Barely Legal (2021) Movie Script

1
[reporter] ...waste any time, right out of the gate
with his speech tonight, really patting himself on the back.
[reporter 2] Absolutely. And he celebrated by saying
that the economy is the best it's ever been.
Jobs are booming. Incomes are soaring.
Poverty is plummeting.
Crime is falling.
Confidence is surging.
And our country
is thriving and highly respected again.
[applause & cheering]
[Casey] What can be said about 2020?
I mean, for lack of a better term,
let's use the word "shit show" or maybe "clusterfuck."
You know what? The kids have heard it on YouTube.
Let's just say there's fuckery all around.
Thank you so much. Thank you so much.
[Casey] 2020 did have promise
but first we lose Kobe, then we had an impeachment.
But I mean, who really cared at that point
because unemployment was at a record low.
Everybody was working!
People were flocking to retail faster than shady businessmen
were headed to Epstein's island.
But that's besides the point.
2020 was the year that was going to change it all.
Somebody created this kick-ass logo for the Olympics
and for lack of a better term, this COVID thing
comes and kicks the world in the balls.
[man] Is it real? Is it fake? Nobody seems to know.
[Casey] This is the age of misinformation.
The bottom line is this:
We're in a national emergency.
We need to act like we're in a national emergency.
[Casey] What we do know
is people are losing jobs right and left.
So what's the government solution?
They just want to start
shelling money out to everybody?
And how is this really going to fix anything?
1,200 bucks for a couple of months?
It's not even going to get you a half month's rent.
I mean, this really seems like the end, doesn't it?
Riots, protests, people losing their businesses.
I don't believe Democrats or Republicans
are going hungry and losing jobs.
I believe Americans are going hungry
and losing their jobs.
[Casey] Can this seriously get any worse?
So when this is all over, what are we going to do?
["In the Hall of the Mountain King" by Evard Grieg]
How can we even begin to dig out of this hole?
Could this be worse than the Great Depression?
Maybe it would be better if an asteroid
just came out of the sky and gave us
a reboot like the dinosaurs.
But what if the aliens land?
Maybe they would help us.
Actually, the government told us there were aliens.
Nobody seemed to care
because all we really want is all this to be fixed.
This is a mess of gargantuan proportions.
The only thing that could possibly save us
is a profitable, safe recession and pandemic proof commodity
to create some kind of market and get us out of here.
We have the tools to fix it.
We have the tools to get through this.
[Casey] But what on earth could do that?
[grunge rock instrumental]





[staticky jazz music]
[narrator] This is the real action.
The pot party,
the trippers, the grasshoppers, the hip ones
all gathered in secrecy and flying high as a kite.
[whimsical classical instrumental]
[Casey] I want to talk about a plant
that's been around for thousands of years
that you dry and roll up and smoke.
No, not marijuana. I want to talk about tobacco.
If we were to talk about tobacco,
we would say it's legal.
But is it really something we need like medicine?
Probably not.
We would agree that it's harmful,
though some people do love it.
And we've all enjoyed the occasional smoke,
even though it is the leading cause of death
in the United States.
Kind of like alcohol which is also legal.
And something else that many of us love.
And we all agree it can be enjoyed in moderation,
which also just happens to be the number two leading cause
of preventable death in the United States.
What about prescription drugs?
These are legal when prescribed
but along with those comes a litany of problems
like side effects and the opioid epidemic.
But let's be real. There are definitely
many prescription drugs people need
because it's medicine.
And it's really the people that abuse prescription drugs
and do them for fun which becomes the real problem,
which leads us to street drugs,
things like cocaine, methamphetamine, LSD.
These are things that are straight up illegal.
Which brings us to marijuana,
which in certain places, it would be a street drug.
But it's also a prescription drug
but it's also a smokable
but it's not as bad as alcohol or tobacco.
It's kind of confusing.
I guess it kind of depends on where you're living.
If you live in these states, basically, you're in the clear.
It's legal. You can get it for medical.
You can get it for recreational.
Although there can be problems
when it comes to the business side of things.
Now, if you live in these states,
you can get it for medical reasons.
And also, if you get caught with it illegally,
you won't get in that much trouble
because it's been decriminalized.
Now, if you live in these states,
it's only just medical.
So if you get caught with it illegally
you're still going to get in trouble.
You can get it for medical, but only for certain ailments
and only certain types.

[ding]
And now if you live in these states,
it's been decriminalized but you can't get it
for medical reasons. And if you live in these states,
you're basically screwed
because it's illegal everywhere.
I mean, alcohol, tobacco and prescription drugs
in a state by state basis are all treated
basically the same way.
It's kind of weird, I know.
But when we looked into cannabis and CBD,
the more confusing it became.
It's a cluster-- [bleep] because of the difference
in law between states and feds.
Um, I think most people in the industry
would be reluctant to say they want the feds to come in.
I think most people's experience with regulation
has been problematic.
And for some people it's been, you know, brutal.
And there's a lot of regulators
out there that would like to kick the industry.
And, you know, you run into those folks all the time.

[Casey] At some point in your life,
you've come across this stuff.
Maybe you smoked it in high school once.
Maybe you smoke it every day.
Maybe your grandma uses it for her glaucoma.
Maybe the smell of it makes you want to throw up.
Maybe your neighbor told you she uses CBD for back pain.
Maybe you give CBD to your dog.
Maybe you won't touch CBD because you're worried
that it's actually pot.
I mean, these are all valid concerns
but we're here to clear that up for you.
I think what we can say is that while some people love it,
the overall consensus is that pot
still gets kind of a bad rap.
And, and trying to send that message with clarity
that good people don't smoke marijuana.

