In this episode, Monica Roerig Olano confronts the deep-seated hypocrisy within the alcohol industry and its impact on cannabis legislation. Despite her personal financial stakes—given her family's involvement in New Orleans' bar scene—Monica boldly challenges the misinformation spread by big alcohol companies. She delves into how these entities manipulate laws to favor their interests under the guise of protecting 'the children,' while funding politicians to maintain their grip on public perception. Join Monica as she unravels the complex web of politics and money, advocating for transparency and truth in how our drug policies are shaped. It's time to see beyond the smoke and mirrors and work together to create a fairer world for future generations.
Articles/Research as promised:
John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richeard Nixon
Cannabis Regulation/Origins
https://law.lclark.edu/live/files/28624-lcb233article1vitiellowebsitepdf
Harry Anslinger
https://publicorthodoxy.org/2020/09/03/war-on-drugs-racism/
Alcohol vs Cannabis - health FACTS
https://www.mpp.org/special/marijuana-is-safer/
https://drugabusestatistics.org/alcohol-related-deaths/
Georgia State Economics Study on Alcohol Sales DROPS in Cannabis Friendly Locals
Incarceration Rates for Cannabis Offenses
https://www.lastprisonerproject.org/cannabis-prisoner-scale
Alcohol Deaths and Stats
https://drugabusestatistics.org/alcohol-related-deaths/
Federal Drug Scheduling Info
https://www.dea.gov/drug-information/drug-scheduling
https://www.dea.gov/fentanylawareness
DEA White Paper on Cannabis/Marijuana stating no overdoses related
https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2023-03/Marijuana-Cannabis%202022%20Drug%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf
Republican Party Climate Change Example
Welcome to the pioneering podcast at the intersection of motherhood, mental health technology, and cannabis. It's Mommy's new medicine. Here's your host, Monica Olano.
Welcome back to Mommy's new medicine. This is episode six, and it is coming to you a little bit late if you are an avid listener. The reason being is we're gonna go a little off script from where we've been before the first five episodes. We have really shown you some different guests and some different perspectives. But while getting ready for this episode, there were some new laws and legislations that were proposed in areas of the world of the United States that are important to me, one being Louisiana, one being Iowa. And while I know you are listening from areas outside of those as well, it may only be a matter of time before those type of laws or those type of legislative issues get brought into your state. And I wanted to take a little bit of time to do some research and really put together why these legislations bother me, the information behind them, and why I think that we all need to be aware of this, even if cannabis isn't really your thing. I mean, I'm not somebody that is.
I don't smoke at all. I don't want to put that in my lungs. I have, you know, my cannabis beverage, my THC beverage, which can be five milligrams to ten milligrams in the evening. And that's really my extent of the use. So I'm not a high spender. I'm not an avid user, but the laws would take away some free rights, and they would help some other organizations that don't have our best interests at heart. I truly believe after doing the research. So I'm going to share with you what I found.
Take with it what you will do with it what you will. The one thing that I cannot stress enough is nothing I am saying is to advocate for prohibition of any drug. The facts I bring to the table about alcohol are in no means to judge your alcohol use, and by no means take alcohol away from the general public. I genuinely just want to make sure that everyone is fully aware and educated before they make those decisions. And by no means am I pushing cannabis or wanting to be a drug lord or a drug pusher. I simply am pissed off that it is being stigmatized so alcohol can be promoted. And I want to share a lot of that background with you, because I know growing up, I was told certain things. I flew home to Iowa last week and had a discussion with my grandfather.
And by discussion, he told me all of his opinions and refused to listen to mine. And his opinions are the rhetoric that his generation was taught through the propaganda that was pushed. So that's by no fault of his own that that's what he heard and what was indoctrinated in him growing up. But there is other research out there. It's just very hard to be heard in this country when you don't have a lot of money to push that other information. So I'm taking my small little window. Thank you, my small little neighborhood and niche for listening in. I will ask one favor before I dive in.
