Transcripts For SFGTV 20120413 : vimarsana.com

thank you for your time. [applause] thank you. next, we will talk about the right to engage in civil society. we have linda evans. the speakers will talk about prohibitions are running for elected office, serving on juries, and voting. good afternoon, commissioners. thank you for conducting this hearing. this is critical. we have already submitted several recommendations for your consideration. i will not take the time to actually make them in person. we know in order for us to actually engage in meaningful way in civil society. we must change the public perception. we think this is a round of voting, are around elected processes being eligible. it being eligible for public office. very few of those are eligible. if you are on probation or off california, if you are in trouble. this has eroded the voting rights for people in prison, in jail, post release community supervision. the secretary of state has actually issued an opinion letter that serves to steal the vote from many many people inside of county jails that should be eligible to vote under a california supreme court decision that was issued in 2006. all of us for legal services children and the aclu is taking this decision of the secretary of the state to court and we hope that it will result in the expansion of voting rights for people that should have them but are imprisoned in county jail. given that civic engagement really means a lot more than just voting or the right to serve on juries, or the right to have elected office, i wanted to include a person from viet center for young women s development of about what the result has been on her drug conviction for her to engage in civil society in terms of the exercise of democracy. i would like to introduce tracy. good evening, everyone. how are you doing? a little bit how all it is, it is heart. it is hard trying to get a regular job like at mcdonald s, burger king, at any little commandant. at any little company. i kind of went back on track and they were required to do 220 hours of committee service, so i had to go through the center for community development. when i was there, it was an internship. i applied, i thought i was not fit to get the job, you know. i had the misdemeanors of my record, they are not going to hire me. a few weeks later they said, you have an interview for us, can you come in and do this? i was super excited because i had not worked since 2008, since i was 18 years old. i was like, wow. they gave me a second chance in the work force. this is good because now i have a little bit of experience and i know what i can do. it is hard for me to try to get a job. i am trying to get a job right now that is like $15 an hour but because i have a felony, i cannot do that. they told me that you have to go through this organization or go through that. i am changing my life so that i can get that job, regardless of what they say. i am going to get it and i will succeed. they really need to be out there for us as young people. thank you. [applause] i really want to thank you for coming and talking about your personal experience and shedding some light on the planning. it is complicated than it is for ordinary budget is more complicated than it is for people it is more complicated than it is normally four people. thank you so much for this opportunity to speak here today. today, i would like to talk about how drug convictions, and even the very minor drug convictions can have a devastating impact on immigrants and their families tend to immigration laws are very complex and when this intersects with criminal law, it becomes a little bit counter intuitive. in many cases, the punishment on the immigration side will far outweigh the criminal penalties that somebody suffers. to illustrate, i will sheriff story he has been a lawful permanent resident, he has been here for 18 years penn. when he was 18 years old, he was working at a people parlor and there was a drug bust. as a result, he pledged to possession for sale. then he served a couple of days of jail. then, he got the conviction it expunged. today, he is sitting in an immigration detention center in arizona and he is fighting his deportation case. his family is all here in san francisco but as a result of this one drug conviction that was a sponge, it is very likely that he will be deported and he will probably never have a chance to come back into the u.s. with the legal status. immigration law has an impact that was not like a citizen. one out of two children in california live in a household with an immigrant parents. we have about 5 million people that are not yet citizens. this includes people who are here with legal status and people who are undocumented. these are the folks who will face immigration consequences. for drug offenses, the immigration consequences are particularly harsh and they are very unforgiving. a lawful permanent resident has been here for 20 years can get deported for the most minor drug conviction of the session, under the influence, possession of paraphernalia, those can result in deportation. so much is undocumented and have u.s. citizen family members. he does not have an opportunity to become legal and a drug conviction means that he will never be able to have legal status to be here with his family. the consequence of a drug offense is that someone will be put into a mandatory detention. that means no bail. white they are fighting their immigration change, that could be from a couple of months. this could be for an offense. even convictions for at the first time simple possessions and the this was part of the state rehabilitative programs. this would carry over under immigration law. even though someone conclude