In an editorial entitled “A Cheech and Chong ‘medical’ marijuana bill“, the Tacoma News-Tribune’s Patrick O’Callahan goes after the medical marijuana bill introduced by Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles and discussed last Thursday at the Capitol. O’Callahan’s editorial is fairly typical of the snide, dismissive editorializing that remains standard within many of our nation’s newspapers, but in the off-chance that anyone is taking this pile of nonsense seriously, I’d like to break it down and provide an informed perspective:
It must have taken some doing, but advocates of “medical” marijuana have come up with a bill that would actually invite more abuse of the drug than straightforward legalization.
Right away, O’Callahan starts with a mistaken premise. By assuming that even straightforward legalization “invites more abuse” of the drug, he ignores a significant amount of research showing that drug laws themselves have no demonstrable bearing on the amount of drug abuse a society encounters. And as has been pointed out numerous times over the years, the amount of marijuana use in Holland, a nation which has tolerated sales of marijuana in coffeeshops for over 35 years, has less marijuana use than the United States, where we arrest over 750,000 people per year just for possessing it.
Even worse, his editorial never fully explains how he came to this conclusion. He’s just spit-balling criticisms, hoping they’ll stick.
The “medical” belongs in quotation marks here, because the measure in Olympia would junk a key rule designed to prevent common drug seekers from getting marijuana on medical pretenses. And once recreational users or addicts got their pseudo-medical authorizations to use the drug, they’d enjoy more privileges than simple legalization would give them.
O’Callahan never specifies what the “key rule” is, so I can only guess at what he’s referring to. But in looking at the bill, and knowing how the system currently works, I can’t imagine any way in which it gets any easier or harder for someone to get a medical marijuana authorization under this bill. My best guess is that he’s referring to the removal of language that specified that a condition couldn’t be alleviated by other medicines in order for the authorization to hold up in court. But that never made a difference to doctors, only judges and prosecutors. And the language was removed precisely for that reason. A judge – or any other government employee – is not your doctor, and shouldn’t be in a position to second-guess doctors over what medicines you should be taking.
They’d be protected, for example, if ex-spouses objected to leaving children in their care; judges would not be permitted to consider marijuana use as a factor in custody arrangements except in extreme cases involving “long-term impairment” – whatever that means.
What that means is that if you get cancer and your doctor authorizes you to use marijuana to deal with the nausea you experience as you go through chemotherapy, your ex-wife or ex-husband can’t use that to prevent you from seeing your kids. That’s just one example, but there are many others that warrant this provision in the bill. If a parent is irresponsible or incapable of being a parent, that’s one thing. But the reality of medical marijuana is that most of the people who use it lead very normal lives and can function perfectly well as parents. They don’t get “high” from the drug and act loopy all day. In fact, if you want to see a good profile of a parent who uses medical marijuana, watch the CNBC documentary “Marijuana Inc”, where they interview a patient’s two sons who tell the reporter that medical marijuana “gave them their father back” because it allowed him to deal with his pain and lead a normal life. If you think that someone like that should be prevented from seeing his kids, your moral compass isn’t pointing north.
The bill would bring down the hammer of discrimination law on companies with anti-drug policies. Employers who refused to hire or employ marijuana users – the drug stays in the body long after use – could be investigated and sanctioned by the state Human Rights Commission.
As I mentioned after the hearing, this is one area where it’s possible the language of the bill will have to be reworked to be compatible with existing anti-discrimination rules (I’m far from an expert on that). But the intent of the clause is clear. Unless a job entails public safety, you shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate against someone simply because they’re authorized to use medical marijuana. Of course, if that person is not capable of doing their job because of their medical marijuana use, then companies should be free to either fire them or not hire them in the first place. Getting the proper balance here is difficult, but I thought this bill did a good job trying to find it.
That’s just scratching the surface of this amazing piece of legislation. It would also legalize large-scale commercial marijuana grow operations and wholesaling – no specified limits on quantity. Cities and counties would not be permitted to ban grow operations in their jurisdictions; the measure leaves all control over licensing to the state.
Oddly, this is the exact opposite criticism of Proposition 19, California’s initiative to fully legalize marijuana production. Proposition 19 left this up to the individual counties and cities, and the criticism was “Oh my god! This will create a patchwork of different laws across the state!” In this bill, we have one law for the state, and the criticism now is that cities and counties have no control. Huh? Not to mention that O’Callahan leaves out the fact that under this bill, cities and counties can use zoning laws to ensure that a production facility can only be located in an industrial or commercial area.
Growing, processing and selling could be conducted in secrecy. Call this one the Home-Buyer’s-Surprise Provision.
This is really the dumbest thing in the entire editorial. The reason that this bill is being introduced is precisely because the “growing, processing and selling” is “conducted in secrecy”. By licensing and regulating both growers and dispensaries, you take this industry out of the shadows and allow the cities and counties to establish the proper location for these activities to take place. This bill fixes the problem of having large numbers of grow operations hidden in people’s basements. The fact that O’Callahan thinks that this bill would cause that is the clearest indication that he doesn’t have the foggiest idea what the hell he’s talking about.
There’s more: Police officers would have to check state databases for medical marijuana licenses before responding on probable cause to “cannabis-related incidents” (also known, under federal law, as “crimes”).