If you have found your way to this episode, you must have some interest in what I'm about to tell you. If you could hit pause, hit in whatever platform you're listening to this on, or watching me on, hit like and give a star review or even write a five word review, that would be great, because the algorithm only shares what people tell it to share. So if this is important to you and you also want others to hear by hitting like, by hitting subscribe and by writing a comment, is what's going to help push this message forward. I'll remind you at the end, in case you don't want to hit pause right now or if you're driving, do not hit pause. Do not do any of that until you get to where you are going. Okay? So, digging in, doing some research, this one hit hard. This quote actually made my stomach turn. And it is from John Ehrlichman, may or may not have pronounced his name right.
That is not the point. So he was one of Nixon's aides back in, you know, your sixties and seventies days. But he was tracked down for an interview, and I believe it was 1990, 419 96. And he said, after being annoyed at a series of questions, he stopped the interview. And he said, do you want to know what this is really all about? And the reporter said he asked this with a bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect the Nixon campaign in 1968. This is his words. And the Nixon White House after that had two the anti war left and black people. Do you understand what I'm saying? He said, we knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or be black.
But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and the blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs. Of course we did. So that leads us into the history of cannabis. I think most of us grew up, and I shouldn't assume or summarize, I grew up with parents that were the Reagans, just say, no, don't do drugs, the war on drugs. And it was preached into us that drugs are bad. But did any of our parents or our grandparents or our legislators or our teachers or the D A R e program officers ever give us a reason besides frying the egg and saying, this is your brain on drugs? Did they ever tell us the background of what happened to make this illegal? They didn't.
They just told us it was bad. We needed to accept it, and we need to move on. So if you want to get a little bit of perspective outside of just do this because I said so, that is what I want to talk about today. So for those of you watching this on YouTube, thank you. But it also is not lost on me that I am filming this in my children's playroom. Would I normally film here? No. But I genuinely believe these topics are going to impact the generations after us. If you follow me on LinkedIn, I wrote a big piece on that yesterday, and how the 18 to 45 generation, our voices aren't really heard.
And I think we're sick of our voices not being heard, so we're not being as active. Cannabis prohibition. And how did it come about? In my research, in the 18 hundreds, the early 19 hundreds, marijuana for years and years before us has been used and well known for its medicinal benefits. However, circa around the early 19 hundreds, 1910s, we started having mexican immigration into the country. That is really when the propaganda in the war, per se, not the full fledged war of Nixon's day and age, but the propaganda and the anti marijuana sentiment really began. And it was more based on racist origins than it did have anything to do with medicine itself. Lots of pharmacies, pharmaceuticals, pharmacists, they were deriving different things from the cannabis plant to use. One example was for cholera.
They used cannabis a lot for cholera, because it eased stomach pain, it eased nausea. It was a good medicinal tool for that. However, when the Mexicans started coming in, in the 1910s, they were the first one to bring the marijuana leaf into the public arena. And they would roll it and they would smoke it. And a lot of the general public were, what's a better word? They were racist. I'm just going to say it. They were racist against the Mexicans, and they were really using this as their tool against them. And also, we're getting into the era of the jazz era.
You know, 1910s, 1920s, and who else? Were we racist again back then? Unfortunately, the black people. So cannabis prohibition really began in the early 20th century, and it was completely based on racism and not science. These laws were used to target Latinos and black jazz musicians. There were rumors down in Texas where it really started against the mexican immigration that the mexican immigrants were going to use drugs to attract our school children and rape and kill them. The movie Reefer Madness was used in 1936 as a very public propaganda piece to basically state that marijuana was going to be used by black and brown people to attract our white children to jazz clubs and turn them into drug abusers, and that our white women would sleep with black men. And that is really where the anti cannabis campaign began against scientific research, against scientific recommendations. This continued to get pushed. I probably won't pronounce his name right, and he could be an entire episode on his own.
But Anslinger, he was the head of the federal Bureau of Drugs or something. I will come back and put that exact reference, and I cannot memorize it. But one man led the drug reform for 32 years, and he did not follow the science. He followed the racist beliefs. But, you know, when these laws started softening. So from 1910 to 1920, when they were, you know, against the mexican immigrants and they were against the blacks and they were showing reefer madness, and, well, in 1960s, your white, middle to upper middle class university students, aka, they had to name them the hippies, Nixon's top aides just told you that they were using cannabis. They were using it regularly, and they were using their voices against anti war campaigns, and the government didn't want that. The government had the reasons for their war.
