Here we have Idaho is sponsored by First Class Cleaning, Tom Luna and Victor Miller.

Welcome to Here We Have Idaho. A local show focused on celebrating Idaho and all it makes Idaho

great. Here we have Idaho will highlight important issues and events that impact Idaho's

citizens and families. Each week we will visit with those people who are writing Idaho's

story and keeping the spirit of Idaho alive and well. Just like our state song says,

there's truly one state in this great land of ours where ideals can be realized.

The pioneers made it so for you and me, the legacy will always provide. Here are your hosts,

Victor Miller and Tom Luna. Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of Here We Have Idaho.

I'm Victor Miller, one of the co-hosts and my other co-host Tom Luna is out on vacation and he

sends his warm hello to everyone and today we have a real special guest, good friend of mine and

former prosecutor, federal prosecutor, big deal, especially took on some hard things in the drug

drug work and it's my good friend, Monty Styles. Welcome to Here We Have Idaho Monty Style.

I am thrilled to be here, Victor Miller, the man, the legend. Thank you for having me on the show

today. So let's start. Today we want to talk a little bit about the marijuana initiative that is

being brought by the natural medicine alliance of Idaho. But before we get into that,

Monty, tell people a little bit about your background. Real quick, I born and raised in Idaho

after law school. I came to Ada County to be a deputy prosecutor five years later. I was hired

at the U.S. Attorney's Office to be a federal drug prosecutor. I ran the federal drug task force

for 25 years and I did a lot of drug cases and I learned a lot of things and I had some very

interesting experiences and that's my background. Now I'm involved in drug education and training

and I worry about a lot of things including the things you're going to ask me about today.

Well, Monty, as you know, in 2019, 2021, 23, 25, the legislature actually had medical cannabis

act bills in front of it. It didn't even get out of committee on any one of those. It actually

stiffened our laws with a law against possession of fentanyl and also a possession of under three

ounces of marijuana. And so we've actually stiffened our drug laws, said no to marijuana. But yet

here we are with an end-around, end-around the representative system that we call our statehouse.

And we have the thing called the Idaho Medical Cannabis Act, which is being brought to us by the

natural medicine alliance of Idaho. So tell us a little bit about what your impressions are of

the natural medicine alliance of Idaho. Okay, so over the years in addition to legislation

that never passed, we've had initiatives one after another and they're all designed to get

a drug legalization bill on the ballot for voters to vote for. They have never been successful.

Idaho is one of the few states that has pushed back on this so that they've never qualified for

the ballot. All of that changed, at least the danger to Idaho changed last fall when the natural

medicine alliance of Idaho came on the scene and they filed an initiative, another medical,

so-called medical marijuana initiative. And they started collecting signatures. The difference

this time is that the amount of money that they poured into this and the secret of nature of the

groups behind it, it makes it an entirely different thing, Victor, because they went from zero

money in the past or very little money to over 1.2 million that they put into it so far. 900,000

of that is gone to a out-of-state political consulting firm that is orchestrating a statewide

signature gathering campaign and paying people to get signatures, about $5 a signature.

They're going around the state getting paid to get signatures and this puts us in real danger

of getting an initiative on the ballot because people don't know what they're signing. They have no

no idea of what they're signing. And can you tell us a little bit, do we know where the funding

is coming from for the Idaho Medicine Alliance of Idaho? Sorry, the natural medicine alliance of Idaho?

We don't know. One group in LLC, natural medicine alliance, LLC, has donated all the money

to natural medicine alliance pack. We don't know who that is, don't know where the money came from,

but 1.2 million for Idaho is a huge amount. I studied these things all over the country and it's

for a state like Idaho, it's very, very unusual. So the money is unknown and it's attempting to

change Idaho laws and what they're proposing is a very bizarre, poorly written, almost embarrassing

from a legal point of view. 24-page document that they want to become Idaho law and they're spending a

lot of money to do it. And just for context, the last time the kind Idaho people ran a medical

medical marijuana cannabis act, I think they got 400 signatures total. And now they are alleging

that they've got 60,000 signatures, but they've only turned in 10,242 signatures to the Secretary of

State. That hasn't changed much in nine weeks. There's only about 4700 that are considered valid

signatures out of those. Again, that number hasn't changed in nine weeks. So we have a secretive

group that is using an out-of-state company basically to run the initiative process that's in

Utah, I believe, and we have no idea how many signatures they have. Other than that, it's crystal clear.

