“San Francisco is much more about organized crime, both cartel-backed organized drug dealing, and then the organized retail-theft industry, which is driven by the addicts who are supplied by those cartel-supply drug dealers. Oakland is different. Oakland is much more opportunistic, more entrepreneurial, if you will. I think it’s mostly just kind of self-organized crews of thieves who just drive around doing crimes: dipping, which is car break-ins, armed carjackings, home invasions …”
Leighton Woodhouse is an investigative journalist, documentary filmmaker, and a native of Berkeley, California. He has been documenting the “street addiction crisis” engulfing the Bay Area, and the political culture and policies fueling it.
“We don’t arrest people, and we certainly don’t send them to mandatory treatment. And what it means is that we’re just allowing the addiction to continue to consume them, because we haven’t forced them into sort-of that moment where they have to choose: Am I going to fight this addiction, or am I going to spend the next 10 years in prison? It takes that kind of a choice to break through the fog of addiction, and we’re not giving people that opportunity anymore,” says Mr. Woodhouse.
Mr. Woodhouse is also the co-founder of the “Public” publication on Substack with Michael Shellenberger, and a key investigator of the Twitter Files. In this episode, we discuss the limits of free speech and dive into the Bay Area ideology of left-wing libertarianism.
Watch the video:
“Harm reduction has evolved into something much more—in my view—monstrous, where literally encouraging people to quit using drugs is seen as oppressive. It seems somehow, like ‘how dare you judge a drug user?’” says Mr. Woodhouse.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Leighton Woodhouse, it’s such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Leighton Woodhouse: Thanks for having me.
Mr. Jekielek: Over a year ago, you wrote a really thoughtful piece about marijuana being the new Oxycontin. Also, you view what has happened in the Bay Area as a nucleus for extreme progressivism. Let’s start with the reporting that you did on marijuana and how everything about it has changed in the present day.
Mr. Woodhouse: I grew up in Berkeley, California, where most people would suspect there’s a lot of marijuana. California is famous for having the best marijuana because of Humboldt County. Even back then, it was pretty potent. I'd say it was probably around 10 percent THC [Tetrahydrocannabinol] for the stuff from Humboldt County that was famously strong. That would be considered a very weak strain of marijuana today, because what is being produced now and that really came into its own after legalization in California is just a completely different drug than what I knew when I was a kid.
First of all, most of it is not the flower portion. It’s concentrated in products like edibles and even beverages. The way that they produce that stuff is they take the marijuana flower, they pulverize it, they put it in a tube, and they run chemicals like butane through it, which strips the THC out of the marijuana flower and distills it into a wax.
Then they can make it even more potent by putting it in a high-pressure oven and get it up to its highest potency, 95 percent approaching 100 percent THC. Most of the stuff they sell at dispensaries is probably somewhere in the 60 percent range, maybe up to 80 percent for the very strong stuff. Maybe you can get stuff as low as 30 percent. Any of those is considered high potency THC. Anything above 15 percent is high potency THC. This stuff is not the same drug that Cheech and Chong were smoking.
I learned about the medical effects of marijuana when I was writing the article and interviewing experts and researchers on it. When you get paranoid from marijuana, that is actually a symptom of psychosis. It’s a very low-level symptom of cannabis-induced psychosis. You may have had that experience where you smoked weed and got paranoid. I have definitely had that experience, and that’s why I don’t smoke weed. That’s how I experienced it when I was a teenager.
If you’ve had that experience smoking weed, that means that you are susceptible to having a full-blown psychotic episode if you do high-intensity cannabis. If you have a full-blown psychotic episode and you continue to use the drug you’re vulnerable to becoming schizophrenic. There’s a lot of cases of people who have had psychotic episodes where they’ve committed suicide. There are cases where people just chronically having these psychotic episodes have threatened the lives of others. Then the long-term danger is that you can become permanently schizophrenic from cannabis abuse.
I wrote that article and a lot of people accused me of reefer madness or of being a prude. I want to make it clear, I wasn’t writing about smoking a joint or even taking a bong trip and smoking flower. That doesn’t concern me and that stuff is irrelevant. I’m talking about this very, very high-potency THC made today that is totally unregulated and is legal. You can buy it at any dispensary. There are probably 15 dispensaries within three miles of here where you can buy these products.