When we were asked to take this magical journey
into the land of Mary Jane, we were educated on the subject.
But, boy, there was really a lot
of information we didn't know.
And it's our job to get everyone up to speed
on this industry and where it stands today.
And I got to tell ya,
it's kind of a mess.
The first problem is it's not one industry, it's two.
You have the legal cannabis industry
which is medical and recreational
and you also have the legal hemp industry,
which is something that's entirely different.
It's a pretty long story. I don't know if you have
-much time. -[Casey] Sure!
[chuckles]
[Nick] Probably safer than any of the other ones.
Can't kill you.
Um, it's been used for what, hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds of thousands of years by mankind.
Some would say, uh, that man evolved with cannabis.
[Bill] If someone could tell me, give me a study
that weed helped me play football better.
Whole-- Cheech & Chong here you--
Here you come because I would have been in the movie.
A brand new industry that's grown out of nowhere,
that has been in existence for years,
which has been federally illegal and highly prosecuted.
And now we've got to deal with how to bring this
into the light. And we're struggling with it.
But people aren't really looking at it from that angle
because I think they're looking at it and saying,
We really want to make sure that this industry thrives
and why haven't you done this for us?
But everybody's in the same boat.
Everybody is confused.
[Casey] Wow. You just kind of blew my mind.
There's got to be a reason people are treating it
differently on a state by state basis, right?
I mean, maybe it just can't break the stigma
of being a dangerous drug.
Mr. Botticelli, I'm not trying to trap you.
[Mr. Botticelli] No, no.
How many marijuana deaths
have there been in the last five years?
So, so, if you're-- If you're referring to overdoses,
I-- I am not sure of those numbers.
-If you're referring-- -[Mr. Blumenauer] Okay then,
stop, then, I would like to have you supply us
with how many overdose deaths there were.
Because I have heard from experts
that-- whose judgment I respect,
that they don't know of any.
You can't die from it. No one's ever died from THC.
Um, I make jokes saying like, if I don't want--
Cause people say like, Oh, you're dabbing me too big.
Or, I'm smoking too much. You're going to kill me.
No. I don't want everybody to remember you from dying.
You get all the glory. I want to be the person
that dies from weed.
[Casey] So if nobody's ever died from marijuana and/or CBD,
why is it so scary? I mean, what's the real stigma here?
What is everybody's problem?
And how can we begin to educate people
on getting rid of that stigma?
And for a lot of people, if you look up north
where a lot of the farms are the light deprivation farms,
they'll be near, let's say, cabbage patches
and things like that. The neighborhood,
they complain about the smell of cannabis.
And the smell of cannabis has just been associated
with some people as being negative.
It's not that it actually smells bad.
It's something that reminds them
of something illegal or negative
because right next to it you have a cabbage patch
which smells terrible.
No one's complaining about the smell of that
because it's just food that you eat.
[Casey] Just because we were curious,
I wanted to look up the number of deaths
per drug type in the United States.
Let's look at 2017. Well start at the top.
Any opioids. There were 47,600 deaths.
Synthetic opioids, 28,466.
Prescription opioids, 17,000.
Heroin, 15,000.
Natural and semi-synthetic opioids, 14,000.
Cocaine, 13,000 deaths.
And we all thought cocaine was so fun.
Psycho stimulants with abuse potential, 10,000.
Marijuana.
Oh, well, that's not marijuana.
That's methadone.
Marijuana is not even on the list.
With all due respect, we should be listening to scientists.
I understand the parents who are grieved
because their child died of an overdose.
They didn't overdose on marijuana.
Willie Nelson has said that a friend of his died
when a bail fell on him, but, you know...
The thing is it's very complicated to understand
and to wrap our heads around the fact that,
you know, people are given, uh, you know,
pharmacotherapies that can have significant adverse effects.
But, you know, marijuana is still Schedule I,
cannabis is still Schedule I.
Federal government made it illegal
then they made it illegal to test it.
And then they said it was horrible
and they prevented anybody from proving em wrong.
And half of America still believes those lies.
[Mitzy] You certainly have a lot of confusion
related to how this is all going to pan out.
And I think, unfortunately, it's, it's time will tell.
[Malek] It's such a new industry
and it's such a new thing that we're figuring it out.
There is no experts, right?
We are the experts as we're learning.
Why is cannabis still federally illegal?
I don't know that anyone has the answer to that.
Under the federal guidelines, hemp is classified
as anything under 0.3 THC.
So everything that's in our field is under 0.3 THC--
[Casey] No, that I get but it seems to me
that the government is going, Well, you can grow this
but you can't grow this because thisll get you fucked up.
Yeah. Pretty much.
[Casey] So with the legalization
of both of these industries,
well, marijuana in some states, hemp in every state
because it's now federally legal,
cannabis is federally illegal.
But that's a whole different problem
we're going to save for later.
But now we're going to talk about
how the two plants are similar
and also how totally different they are.
The main difference between THC and CBD
from a consumption point of view
is THC has a psychoactive effects to it
whereas CBD, you won't feel any psychoactive effects.
People use it more so for inflammatory reasons,
anxiety and things like that.
However, if people want to feel that,
that, that high, then that's coming from THC.
[Casey] Cannabis contains a variety
of different cannabinoids.
The two most dominant and the ones
that we hear about the most,
one which is THC and the other is CBD.
While both have been shown to have benefits
to the human body, THC has psychoactive effects.
CBD does not. Let me repeat that.
THC has psychoactive effects.
CBD does not.
There are a lot of other cannabinoids
that just haven't been studied yet
because this has been federally illegal.
And so we're finding CBG, CBC, you know,
all kinds of different cannabinoids
that we can ultimately get into a product to give a customer
or patient that entourage effect without THC.
Cannabis is a little bit complicated because it's--
You think about, like, the therapeutic value.
It's not just being used for, you know,
personal or recreational use as is alcohol and tobacco.
Okay, you have insomnia problem,
you want to take some CBD to help you relax at night.
What's the milligrams? How much should you really take?
Should it be 10 milligrams? Should it be 100.
Should it be 1,000? Should it be 10,000?
I don't know. And the only way to really find out
is trial and error. Okay, let's start at the low amount.
Go from there. Let's take 10 milligrams.
Let's try...
What does that do for me?
You know, THC, we found out
that the average consumer can take 10 milligrams
and feel a little something.
[Casey] Hemp, on the other hand, has over 25,000
possible uses as supplement of skin care,
clothing, fabric, paper, even construction and fuel.
Hemp is legal to purchase in all 50 states.
It's legal to ship within the U.S.
Marijuana, however, is not legal in every state yet.
But those are the main differences
between hemp and marijuana.
Once it became legal and I was working for it
and I was able to educate my family on the benefits
of cannabis and hemp rather than just the stigma
that people put on it, being a stoner, whatever it might be,
they've completely flip-flopped their opinions.
Im providing them with CBD tinctures when they need it.
Um, almost my whole family uses it as a,
as a stress reliever or a sleep aid at this point.
[Casey] So I guess it's around now we have to ask ourselves,
If this drug is not killing anybody
yet kids are still being ripped out
of their cars and arrested for it,
why does marijuana still have a bad reputation?
We're not going to spend a ton of time
getting into the history of this, but I do think
it's important to know that there was a huge campaign
against marijuana for not the best reasons.
[distorted synth instrumental]
[narrator] To John, his first pot party
looks exciting. Everyone seems to be having fun.
Best of all, there are no parents, no other adults,
no one to interfere with the fun.
The feeling of importance, of belonging,
of putting one over is taking hold.
Pete intends to tighten that hold,
to squeeze it, to hook it, to lock it in.
Now's the time to introduce the joints--
[Casey] Now we can't say with full confidence
that this anti-marijuana video was funded
by William Randolph Hearst.
But what we can tell you is
that arguably the greatest movie of all time,
if you ask any critic or any cinephile, was Citizen Kane.
Citizen Kane was made by one
of the greatest directors of all time, Orson Welles.
Orson Welles based this movie on William Randolph Hearst.
He thought Hearst was a first class douchebag.
Now, here's the thing about Hearst.
He was a media giant.
And from reports if you read back in history,
he wasn't a big fan of Black people,
wasn't a big fan of Asian people
and was especially not a fan of Mexican people.
Now, why is that? Well, you see this guy right here?
Pancho Villa. I'm sure you've heard of him.
Villa and his rebels took over 800,000 acres
of Hearst Timber during the Mexican Revolution.
And Hearst found out that these guys
loved to smoke marijuana
which at the time was probably just hemp cigarettes.
So he demonized it,
printing ads, telling the American people
that marijuana would ruin their lives.
Also, ironically,
around the same time, Hearst found out that hemp was cheaper
and easier to grow than trees.
Far more durable. The paper is far superior.
In fact, the whole reason why William Randolph Hearst
demonized marijuana in the first place
was to protect his business
because he had paper mills.
And he was trying to protect it from hemp.
[retro male voice over] Marijuana!
The burning weed with its roots in hell.
Well, they came up with this decorticator in the 1930s.
It was on the cover of Popular Science magazine:
Hemp, The New Billion Dollar Crop.
Well, William Randolph Hearst didn't
just own Hearst publications and newspapers.
He also owned these huge forests
that they were making paper with.
So he, along with Harry Anslinger
and using his newspapers,
demonized marijuana to stop the commodity of hemp.
So they came up with this new name.
They called it this drug. Everybody freaked out
because they didn't have the Internet back then.
No one had access to real information
other than Hearst Newspapers, Hearst Publications.
So he just fucking out and out lied
and made up these crazy stories
and funded these documentaries.
And then marijuana became illegal
and still is to this day.
Well, when you look-- When you look back
at Anslinger and the whole campaign,
the Reefer Madness campaign in the 30s, it's,
it's quite funny when you watch it now.
But you have people in the legislature
that are actually standing up and quoting
some of these things from the 30s and 40s.
Good people don't smoke marijuana.
[Casey] See? It was right around 1936, 1937,
that things started to get hairy.
Prohibition had ended and guys like Anslinger
had nothing to do with their spare time,
then try to be a giant fucking buzzkill.
He couldn't go after alcohol anymore
so he went after marijuana.
You know, it was a very ugly time.
But that time was based on, on not being educated.
And, you know, it took 50 years, 40 or 50 years
for us to come back around
and to understand what these two plants are.
[Casey] By '52, they passed the Boggs Act,
which made sentencing for drug convictions mandatory.
In the first full year after the act was passed,
Black people were about three times more likely
to be arrested for violating drug laws than whites.
And Mexicans were nine times more likely
to be arrested for the same charge.
Now, I know some people love Nixon.
Some people hate him.
I wasn't really around for that time
but I will say what another huge asshole this guy
has to be to make marijuana a Schedule I drug.
Schedule I drugs are considered
to have a high potential for abuse and addiction.
You know? Drugs like heroin, LSD, ecstasy.
And classifying cannabis as a Schedule I is fucking stupid.
It's incredible the drug, right? It can make you bigger.
It can make you smaller, right?
It can make you high. It can make you low.
It can make you hungry. It can make you silly.
It does all that stuff,
which is what's really scary for Big Pharma.
Then we have real human gems like this guy,
Kansas State Representative Stephen Alford,
who made a case against legalizing cannabis
because of race.
This is getting embarrassing at this point.
But you know what? The future is bright
because we do live in a progressive world
and things like incarcerations and arrests
based on things like race at least
are not contributing to this problem.
Actually, they kind of are.
Considering this stuff is from 2010.
That's 11 years ago.
States are wasting three billion
every year enforcing marijuana laws.
I mean, it doesn't take a genius to see
the huge problem in all this...
or maybe it does.
So the bottom line is, I guess we're going
to have to take this fight to Washington.
[quizzical instrumental]


