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Life & Times Transcript

5/25/07

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."

Tony Rackauckus>> "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, 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 identification 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, and 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 called 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 tend 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.

Val Zavala>> As I mentioned, Ken Burns has agreed to amend the series and add material about the Latino and Native American experience in World War II. Latino groups who pressed for the change called it a major victory for the Latino community who has sacrificed so much for this nation.

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

Life and Times
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You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> Los Angeles prides itself on being the city of the future, but it could be on the verge of losing a rare treasure from the past. It's a Frank Lloyd Wright home that's slowly crumbling away, yet if you ask most Angelenos where it is, they'd have no idea. Fortunately, Saul Gonzalez knows the way and he takes us on a tour of a one-of-a-kind home that is now on the endangered list.

Saul Gonzalez>> In the hills of Los Angeles's Los Feliz district high above the din of the city, there's a home like few others in the world. From the outside, the residence looks imposing and mysterious like something that's emerged out of an archeological dig.

Come within and the visitor discovers grand and other-worldly spaces that make you feel like you've been transported to another time and place. There are rooms that balance drama and tranquility, strength and grace. Constructed in 1924 for a wealthy Los Angeles couple, this is the Ennis-Brown House, an architectural landmark created by that titan of twentieth century design, architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Eric Wright>> He was always interested in how he could shape spaces so that the people inside always had this sense of drama, sense of mystery.

Saul Gonzalez>> This man can speak with authority about Frank Lloyd Wright. He is Eric Wright, a noted architect himself, and Frank Lloyd Wright's grandson.

Eric Wright>> Space within the building was the really important thing. He had seen a quote from the great Chinese philosopher Lao Tse which said, "The reality of the teacup is not the teacup itself, but it's the space within the teacup." My grandfather saw that and said that's what I've been trying to do all my life with architecture. The reality of the building is not the building itself, but it's the space within the building.

Saul Gonzalez>> If you want to understand why Frank Lloyd Wright and the buildings he created such as this one are so revered, you have to know something about the man's philosophy of design. For Wright, architecture was about far more than creating spaces to live and work in. It was about the search for truth, beauty and the perfect union of form and function. In his quest, Wright drew his inspiration from nature, thinking about building design in almost biological terms.

Eric Wright>> What he worked with and what he was practicing was organic architecture. By that, he meant that it was like a seed of an oak tree. You plant this little seed and, out of that seed, it's the center, and out of that grows your huge oak tree, but all the essence is in that seed.

Saul Gonzalez>> The essence of the Ennis-Brown House can be found in its building material, concrete blocks, each stamped with an abstract geometric pattern giving the residence its exotic and ethereal feel. Cast on-site during construction, the home is made out of over twenty-four thousand of these blocks locked together like an immense Lego puzzle.

Wright created four textile block homes in the Los Angeles area during the 1920's, with this ten thousand square foot house the largest of the projects. Although it's eighty years old, the Ennis-Brown House seems very much at home in the twenty-first century, says Franklin De Groot, the Director of the nonprofit organization that owns and oversees the house.

Franklin De Groot>> Well, if you think about the fact that this was built in 1924 and you look at the architectural styles of this house versus what was being built elsewhere, it was very cutting edge. It was the idea that the house would be something that would be unique for the area and, in fact, it's proved to be unique even to today.

Saul Gonzalez>> However, this home, for all its undeniable beauty, is in jeopardy. Stand on the street below the residence and you see gaping holes in the building, making the house look, for all the world, like a fortress that's been struck by cannon fire. Gaze closer at the textile blocks on the home's exterior and you find hundreds of them are pitted, cracked and slowly crumbling away.

Franklin De Groot>> Clearly as time has gone on, the damage has continued to get more and more pronounced.

Saul Gonzalez>> Earthquakes, particularly the 1994 Northridge temblor, have caused much of the damage here. However, this home's chief nemesis has been water, water that over the decades has seeped into the textile blocks and ruined them from within. Franklin De Groot showed us some of the damage.

Franklin De Groot>> As you can see, this block is a very good example of a damaged block. This is the kind of damage that occurs when water gets inside the concrete, attacks the steel, causes the steel to rust. The rust, in fact, causes the steel to expand and the expansion then blows out the side of the block, cracks it, and eventually weakens the entire structural system.

Saul Gonzalez>> And what's happened to this one block is happening all around the house?

Franklin De Groot>> In many, many places in the site.

Saul Gonzalez>> This home is in such jeopardy and considered so important that last year it was placed on the list of the globe's hundred most endangered cultural sites by the World Monument Fund. Eric Wright is pleased that the home's sorry condition is finally getting attention, saying it deserves to be protected like a great painting or sculpture.

Eric Wright. I think people have to look at the work of architects, especially the work of my grandfather, Frank Lloyd Wright, as some of the greatest expressions of architectural and creative artistic work in the world.

Saul Gonzalez>> However, Frank Lloyd Wright also bears some responsibility for this home's current condition. Like many of his other projects, his design and material choices make his buildings fragile and difficult to maintain.

Franklin De Groot>> When it rains, this house does leak. It's just one of the facts that you learn to live with in terms of dealing with a Frank Lloyd Wright structure.

Saul Gonzalez>> Frank Lloyd Wright homes need constant tender loving care.

Franklin De Groot>> Yes.

Saul Gonzalez>> Some work has been done to save the Ennis-Brown House. The Getty Foundation has contributed a hundred thousand dollars to both stabilize the building -- that's what these girders are for -- and to conduct site surveys and engineering studies.

However, much has to be done at a cost of ten million dollars if this architectural landmark is to be restored. The building's retaining walls and roof need to be repaired and thousands of damaged textile blocks replaced. Friends of the Ennis-Brown House are trying to raise the repair money and Eric Wright is part of the architectural team drawing up plans to restore the home.

Eric Wright>> I feel a responsibility. I look at it as a responsibility and people have actually --

Saul Gonzalez>> -- to your family? To your profession? To both?

Eric Wright>> To both, and to the public. I mean, they need to see these examples of great architecture. We can't lose them.

Saul Gonzalez>> Franklin De Groot contends that preserving a building like this is especially important in Los Angeles, a city that has allowed too much of its architectural history to vanish.

Franklin De Groot>> We've failed to preserve any of the trappings of our past. Fortunately, there are still some icons left in Los Angeles, but many, many of them have been lost. It's up to us to be sure, here in the twenty-first century, that we don't lose the trappings of where we've come from, what's so important about Los Angeles, why it's such a wonderful city.

Saul Gonzalez>> It's important to our civic civilization?

Franklin De Groot>> Yes.

Saul Gonzalez>> The Ennis-Brown House was further damaged by severe rains in 2005. Conditions were so bad that the city partially yellow-tagged the property. However, the good news is that a massive repair and restoration effort has been launched to save the residence. As part of the work, a fresh concrete foundation has been poured, a new roof put on the house and work continues to replace missing and damaged textile blocks, the home's signature feature.

Frank Lloyd Wright once said he wished to create buildings that graced the landscape, not disgrace it. Funds continue to be raised for additional repairs and improvements so that this home will grace Los Angeles's landscape for countless years to come. I'm Saul Gonzalez for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> I'm Val Zavala. That's 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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