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Life & Times Transcript

4/26/07

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

The debate over medical marijuana reaches a new forum. Will Orange County side with the voters or the feds?

Alan Bock>> It's just a matter of people being kind of stuck in the status quo and assuming that, if they touch this third rail of endorsing the medicinal use of marijuana, they're going to be hurt politically.

Val Zavala>> And then, he made a name for himself with "The Civil War". Will Ken Burns be able to conquer World War II?

Those stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> Could the latest identification card be for people who are allowed to smoke pot? Well, recently the Orange County Board of Supervisors voted to regulate medical marijuana and part of the plan is to issue identification cards to patients with cancer or AIDS. As Orange County reporter, Roger Cooper, tells us, it's the latest in the battle over medical marijuana that started eleven years ago when California voters approved Proposition 215.

Roger Cooper>> It's the notorious plant that has launched a legal battle among the feds, the states and individuals coping with disease and pain. That little green plant is marijuana.

Marla James>> "I'm forty-six years old. I am a medical marijuana user and I am not a criminal."

>> "Under federal law, a doctor can't give a prescription for marijuana because it's a forbidden drug."

Roger Cooper>> Back in 1996, California voters passed a medical marijuana initiative, Proposition 215.

>> "Further discussion on this item."

>> "I'll move it."

Roger Cooper>> Now the issue has reached the halls of the Orange County Board of Supervisors. On their agenda, a motion that would prepare the way for Orange County to issue identification cards to medical marijuana users. A piece of plastic like this one from Contra Costa County would tell law enforcement that the cardholder has a doctor's permission to smoke marijuana.

Katherine Smith>> "I am an unlikely speaker for this particular item, being a fourth generation Californian and Republican."

Roger Cooper>> Katherine Smith told supervisors that marijuana can help cancer patients who are too nauseous to eat.

Katherine Smith>> "In 1977, my stepmother, beloved to me, came down with cancer of the pancreas and, if any of you have ever experienced a loved one who has wasting syndrome, you have not lived because I can tell you that it really changes your life."

Roger Cooper>> Marla James said, for other patients, marijuana is the only answer to excruciating pain.

Marla James>> "And this does help the pain, especially the nerve pain when something is cut off. My leg was cut off and my nerves still think my leg is there and it's very painful."

Roger Cooper>> But Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas staunchly opposes the medical marijuana identification cards.

Tony Rackauckas>> "If I were somebody who liked, you know, smoking marijuana for whatever the various reasons are, you know, if you just like to escape from the realities of life and get high once in a while, I would enjoy going to the health care agency and getting an identification card.

If I got an identification card, I'd look at this and I'd just go, "Wow, this is my license to use marijuana, to smoke it wherever I want, whenever I want in Orange County issued by the county of Orange."

Roger Cooper>> But Orange County may not have a choice. A state law passed four years ago requires counties to set up systems to provide medical marijuana patients with ID cards.

Los Angeles County has moved forward and is poised to issue identification cards in June. But other counties, including San Diego and San Bernardino, are suing the state hoping to get the identification card law overturned. In Orange County, the issue has come down to this vote.

Chris Norby>> "And if this is something that can give them relief, we really have to today I believe start a process of accommodating that."

Roger Cooper>> But the years of legal wrangling frustrates people like Anna T. Boyce. She is a registered nurse and one of the co-authors of Proposition 215. Boyce says that the district attorney has it wrong.

Anna T. Boyce>> I object to his making it sound like a curse, meaning that people are using this to get high, pretending they're ill, pretending that they're dying just to get some cannabis.

Roger Cooper>> But District Attorney Rackauckas points out that, even though voters approved marijuana for medical use, it's still a conflict with federal law. In the federal system, marijuana is still classified as a Schedule 1 drug, meaning it cannot be prescribed.

Alan Bock>> Federal law is absolute prohibition because they have chosen to put marijuana on Schedule 1 under the Controlled Substances Act.

Roger Cooper>> Alan Bock is Senior Editorial Writer at The Orange County Register. He wrote this book, "Waiting to Inhale: The Politics of Medical Marijuana". Bock argues that the political debate would be resolved if marijuana were reclassified and moved out of the Schedule 1 category.

Alan Bock>> I would argue that it is there illegally because the criteria to be on Schedule 1. Let me read that. "A, the drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse; B, the drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States; C, there is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision." Marijuana does not meet any of those criteria.

Roger Cooper>> The motion to study medical marijuana identification cards was introduced by supervisor chairman, Chris Norby, who urged his colleagues to act despite the federal conflict.