The reason why cigarettes are still legal,
reason why alcohol is still legal.
You understand these are two of the most powerful lobbies
in D.C., period.
[Casey] I'm sorry. Before I explain some of the stuff,
I want you to just take a look at some of those numbers.
This is from the government website
where you can see how much money
lobbyists spend on their specific industry.
You know, right now we have, we have a Congress
that's full of career politicians and they're very,
very, very reliant on the campaign contributions
that they get from, you know, essentially our enemies.
[Casey] The number one, of course, is pharmaceuticals.
Now we're talking $281 million spent in lobbying
for pharmaceutical companies.
Marijuana, somewhere around 5 million.
You know, you have drug companies
that will-- What do you think they're going to put out?
They're going to fund studies that try to show
it's bad for you in some way.
And guess what?
If you have enough money, you can almost prove anything.
So let's just be straight up there.
So despite the alcohol lobby dumping
so much money into, into anti-legalization,
what ultimately is going to happen is the alcohol companies
are going to be forced by way of declining sales
and revenues to either invest in cannabis companies,
which is already happening.
Or they're going to be forced to just shift gears
and operate more efficiently.
So it's a long process.
They're, theyre fighting a losing battle.
Um, do I wish they were out of the way? Absolutely.
[Casey] When you get into something like OxyContin,
where the family that created it
was actually shelling out billions and billions
of dollars to take doctors on golf trips
and give them cakes shaped like OxyContin.
Yes, this actually happened.
So while you don't have enough money
to push marijuana legalization, you've got tons
and tons of money towards things like pharma and alcohol.
Years of our federal government really lying to us
and creating whole mechanisms and cultures
and, and systems and everything that are there
to support that lie.
And it takes time to get around each of those.
And every time you beat one of them,
the other one still there, still popping up.
You know, we got, Its legal but no banks. Right?
[Casey] The thing about lobbyists
and drug and alcohol companies is they shouldn't have to lie
because they have hundreds of millions of dollars
to influence people. So I guess the marijuana people
need lots of big money so they can lie to everybody
about what their products do.
Again, we don't make claims but you can use it
and see for yourself.
I've been using it for six years
and I'm a huge advocate.
I'm a, I'm a, Im a client and I'm the president.
You name it. Right? There's, there's, there's--
It just takes time for it to fully evolve.
We need to approach the FDA
and actually provide them with a set of rules
and-- and guidelines to be able to-- to actually
monitor the industry, because without that
they're not going to create it. The government
is not good at actually crafting anything.
[Casey] People wonder why it's treated in certain ways.
Why is it now becoming legal?
There's just a lot-- People ask a lot of questions.
And a lot of this is rooted in history uh, and uh, culture.
So it's not necessarily based in science.
[playful classical instrumental]
[narrator] American hemp must meet
the needs of our Army and Navy as well as of our industries.
In 1942, patriotic farmers at the government's request
planted 36,000 acres of seed hemp,
an increase of several thousand percent.
Be careful how you use it for to grow hemp legally,
you must have a federal registration and tax stamp.
This is provided for in your contract.
Ask your Triple A committee man
or your county agent about it.
Don't forget.
[Casey] Now that we've cleared the air
that CBD is the active ingredient in cannabis
that does not get you high, we can take a look
at everything that involves CBD.
When did it come about? Where is it coming from?
Who's growing it? Who's processing it?
How is it different from THC?
What's the evidence for its health benefits?
Is it safe? Should you take it?
Should you not take it? Why are things like gummies
legal in some states but not legal in other states?
[John] My interest in it was piqued, I guess,
in CBD was piqued through Colorado.
I have a home in Colorado and we spend
our summers there and part of our winters.
And down here in Louisiana, it's, it's viewed upon
with big, giant question mark, I think.
Uh, because people don't know about, about CBD.
They don't-- A lot of people don't know
the difference between THC and CBD.
When I got to Denver, which was right around
halfway through my career, I was looking
for the best people in the world
that could help my brain,
help my body, help get rid of inflammation,
help me get stronger, help me do what I gotta do
to this body so I can go do it
more and more and more.
So I can knock the fuck out of people
every goddamn day.
[quirky instrumental]
I've taken it enough to know it does something.
[Casey] So if you're just a regular red-blooded American
and you drive around the States,
you can see that CBD is everywhere.
It's all over the Internet.
It's in gas stations, malls,
it's in your smoothies, it's in chocolates.
It's even in face masks.
But I gotta tell you,
through this process, it's still confusing.
And in order to help us make some sense,
we figured we would do our due diligence
to call a guy we knew who not only
owned a hemp company but also a cannabis company.
So if anybody knows how it's all going to work,
it's going to be this guy.
[man] Yeah, it really is confusing to be quite honest.

Depending on who you kind of talk to,
they, they almost give you their opinion of, of,
of how the law reads.
It's not as black and white as if, if,
if you kill someone, you go to jail.

Today, it's confusing to the people
who are enforcing it.
I think the lack of education is, is, is really to be...
That's the main factor.

[Casey] Why is it approved for certain things
in this state and not this state?
So you think some of these states
that they've approved it for certain ailments,
there's not a ton of research behind that?
Or just sort of going, Yeah, just use it for epilepsy
if you need to, you know?
Like, how does that work?
It's a good question.

[man] It's just people are confused, right?
There's a lot of information out there
but there's nothing-- There's no clean divide of,
Okay, that's B.S. or Okay. This is factual.
People have to understand the law.
They have to study the law.
They have to take advice
and they have to have the--
I-- I mean, they really have to have the balls
just to attack it face on.
[Casey] So can you guys sell your hemp out of state?
Well...
They issued another memo two weeks ago
where they said, and I quote,
Many people have asked us about the legality
of selling flower and CBD products online.
We-- MDAR--
Suggest that you consult with the FDA.
And that's the quote.
So you tell me.

You know, we don't smoke pot.
We don't never deal with any of that.
We have never and we never will.
And uh, hemp. I had a little idea.
You know, it can be something
to give us something else for our family to continue
to grow and do something
besides what we've always done and get by.
Because you're just going to get by,
which is okay, but that's all you're going to ever do.
[son] Hemp for me, I didn't even really understand
that it was related to marijuana that much.
I thought it was--
I knew that it had relations to marijuana
and that but in my mind, it was always a different crop.
It looks nothing like cannabis:
A short little bush with big, old giant nugs on it.
This stuff is 12 feet tall
and it has a grain cluster at the top
that's four to eight inches long.
You know? That's-- That's a hemp crop, there.
The cannabis industry, in my mind,
there's only going to be a certain group of guys
that really use that in the grand scheme of things.
I don't know what the percent--
[son] Whether it be recreational--
[Mr. Dyer] But-- But I don't think we've even
started to see what the CBD market,
the hemp industry can do because everyone,
everyone can use that.
[Casey] CBD goes back to about 1946 when Doctor Walter Lowe
conducted the first tests on lab animals.
They gave proof CBD doesn't cause
any kind of altered mental state.
Further research continued into the sixties on primates
and then British pharmacologists released
the first CBD oil meant for therapeutic use.
Over the next few decades, that research continued.
In 1980, Dr. Raphael Mechoulam made another breakthrough
when he ran studies which showed CBD
could be a key factor in treating epilepsy.