But now, all of a sudden, we couldn't blame everything on racism. It was us white folks. And I want to pause for a second. It is not lost on me that I am a 38 year old, decently privileged, middle to upper middle class white woman in Louisiana, in the south, but born in the midwest. The amount of privilege that I've had given to me is not lost on me. Do I think I should be the voice saying these things? Not necessarily. Do I think my voice might get heard more than some others? I do. I really do.
So it's not lost on me that I'm the one preaching this, but I'm also doing it because I believe I have a platform that can help. So, in the 1970s, states actually began to loosen their criminalization of cannabis, which Nixon did not like. They did not like that, but interesting enough, 49% of white people have reported consuming cannabis at least in their lifetime. This is compared to only 42% of African Americans and only 32% of Latinos. Two thirds of all people in state prisons for drug offenses are people of color. And according to FBI data, half of all drug arrests are for cannabis, 92% of those are for simple possession. And more people are arrested for nonviolent cannabis offenses than for all violent crimes combined. It leads me to the question of why.
So I know that is just a very brief history, and we use some very triggering terms, such as racism, black, latino, fear mongering. They're out there. You can do the research. I'll include the links, because there's no way to cover that in a 30 minutes episode, and we have a lot more to cover. But knowing the background for why cannabis is told to us the way that it is is important when we start comparing cannabis to the hypocrisy of the drugs that are legalized and glamorized to us. In Nixon's day, they came out with the drug scheduling. He got the DEA, they came out with the drug scheduling, where basically, if you're not familiar with drug scheduling, they have a list of scheduled drugs from basically most harmful, most addictive, down to not so much. It is very important to note that alcohol is not even on there, but we'll get to that later.
And they put cannabis as a schedule one drug. For those of you that don't know federally, cannabis is a schedule one drug that is defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use, although there is very, very massive amounts of research contrary to that, and high potential for abuse. Other examples of schedule one drugs are heroin, lsd, and ecstasy. And that is where they put cannabis. Just for a broader reference, schedule two, so defined as less potential for abuse and less potential health effects include vicodin, cocaine, methamphetamines, oxycodone, fentanyl. They have fentanyl listed scheduled as less dangerous than cannabis. I intentionally pause there because I want to let that sink in. We have an entire war on fentanyl happening right now.
The DEA actually has a faces of fentanyl wall special exhibit where they commemorate the lives lost from fentanyl poisoning. Do you think the DEA would have enough room to put the faces of cannabis and put all of the folks whose lives have been ruined by being jailed and having criminal records and losing that family structure for small cannabis offenses? What if they had a wall of that? Do you think the DEA would have room? Or is fentanyl a hot topic button because our kids have touched it and a few white kids are dying from it. You can look up the numbers. I'll put the stats in the show notes. So if you're listening to me and you're like, oh, there's no way that can be true. There's no way they have cannabis like that. I'm in Illinois, and I can go buy pot if I want to. Well, federally, you cannot.
And how. We're kind of at a crossroads right now, and this is all starting to come to a head is the farm bill of 2018. If you're not familiar with it, what the farm bill did was it differentiated hemp from marijuana simply by its THC content. The farm bill legally defined hemp as having less than 0.3% THC and making its cultivation technically legal at the federal level, recognizing its use in products like clothing, food, and CBD oil. Conversely, marijuana has higher THC levels and remains federally illegal due to its classification as a controlled substance. That's legal jargon. What that means is that these places in Illinois and these drinks can cultivate hemp, and they can basically just pull 3% of the THC out of that hemp and then use it to make the drinks. So the only difference is where they're acquiring the THC.
Are they acquiring it from the hemp, or are they acquiring it from the flour? Either way, it's THC, and it does the exact same thing. So the world has found a loophole. You're welcome. And the federal government and the state governments have not caught up yet. However, now let's circle back to why I'm having this discussion today. They are trying to catch up now, and I'm going to go into why they are trying to catch up in a second. But I think before we do that, it is important to really take what we're talking about and contrast it against alcohol, because alcohol is legal. Alcohol is glamorized, and alcohol has been taught to us that it is okay.