Chris Norby>> The feds are out of line on this and I think it's really up to us at the county level and the state level to lead them. Our congressional delegation has done it. Four out of six of them have supported respecting state practices here. If there was a national vote today, I have no doubt that voters would vote for this nationwide.

Roger Cooper>> Alan Bock says it's still hard to have a rational discussion on what has always been a hot-button issue.

Alan Bock>> I think it's just a matter of people being kind of stuck in the status quo and assuming that, if they touch this third rail of endorsing the medicinal use of marijuana, they're going to be hurt politically, which is very odd because every survey shows seventy to eighty percent of the American people approve of the idea.

Roger Cooper>> Supervisor Bill Campbell says he's willing to take another look at the medical marijuana issue.

Bill Campbell>> "When I was in the state legislature, some of these laws came before us and I tended to vote no against them because, at that time, I couldn't find peer-reviewed medical evaluations done in the United States that indicated there was medical efficacy to marijuana. Since that time, there have been peer reviews. The most recent one is this one out of the University of California San Francisco Medical Facility. It does indicate there is an efficacy to it."

Roger Cooper>> District Attorney Rackauckas cautioned supervisors that marijuana identifications will not shield patients from federal prosecution. On the contrary, he says that the feds could use the cards to track down users. The D.A. also predicts that the identification cards will be an open invitation for illegal growers to step up their shipments to Orange County.

Tony Rackauckas>> "It's going to encourage a lot of people, not just a few people, but a lot of people, maybe thousands and thousands of people, to go over to the health care agency to get one of these identification cards. It's going to increase the demand for marijuana very substantially in our county."

Roger Cooper>> So what did the Orange County Supervisors finally decide? Nothing definitive. They voted four to one to study medical marijuana identifications over the next ninety days and some said that their vote in favor of the study doesn't mean they'll necessarily vote to implement it. So the controversy over this little green plant goes on. In Orange County, I'm Roger Cooper for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> So what do you think is the best way to regulate medical marijuana? You can post your opinion. Just go to kcet.org and click on the Life and Times Blog.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> It's a major seven-part documentary about World War II coming to PBS in September by Ken Burns. But for the past couple of months, Latino groups have been up in arms, angry that Burns did not include their experience in the series. Well, now PBS and Burns have agreed to amend the series and include the Latino experience.

I talked with Ken Burns before the controversy broke out about how he approached this major chapter in American history. Ken Burns tells the story of World War II, as he says, "from the bottom up through the eyes of ordinary people."

>> "It was on one of my very early missions that I first knew that I had killed men. I remember the impact it had on me when I could see my bullets just tearing into them and I was doing it knowing I had to do it, that it was my job."

Val Zavala>> In the war, you focus on four cities and towns in the United States. How did you choose them?

Ken Burns>> We wanted to pick towns that were geographically representative of the United States. We chose Waterbury, Connecticut, a gritty mill town; Mobile, Alabama, old south; we picked Laverne, Minnesota, a small tiny farming community in Minnesota; and we picked Sacramento.

We knew from the very beginning that we wanted to tell the story of a West Coast town, but also focus on the Japanese American story. Not just the more familiar story of internment, but the fact that out from those camps came young men who were asked to volunteer for specific combat duty.

Essentially, they were cannon fodder in the beginning of the war in Italy and later in France. They distinguished themselves so remarkably that their story is very, you know, unknown and we wanted to celebrate that.

Val Zavala>> And who was the main person or voice that we hear coming out of Sacramento?

Ken Burns>> Well, we have several. We have three or four Japanese Americans who describe not only the moment of Pearl Harbor and that kind of "Uh-oh, this is not right" to the horrible internment where the families are snatched up, given a week's time, only what you can carry in one suitcase, and moved inland.

They're American citizens, many of them citizens, and they organized the camps just like they would Americans with baseball leagues and PTAs and Boy Scouts and things like that, but they're under armed guard.

Val Zavala>> Not included in the original series was the experience of about half a million Latinos, mostly Mexican Americans who served in the war. That led to an outcry from Latino groups who demanded to meet with PBS and their premier documentary filmmaker.

Ken Burns>> You begin to realize that we can't touch every base, as we couldn't do in "The Civil War", but we can show representative stories. We can introduce you to a couple of men and then drop them into D-Day and that will stand in for everyone's experience.

Of course, somebody is going to say, "Oh, you didn't do this, or you didn't do that." We couldn't. We didn't want to be an encyclopedia. We didn't want to be the phone book. We wanted to tell a compelling story.

Val Zavala>> Latino groups persisted and, in the end, Ken Burns agreed to incorporate the experience of Latinos in the seven-part series.

Ken Burns>> We also have the home front in which many of the most important characters in our film are women struggling to, you know, be at home in the face of the worry they have for a brother or a husband or a father, or working in factories and having their own social status changed.