It's such a phenomenon and such a cultural,
like, outbreak, the CBD movement and the-- you know?
And it's really all stemming from cannabis.
And people want legal cannabis.
They want it available, they want it in their neighborhoods,
they want it-- They don't want to go
buy it from Joe Schmo,
that they have to go to his backyard
or his house and buy it illegally.
And they're scared that he rips them off.
He sells them something bad or that
they get in trouble legally,
which is really the underlying fear for most people.
So then it goes to, Well, what's-- what's legal?
CBD is legal.
Oh, you know, hemp's legal.
Let's-- Let's smoke hemp, lets take CBD.
This is the next best thing.
[Clay] That's what brung me out here.
Um, I'm coming out here to educate myself
more on the farming side.
Uh, I don't want our farmers
back home to reach into a crop or commodity
like hemp that's gonna be a, a good business move
but without any understanding.
[quizzical synth instrumental]
[Casey] In the event that you do suffer
from some sort of ailment that's going to benefit
from taking CBD, how do you go about it?
I guess you got to do your research, right?
I mean, God bless the Internet.
We stumbled upon a Facebook group of people
that suffer from epilepsy,
and the messages were just staggering
to say the least.
But the thing I noticed the most was how people
were talking about how there's no side effects.
Let's for a moment go to a medication website
and take a look at the side effects
of common epilepsy drugs.
Let's see:
Tired, upset stomach, dizziness, blurred vision,
rash, problems with liver, pancreas,
a serious drop in the number of white blood cells,
which is what your body uses to fight infection.
Probably not the best thing to have.
Serious drop in the number of platelets your body has.
Dangerous and potential failure reactions are rare.
Rare means sometimes.
Sores, blisters, ulcers in the mouth,
blisters on the skin, excessive bleeding,
or bleeding won't stop,
stomach pain, fever, unusual infections, dizziness,
double vision, headaches, stomach pain.
So when I go back to the Epilepsy Board
where people are talking about how CBD worked for them,
what I'm not seeing is anyone talking about any side effects.
So I guess you got to wonder what the difference is
between epilepsy drugs and things like CBD.
Epilepsy drugs are run through pharmaceutical companies,
the guys who were spending, like,
180 million a year on lobbies.
And CBD lobbies were what?
Maybe five million bucks?
People who were just trying to get this plant on the shelves.
So I'm sensing we're starting to see a pattern here,
spending a lot of money on drugs
that will give you bad side effects.
Nobody here is helping these guys
who have drugs that don't have side effects.
Do you think the melatonin manufacturer
wants someone to take his melatonin away
because someone will take a CBD, you know,
tincture or gummy bear and sleep twice as good
as taking the melatonin.
Or!
The drug company that's making Lunesta!
Do you think they want this natural,
fairly inexpensive, does not mess up your liver,
doesn't do anything to harm you
other than make you sleep better?
I don't think the Lunesta company wants that to happen.
And the pharmaceutical industry
does not want to see this happen.
We see they spend a lot of money
in the Louisiana legislature.
We had a very, one-- I think, we were in the top ten
of opiate prescriptions per capita.
Well, the fact of the matter is,
is we see the fact that more and more people--
And it's not more and more young people,
it's mostly more and more older people
who are either experiencing it for the first time
because they do not want to get on these litanies,
these handfuls of medications with 30 pages of side effects.
You know? The fact is, is there's a plant
that can, that can help.
[Latin instrumental]
[metallic tinkling]
[machines whirring]
My name is Sandro Piancone.
I was born in New Jersey where I like to say
great pizza and Bon Jovi comes from.
It's called Sayreville, New Jersey.
I like to say I got into the tobacco
and hemp business by accident.
Uh, we owned a cheese company, uh, here in Mexico.
And it came with a permit to import tobacco.
It was a very old, grandfathered-in permit.
We don't know anything about it because we're cheese guys.
Until a client came and asked us to-- if we could
import their cigarettes for them, we said, Sure.
We did the first truck.
We made good money, the second truck.
And then they asked us
if we could do a private label.
So of course, the ever-entrepreneur,
I said, Of course we can!
So we ended up buying machinery and building
a facility here to do private label tobacco products.
A year later, a client called me from Spain
and asked if I could do a tobacco and hemp cigarette.
I said, Of course. And after I hung up I said,
What the heck is hemp?
So I've been learning for two years,
studying, uh learning hemp, going out to farms,
understanding it all.
And now we're launching our own line of hemp smokables.
[Casey] Businessmen like Sandro see an opportunity in CBD.
We actually stumbled across an empty warehouse
of what seemed to be old Redbox machines
that were being retrofitted to hold,
sell and dispense CBD and CBD products across Mexico.
And for someone with the business acumen
as a self-proclaimed cheese salesman,
he was able to get those machines out to people.
So I guess the fact that people like Sandro
are processing hemp in places like Mexico,
it shows you that maybe some of the world
is ahead of the United States in a game like this.

[Jake] I mean, I've been fighting the fight.
I've been in with the legislators.
I understand how this game is played.
And it's-- It's a full on uphill battle.
Why would the liquor lobby's not want us there?
Well, because we're giving people alternative products.
People might choose to smoke marijuana versus drink a beer.
And that has happened.
And you've seen liquor sales diminish in states
where cannabis is legal.
You have a Republican Senate
that pushed forward under Mitch McConnell.
What do they grow in Kentucky where he is a senator?
Tobacco.
As the tobacco industry has changed--
[Casey] Hang on there, Mitch, for one second.
When you say the tobacco industry has changed,
what you mean is people finally figured out
that tobacco was harmful for humans,
so people stopped smoking it.
Some farmers in states like Kentucky
have been searching for a new crop
that can support their families and grow
our agricultural economy.
And many believe theyve found such a product.
Industrial hemp.
You know, there's a lot of times when hemp
wasn't allowed to be cultivated.
So all of a sudden they're trying
to figure out with their limited staff,
how do they create their own regulations related to hemp?
Because they-- They have to do it all on their own
while they're regulating every other agricultural commodity.
[John] Government typically is slow to react,
I think in general.
Um, and I think they've been slow here.
And, and I think they're playing catch up.
And um, you know, all eyes nationwide
seem to be on CBD these days.
So there's not much question in my mind
that, that sooner rather than later the FDA
is going to get involved in this in a big way.
But of course, there's a lot more work to do.
[Malek] You know, this is the thing about it,
is we're still learning so much about it.
And that's the other benefit of when it gets to go
to legalization and recreational
across America and the real,
you know, research is being done.
Then we'll really get to find out some things
that we don't know, you know?
Right now, most of the research,
if not all of it, it's all independent.
So once again, there's not that standard to know,
you know? It's not like other industries.
[pensive harp instrumental]
[Casey] One of the problems with CBD,
much like any commodity that comes out
on the market and just floods and you can see it everywhere--
Gas stations, sports stores--
Is that you don't really know what you're buying
and where it's coming from.
And that potentially could be a problem.
And certainly we've seen enforcement actions
or we've heard of enforcement actions through,
say, the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture,
where they may go in and seize product
and they go to test the product to determine exactly
what's in the product that's claimed
to be either hemp or CBD,
and most of the times they find it's melatonin.
I don't know where it's been grown.
I don't know, grown in California,
grown in Colorado, grown in North Carolina?
You know, we can't rely on the federal government
to mandate all the legislation.
We have to take it upon ourselves
as an industry to create this consistent product.
[Casey] It seems that the biggest hurdle with CBD
and CBD products is there's not enough research
to back up the claims.
But if people are swearing by it
and it's doing justice to people with epilepsy,
people with Crohn's disease, people doing chemotherapy,
what's the harm in people taking it?
I guess you want to have it regulated.
You want to make sure you're getting the right stuff.
But if it's working for people,
where's the harm in people taking it?
This is a free country.
People should be able to take
whatever they want. People smoke cigarettes daily.
People drink alcohol daily.
Why should they not be able to take CBD daily?
Why do you need to continue to do research?
It doesn't make sense to me.
They do research on cigarettes and say cigarettes are bad,
yet people can still buy them and smoke them.
The limited research that's been done on CBD,
they say that it's beneficial.
So what's the holdup?

