Drug Legalization Before it Was Cool: The Story of Kurt Schmoke

My History Can Beat Up Your Politics

Bruce Carlson

News, Politics, History

4.5 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2022

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

timore Mayor Kurt Schmoke was called a madman, a "brilliant spokesman for a bad idea," and e even the most dangerous man in America when he called for drug legalization in the late 80s and early 90s. Those were forbidden ideas then. Yet Schmoke's statements seem prophetic now, and his radical plans are the basis of drug policy in many cities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to an AirWave Media Podcast.
0:05.6	Hello all, Eric Rivenus with the most notorious podcast here.
0:09.8	Each week I interview an author or historian about a historical true crime, tragedy, or disaster.
0:16.9	Subject matter ranges from gunslingers to gilded-age murder, to gangsters, to fires, to pirates,
0:23.2	to wild prison breaks.
0:24.9	I guess spring their incredible knowledge directly to you.
0:28.7	Please subscribe to most notorious on your favorite podcast app, Cheers, and have a safe tomorrow.
0:35.5	It was one of those unplanned events that had happened in an atmosphere when crime was
0:41.6	rampant and the police were on the back foot.
0:47.0	Marcellus Ward was an narcotics detective in Baltimore, working on a federal state drug
0:53.1	task force, and he was executing a series of undercover buys to try to help to bring
0:59.7	down a drug organization.
1:03.1	The police didn't know.
1:04.9	One day when Ward was executing this undercover drug operation, there's an unexpected police
1:09.5	bust.
1:11.4	The dealer panics, pulls out his 357 caliber, and shoots Ward three times, once in the
1:18.4	hand, twice in the heart, killing him.
1:24.2	And so I was a traditional drug warrior, figuring that we could arrest and prosecute our way
1:30.0	out of the problem.
1:32.0	The thing was, for many years, Ward had been working with a young and promising state's
1:38.5	attorney, the equivalent of a DA in Maryland, named Kurt Schmoke.
1:44.4	When I had a friend of mine who was a police officer, working undercover who was killed
	...

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