Mr. Jekielek: When you mention Oxycontin, you’re really talking about addiction. That’s where you’re making that connection.
Mr. Woodhouse: There are a couple of comparisons. First of all, I want to be clear that this high-potency THC is an addictive substance. Everybody is used to the idea that marijuana is non-addictive or that it’s only psychologically addictive. This high-potency THC is addictive and people can go through withdrawal symptoms.
As a matter of fact, people tend to smoke or consume edibles because they think that it relieves their stress, when in fact the stress is induced by withdrawal. It’s a vicious cycle. People think that it’s medication, but it’s actually medication for the withdrawal that you’re experiencing from not taking the product. It is addictive.
The comparison to Oxycontin is really more about the marketing of the product and the way in which it has been propagandized as medicine. Just like Oxycontin, it is the cure for the pain and this chronic condition that we had ignored until now, but now we have a solution for it.
A lot of these states initially passed medicinal marijuana legislation before it became fully legal with recreational marijuana. You can still go and get a medical card from a doctor. It’s completely bogus. Literally, there’s a website called NuggMD where you can call them within five minutes. They don’t turn down anybody.
This is the only medicine where everybody can get it. You get a prescription to get as much as you want. You don’t have to refill it. You just have this card and basically the card is a discount card. You get a break from certain kinds of taxes.
This whole idea that it’s medicine is a total pretense. A lot of the corporations behind alcohol and pharmaceuticals have heavily invested in this industry. There is corporate backing and a corporatization of this addictive and dangerous drug. That’s where the comparison to Oxycontin comes into play.
Mr. Jekielek: Why are they investing in them so heavily? Are they looking for a new market?
Mr. Woodhouse: I think it’s the future. There are a lot of people who might not drink a lot. They hear that marijuana is this natural product that’s medicinal and that will help with their stress or their back pain. It’s a whole new market of people who normally wouldn’t partake in substances that frequently. They’re very open-minded to cannabis.
There’s a couple of things. First of all, it’s a way to access a new market. Also, it’s just the future, and it was inevitable. All these states are legalizing it. Of course, everyone is going to get into it and ride this train. A lot of states have legalized marijuana to revive their entire state’s economies.
These local governments and state governments see this as a revitalization of the local economy, bringing back agriculture and manufacturing, whichever category you want to put marijuana cultivation into. This is a new tax base. This is seen as a panacea, not just in terms of health, but in terms of local and state economies. This is a huge opportunity for these corporations.
Mr. Jekielek: This reminds me of gambling, but it’s sold as something healthy.
Mr. Woodhouse: There has been this bait-and-switch around cannabis. First of all, there was this idea of a criminal black market of marijuana cultivation. The idea is that if you legalize it, then you’re going to get rid of that criminal element. You’ve heard this argument a million times. There was another argument that this is going to be a new tax base, as I just mentioned.
What’s happening is that the black market for marijuana has not gone away. As a matter of fact, it has expanded. If you talk to people in Humboldt County, where traditionally the black market for marijuana was, the cartels are getting into marijuana cultivation in Humboldt County. Along with the cartels has come sex trafficking and all these other criminal enterprises that come along with that criminal industry.
The footprint for black market marijuana has actually expanded in the United States. A lot of what was happening across the border in Mexico has moved to this side of the border. Now, these politicians are talking about cutting taxes for marijuana cultivation on the pretext that legal marijuana can’t compete with black market marijuana.
We were promised the criminal element would go away and that it would be this new tax base. Now they’re saying we should tax marijuana less because the criminal element has not gone anywhere. This is a huge bait-and-switch.
Mr. Jekielek: When I lived in Vancouver, people would say that the biggest cash crop in British Columbia was marijuana. Is that what is driving this?
Mr. Woodhouse: I think it’s just business. It’s just good old-fashioned American capitalism. I was hearing stories about the consequences of this stuff. There’s a guy who lives not far from here whose kid just had a psychotic break and drove his car into the bay. A psychiatric social worker told me a story of a guy who climbed a 700-foot crane. He didn’t jump, thank God. He was considering jumping off, not because he was suicidal, but because he thought that he was in the matrix and that if he jumped off, he would just bounce right back.