>> "We had started losing boys in the neighborhood. The boy up here on the corner was a Navy pilot and he was killed. The boy down the street was an Air Force pilot and he was missing in action. It was a very, very fearful time."

Val Zavala>> Of course, we're in wartime now. Do you hope that this documentary will change our attitude toward war? Will make us more cautious about going to war?

Ken Burns>> Well, always that's what you want people to do. This film is not a political film in that small "p" kind of way. We're interested in telling what happened. We call it "The War", which is what anybody who takes a look at the horrible twentieth century refers to the Second World War as, but in some ways, it's about any war.

The truths of this war are very echoed today in our own experience right now, but I'm sure it's also true of some ancient Peloponnesian war where soldiers are complaining about not getting the right equipment, they're doubting the sanity of the commanders who are sending them into battle and the uselessness of some fights and the tendency that's in almost every human breast to get excited about war and then, as its realities are presented to you, suddenly draw back and go, "Maybe not."

Val Zavala>> I understand that some of the archival footage that you are using is very graphic, very violent.

Ken Burn>> Well, I think that people know deep down that all wars are horrible, but I think what happens is that as time progresses, we need to smother them with a kind of gallant, bloodless myth. A lot of that has sort of grown up around and obscured what happened in the Second World War.

We're also in a celebrity culture distracted by the big names. You know, we focus usually in World War II stuff on presidents and prime ministers and the famous generals. We then obscure our ability to actually understand what actually happened. What is battle like? What is war like?

So we took years and years and years and we went into the depths of the National Archives and went around the world to archives in Tokyo, in Moscow, in Berlin and London and hundreds of other places to find the material. Some of it is quite graphic. The worst stuff, we didn't put in. None of it is, we believe, gratuitous, but we wanted to give people a sense of what it was like.

>> "I don't think there is such a good thing as a good war. There are sometimes necessary wars and I think one might say just wars. I never questioned the necessity of that war and I still do not question it."

Val Zavala>> Now you know American history better than most of us. Did anything in particular surprise you in the course of the research for this documentary?

Ken Burns>> Well, I'm an amateur historian at best, so I try to pick subjects that I don't know about and get to know them. Every day, it was a surprise, continual surprises about just the complexity, the depth, the horror of the war. You know, people have referred to the Second World War as the "good" war. How could it be the good war? It's the worst war.

It's the biggest cataclysm in the history of the world, manmade, and it snuffed out the lives of between fifty and sixty million people. This is not a good war and we tried to honor the experiences of the young men, late teenagers and early twenties, who went over there and helped save the world on our behalf.

The world we enjoy was delivered courtesy of their sacrifice. These guys are now dying off at a rate of a thousand a day and we're obligated as citizens of this country, particularly in difficult times like these where we're struggling to find common purpose and common direction, to look back at their experience and that can be a valuable lesson to us today.

Val Zavala>> Ken Burns, thank you for your time and thank you for bringing so much to the American people.

Ken Burns>> Thank you.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

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Larry Mantle>> Welcome to FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC. Our first film this week is the thriller, "Next". It stars Nicolas Cage as a small-time Vegas magician who can get glimpses of the future. Well, the FBI finds this to be an invaluable service and, in the person of Julianne Moore, they seek to collaborate with him. Jessica Biel costars in the film.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> I'm joined this week by critics Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com and, from City Beat, Andy Klein. Henry, what did you think of "Next"?

Henry Sheehan>> Well, I thought it was a ball. I thought it was a very good action movie. You know, Hollywood prides itself on action movies (laughter), but it's been on a pretty bad run. There have been some pretty terrible ones.

This movie stars Nicolas Cage as a cheap Las Vegas lounge magician who actually has the power to see into the future for two minutes if the future affects him, except for one vision of a beautiful woman he has which is sometimes further in the future.

Well, he gets involved with the FBI who wants to use his powers to find a stolen nuclear weapon that some terrorists have hidden somewhere in Los Angeles, and we find out that the beautiful woman is Jessica Biel who is a very beautiful woman.

It's just wonderful. It's the kind of film you could cheat because of the seeing into the future thing, but I don't think it does. It does tell you to be on your toes because what you're about to see might be speculative and not real, so you have to keep that in mind the whole time. But I think the film does it honestly.

There are two big huge action scenes which I think are just wonderful state-of-the-art things. It's Lee Tamahori directing from a Philip K. Dick story. He stays away from the kind of schizophrenic paranoia stuff Dick likes and gives us more of a hardboiled action film.

Larry Mantle>> What did you think, Andy?

