is the da playing politics with marijuana all for the benefit of the government and big pharma at the expense of the average american that's of marijuana advocates arguing after a number of recent developments the da has recently reclassified t.h.c. the psycho active ingredient in marijuana to schedule three substance more than marijuana plant itself remains a schedule one substance the kind that carries the harshest criminal penalties and why would they do that all apparently sort of pharmaceutical companies can push products with naturally derived formations of t.h.c. meanwhile dr lyle a professor at the university of massachusetts has dropped his nearly decade long fight to persuade the government to allow him to grow marijuana for medical research so is the government really anti-marijuana or do they just want to keep all the money that can be made from it at the top joining me to discuss it is paul our deputy director of normal and the co-author of marijuana is safer so why are we driving people to drink thanks so much for joining us now first of all can you give us a little bit

big pharma big big everything can be you know protected but when it comes to the middle class who protects them. and that's exactly right peter you know we have we have people in employee unions making thirty forty fifty thousand dollars a year their wages essentially if you look at it have not gone up in thirty to forty years the people of the right the richest one percent the c.e.o.'s their income is gone the share of the pool has gone from sixty to one to two hundred fifty to one in the last forty years and middle class and lower classes have no more disposable income left the republican model of saying it's a tax issue we'll give you a couple hundred dollars back more you know a year in taxes that's not going to affect the lives of middle class americans middle class americans should be making if if we kept to the sixty to one income model of top one percent. to the average non-supervisory worker you know middle class americans should be making about two to three times what they're making now and that would make a big difference in terms of disposable income in the lives of average ame

drug plan but without passing cost controls in which the government demand certain concessions for big pharma which can still make money, charging a lot less for those drugs. if the government is going to be its biggest customer it has the right to demand a ceiling on drugs which cause, the same drugs cost so much less in every other country in the developed world. there is no solution to providing universal health care for the old. without more government cost controls. but i believe also there really is no solution to the problem of medicare for the old. the financial one without a solution to the rising cost of health care and health insurance for the young. i write in my book when i started working at the "washington post" in 1965, social security seems a lot bigger on $105 a week salary that it did later. i didn't resent it. that was for my grandparents. however, if i had good health insurance in the "washington post" and health care did not cost that much been. now for the last 20 years i have been spending 15% of after-tax income for a bad private health insurance plan. the next genera

i think what we need to do is allow pharma and big oil to take a hit. more people like you, marcy, here in southeast alabama. host: he mentioned the cuts. "the washington post" did a poll. they ask, do you think cuts in federal spending would do more? cut jobs, 45%. create jobs, 40%. it is pretty much even. the country is even on this idea of spending cuts and whether or not it would create jobs. guest: we need a growth economy. we need jobs in america, in order to have a robust economy that can produce the revenue to pay the bills. the key question is how do we create jobs? yes, the deficit is important and we have to deal with that, but what congress is not talking about is how we create jobs in this country. i brought some charts here that i thought we could put down. it shows how the financial sector of our country has gained such ascendancy. the big banks that took us to such a terrible point, and had manufacturing has gone way down, it is shocking. millions of jobs lost, outsourced to other locations. what you called in about is actually correct.

i think what we need to do is allow pharma and big oil to take a hit.e need more people like you, marcy, here in southeast alabama. host: he mentioned the cuts. "the washington post" did a poll. they ask, do you think cuts in federal spending would do more? cut jobs, 45%. create jobs, 40%. it is pretty much even. the country is even on this idea of spending cuts and whether or not it would create jobs. guest: we need a growth economy. we need jobs in america, in order to have a robust economy that can produce the revenue to pay the bills. the key question is how do we create jobs? yes, the deficit is important and we have to deal with that, but what congress is not talking about is how we create jobs in this country. i brought some charts here that i thought we could put down. it shows how the financial sector of our country has gained such ascendancy. the big banks that took us to such a terrible point, and had manufacturing has gone way down, it is shocking. millions of jobs lost, outsourced to other locations. what you called in about is actually cor