probation, they participated in a program and wanted to get interest from the record, that it no longer exists. in san francisco, on the public defender s office often works with the district attorney s office to try to negotiate pleas that would protect an immigrant from these gross consequences. there are not a lot of alternatives available for immigrants when it comes to convictions for drug offenses. what we recommend is exploring options where a non psittacine does not have to enter a plea of guilty to participate in the program. some are pre arrest diversion programs, another option is informal diversions where a district attorney and public defender can negotiate a person participating in a program and if they successfully complete to that program, there will not be a conviction on their record. thank you. thank you. my colleague provided some written testimony about the impact of juvenile delinquency adjudications and the consequences in terms of the immigration and i brought some copies for the commissioners. thank you very much. thank you. we will make sure that gets into the record. you will not stop you will next talk about health as a human rights, human safety. the first speaker will be the interim stage director for the drug policy alliance and i believe she will talk about a health-centered approach to drug use. thank you. first of all, i want to thank the commission for holding this hearing and the commission staff who worked so hard for the last several months on this as people have been talking, the correlation and drug use is a barrier to our human rights. we re talking about how to bring this hearing and the human rights framework, i went back and look at the the united nations declaration of human rights. article 25 was about the right to help and it says that everyone has a help to a standard of living adequate to the health and well-being of himself and his family including medical care and necessary social services and the right to security in the event of sickness or disability. that is the right to human health as declared by the meditations and yet the extent to which we are treating people who use drugs as klaus means that we are denying people access to their human-rights. we are sentencing them to incarceration and wheat gave them for their health and community. trading people who use drugs as criminal designs is denies them access to health care and prevention and i have a background on working on a tidy and this is the same we have become aware of, the extent to which the war on drugs has driven mass in corp. and this is incredible racial disparities that we have seen in this country with african- americans bearing an overwhelming burden of hiv aids. we have created a lack of concern about affective and treatment programs. the back of substance use is not something that we would tolerate if it was for any other disease, if it was for diabetes, breast cancer, we would not tolerate the hoops that we make people jump to to get substance-abuse. this is the reason that we continue to allow the shortage of treatments the lack of full legal regulated access. people who need access to medical cannabis are some of the worst victims of the what of the war on drugs. we are to nine people who use drugs the tools that they need to take care of their own health and that of their families. this includes syringe access, methadone, some of the evidence based treatments such as prescriptions and heroin, medical cannabis, to permit an overdose. we believe that no one should be punished for what they put in their own bodies absent harm to others. this was adopted as a guiding principle. drug use and people who use drugs to not belong in the criminal justice system and continuing to do so continues the violation and increases the health cost to them and increases the cost to the taxpayer as well. my recommendation for san francisco which i hope the commission will pick out is to the greatest extent possible, the drug use and people that used drugs out of the criminal- justice system and we should look to portugal as a model where they have had great health results from a dramatically increasing treatment capacity and reducing the criminal justice system engagement for people who use drugs. we advocate for the elimination of criminal penalties for drug use and recognition such as supporting the bill 15 06. as health-care reform comes in san francisco and accretes programs that helps healthy san francisco, which we have in place, that we ensure that we are fully recovering substance abuse treatment modalities and making them accessible including covering medical cannabis for those that benefit. we look at assisted treatment as an option and we make sure that we re providing this on request. we have supervised facilities as a service to improve health and well-being and eliminate new infections. this is what it could do for san francisco. we addressed this as a barrier to care and to engage for drug users. we redirect to enter substance-abuse treatment. we look at a dedicated a stream such as an alcohol tax. we ensure that as people are re- entering the community that they re fully linked to care and they are given overdose training and prescriptions prior to release. and that san francisco accept our belief in regulated and protected access to medical cannabis and the human-rights commission sends a letter to the u.s. attorney asking her to cease all activities closing medical cannabis dispensaries. thank you. thank you very much. our next presenter is the president of the san francisco drug users union and i believe that mr. jackson will be speaking about addressing the problem with discrimination in the emergency room. what can be more egregious to have this happen