If you listen to the episode before this where I had Doctor bath on, he really went into a lot of the health consequences of alcohol that he sees from both a practitioner level as a primary care provider, but as a state legislator, he is also referencing this back to the drastic increases in cancer rates and how highly alcohol is correlated with the increase in cancers and other health effects right now. And to put alcohol into a little bit more perspective, and again, I will say this till I'm blue in the face, I don't want to take your alcohol. If you enjoy your alcohol, God damn it. Enjoy it. That's fine. What I want is when my kids come of age to know the truth about alcohol, I want them to be educated on, this is how alcohol will affect me. This is how nicotine will affect me, and this is how cannabis will affect me. And God damn it, it's their right to get to choose what will affect them.
It is not somebody that's going to make the most money off it telling them what they can and can't do. That is what I'm out here to do. So anyone that gets mad at me that I'm trying to take away your alcohol, call me, talk to me. I don't want to take your alcohol, but let's look at this. 178,000 people die each year from excessive alcohol use. Now, that's pretty broad. That could be quite a few different things, so let's break it down a little bit more. That's 261 alcohol related deaths every day.
95,000 people are the number of alcohol related deaths in the United States annually. If you look at another statistic. But over 10,000 people in one study, 13,000 people in the national highway Traffic Safety Administration studies die of drunk driving deaths in the United States annually. And 47,000 people are the number of deaths attributable to the long term health failure of drinking. So could you have a couple drinks and die today? Yeah, if you get behind the wheel or you get in a car and you're out driving and somebody else had too many drinks. Absolutely. There is no denying that you find me a person that can get on stage, under oath and deny that that can happen, but it's not only just that. One off.
Oh, that was bad luck. These are compound effects. Doctor Baith broke it down. No, you're not going to have two drinks today and get cancer tomorrow from it. We're not telling you that. But every choice you make has a risk, and these risks are now well documented and very well received by the medical community. So every drink you take is having a compound effect on your health. And I said it once, and I'll say it again, what do you want that last decade of your life to look like? Do you want that last decade to be dealing with the health consequences of the drinking you enjoyed in your twenties and thirties? Or would you rather be a little healthier running around with your kids, chasing your grandkids and reducing your risk of health complications? That's up to you.
That is not up to me. I have made my choice. What you choose to do is up to you. What I'm pissed about is the hypocrisy of saying cannabis is bad. Cannabis is going to hurt our children and them. Using children as our scapegoats once again to do their bidding so alcohol can stay as the main drug of leisure or of acceptance and easy to get. It makes me angry and mad just talking about it. And if you think, oh, well, no, I don't understand why you're contrasting alcohol and you're contrasting cannabis.
Well, it's because, on average, this is not just me saying this. A Georgia state economics professor. So nobody in the game with any allegiance to either alcohol or cannabis studied and researched, and this is just prior to 2019. I believe that in areas that legalized marijuana or cannabis, they see, on average, a 13% drop in alcohol sales. Alcohol sales are about $184 billion annually. 184 billion. So if they're losing 13% of their revenue, I will not make you pull over and do the math. I asked AI and chat GPT because honestly, I didn't know how many zeros to put in a calculator for billion.
So I asked AI to do the work for me. That's $23 billion that alcohol stands to lose annually by legalizing cannabis. And that's now, that's when it's not even fully legalized. It's not even fully accepted by the federal government. They still have propaganda campaigns for your parents or you or to teach you that it's wrong and they're still telling you it's gonna hurt our kids. Imagine the revenue loss that's gonna happen when folks listen to podcasts like this that do the research and break it down, when we have politicians that are fighting for cannabis regulations instead of getting paid off by lobbyists. The impact it is going to have on the alcohol industry is massive, and they are going to do everything in their power to not let that happen. So when you hear an anti cannabis thing, propaganda, whatever you want to call it, or someone wants to fight you.