These are severe cases of psychosis. Then there is chronic depression and all these other mental illnesses that come out of this abuse. I wish that we hadn’t gone for straight legalization. I understand the argument for decriminalization and I support decriminalizing marijuana. People should not have been going to prison for 5, 6, or 7 years on a marijuana charge, which I think is ridiculous.
Decriminalization and legalization are two different things. Decriminalization means you’re no longer going to lock people up for a marijuana offense. Legalization means the door is wide open. Corporations can come right in and market it all they want. Jumping straight to legalization was a huge mistake. We actually could have foretold that it would drive a lot of the innovation that has made the substance much more addictive, much more dangerous, and much more deadly.
Mr. Jekielek: The ideology emanating from Berkeley and from San Francisco is that all drugs should be legal.
Mr. Woodhouse: I’ve written about this before. The Bay Area has really unique politics. People tend to think of the Bay Area as very liberal, very progressive, maybe even radically Left-wing, and that’s true. That misses a big element of the politics here, because it is also very a libertarian culture.
There is this Left-wing libertarianism here, which accounts for the fact that we allow open-air drug dealing without criminal enforcement. We allow open-air drug use. We allow people who are severely addicted to drugs to go untreated and just camp out on the streets. We simply have stopped prosecuting crimes in Oakland.
Yes, all this stuff emanates from this progressive, Left-wing ideology. But it’s also more of a libertarian ideology that sees any constraints or acts of coercion or even institutional power as somehow wrong. You just can’t govern a society that way.
Mr. Jekielek: Before we continue, please tell us about yourself, because you’re from the Bay area. You’ve seen how it has changed since your childhood.
Mr. Woodhouse: I was born and raised in Berkeley at the tail end of the 60s. For me, the 60s feels like it was like a hundred years ago. Now, in retrospect, I think about how the classrooms all had the doves with the olive branch and all the peace signs. All the holdovers from the 60s were all over our classrooms and just everywhere in Berkeley.
It’s not like that anymore in Berkeley. I grew up at the tail end of that generation that came through the Bay Area. A lot of that libertarianism, like the back-to-the-land movement and the entire new Left, was very much present during that era. The new Left of the 60s was very much an individualist, libertarian movement.
There is the speech that Mario Savio famously gave on the steps of Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley where he talks about how we have to throw our bodies on the wheels of the machine and stop it from moving. There’s a moment before that, which is not so famous, where he talks about the union workers in Sproul Hall behind him. He says to the crowd, “These members of the painter’s union are up there. They have not agreed with our request to stop their work while we do this occupation.” Then he starts going off on the unions.
Then he backs off and says, “We don’t want to blame the workers for the shortcomings of their union.” I found it really interesting because it was expressive of the break of the new Left from the old Left, that old materialist Marxist Left, which was very much embedded within the labor movement in the United States.
The new Left was a reaction to that, and a reaction to the New Deal. The New Deal was about scaling up all these huge government institutions and these public works projects, and along with it came the scaling up of mass politics. The Port Huron Statement that Tom Hayden wrote starts off saying, “We’re the children raised in relative privilege.”
It was about how our generation is about self-fulfillment and self-affirmation and not being part of this big war machine, and there’s a lot of noble sentiments in it. But it’s very much about declaring their independence from mass politics, from corporate culture, and from everything big and institutional and standardized and uniform.
That was very much what Mario Savio’s speech was about. It was a very individualist and libertarian movement where they were freeing themselves from the shackles of this machine and the system. The most radical exponent of it were the hippies who literally went up to Northern California or New Mexico or the Hudson Valley and started creating their own little utopias outside of the oversight of government and the larger mainstream society.
It has this Left-wing cast to it because it was the 60s and these were hippies. But it’s really almost like an Ayn Rand kind of thing, and you could see this being a Right-wing movement too. There have been Right-wing movements that are similar to this. That libertarianism was very much part of that new Left generation during their mobilization, and it is very much expressed in today’s politics in the Bay Area.
Mr. Jekielek: What do you call today’s progressive Left? Is it still the new Left? They seem to be all about institutional power and coercion and affecting power by those means.
Mr. Woodhouse: There are a lot of contradictions within this movement. I can speak most clearly about California and specifically, Northern California. There’s a really amazing book I read, an old book called Albion Seed, which is about the settlement of the United States in the colonial era by different waves of migrants from England. It describes the wave of Puritans who came into New England.