Caution must be exercised when learning
about the therapeutic effects and potential risks
of a new treatment, end quote.
Now, despite promising anecdotal evidence,
we actually know very little about cannabidiol
because there is limited research.
And as the chairman mentioned,
what we learned was a conflict between
the Department of Justice and the Department of Health,
which prevented that research being done
because it was a Schedule I drug.
[Casey] I think I'm starting to see the problem here.
The problem here is they're treating CBD and marijuana
as something that's going to potentially be therapeutic,
like medicine, like we said in the beginning.
However, if we just delegated it to be
a recreational product,
not unlike alcohol or tobacco, you can get rid
of all this bureaucratic stuff and start selling it federally,
legally and making tax money.
Also, if you're federally regulating it,
you can keep an eye on what's being sold
because if you're not,
that creates its own litany of problems.
Most of the guys in this industry--
You're either a farmer or you're an extract company,
or you're a branded company.
But there was no chain of custody, right?
The farmer farmed it. Some guy made it into isolate.
You bought that isolate and you put it in your products
and called it whatever, CBD-- Joe's CBD.
Number one, you start out finding a really good quality
manufacturer, someone that's growing it all the way
from the seed, the processing, turning it into oil,
and then having it go into a product,
and then having it go on the shelf.
If you can follow that process,
there's half the battle right there.
[Casey] Do you guys personally use any CBD products?
-[Mr. Dyer] Yes. -[Casey] Sleep aids or...
[Mr. Dyer] Well, why don't I-- I'll tell you a personal story.
[Casey] Sure, absolutely. That why we're here.
I had a-- Last year, about this time.
-No. August-- -Or August.
I went in for a check up. I had esophageal cancer.
And um, I went through chemo and all the stuff you do.
And meanwhile I-- I took CBD and did that pretty religiously
and came through it.
As far as I know at this point, flying colors.
I havent had my last checkup
but um, the doctors were amazed.
I didn't-- I gained weight on chemo.
Not many guys gain weight on chemo.
I don't know-- I dont-- I mean,
there was a lot of people praying too,
that's a pretty big deal, but uh--
[laughs]--
CBD, I don't think was, was bad.
[pensive piano instrumental]
[Linda] Is hemp now FDA regulated or not?
Well, the FDA hasn't even weighed in.
And they have issued statements that say
they're not going to weigh in for three to five years.
Hemp is proving useful across a wide variety
of innovative products.
Its fibers are being added to concrete
and home insulation.
Its extracts are being researched
for potential health benefits.
And some breweries in Kentucky have even crafted
hemp-infused beer.
People are benefiting from them.
And you have a testimonial from someone that says,
I had arthritis and it changed my life.
You're not allowed to put it on your website?
Right. No. The FDA prevents us from making any claims,
even on behalf of other people, or on behalf of ourselves
about the health benefits of CBD.
CBD is now a Schedule V drug.
[Casey] To further the confusion about CBD
in testimonials and claims that people are making,
even though people like Jake from Solari
said that there are no claims to make.
As I was driving the other day, I heard a commercial
on satellite radio about a company called Lord Jones.
They literally had word for word testimonials of people
that claim their product was changing their lives.
So at this point, we're ready
to just throw our hands up and say,
What the f--? [tape rewinds]
[man] Yeah, it really is confusing to be quite honest.
But in Massachusetts, it's also kind of bizarre
because the Mass. Department of Agricultural Resources
issues licenses to grow and cultivate hemp
and to process hemp, but they don't allow
for the commercialization of hemp and CBD products.
So there's no real way at the state level
to be able to take what you have created and extracted
and refined in your CBD oil and commercialize it
with hemp grown in Massachusetts.
So you're kind of at the point where we are pretty
much told to just grow it and hold on to it.
So from a commercialization perspective,
of course, you're stuck.
In the state of Massachusetts, it's illegal--
A crime, illegal, not a civil infraction, illegal--
For me to grow this plant without a license
even though it doesn't have THC.
As a matter of fact, I can grow 12 pot plants.
[Casey] I grew some this summer.
I smoked it and it got me really high.
But I can't grow one hemp plant without a license.
I know, its crazy.
-[Casey laughs] -No, seriously.
[Casey] Wait a minute. You can grow cannabis, 12 plants,
but you can't grow hemp,
even though it doesn't get you high?
[Linda] Right. We want to grow it for medicine.
[Casey] That doesn't make any sense.
That literally doesn't make any sense.
I know it doesn't.
But that's what happens when you have committees make laws.
Chapter 55 made marijuana a civil infraction,
and all rules about marijuana all talk about fines.
None of it is crime anymore.
But when they got to the part about making hemp
a legal crop, they made it a crime for you to grow
without a license from the Department of Agriculture.
[quizzical instrumental]
[narrator] But everything that goes up
must come down.
When John came down, he landed with a thud.
Due to the effects of the alcohol
and the late hours at the party,
the following day, he was too tired, too sick to study.
[Casey] All right, now we can finally
get into the good stuff, the devil's lettuce.
This is the stuff that we really want to talk about.
This is the stuff that's bad for everybody.
This is the stuff that's going to make your wife run off
with a Black guy or even worse, a Mexican guy.
Hopefully Mexican dudes.
[laughs]
[Casey] It's been around forever.
I mean, it's so bad for everybody.
It's so bad they even make movies where it's the bad guy.

Marijuana is now everywhere,
especially in states that have legalized,
and it can be smoked, drunk, eaten and vaped.
As I like to say, This aint your mama's marijuana.

[Casey] Speaking of government, isn't that kind of why
we're in this mess in the first place?
You leave it up to a place like Louisiana or Florida,
things don't get passed the way that you would want them to
or the way that they should be.

Why can't we just take the model from Colorado
and federally adapt that to every state?

I think a lot of the problem is that our lawmakers
are a lot of older motherfuckers who don't really
seem to know what exactly is going on.
All the leading medical organizations
reject the idea of smoke marijuana as medicine.
[Casey] Now, I found this clip on the Internet and it
really moved me and I wanted to share it with everybody.
I want to show this clip while you listen
to our lawmakers talk about how bad marijuana is.
[woman] And we are going to show you his movements here.
-Thank you-- -[lawmakers laughing]
[woman] So you can see how his condition
affects him physically.
Uh, you heard her, CBD.
[laughter]
As you know, a 2018 report by the Substance Abuse
and Mental Health Services Administration found
that an estimated 43.5 million Americans used marijuana
in the last year.
Have you start the way I introduced you but is that--
That-- [indistinct whispering]
[woman on video] Okay. Ive just prepared
his uh, smoke of cannabis for him.
He's just got to try and get his action together.
Frankly, it's amazing to me uh, that this one memo
issued by the Department of Justice in August of 2013
has resulted in a marijuana industry
that has become completely untethered.
Um, it was...
This is a critically important public health issue
that needs to be changed.
-[woman] Okay-- -For whatever.
Finally, it's important to remember that marijuana
remains illegal under federal law
and nothing in the court memo--
[woman] Oh, dear. Need a hand?
[thump]