Not fight you, but someone wants to debate with you, well, what about the children, then? Let's talk about our children. Let's do it. So, there's whole divisions on how alcohol specifically targets underage drinkers. Do you know why? Because if their product is killing their regular consumers and their regular consumers die off, they need new people in their funnel. It is marketing 101. You lose customers, you have to replace customers. How are they replacing customers? They've got to go after the kids. So I highly recommend, I'll put the link in this episode, too, that you check out the center on alcohol marketing towards our youth, they have unbelievable data, years and decades of research, hoping to get a guest on here to really go over it.
But again, I also believe everything's all comes down to the money. So I would like to let you know that alcohol companies make at minimum 17 and a half billion dollars a year off underage drinking. What are the rules against marketing to kids? None. Alcohol is a self regulated, for the most part, advertising industry. So they have put self regulations on themselves of how they will, basically they've given you lip service of how they will not go after children. But if you dig into the research, especially that department that I'm going to post in the notes from Boston University, they break their own rules, but who's going to stop them? Who's out there enforcing that? No, we're all busy enforcing the cannabis over here. They're waving the pretty flashy thing over here and they're doing this over here. Now, would you also like to know that every year approximately 3500 people under the age of 21 die alcohol use? I don't know about you, but let's even talk about universities.
How many hazing deaths have we been hearing about? There was a news article just last week down here in Louisiana that at a bar in Tigerland, at LSU, another fight broke out and a guy swung, he missed, and the guy he swung and missed at fell backwards, landed on his head and died. The man that died had a kid under the age of one, I believe, and was simply, I believe, going out for a bachelor party and alcohol fueled it. And here we are. But we don't talk about those things. We don't talk about them in that light at least. What fueled it? What caused it? How many people are dying from drinking every day? No, we're saying that cannabis is going to harm our children. If you go on to the DEA government website, drug enforcement agency, on their drug fact sheet for marijuana, cannabis, what are its overdose effects? No deaths from overdose of marijuana have been reported. None.
How many people have died of alcohol poisoning? How many kids have died of alcohol poisoning? I'm gonna give you a little story time. I was 15. I wanted some booze for some friends with a sleepover. I found somebody that would buy me booze and they bought me fire and ice. Look it up if you don't know it. Do you think a 15 year old girl who doesn't drink has any business drinking fire and ice or knows what the she's doing? She doesn't. So you know what she proceeded to do? She proceeded to drink too much. Her friends freaked out, luckily got her mom, and I was rushed to the hospital and had my stomach pumped.
If my friends wouldn't have done something, if my mom would not have been a nurse, if I wouldn't have went to the hospital, the doctors even said I easily and should have died that night. It's hard. I have a cousin who decided to drink and drive. Do I think that was his first time? No. And he was 18, and he had a 15 year old girl in the car with him. 15 or 16. Drove recklessly. They both died that night.
I was 17 when that happened. I've been exposed to it. I've been part of it. I come from a family where alcohol is glamorized, where alcohol is okay, where last week I didn't order a glass of wine with my family, and they proceeded to tell me that I just traded one drug for another. I beg to differ. I'm not drinking three or four bottles of wine a night. I'm not impacting my health. I'm not putting people at risk when I drive.
I'm not showing my kids that this is okay. I'm simply out here trying to draw exposure for the hypocrisy of alcohol being glamorized and the ridiculousness of how cannabis became illegal and why we're still trying to fight it to make it legal. It's not for our health. It's not for our children's health. It's for the deep pockets within this country. And it's not just alcohol. When you look at the incarceration rates, they're high. They're really high.
I'm going to take a quick second to take a deep breath. I spent the last two decades numbing with alcohol. Numbing. And I'm realizing it's because I'm frustrated with what I see. When I feel something. I feel it passionately, and I want what's right for the world. I don't know what that is, but I know this isn't right. Okay, so, like I said, two thirds of people and state prisons are for drug offenses.
I don't have the exact number of people in prisons that are just for drugs, but I can tell you it's very high, and I will pull that and put it in the notes. You know who makes money off prisons? Private entities. It's a $70 billion industry. So let's. We already talked about how much money alcohol has to lose. Of course they're going to pay lobbyists and news media and propaganda to keep their product on shelves. Even though it's killing us in jails, they make a lot of money, too. It's a $70 billion industry.