So let's talk about the initiative itself and what it does, okay? So first of all,

the medical cannabis act, the medical cannabis act deals with what's called, quote-unquote,

serious medical conditions. Talk about those serious medical conditions and how theoretically

restrictive they are. The proponents of this talk about it as a tightly controlled, highly medical

plan for Idaho. And in order to get so-called medical marijuana, you have to have a card.

And to get a card, they have decided in this bill that there are 18 conditions, they call them

serious medical conditions. And some of them are, but the serious medical conditions also include

things that are not something that you would think people would need. And that includes anxiety,

anxiety, and insomnia, and acute pain. And Victor, do you know anybody that couldn't,

at some point, go into their doctor and say, I am very anxious or I can't sleep,

that list is so broad, it would virtually allow virtually any Idahoan they wanted to to get a

card and to buy and use quite a bit of marijuana. So it's a list itself, it includes things that

are so broad most people could get one. And just everybody knows those three that you talked about,

which was insomnia, acute pain, and anxiety. Right now, the average, 20% of average Americans

have anxiety, 30% to 40% are suffering from insomnia, and 77% of people are faced with some kind

of acute pain that's lasting more than six months. So if you just run the numbers just on those three

of the 18, it might lead you to conclude that this is not so tight in terms of its accessibility.

Now let's talk about the doctor's role. What is the doctor's role in getting a medical cannabis

card? So this is another place where this particular initiative is unusual and slopily written.

Instead of, most states that go down this road, they get talked into this, they have a provision

where a person has to go to a doctor and a doctor has to recommend that they use marijuana

for any condition, basically, in most states. And so you go in and you explain to the doctor what's

going on, and the doctor would decide, oh, you need to smoke weed, you need to get marijuana

for your condition. And in that case, most states require the doctor to provide some kind of written

recommendation, which then is used to get a medical marijuana card. This one, rather bizarrely,

requires no doctor ever to recommend that somebody get a card, that somebody use marijuana.

There is no requirement that a doctor recommend that that happen. And in that case,

it's only the diagnosis itself. It's a medical chart that says you're anxious or you have insomnia

or that you have knee pain or something. That's all someone needs. A doctor never has to know,

never has to treat you, never has to do follow-up. It's not required. So there's no medicine

in the part except a diagnosis, which the people that wrote the bill, the initiative,

decided what should be on the list. That's who decides. Well, a crazy thing is in a letter to the

honorary Secretary of State Phil McGrain from Givens Pursley. It actually says a prescription by

licensed medical professional would not be necessary. There it is, straight out. So then,

how would the process work of getting a medical marijuana card if it doesn't involve the doctor?

How does that work? Okay, so voters need to know that under this initiative,

past that the state agencies, including the Department of Health and Welfare and the Board of

Pharmacy, would have to set up an entire state program for manufacturing, processing, distribution,

retail sales, cards, all of that stuff. So a person that wanted to get a card would get a

diagnosis of one of 18 things. Take that diagnosis to the Department of Health and Welfare,

who would be required to give him a medical marijuana card authorizing that person to buy

a quarter pound of marijuana a month and some other products. And that's it. You take your

paper in. They have to give you a card and that gives you the right to go by pot for without

any medical supervision, including not just the pot dispensaries that set up around the state,

including online sales. This is another bizarre part of this is that you don't have to go to a

pot shop and get and look at everything and decide. You can order from the online sales and have it

delivered anywhere in Idaho. It gets provides for in-person delivery. I don't know if that's going to be

Uber drivers for what it is, but anywhere you can get it. This is a very strange

and far-reaching situation. It's not going to be Uber drivers. It's going to be

Erbo driver, right? So anyway, talk about so what happens here is you get a diagnosis, you take

your my chart, you go to the health health and welfare department, the issue of medical marijuana

by the way, for up to a year. And it's renewable. And then after you get the marijuana, then you tell

your doctor that you're actually on medical marijuana, even if they didn't think it was the best

thing for you. And that's a crazy part of this initiative as I read it as well. Talk about

the bill allows you to have a quarter pound of smokeable marijuana and 20 milligrams of

ingestible marijuana, I mean a THC. Talk about how much is a quarter pound of marijuana? What

does that mean in terms of joints or how would we qualify that? Well, the amount of marijuana people

depends a lot on how heavy of user they are. But you could take a quarter pound and roll it into

joints and probably result in like eight joints a day for the entire month, which is a lot. You

basically be wasted every day. And of course, somebody might smoke a lot more than that and they say,

oh, it won't last me that long. But the 20 grams of THC is very interesting because

in the old days, marijuana, natural marijuana was 1 to 3% THC. And what they're making now through

crossbreeding and genetic manipulation can be 25, 30% THC. It's different. It's a completely

different kind of plant. It's been genetically modified. But the real product of marijuana is not

plant material. It is THC. That is the active ingredient that makes you high. THC is the valuable

product. And you can buy that in dispensaries that is virtually pure THC. So if a person had

the right to buy 20 grams of THC, that is a lot of dope. And it can come in a variety of forms.