[exhales]
[sighing]
A couple of minutes later.
[woman] Oh, yeah, um.
I'm calming.
[woman] Yeah.
[woman] Okay. Now, that's probably another minute
-to two minutes on. -There ya go.
[woman] I think we should get some help.
Thats what you need, sadly. Thank you.
[woman] Thank you for watching.
And-- and trying to send that message with clarity
that good people don't smoke marijuana.
[Casey] On the surface, if you Google it,
places like Colorado and Oregon are benefiting
massively from their legal marijuana industry.
Uh, it's really been terrific but more importantly
than the public revenue has been the tens of thousands
of jobs that have been created.
Uh, it's helped support tens of thousands of workers,
created quite a bit of value in our state.
And we look forward to continuing
to be a leader in the cannabis economy.
[Casey] So let's shift off Colorado for a second
and go to a place where it's not legal,
like a place like Florida.
You look at someone like Debbie Wasserman Schultz
who is head of the DNC.
I don't have a problem with anyone's political party
but she's a very,
very staunch anti-legalization supporter.
It just so happens that one of her biggest campaign
financers is the alcohol industry.
Because I know were seeing in other places
where once again as-- as cannabis,
cannabis becomes commonplace, that the-- the wages
are going down a little bit and-- and things like that.
But still these were jobs would be much better than what most
of the jobs that a majority of New Orlean-ians have now.
The real money in cannabis
is in the peripheral industries.
You know, like I said, transportation, packaging,
uh, security can be both a within and without
the industry, uh, kind of, um job.
[Mike] It's providing more jobs
than people are even realizing.
I mean, the one thing is it's also taking people
that are in the black market that are getting punished
for selling this plant,
that are going to jail for many years,
now they have an opportunity to come on the right side
of the market and actually work without hiding
and, you know, pretending what they do, you know,
to their family, friends, whoever it is.
You can actually be proud of what you do, have a legit job,
pay your taxes and everything else that comes with it.
[Casey] We'd like to interrupt Mike for a second.
What he's talking about is the Social Equity Program,
which actually is pretty cool.
In places like Los Angeles, the goal of it is actually
to promote equitable ownership and employment
in the cannabis industry in order to decrease disparities
in life outcomes for marginalized communities.
And, to address the misappropriate impacts
on the War on Drugs in those communities.
So what they're basically doing is they're offering jobs
in the cannabis industry to people of color, minorities,
people who, maybe, were sort of given a raw deal
because they ended up in jail due to the cannabis industry,
which is fucking ridiculous in the first place.
[quirky instrumental]
So while the cannabis industry is creating all these jobs,
what's the major difference here
between this and the hemp industry?
Well, the hemp industry, things are going
towards CBD, hemp seeds, hemp fabrics.
In the cannabis industry, the main goal
seems to be that people want to get high.
So all these jobs are created
because people want to get high.
After all, nobody needs to drink alcohol
and nobody needs to smoke cigarettes.
But let's go back to our classification system here.
Drugs are classified in the way in which they are therapeutic.
So if you say nobody needs to get high,
that's like saying nobody needs diabetes medication,
nobody needs high blood pressure medication
and nobody needs medication to turn their life around
when they're diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
[swanky jazz plays]

-Do you like to vape? -Yeah, man!
-Suckin on that pipe? -Yeah, man!
-It gets you feelin tight? -Yeah, man!
-Oh, smokin that weed! -[Casey] This is Megan.
We came across her when we were looking up articles
about people who were using medical for some sort
of therapeutic activities.
It turns out Megan was diagnosed
with multiple sclerosis seven years ago.
So we wrote her an email, told her we were making
a documentary, just to see how she had been doing
and thinking that she would get back to me
saying that marijuana had helped,
that MS was destroying her body.
And what she got back to us with was this:
Hi guys. Thanks for reaching out!...
I absolutely still use cannabis and cbd...
[words on screen]
I don't want to make light of Megan's situation
because I think she's fucking amazing.
But this email also sounds like a lot of people I know.
Anyway... Three years ago...
[words on screen]
...Regularly with my husband and even managed to find
the mental clarity to publish my first book- which is about
my journey to being diagnosed, and being a mom of young kids
while trying to readjust to fit
an incurable disease into the mix...
[words on screen]
... And are in the process of opening
a cannabis retreat and educational center.

Okay. I don't know about you,
but I think that's enough for me.
I think we pretty much have just proved the case
that this is just a plant and it's medicine
and it can help everybody.
And I'm not one who's going to shout from the rooftops
and say that this is a cure-all because it's not.
But it's clearly working for people like Megan.
So I guess now we really have to say,
Well, what exactly is the problem?
However, they found insufficient or no evidence
regarding potential therapeutic effects of cannabis or
cannabinoids for a variety of health conditions considered.
Ah, smokin that weed!
[Casey] After this movie comes out, if I make any money,
I'm just rolling it into a cannabis business.
I mean, I live in California. It's legal.
I'm just going to take that money,
grow some stuff, get an accountant,
do all my write offs and make some money.
I mean, it's just that simple, right?
Its a little bit... What-- What exactly
-is this 280 E bill--? -[man] Right--
[Casey] Or law, whatever it is you-- You keep referencing
it but people may not know exactly what it is.
So Section 280 E as its called is an Internal Revenue
Code section that was created by Congress
during the war on drugs.
And it basically says that if you traffic
in a controlled substance, which-- uh, a Schedule I,
or Schedule II controlled substance which marijuana still
is, you don't get to take your federal deductions.
So because marijuana companies can't take
their deductions as they're called,
they pay tax on their gross revenue, as it's called,
which is a lot more than they actually receive,
which then creates what's called phantom income,
which means you get the tax for the income,
but you don't get the income... Which is really tough.
So if you're a dispensary,
all the people-- The only thing that you can deduct
is the cost of goods sold, which is what you're purchasing
a product for,
from a manufacturer or from a cultivator.
But if you're a pure retailer, then the person
who's ringing the register, any selling,
general administrative expenses that are pretty typical,
like your rent and your utilities
in a dispensary are not deductible.
[Casey] Now, if you think that's bad,
let me explain something else.
There are people that don't even work in the cannabis
industry, that work in the cannabis adjacent industry,
like guys that make the machines
that press the actual distillate.
They can't even get mortgages because mortgages
are federally regulated.
Those federally regulated mortgages are considered
illegal because your money's coming
from a cannabis adjacent business.
It's fully legal.
I'm allowed to work for a cannabis company.
I'm allowed to be employed by a cannabis company.
However, going to get a home loan,
going to do anything with the banks,
it is an absolute nightmare because it's not federally
legal and the banks are federally owned.
So if you're trying to purchase a house right now
and you live in California and you've been working
with a cannabis company, good luck.
You might have to get a loan from an equity company,
someone else, because you're probably not going
to be able to pull it from the bank
because they don't support cannabis.
-[Casey] What? -Yeah.
[Casey] See, you just blew my mind again.
-Yeah. -Every time you turn around,
someone doesn't understand the industry itself.
And because they don't understand the industry,
they don't take the time to understand the industry.
They don't take the time to understand that there
are businesses and ancillary businesses that we service
where their banks have shut them down as well.
[Casey] I think we've all heard the phrase,
Keeping up with the Joneses.
If your neighbor buys a new whip,
you might want to go out and buy a new whip.
If he puts in a pool, you want to put in a new pool.
How come these states aren't keeping
up with the Joneses states?
They're putting money into schools, highways.
It's really been terrific.
But more importantly than the public revenue has been
the tens of thousands of jobs that have been created.
Tens of thousands of jobs that have been created.
[Casey] You eventually can see the state of Louisiana
being in the same position as, like,
a Colorado or California?
That is a question for the legislature.
[Casey] You go down to places like Louisiana in the South
where people just have a different attitude
about things like drugs, just doesn't seem that easy.
[Kevin] Well, first of all, they have
a ballot initiative process in Colorado.
And a ballot initiative process uh, allows citizens
to band together, get a certain number--
And each state is different-- A certain number
of certified signatures.
And then they can put forth legislation
to the people to vote on.
Um, and for example, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee,
Louisiana and Texas do not have ballot initiative processes.
But yet Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Arkansas do.
And guess what? Oklahoma, Arkansas, Florida
all have very robust medical programs.
[quizzical instrumental]
The history goes back to, you know, drug and drug use.
Um, they always tell you about the beginning of the 60s.
And they talk about, you know, pot,
and how pot was-- was very, very relevant
as it pertains to drugs then.
And some of those individuals have witnessed
over the years the eccentric part of it where it's changed.
And they feel like any efforts to-- to, um,
further along that process is basically
um, what they call the gateway, if you will, you know,
to, to smoking marijuana and everybody getting high.
And it's not what it is.
When we were trying to get, for the third time,
because the first medical therapeutic cannabis law
was passed in 1978 and never implemented.
In 1992, it was amended and still not implemented.
And so starting in 2014, we began the process
of finally setting up the infrastructure to have
a therapeutic cannabis program.
[Casey] Obviously, these are Kevin's opinions,
not mine, but he lives in Louisiana.
I live in California, where it's legal.
So he's got to be screaming from the rooftops
because some people can't get what they need.
I mean, take a look at Megan. She's in Washington State.
She's getting everything that she needs.
And what about people that live in Louisiana
who can't get what they need?
I have a relative with autism. Um, he's non-verbal.
And I saw from his growth from a--a toddler
to where he is now as an adult.
And it's like everywhere else they're talking about it.
They're doing it in-- in certain states.
You know, why can't we introduce it here?
[Caitlyn] Ramsey suffers from seizure clusters now.
He could have 20 or 30 in a 24-hour period.
I was at the hospital, one night, day three of seizures.
And they weren't stopping.
They weren't even breaking between seizures.
And seizures can kill.
There is a Sudden, Unexpected Death by Epilepsy, SUDEP.
And I was terrified and at my wit's end.
And I called my lawmaker and I said,
I am going to treat this child in the hospital
because I'm going to lose him.
She has been probably the most
profound person, you know,
to work with on anything I've done so far in legislature.
[Casey] So if you, or someone in your family,
suffers from an ailment that a doctor deems
needing some sort of prescription medication,
what you do is go to the pharmacy,
you get that medication, and you live your life
with some quality of health.
What people like Caitlyn need to do is they need to fight
and fight and fight to get the medicine
that she needs for her kids.