So if we're having all these arrests for cannabis and minor drugs related offenses, and it is really targeting the peripheral population, the ones that have already been stigmatized, the blacks, the Latinos, I don't care how racist I sound right now. They're not coming after me. They don't care that I'm drinking my beverages. They're not. They're not. It's not the middle to middle class white folks that they're coming after. But you know what they're doing? They're making $70 billion off putting these people in jail. The goods alone that incarcerated folks put out is an $11 billion a year industry.
They pay those folks, on average, $0.86 an hour to work in our jails. $0.86 an hour. So when you wonder why they're fighting so hard and don't let it be lost on you that your state allowed it last year and the elections are over, and now your states are trying to pass anti marijuana cannabis, close this loophole, don't let that be lost on you that it's being put through after voting has happened. And the voting that's happening now is federal. Of course it's not happening on the federal level right now. You could have an impact there. They're getting you where you can't have an impact. And you know where else they're getting you? The amount of people that can't talk about this, because right now, I have nothing to lose.
I don't have a job that can fire me. I don't give a shit if the other parents at my kid's school stigmatize me because I know what I'm doing is morally right, and it's here to help people. However, the amount of messages that I get from folks thanking me for saying this, because they can't. If they say it publicly, they might get a random drug test at their place of work. They might get kicked out of the military. They. Even though my beverage is legally acceptable in the state of Louisiana, doctors can't have it. They risk their medical license.
I know a lawyer locally that would love to be on this podcast with me, but she puts her law license and her livelihood for her family at risk. So they know that with the current state, if they don't pass these laws through to protect their alcohol money now they're going to do it. When people can't talk about it, send me messages, send me whatever you can. I know I'm not the only one out there. I know because you guys are already sending me the messages. We have to find a way to get our voices heard. And again, that goes back to the LinkedIn article that I wrote. They know they aren't listening to us.
They know they aren't listening to our voices. You take the republican party, for example, and this is not to be political, but I read an article that even within the republican party, how divided they are over things that I think it's 42% of the Republican Party. And if you look at the ages, you'll know which age it is. Actually believe abortion should be legal in states. They believe that cannabis should be legal. But the way the political system is set up is they have to pick one person. The entire Republican Party has to pick one person. And it's the younger voices that are not showing up to vote as much, that don't feel like they're being heard, that we're not able to push forward the things that different generations are able to right now.
And if you look at it from the age of 18 to 45, the number one topic across the board was climate change. And when they did the Republican Party primary. I don't know. I'll have to. I'll pull the article again and I'll put it in the notes. But they tested them on it. They asked them about climate change, and they asked all the republican candidates up there to raise their hand if climate change was something they felt was important and something that they thought they were going to work on. Do you know what the republican candidates did? They refused to answer that question.
They showed their cards. They said, we're not in school. We're not raising our hands. And instead of genuinely answer the question and put their feet to the fire about if this is or isn't important to them, show their cards of who they are and aren't going to take money from. They didn't answer it. And they attacked the moderator. They attacked the moderator for allowing such a question in and asking them to raise their hand like schoolchildren. If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know, they're not in our best interest when they tell you something's for the children.
Stop letting them use the children as scapegoats. I have three young children. Climate change is important to them. Alcohol abuse is important to them. These things are important. We need to let our voices be heard. So thank you, guys. This was a lot of ranting.
I may have cried a little bit during it but I cannot express enough how passionate I am about this, how aware I think we all need to be of this. And the next time anybody says it's for our children, ask deeper questions. Ask how what we're allowing is helping our children. Ask them for the scientific statistics for how this is impacting our children. Ask for a full review. Ask for anything other than, well, it's for our children. Cause right now, they don't give a fuck about our children. Again, if you have now pulled over, please hit like.
Please follow. Please leave a comment, a review. If you disagree with anything I say, prove me wrong. Please. That is what I want. I want open discussion. I want all the facts on the table. So it's not, this is right.
They're wrong. Peace out, mic drop. Let's bring the full discussion to the table and we'll be back for a regular guest episode. On the next one, we'll lighten it up a little bit. It might be sexual violence with alcohol. Who knows? See you then.
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