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Monday, November 15. 1971
University Daily Kansan
Vern Miller Looks at the Law
(Editor's Note: Atty, Gen. Verm Miller, the state's highest law enforcement official, has touched off several controversies in his pursuit of "full and fair enforcement" of the law. In this interview Miller talks about drugs, bingo and gambling and his view of the office he has now held nearly one year.)
Malone: What do you conceive of as the duties of the attorney general? The things I think most people around the state, from probably media distortion, get the idea that about the only thing you do is go on and talk to lawyers. They are they don't think that anything else goes on.
Miller: Well, I'm sure that's not true since there are a lot of articles in the paper about our opinions and about our prosecution of certain litigation. You know, there are all types of things. The state has laws that are a lot of responsibilities. First, he's the legal adviser to the executive departments of the state. In other words, we give advice and direction to many of the departments right here in the state government. We, of course, have laws that govern the chief law enforcement officer and this in a sense, means that this office, as I see it, and I sure correctly, that this office has the obligation to take a stand against the violation of our criminal code and to encourage local officials to do the same, to hold them accountable across the state. There's nothing right about having a situation in some small town or some area of Kansas where gambling and law violations exist, while in a town such as Wichita where the law prohibits gambling, everybody has the right to be treated the same under the law, and that's what we're trying to bring about in Kansas.
Maleone: Uniform enforcement of all laws?
**Miller:** Uniform enforcement, you know. Not abusive, not oppressive. But the same for everybody. And of course those people who are affected by it—for instance, when the police get involved in those people who participated in gambling activities, they thought that was abusive in
their direction. There were areas in Kansas where those violations did not occur; local law enforcement people enforced the laws. In Sedgwick County when I was sheriff there were no slot machines, there wasn't any bingo, and there weren't any gambling activities going on. I'm not saying that maybe somebody in the back room didn't ... And there weren't any open violations. Open violations. Bingo did go for on a whirl but it was stopped. It just came to a point where it had to be stopped.
Malone: Was your stand against binge
from the legal aspect, not from a personal
relationship?
Miller: I have no personal . . . of course, not at all. Finest people in the world play bingo. But the fact is, they weren't playing bingo in Sedgwick County, you know. They were playing bingo in Kansas where local law enforcement people enforced the law. It a lottery, it is prohibited by law, and there's nothing right about them playing in other areas. And it brought about the passage of bingo in a sense, legalizing the playing of bingo.
Malone: You do think that it was a good idea that that statue was . . .
Miller: Well, Pat, I don't usually comment on whether a law's good or bad. As a law enforcement official, I can't take the law for granted and be published, my obligation is to enforce it fairly as I can. But when the legislative session meets, then I will go to the legislature and tell them that I think this law is appropriate and that it needs a different penalty, and so on. I can do that, but I generally don't comment on whether bingo is good or bad, you know. I could care less about whether it's good or bad, I could care less about whether the law is enforced.
**Malone:** Okay, you mentioned two duties, legal adviser to the executive department and the number one law enforcement officer of the state. Are there other things that
Miller: Well, that pretty generally takes in everything, you know. Well, we're required to write opinions to local officials and businesses, not just opinions, that doesn't mean our opinions
are the law. It's a reason, you might say, for a county attorney to follow a certain line of reasoning because we have said so in our opinion. Or if we give an opinion to some directive state department, then that's law until it's contested. But anybody can appeal or take us to court on any other case, and that's how it's been finalized. Other things we've been doing include investigations of local officials on complaint from other local officials. Of course, the other types of law suits that we're involved in are generally delegated out to the attorney. You see, like federal habeas corpus hearings, civil rights cases, emancipation cases, anti-trust cases. We'll rights commission, anti-trust cases. We'll a lot of litigation in that respect and we have a lot of litigation going in the consumer fraud area.
Malone: What kind of consumer fraud
things do you have going?
Miller: Oh, many different kinds. Mostly consumer-related problems.
Malone: Were you involved in that Koskott Interplanetary suit?
Miller: Yes, somewhat . . . You see, quite often, we're involved with local county attorneys in the filing of their actions and helping to advise them as to what action we might take and helping to conduct the investigation. And a lot of them have had to be situated. You know, they cross the state and therefore they need our information and our evidence in order to form some kind of a pattern for prosecution.
Malone: So you kind of coordinate the
Miller: Yes, we work very closely with the local county attorneys and sometimes file our own actions because under the statutes we have certain powers that they do not have. But most generally, it's a very close relationship.