I am not one of these people that believes
that this is a miracle cure-all for-- for everything.
But the fact is-- is it can make the quality of life
for a lot of people much better.
[Caitlyn] And so I rubbed CBD oil on his feet.
I rubbed a whole bottle of CBD oil up his feet and up his
legs and five minutes later, his seizure stopped.
And we got to leave the hospital the next day.
And for me, that was-- I have the chills.
For me, that was all the proof I needed,
that if it could break a storm of seizures that strong--
And this was just the CBD without even the THC added--
Then what could the whole plant do for us?
[pensive instrumental]
When FDA approved Epidiolex, you know, as a medication,
that is part of the reason why, you know, the FDA right now
is coming out with rules and regulations
related to how cannabidiol can be marketed, um, and sold.
Because now we know that cannabidiol is a drug.
It's an effective drug for certain indications.
And selling it as supplements or infusing, you know,
food with cannabidiol, um, is in conflict with this idea
that-- that cannabidiol is-- is a medicine.
Epidiolex was approved by the FDA a year ago.
It's a drug made by GW Pharmaceuticals, which
is a British company that filed a patent in the United States.
Because THC is still a Schedule I federal drug,
even though the FDA has approved this drug,
Epidiolex, and it is being sold in the United States
at $30,000 a dose, by the way.
And it is, it's the real plant. It's not a synth.
A highly concentrated CB drug called--
You want to help me with this too?
-Epi-DI-olex is currently-- -Mm. Epi-DEE-olex.
-Yeah. Thanks. -You did it well.
Yeah. Thank you. I got a compliment.
[laughter]
[Casey] The problem for people like Caitlyn
is she can't get the medication that she needs.
As of right now, Louisiana will only store
tincture on its shelves. They can't get flower.
She can't get distillate, they can't get gummies.
She told me that gummies were the only thing
her son will take and she can't get those in Louisiana.
What are people supposed to do? Where are you supposed to go?
Where are you supposed to turn to if you can't get
the medicine that your family needs?
So to us, it kind of breaks down like this:
This plant, which helps millions of people has such
a stigma attached to it for over a hundred years
because of racism that people can't get past certain
prejudices today.
And it's still affecting many people up until now.
[Kevin] And we've ti-- You know, and you sit down
and you talk with these state senators
and they'll tell you, Listen, I really don't
have a problem with this, but, you know,
my sheriff and DA will make sure I never get elected
again if I vote with you on this.
[Casey] Because they make their monies off of prisons?
[Kevin] And diversion programs.
One of the-- the key wording that I tell advocates
is, Don't say people going to jail for cannabis.
Talk about people being entered
into the criminal justice system.
Because what they do, the DAs and the sheriffs,
depending on the parish.
In some parishes, DAs run div-- diversions,
in others, sheriffs do.
They allow you to pay to get into a system
that you can pay for your own urinalysis
of 18, 24, 36 months, and then you are under
the heel of that sheriff and DA until
your um, until your diversion program is over.
And these sheriffs and DAs can make millions of dollars
a year off of diversion programs.
And that's monies they do not have to ask
their parish governments for.
So they basically run their operations off the back
of, um, cannabis, uh, uh, people and they talk about,
Oh, we brought all the stakeholders to the table.
Well, the stakeholders was the Louisiana Medical Society,
the She-- the Louisiana Sheriffs Association
and the Louisiana District Attorney's Association.
There was no representation of patients,
of- of civil rights or criminal justice reform advocates.
They were not even invited to the table
because we were not considered worthy.
We weren't stakeholders.
Well, quite simply when it comes to cannabis
and to a greater extent the drug war in general,
is there is no equal justice.
There's justice for poor people
and then there's justice for everybody else.
Most people have a stigma and they've been very well
indoctrinated through the War on Drugs
to say that this is bad.
And so in order for people's minds to change
and to really open up and understand the potential
benefits of cannabis, that applies to the legislators too.
And-- and it applies to Congress.
[Casey] Do you feel like it's been a little bit harder
to pass in places like Louisiana because there's still
a little bit of that, kind of old-school racism
kind of going on in the House with some of the older--
Not saying anyone specifically.
Well, particularly on this issue,
I don't see that as a factor because when I lobbied,
my colleagues and I worked with them,
I had no person of color that I spoke about.
I spoke about the issue.
The issue was the debilitating conditions of autism.
Those who voted yes were white and Black.
Some of the most conservative people of this state
in the body voted yes because of the fact
that they were people, they had family and friends
who were affected by this condition,
which had no color to it.
You know, so on that issue, you know, I-- You know,
I denounced the part of racism, un-involving it.
It was just people doing what people need to do for people.
And so you need to have people that are really advocating
for how and why we should legalize this federally.
And I think that typically we see once two-thirds
of the states tend to make a movement on a state
by state level towards some measure of legalization
of anything, something like gay marriage, for example.
We have sports betting, but that came through
a Supreme Court ruling which really legalized
it across the country.
But if you-- you start to look back at those things
in the political movements, once a certain
threshold has been met of the states legalizing it,
it's typically the tipping point from a federal
perspective as to when it goes legal federally.
[Casey] Now, here's the crazy part of all this
that we learned while doing this film.
While Caitlyn is trying to get medicine for her kid,
she can't get what she wants.
Let's say eventually she does get medical,
but it's too expensive because health insurance
won't pay for it.
What is she going to do? She's going to find a dealer.
She's going to go get that medicine on the black market.
She has no other choice.
So when you look at a place like California
that was expected to take in a billion dollars
in tax revenue in 2019, they only collected 300 million.
So you have to start to wonder, why is that number so off?
It's been a whirlwind year for the recreational
cannabis business here in California.
And transitioning a historically illegal trade
into a fully, legally operable--
legal operation has come with some challenges.
If it was legal, yeah, it definitely would be easier
but there wouldn't be nearly as much money
as there was back in the day in it.
I would say since legalization,
it's kind of been the opposite shift in California.
I would say the black market is thriving more than ever.
Um, which is kind of, you know, a negative for us.
And that's why the state needs to act on what they said.
They would put people in place and they would prosecute
and they would stop illegal activities that are going on.
And then as far as the cultivation in the farms
and everything else, it's too easy to get them passed
through the testing and run it through
other people's licenses.
Or just undercut the business and people
are just moving it because it's significantly cheaper.
I think it was New Jersey or New York had an issue--
I don't remember which state it was, in particular--
Where they're proposing legislation to legalize
and yet they hadn't decriminalized.
So one of the issues was that they would
legalize the use of it, but they hadn't decriminalized it.
So you ended up in this kind of circular reference
where people would be able to go and sell
but then potentially be thrown in jail for it.
But yet they'd get expunged.
And you'd have this vicious cycle of- of kind of confusion
related to what's legal, what's illegal.
You're allowed to do this under state law, but it's not--
It's decriminalized so you're going to get a fine.
And, and there-- There's just been a huge kind of,
theres a huge confusion over the entirety of it.
[Casey] After 100 years of this stuff being illegal,
we've now legalized it in certain places.
But what they're saying is, is you can legally sell it,
you can legally grow it, but if you grow it illegally
and you get arrested for that, it's not illegal.
So you can't really get in trouble.
See how fucked up this all is?
[words on screen]
That's a great question. That's a great question.
I would love to know the answer to that.
It's very, very counterproductive to raise
taxes on any program that is actually benefiting people.
Because people are ultimately more productive
when more of your population is employed,
they're paying greater employment taxes.
Eh, the sales tax revenue alone is a substantial boost.
It keeps money, it keeps money in circulation.
[Casey] Things like the black market are never going
to go away unless you enforce stiff penalties
for those that aren't doing this legally:
the right way and the regulated way.
There's just no other way around it.
When we were filming interviews in Los Angeles,
one of our crew went into a famous dispensary in L.A.,
the one that everybody tells you
when you walk into the place,
it's, It's almost like the Apple Store for weed.
He was trying to buy regular flower,
and the kid behind the counter said to him,
Hey, man, if this is too expensive,
I can meet you after work,
and get it for you for half price.