And it's very intoxicating and it's very expensive. A gram of pure THC can reach almost the value of

a gram of the spot price of gold depending on the market. It's very valuable. So people need to

understand that these people are growing green gold. That's what they're growing. They're growing THC

that sold to people under the guise of medicine. Now I don't want to discount the worries of

people that are truly, truly sick. But Victor, as we've talked about before, it's not that. It's a sad

thing. But the consequences of legalization are far reaching. There's a lot of grim realities

of legalizing dope that go far beyond people being sick. Welcome back to, here we have Idaho. I'm

Victor Miller, one of the co-hosts. The co-host Tom Loon is out on vacation. He sends his warm

pillows. We're speaking with Monty styles and Monty styles of former federal prosecutor dealing

with drug issues, very tough stuff. And we're talking about the Idaho Medical Cannabis Act, which

is an initiative, Citizens Initiative that's being brought by the Natural Medicine Alliance of Idaho.

And so thank you for joining us, Monty. Another question I have for you is how many pot factories

or farms could we have in Idaho? I think it's 12 theoretically, six to start, but as our population

grows it can go to 12. And then with dispensaries going from 18 initially to up to 36 as our population

grows, what does that mean to have the marijuana being grown and sold like that in dispensaries?

Well, one of many loopholes or inconsistencies or whatever about this law is that there's a lot

of detail that's not in there. And so it provides for certain number of licenses, certain number of

grow locations, certain number, you've already described the numbers, the retail operations that they

call dispensaries. But there's no limits on how much they can grow. I mean, they could, there's no

limits on how large these marijuana farms could grow, how much they could produce, how much they

could sell. It's just no limits on that. But I think Victor, the thing that's probably the most

troubling or a legal point of view, and that's a practical point of view, is online sales.

So you're not restricted to people going to a place and buying it. Somehow people are going to be

able to order whatever they have and get it delivered to their home, their neighborhood, their

church wherever it is. It's wide open and it's just a wide open market for it. And how they think

the state is ever going to monitor all of that. How in the world is the state of the state

department of health and welfare has a lot of things going on. They are in charge of protecting

kids, protecting communities, protecting health. And now they're going to be in charge of the state

pot program from seed to sale, keeping track of cards and purchases and all of that and making

sure it's a bizarre thing. And in a year where we're really fighting for budgets for state agencies to

take on that additional burden, it's an unbelievable burden they're trying to place on.

And the one thing you should know is that their own documents say the IDO medical

cannabis equity increased the administrative budget of the IDO health and welfare department

by an estimated 1.1 million annually and required 2.9 million dollars of startup costs.

So as you said in the throes of cutting the state budget, that's kind of a bizarre move.

Let's also talk about something else about the medical cannabis act, which is very subtle,

but it's interesting. In 2021, House Bill 126 legalized the production processing research

and transportation of industrial hemp in IDO. And what's interesting about that

Monty is that the IDO medical cannabis act would allow five companies and there's been five

companies that have been producing hemp since 2021 or 2022 when it was first allowed. It would

actually give them kind of a front row seat on getting a medical marijuana production license. So

it kind of subrogates the entire intent of the 2021 bill, which was to be about industrial hemp.

Just some thoughts on that hemp versus marijuana. What does that mean for the grower?

When the idea of hemp farming was sold to the legislature a number of years ago,

the hemp industry made a lot of big promises. And there were promises that people promoted to

legislators and thankfully legislators created a very limited, but now under this law,

hemp farmers that are growing hemp for fiber or something else will go from 25 cents a pound

to $900 a pound. And so there's a great incentive for hemp farmers to be in that list of people.

And another weird thing about this law is it gives them the right to control everything from

the growing processing, testing, transportation, and even retail sales. The tremendous amount of

power put in the hands of three hemp farming operations in IDO. So you alluded to the grim

realities of marijuana. So talk about some of the issues that you've seen as a prosecutor.