Malone: You filed a suit some time recently against General Motors and Chrysler and other auto manufacturers. What was that about?
Miller: First we sued them on the basic premise that they had conspired not to reduce pollutants. They hadn't put the right type of equipment on their vehicles and it was kind of a conspiracy for every one not to do that. That investigation was pretty much done by other states and there were a number of investigations filed so we got all their investigations together and we joined, I think, some 27 other states in that lawsuit.
Miller: There have been a lot of pleadings on it, a lot of court procedure, and it's in an appeal state of some type. There haven't been any rallies on it yet. I don't think we're going to collect much Kane for us. I can't see any wheat that's been hurt by cattle or monoxide or the exhaust fumes from these automobiles. But we want to be in on the benefits if the court says, "Okay, you've got to start putting certain things on your automobiles." Then we want Kansas to come under that, so we have them in Kansas. And the states that didn't enter are going to look because, in those states, you see, what that's going to do is raise the price on certain automobiles.
Malone: Has anything happened on that yet?
Miller: Well, not really. I'll tell you what our position is. The State Board of Health has that primary responsibility in this area toward the governor. And what they'll do, they'll go out and investigate areas of complaints, on pollution, or if they need somebody burning, and so on. If they need somebody to come to our office. And so far, we we've only had threatened prosecutions. We've only filed one action and that's down in southern Kansas because some oil wells were bubbling up, and going all over the ground and getting into some water supplies. So we filed action down there on those people to cap their wells. So rather than we have agreed to cap them so we wielded the capped all the wells. It cost them thousands of dollars to do that. But what we generally do, say we've got a construction company burning or a big
Malone: Has your office done much work in environment protection?
salvage yard burning, we'll write them a letter and say, "We're bringing action against you," they may then just try to use them do it because they think they can get by with it.
Marijuana and Gambling
Malone: Some people have criticized you for being sensational by using the drug raids in the middle of the night and the latex state. How would you answer your critiques?
Miller: Well, Pat, I have been in law enforcement a long time and I've been able to see all types of law enforcement operations. I can only move in the way I think is best, in other words, the kind of activity that gets the best results. And the experience of law enforcement knows that at a certain hour of the day we unawares, generally, that have committed crimes. When we've conducted a gambing raid, like the one at Great Bend . . .
Malone: What time of day was that?
Miller: We hit that about 11:30. If we would have gone at five o'clock in the afternoon, we might have found slot machines in some of the clubs, but we wouldn't have found the great gambling tables. And we wouldn't have found the dice tables and the card tables and on so that we found in a couple of the clubs. And on our drug raids,
generally, the people involved in that traffic are either under the influence or mellowed by the drugs. If we have a home where people are usually at home by about four o'clock.
Miller: Yes, if it's a heavy drug party,
it's usually going on at about four to six
Malone: In the morning?
Butter: Oh, you bet. One of the tweaks was a party in Topeka, where we saw some heroin and other types of drugs. We pulled the party in full swing. A party was in full swing. Occasionally in Lawrence in some of the places we've raided, there've been little parties in progress. In Manhattan, the same, too. At the party, those parties, you know, are pretty lengthy.
Malone: Have you come across any of those parties?
Miller: No, Pat, I really don't, and here is the main reason. Marijuana is an intoxicant. If you injest enough THC into your system, it will injextuate you. I don't care who you are. And if you injest enough of it, you can become very intoxicated.
Malone: On the general subject of
drugs—do you think marijuana should be
used?
Malone: But a lot of people say that's just like netting intoxicated on alcohol.
Miller: Sure. Now they've legalized alcohol. It's been voted on and accepted by the public and it's legal. But there are several restrictions. It's not legal for people under 21 to drink an alcoholic liquor. And it's not legal for people under 18 to drink an alcoholic liquor. They them to have it in their possession. Now, the marijuana problem is really with the younger people under 18 years of age or under 21, and the intoxicated aspect of it
is quite important. And you know, we're
bearing around intoxicated. You ought to be
running around intoxicated.
Malone: What if it were legalized for people over 21?
Miller: That would certainly be a different aspect, but then, there are a lot of other implications to legalizing marijuana. In the first place, marijuana is also a product. In liquor, you can determine the alcohol content of the bottle, it has it so much alcoholic content. If you buy a bottle of brandy or liquor, or on down the line, it generally tells you. The reaction from liquor is much more stable than the reaction from wine, because it produces liquor is rather restricted. You can't make good liquor, you know.