If they're really worried about all this weed,
like especially in like, Colorado, California,
all these legal states um, going out into
the black market, personally what I feel like the people
that are growing on the black market,
they should given em-- Give them an incentive
to sell it back to the state or to the dispensaries
and get it tested and regulated.
If everything tests clean, then they should sell it
to the dispensaries for them to sell,
versus it leaking out into the "black market."
[Casey] Doesn't it seem like all these problems
could be solved if we just federally legalized it,
treated it like alcohol and cigarettes and let people
use it at their discretion?
People that needed it for medical
could get what they wanted.
People that wanted to use it for recreation
can get what they wanted.
Think about how bad it's been for the past 30 or 40 years
and the problems it's created.
Imagine if in just one fell swoop we could eradicate
all those problems and pump all kinds of billions
of dollars into the economy.
[scintillating instrumental]
[Joshua] The combination of making this, this legal,
uh, you know, significantly cutting back on resources
that municipalities are-- are spending on drug enforcement,
um, as well as, you know, creating jobs,
creating that tax revenue through employment taxes.
Those are all things that if you map out would have such
an-- uh, incredible economic impact on our country.
Yeah, we absolutely need to do it.
There is no better time than now.
[Casey] Let's just say for a moment that the majority
of arrests due to marijuana had a little bit
to do with systemic racism. Let's fast forward to 2020.
These are the number of people that spent time in jail
due to marijuana arrests. Pretty staggering, right?
So now let's take a look at the amount of money
that would be made if marijuana was federally legal.
What could we do with that money?

During the editing of this documentary,
we had the horrible tragedy that was George Floyd.
And what came out of that was L.A. County saying
they were going to defund police by 250 or $150 million.
They want to give that money back
to the African-American community.
We think giving back is a great idea.
However, if you look at the amount of money spent
on marijuana arrests, around 6 billion,
why not take that money
and give it back to the communities?
Stop making those arrests
and use that tax money to give back.

If you were to take a 10-year period
and say 120 billion is going to be made,
what if you took half that money,
sixty billion, and gave it back
to African-American communities to use
throughout the United States?
Seems a lot better than defunding police.
I don't know. That's just kind of the way it seems to us.
Furthermore, what's crazier about this whole situation
is instead of taking suit from places like Colorado,
California decided they were going
to increase marijuana tax.
So if you're a guy who doesn't make a ton of money
but you want to buy marijuana, you're going to go
to the illegal places because the taxes have gone up.
So California should be decreasing their taxes,
taking that money and giving it back
to the communities that need it.
I mean, this just seems so backwards.
Somebody really needs to come in and make these decisions
and sort this whole thing out.
Our industry is going to pay for sure.
It's all about how the politicians
spend it at that point, right?
We're going to add to the budget without a question.
Hopefully we vote people in that spend
the money correctly, right?
It's not about people are getting high
or we have moral objections about this,
it's about taxes and is it regulated?
Are w-- Is the government getting their side
or their change from it? Their part of it, you know?
Is it happening right? Or... Or is it not?
And that's really what's going on.
Unfortunately, we live in a country where our government
is focused on, on forever increasing budgets,
increasing the number of employees and increasing
the resources they have at their disposal to enforce.
And they need laws to enforce.
So you can't have expansion of government
and a reduction in need for government
oversight at the same time.
[Casey] And before you go jumping to conclusions
and think our solution to all this is to accumulate
tax money and give that to undeserved communities,
you have to look at this:
If you're a conservative person,
if you're a business-minded person,
if you're an investor or a real estate magnate,
because of the pandemic, corporate offices
are going to lose about a 50% in capacity.
They're talking about scenarios where one guy
works in the office Monday, Wednesday, Friday,
and someone else works in the office Tuesday and Thursday.
So you're going to start losing billions of dollars
on a city by city basis because of corporations
pulling out of big offices.

I feel like we've come up with a pretty good solution.
We've just got to convince those people
that still think this stuff is bad, that they're wrong.
We have the opportunity to literally eliminate
black markets, lower crime.
We have the opportunity to also improve the economic
status of every state, every individual that participates
or has an interest in participating in the industry.
I don't-- I don't have a client that doesn't have a,
that doesn't have a customer that doesn't have that story.
Um, and, you know, I have to go into my clients' businesses
and, and I'm there and-- and you hear those stories
again and again and again and again, and the industry
is just full of people that are just overjoyed
and-- and, and, um, thriving because of their ability
to get marijuana.
And it's-- it's-- it's, it's really encouraging.
Really encouraging.
I think just b-- More big pharmaceuticals need to get
involved in wanting to be a part of it, obviously, I think.
We all know, I think that's like, the main reasons,
the money inside of pharmaceuticals
kind of holds that to a stronghold.
I love being in the legislature.
I love helping people.
I hate that it's so slow.
I hate that the process is so slow.
And I hate that the government is-- is so into everything
that it doesn't have a clear path forward,
where we should want to help everybody
and good people across the board.
And the only way this industry is going to-- to be credible
is if we all get together and we start self-policing
uh, all, all of these, these requirements
that we want to put into place.
Then the federal legislation will happen
and it will happen easier.
There's so many factors at work,
state by state, but from a federal perspective.
I think that's why I look at it and say the STATES Act,
whatever the state wants to do, the state has control
over the market themselves within their own state
that I think that's going to be the one that's really
going to be the first movement
towards a federal legalization program.
And it's federalism.
So it kind of, you know, brings it all back to where
we used to be years and years ago.
[Casey] Like the ACLU said,
[Casey speaking words on screen]




[Casey] It's clear that the majority of Americans
want legal marijuana but it's going to require
cannabis-supporting lawmakers inserted into leadership
roles for them to truly lead the charge
in federal legalizations.
Make sure you go out and vote, vote for the right people.
When it comes to cannabis, have an open mind.
If there's anything about you or even your grandmother
that is anti-cannabis,
I implore you to do your research.
Share that research with your grandma,
your grandpa and with your legislators,
because knowledge is absolutely power.
[Casey] So at the end of the day,
what we have is a plant, a medicine,
a drug that's less harmful than alcohol,
less harmful than tobacco, the two most profitable
products available everywhere and taxed by the government.
It's time for the government to step up
and legalize marijuana federally.
It's time to federally create jobs for people
and put a stop to the ones that are selling it illegally.
Because if we can't come to an agreement
on how this is all going to be treated,
at the end of the day, it's only going
to remain barely legal.




[soothing instrumental]