Andy Klein>> I liked it too. I'm a little less enthusiastic than Henry. You know that I go nuts on films like this trying to get them to make sense. I have to say that this one was way better worked out than usual and it's true that, every time they're pulling a cheat, I realized, no, they've actually established this and the mechanisms by which his precognition work, they've established them pretty well. So I couldn't really get into my high dudgeon mode here. I always enjoy watching Nicolas Cage. The scenes with the FBI I thought were actually kind of bad, but having said that, mostly this delivers and it's a swift piece of work.

Larry Mantle>> The movie, "Jindabyne", is based on a Raymond Carver short story. Gabriel Byrnes stars as a guy who goes on a fishing trip with his buddies. They discover a body in the lake where they're fishing, but decide not to report it until they return. This creates tension with his wife, played by Laura Linney.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Andy, what did you think of "Jindabyne"?

Andy Klein>> I thought this was a very strong film. Essentially, the story is about a woman in Australia played by Laura Linney who has to totally re-evaluate her view of her husband when he comes back from a fishing trip and waits a day to tell her that, on the fishing trip, he discovered a dead body, but he and his buddies didn't want to interrupt their fishing, so they essentially fished for a couple of days next to the dead body and then called the authorities.

If that sounds familiar, it's because the same story was one of the stories that Robert Altman did in "Short Cuts" which was based on a number of Raymond Carver stories. This is an expansion of that one story. Whereas Carver works in miniature, this involves obviously bringing in a huge amount of backstory, flushing out characters who didn't exist in the original story.

Larry Mantle>> So they just used the story as a point of departure for the screenplay?

Andy Klein>> Absolutely. Whereas that was a story about, I think, sort of one person's moral obtuseness and his wife's reaction, this is like a cavalcade of moral obtuseness, including Laura Linney's character who is our protagonist, but she's a questionable character as well.

Henry Sheehan>> I loved the pace of this film, especially in the beginning when it took so much time to establish a very large group of characters and this strange place in the back of nowhere in Australia, this little town. It's not slow, but it's kind of leisurely. It kinds of captures you in that rhythm.

The only problem I had with it is that I think it tried to hit some notes of mysticism. I mean, this is kind of like out of that early Peter Weir, "Picnic at Hanging Rock" school of filmmaking and I thought that didn't always work. But this is a very well-made film and one worth seeing.

Larry Mantle>> Our third film is a slice of life tale that takes us to late 1970s Long Island and clam-diggers who were doing the work the old-fashioned way. Paul Rudd stars in "Diggers".

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Henry, what did you think of "Diggers"?

Henry Sheehan>> Nice little film, I think is the phrase we use for movies like this. Paul Rudd stars as a digger in far eastern Long Island in 1978. Diggers are people who harvest clams from mud flats using a rake rather than machinery and it's the most ecologically sound way of harvesting clams. But a large corporation is buying up the local flats. Paul Rudd's character's father dies. He's at a crossroads of life.

The film is very good at evoking place and groups of characters, milieu and tone and atmosphere. It's kind of plotless, but it's nice to see these characters developing kind of slowly. Maura Tierney plays Paul Rudd's sister. Like I say, nice little film. Don't expect too much, but if you just want to spend some time with some interesting people in an interesting place and time, this is not a bad way to do it.

Larry Mantle>> And finally this week, the movie "Stephanie Daley" starring Amber Tamblyn in the title role.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Amber Tamblyn is "Stephanie Daley". What do you think, Andy?

Andy Klein>> Yeah, she really is and she does a terrific job here. I haven't seen her in other things that really, you know, challenged her. This is a hair-tearing dramatic role. She plays a sixteen year old who gets pregnant, but it's not clear since we get a lot of this in flashback, whether she had any idea she was pregnant. But one day on a ski trip, she miscarries and acts surprised like, you know, what's going on here?

She's being brought up on charges by the D.A. of negligent manslaughter. Tilda Swinton plays the psychologist who's sent to evaluate her, who herself is pregnant to about the same extent. So you get this comparison which is crucial to the psychological development of the story. It's not as much an ideological film as it sounds, although it does have to deal with issues of when you consider a fetus to be human or not.

But mostly this is psychological. I think Swinton is great. I always love her. There are perhaps some other currents going through the story that I don't think get fully developed, but I thought this was an interesting film.

Larry Mantle>> That does it for another FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC joined this week by critics Andy Klein of City Beat and, from henrysheehan.com, of course, Henry Sheehan. Thanks for joining. We'll talk with you next week for the next FilmWeek on Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> For a longer version of FilmWeek, you can tune in to KPCC radio on Fridays at eleven a.m. I'm Val Zavala. That our program. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


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