Malone: But we could make homemade wine.
Miller: "Yeah, we could, but I doubt if you could sell much of it, because it's an art. But you could sure go out and pick marijuana and hang it up and dry it and sell it, you know. We could lay marijuana on different drugs, which we find quite often.
Malone: What have you found it laced with?
Miller: Oh, you find it laced with everything from morphine to opium. LSD, in fact. We have analyzed fine marijuana that is able to drop acid into marijuana to make it that much more potent. You know anything can be tried. But it's not uncommon for us to purchase marijuana that has been laced with opium or some other hard drug.
Malone: You do think marjuanja, as a drug, is more dangerous than lignor?
Miller: Oh, marijuana and liquor. I do in a way. I tell you why. Now I think it would depend upon the amounts consumed, you know. If we smoked a marijuana cigarette and then drank a half pint of whiskey, the whiskey would be more potent than the alcohol generally leads to heavier intoxication than I see with liquor. But you see, hundreds of thousands of people go out and have a few drinks at night with no bad results. And they get up and go to work. But not hundredts of thousands of people smoke marijuana without getting involved or onto cocaine or lordarbitrates, or onto coccine or lordarbitrates even. The percentage of people who use marijuana who go to harder stuff is much heavier than those people who drink alcohol and become alcoholics, at least from all the information we've been able to gather. When people smoke marijuana, or use marijuana, generally, they're excused for being able to have people with access to other drugs. That drink liquor generally stick to liquor. If they drink beer, they might go to whiskey, and so on. Where do you go to whiskey, and so on? an alcoholic? But there's no end to where you go from drugs, you see. Great difference. But there's no easy idea how much marijuana your agents have purchased you too office?
Miller: Oh goh, it'd be hard to say. I say several thousand dollars worth. That's what they want. We probably 50 thousand dollars worth. We've seized large amounts of marijuana. We've a whole barn here in Topeka full not too much, but we're making bricks of marijuana that were made up.
Malone: Is that locally grown stuff, or
Malone: Is that locally grown stuff, or
Miller: Yes, it was Kansas grass. It would be hard to estimate in dollar value
really, because you know drugs go for what you can get.
Malone: What other kinds of drugs have your agents been able to purchase?
Miller: Okay, we've purchased opum,
heroin, morpheine, cocaine, LSD, barbiturates and amphetamines, mescaline,
peyote-I don't know of any drugs we haven't purchased in these investigations.
And let me throw something else in. You have to fight the drug problem because you're not only getting the user." And that's not true. We've never conducted a drug raid on evidence of use. Every single arrest which was brought about by a drug raid was a sale. We're not particularly after the user. But I arrest the user if we catch him, but he isn't going to fight the seller, the pusher. And when a man sells you drugs, I don't care if he sells you one marijuana cigarette or ten pounds of or a spoon of heroin, he's a pusher. If he sells, he's a pusher, legally. He's a seller. The quantity he sells probably is determined by the seller's intent to sell the drug is there. Maybe sometimes we are not able to buy large amounts, but that's not because the seller didn't have it available, many times. That's because we didn't have the money to spend. Many of the people we buy a five ounce bottle, or a ten dollar lid of grass from, having bought it, could I could sell you fifty litres or ten pounds? "But we can't afford to operate that way."
Malone: Do you think you've been barmered by not having enough money? You don't need it, but no limit to what we could do. If I had had many more drug agents, and another $10
in the world play bingo."
Malone: How much purchasing money have you been able to bid?
thousand buy money, we could really put the pressure on all over the state.
Miller: Well, that's kind of a military secret. Let me tell you, it's minimal; it's a small amount. And like I said, many times when we've purchased two hits of LSD for five bucks or for three dollars, we could have purchased a hundred.
Malone: So you think you are getting the pushers even though you aren't not.
Miller: Sure, no doubt. But we can't do anything else.
Malone: Yeah, Well, some people have said you're just getting the snail-time
Miller: Yeah, well, I know. We're going to have our critics. But I think the public, in general, realizes that that's the only way we can operate. We're operating with money. So why should we go around and spend a lot of dollars on a buy, when we can get the same results in court on a ten dollar buy, or a five dollar buy. It's the same; it's the same crime. And, oh, I'd like to do it; I'll look in court, but there's no way we can go back. What was offered, what was offered, and the majority of them are, "What do you want, man? I can
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