and knew that the military was in my future. So I chose to be a military lawyer and actually went into Navy JAG for four years, did criminal defense work and legal assistance and things like that. Thereafter I was a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles and then in the private practice of law, civil business litigation basically, for about five years. Then at the end of 1983 I was appointed by Governor Deukmejian to the Municipal Court in Orange County, California, and thereafter elevated to the Superior Court. It became immediately clear to me that the biggest problem we were facing in the municipal court was alcohol-related offenses. We really weren’t doing much about it, kind of growling at them, taking their money and then putting them out the door. So I finally decided when I had an involuntary homicide civil case where there was just nothing that could be done – this woman’s son had been killed by a drunk driver and she was suing him, and he didn’t have any money. All I could think of was I got off the bench and just hugged her and said I’m sorry. And I thought to myself, somebody should do something about this, and decided who better than me, as a trial court judge. So within six months of my appointment to the municipal court we had up and running probably the first drug court in the United States of America but dealing with alcohol related offenses. It worked pretty well. We were able to keep about 65% of the alcoholics – although we called them high-risk problem drinkers – off alcohol for at least nine months, which is as long as I was able to keep statistics. So you start looking further and see that alcohol is a mind-altering, sometimes addicting substance just like these other drugs that happen to be illegal. And they’re medical issues but we’re putting people in jail for having medical problems, and also making the cost of these drugs astronomical, which has, of course, created many more people willing to meet that demand. You must understand that as long as the demand is there it will be met. That’s true locally and it’s true nationally and it’s certainly true internationally. So you can go into Colombia and try to beat them up for selling their largest cash crop and eventually, all you’re successful in doing is kicking them out of Colombia and pushing them into Brazil or into Ecuador. So the problem is the demand. I saw that we were leading the world in the incarceration of our people, both by sheer numbers as well as per capita, ruining people’s lives, and I decided the so-called remedy is worse than the disease – namely, of course, drugs can be dangerous but they’re made more dangerous because they’re illegal so you have no quality control whatsoever, no say over the quantity sold, the place of sale, the licensing, the age restrictions, all of that. You soon learn that the term “controlled substances” is the biggest oxymoron in our world today because as soon as you prohibit a substance you give up all of your controls, in effect, to the criminal element, to the bad guys. So who should do something about this more than a fairly conservative judge in a conservative county who’s never used any form of illicit substances whatsoever? At least by my coming out publicly and stating my conclusions with my background I make people listen to the message. Nobody could accuse me of being soft on crime or whatever. So that’s what I did. And in April of 1992 I did something very unusual for a sitting trial court judge. I held a press conference and stated that you couldn’t do it worse if you tried, we’re going to have to regulate and control these drugs, take the criminal element out of it and then address the drug problems. For example, there’s no question that Robert Downey Jr. is a gifted actor but he’s had a lifelong heroin problem. Putting him in jail for his heroin problem is pretty much the same thing as putting Betty Ford in jail for her alcohol problem. That’s a medical issue. Bring them closer to medical professional that can help them instead of relegating them to the automatic criminals and pushing them farther away. But if Betty Ford, Robert Downey Jr., you or I drive a motor vehicle while under the influence or impaired by you name it – alcohol, methamphetamines, heroin, marijuana, whatever – that’s a crime. What’s the difference? The answer to that is that now by your action you’re putting our safety at risk and that’s a legitimate criminal justice function. That was certainly one of the reasons I became a Libertarian but I was a lifelong Republican until the passage of the so-called PATRIOT Act. At that point it just did me in because I could not be a part of any group that could condone, much less assist, this direct, frontal attack on our civil liberties. So I gave up my involvement with the Republican Party and it literally took me 13 seconds to decide I really am a Libertarian. In 1999 I’d never heard of the sitting governor of New Mexico but I read the newspapers and thought, wow – who is this Governor Gary Johnson fellow who’s a Republican governor of New Mexico? He had launched what he called his own audit and concluded that the war on drugs is not working and has to be changed. So that’s the first time I knew who he was. Within a month he had organized a drug policy form in Albuquerque and because I was involved and pretty well out there I was invited. I met him, got to know him and when he ran for president in 2012 I started calling him the most qualified person that I know of to be president. Well, he became a Libertarian and I guess I said it a few too many times because he asked me to be his running mate and I agreed, on two conditions: The first was that we run to win, which he readily agreed he would do, and the second was, “You have to dress more presidential.” He kind of chuckled and said, “Well, I’ll try but you may not always like the results.” He’s really a down-home fellow. When he was in college he actually started his own handyman company, graduated from college and then turned that into the largest construction company in the state of New Mexico and really did quite well. So when he eventually was governor, he left the state with a billion dollar surplus, was financially responsible, socially accepting, worked really well with people and, again, I was proud to be a part of his campaign, our campaign, for president in 2012.

Daily Bell: So what came of a sitting judge holding a public press conference and stating the war on drugs is failing, that we need to do something else? Any repercussions?

Jim Gray: Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect. I expected death threats, actually. I expected that there’d be a recall election (judges in California are elected). I certainly expected someone to run against me in my next campaign. We have a six-year term and I wasn’t completely stupid about it; I’d just won a term about five months before that so I had another five and a half years to let the dust settle. But I also didn’t know if there’d be an ethical inquiry. In fact, I told my presiding judge about two weeks before I did this just so I wouldn’t blindside him. The next time I saw him was on Channel 11 News, anticipating that there’d be an ethical inquiry about me by the Judicial Performance Commission. Thankfully, the Judicial Performance Commission saw that as well and wrote me an unsolicited letter saying: “Dear Judge Gray, We know that you’ve seen speculation in the media that we’re running an ethical inquiry about you. This is just to let you know that we are not. Sincerely yours.” That was well received in my family. I didn’t know what to expect. Honestly, nothing happened. The district attorney didn’t like what I was doing and the sheriff didn’t like what I was doing, but they’re both gone and I’m still here. The bar association passed a resolution not agreeing with me but agreeing that I have the right to discuss this publicly. So I basically was able to get away with it with the overall view that some things are more important than job security and, fortunately for me and my family, I was able to emerge pretty well unscathed.

Read the rest of the interview here.