when you are ill or sick and you needed the services? there is not much that i can add to in terms what we would like to see happen. we would like to share the work that we re doing and what we would like to see happen. we have the issue of mental health and drug use. i think that it is pretty much accepted that not all chronic drug users, many chronic drug users, this is symptomatic of underlying conditions or state of mind for whatever reason. so, to equalize people that have an organic his position to seek drugs, this is really inhumane. when 80% of the people that show up in the emergency ward are there because of drug use, it is really the same for us to not give them all of the love and care and compassion that we have to offer. it is really the same for us to give them all the love and care and compassion that we have to offer. there is a need for it to be useful. people come here from other parts of the country that are gay, lesbian, transgendered, bisexual, immigrants, people who are stigmatized yet. you have a lot of potential for it this sort of abuse. i will say something really quickly. i went to san francisco, i have been here for about 20 years. i was unfamiliar with what ultimately became one of my favorite drugs, speed. no one told me that one could become speed psychotic. so, i had a lot of things happen to me. i ended up in the emergency room. . fast forward 10 years, thanks to peer groups like the speed project, things like that. i realized what was going on. i had a real help emergency, which is something that happened to me. something in my i was going on. i went, there is something in my eye. then, they could tell, they looked at me like it, ok. i sat there for hours and hours. i left, fine. there was something in the emergency room, i did not take it personally. sunday night, i was riding my bicycle. suddenly, i had a depth of field, everything was flat. so, what happened is that i went back there and, that was a problem. they looked at my eye, hey, there is no right now there. there is no retina there. they did not take me seriously because of the record. i was in the psych ward once. bernanke. thank you. thank you. the final statement from the scheduled speakers deals with reclaiming rights and the civil rights movement of tomorrow starting today. our presenter is debra small, the founder and director of break the chains. our presenter is deborah small. i want to go back to where we started this evening with conflict that president huffman made and talking about what the war on drugs is and how we got to this place. i feel like it is particularly important that we re having this conversation in san francisco because san francisco was one of the first cities to pass a law restricting drug use back in the late 1800 s. not surprisingly, as was noted by alice in her talk, that first drug law was specifically directed at opium use and it had its bases in discrimination. it was specifically designed to target the chinese community for their drug consumption and completely ignored similar drug consumption by europeans here. in that way, that that law here in san francisco was based and built in discrimination, so have all of our drug policies in the u.s. parent is not an accident that we have chosen to target cocaine as opposed to ritalin, opiates as opposed to other products that we have targeted. all of the laws that we have passed initially were linked to monogamy is. the first anti canada s law was directed towards mexicans and an effort to control their behavior. the first loss against cocaine were specifically directed towards african-americans. the passage of these laws, you hear the same arguments being made, that these people are economic competition, that their morality is suspect, and that we re going to use these laws as a way of addressing behavior we don t like. it is not an accident that fast forward a hundred years, that a majority of the people targeted for the enforcement of these laws continue to be people from our minority community, people that are marginalized, people that we want to have control over. i also want to draw on the parallels and history that was laid out in the book, which is one of the reasons we re having this conversation. i think it was important for her to make the connection between the history of slavery, that black people began in this country that was then followed up by 100 or so years of segregation. i don t think that it is an accident that it was at the time that the people of color had this segregation that the war on drugs was launched to do the same thing that segregation had done before which was to allow people to be economically exploited and politically and socially marginalized. regardless of how you feel about the war on drugs, about how you feel about drugs, i think that it is really important for us to look at what the impact of what the drug war has been after 100 years in our country despite the fact that we know that they are used equally among every socially economic group and it does not matter, you will find the prisons filled with people of color, even in states like maine and vermont, where they don t have that many people of color. they still seem to find them and lock them up and did you have to begin to wonder whether or not the war on drugs is actually about drugs or is it about social marginalization and control. if you look at the fact that no matter where you go in the country, the majority of the people that were in jail for drugs are poor people. then you have to wonder about it. if we had similar laws for adultery and fornication and we said that we were going to lock people up and give them mandatory sentences and yet the only people ended up behind bars for that were peop