I imagine you've seen some horrific things in illegal grows, illegal grow houses,

human trafficking. Anyway, tell us a little bit about what you have seen on the ground as a

federal drug prosecutor that when you look at this, that's why you're here fighting and telling people

the truth about it. So number one, what you see is a tremendous amount of fraud people getting

cards that they shouldn't get. And it basically turns into a de facto recreational because of the breadth

of the bill. But I think a couple of things that strike me as being the most important is people

need to understand that when government accepts the idea that marijuana is medicine, a crude street

drug is now medicine without any supervision over that. They get into the mode of communicating

that not only is not harmful, it is helpful. And that message to our children and to society in

general is so damaging. It's so damaging because our kids are then said, no, it's okay. The government

accepts it, the government sells it. It's all okay. So why should we not be able to use this

wonderful drug that doesn't hurt us and actually could be medicines? That's a huge thing to teach kids

that. Second thing is people need to understand is the black market flourishes in states where

marijuana is legalized. And there's a couple of reasons for that. Number one, the man for marijuana

goes up. Number two, because the so-called legal marijuana dispensaries are taxed and regulated.

And that gives cartels the opportunity to come in untaxed, unregulated, and undercut the price.

And so much of the market for marijuana, I think you and I talked about 70% of the marijuana sold

in these legalized states is coming from cartels. And the cartels are producing it without regulation.

And so you've got marijuana being grown in the hills, foothills and mountains of Idaho or

wherever that's being sprayed with dangerous pesticides that make it their way into the environment.

And into the lungs of users who are absolutely clueless that pesticides that are so dangerous,

they're illegal in United States being sprayed all over the stuff they're smoking.

The crazy part, too, is you're alluded to the black market. So it's estimated that the entire

market is about a hundred billion dollars for marijuana. And then only about 25 billion of that is

legit, 25 to billion, 25 to 30 billion of that is legit, which means the black market accounts for

70 to 75% of the market, which is just mind blowing. Hey, I want to, so I watched a video that

Charlie Kirk did, which I thought was amazing. And he basically said, here are the four big

marijuana industry lies. So I want to just name them off and see what you think actually happens.

The first one is legalizing marijuana leads to a decrease in crime. The second one, legalizing

marijuana, that usage with children will go down. Legalizing marijuana cartels will be weakened.

Legalizing marijuana will make folks not revere it as much. Your thoughts on those big industry lies.

None of those are true. That story was told to Californians in 1996 when the first state

legalization thing happened. It is over the years, it has been so found to be so untrue. And yet

they continue without those things. Even a state after state has shown that it's not true,

but they continue. And there's a lot of others that they use. But yeah, that's a sad thing.

When you think about it here in Idaho, who's fighting, who's opposing this? It's mainly just

volunteers of people that care. There's no state agency fighting it. There's no group that has

hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight it. It's just a few people that are trying to educate

people. When they're facing a group that has a million two, how is that David and Goliath

thing work? It requires good people to learn facts and share with neighbors and get the information

out. Because otherwise people will believe this is all about just about gummies for grandma.

And it's a benign thing when in fact it's a way to change Idaho laws forever and have Idaho

join other states and foolish laws and policies have led to very serious consequences.

When if you look at an increase in crime rates, increase cartel activity, you talk about

increase in pair driving, right? You talk about the economic impact of having a workforce that

is not marijuana free. You talk about the impact to emergency rooms, to people's health,

kids psychosis. They're talking about impacts to kids in the womb. They're talking about

scrummeting, which is this new screaming vomiting from continual use of cannabis. It's just

the evidence is starting to pile up. What's your thoughts about that?

For many years, we have excellent leaders in Idaho, legislators, governor,

others that have kept us free from this. We've been free from large amounts of money because of

Idaho's reputation for being anti-legalization. But now we have money that's come in and from

people that we don't know who they are. So, do you think about the consequences?

Idahoans, even if you don't know about the consequences of marijuana use itself, which you should,

if you look at the initiative and see all of the problems there and you will know by reading

their own words that their campaign is not telling the truth.

What I like is, say, if the medical cannabis act, Idaho medical cannabis act was a candidate,

you would not vote for the candidate because it's such a flawed candidate. I'd like how you

said that. By the way, Charlie Kirk to end his video where he talks about the industry lies,

he poses three questions. As New York, LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Denver,

gotten better since marijuana legalization, two, does marijuana legalization increase national

unity and improve our strength versus other countries? And three, if more people smoked,

consumed marijuana, would America be a better place? And his answer was reject the siren song

of new drugs. And with that, thank you, Monty Styles, for coming on here. We have Idaho.

And as we always say, before we sign off, God bless the great state of Idaho. And thank you again,

Monty Styles. God bless America and God bless Idaho. Thanks, Victor, appreciate it.

Thank you for joining us today on Here We Have Idaho. We hope you enjoyed today's show and we

look forward to visiting with you for a half hour each Wednesday and Friday at 4 p.m. on Kspd 790

a.m. and 94.5 FM. Till next time, God bless the great state of Idaho.