I’m having trouble not getting too snarky about this, but this attitude is extraordinary and O’Callahan’s lack of understanding of the law is terrifying. For starters, our local police aren’t supposed to be enforcing federal laws, so the fact that marijuana is illegal under federal law is irrelevant to any law enforcement official in this state. Second, asking that a police officer check a database – before bursting into someone’s home with weapons – to see if the person they’re about to invade might be a law-abiding citizen is not unreasonable. In fact, it should be considered a very basic part of a police officer’s job.
Individual officers could be personally fined or sued for failure to do so. There’s no obvious reason this wouldn’t apply to, say, a cop who spots dope and money changing hands in a dark alley. Odd: The law doesn’t paint a legal bull’s-eye on officers for responding to “alcohol-related incidents.”
As far as I can tell, this is completely untrue. If a police officer sees a transaction between two people in a dark alley, the officer should be able to respond exactly the same way whether it’s alcohol or medical marijuana being purchased. Those transactions should not be occurring outside of licensed establishments.
The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, has been touted as a “clarification” of the legal status of the illegal marijuana dispensaries that Washington cities and counties – including Tacoma – have begun to tolerate.
The measure’s actual reach is far, far more sweeping; it amounts to legalization with privileges.
Again, O’Callahan says this but doesn’t provide any actual evidence to back it up. This bill does not change – in any way – the process by which an individual with one of the qualifying conditions goes to a doctor and gets an authorization. Recreational use is still illegal. The result of this bill won’t be an increase in the amount of medical marijuana users, it will be a better system for ensuring that those individuals can have a safe place to obtain it.
To legitimize the dispensaries, the logical first step would be to impose genuine medical-pharmaceutical rigor on the authorizations that allow people to acquire “medicinal” pot in the first place.
And that would be a wonderful thing that just about every medical marijuana patient would welcome, but sadly the Federal Government makes this impossible so long as marijuana is considered a Schedule I drug.
As things stand, a handful of clinics – often fly-by-night operations – do brief, assembly-line-style “exams” of marijuana seekers and churn out authorizations like factories. They rubber-stamp the documents – often for about $200 a pop – for users with nebulous complaints of “intractable pain.” These mills have been transforming who knows how many garden-variety marijuana smokers into “patients.”
The law permits little effective regulation, and no one has ever been sanctioned for over-authorizing marijuana. The lack of controls blurs the line between legitimate providers and money-hungry enablers.
I have no doubt that this happens. And I have no problem with medical boards coming down on doctors who do it. But this phenomenon has minimal effect on anyone. In some ways, it’s better that recreational users become medical users because then the money they spend on marijuana is more likely to go to a local business rather than a criminal organization. That’s why over half the people in Washington state just want it legalized for both medical and recreational use. But until that point, you’ll likely always find some subset of the medical profession who decide that money is more important than their integrity. Just like journalism.
Instead of tightening the process, Kohl-Welles’ bill would actually loosen it. Under the existing law – an initiative approved by the voters – marijuana is largely treated as a last resort to be used only when legal, conventional treatments and FDA-approved medications fail. Her measure would let it be used as a first resort.
As I mentioned above, this language was taken out because it was putting judges in a position to make medical determinations for the folks in their courtrooms. It’s odd that in a world where we’re so easily terrified of “death panels” and “government getting inbetween you and your doctor”, a newspaper is actually editorializing in favor of giving the government the ability to send you to jail for a health decision that you and your doctor agree upon. That’s stunning.
With this in place, any drug abuser who didn’t get his get-out-of-jail-free card would deserve to be arrested for sheer stupidity.
This is even more stunning. Regardless of how one feels about the language of the bill, believing that “drug abusers” belong in jail is a sign of complete moral bankruptcy. Hardly anyone in our society still believes that the proper way to deal with a drug addict is to send them to prison. Even worse, that’s still quite separate from the reality here. The vast majority of both medical and recreational marijuana users aren’t “abusers”. They aren’t destroying their lives with it. But to believe that the few who do abuse the drug will turn their life around if you send them to jail is beyond stupid. Seeing something that dumb in an editorial from one of the state’s largest newspapers is quite remarkable.
Words fail. This bill could have been written by Cheech and Chong 30 tokes past midnight. Any lawmaker inclined to support it should make a point of reading it first.
I’m not sure what else there is to say. The sad reality is that people this clueless and blindly ideological are still employed by the major newspapers of this state, even as they’ve been under intense pressure to trim budgets. Like O’Callahan, I strongly encourage every lawmaker to read this bill, and if they have as much trouble as O’Callahan did in understanding it, I’d encourage them to do something he didn’t do: talk to someone who’s actually knowledgeable about medical marijuana and the history of how the law has worked in this state.
UDPATE: I was just sent this clarification to the “long-term impairment” part of O’Callahan’s editorial over email:
[T]he “long-term impairment” that confuses Mr. O’Callahan is exactly the same “long-term impairment” already described in the statutory provision allowing judges to preclude or limit visitation based on a parent’s struggles with “drug, alcohol, or substance abuse,” RCW 26.09.191(3)(c). Family law judges and attorneys are quite familiar with it.
Excellent work, Lee!
Thank you for blowing that horribly misinformed and misleading editorial out of the water.
O’Callahan’s lack of knowledge — coupled with blustery bravado — around the marijuana issue is downright embarrassing.
The Tacoma News-Tribune really should print your rebuttal. And/or a retraction of the original article, since it contains so many demonstrable falsehoods.
I wonder how much stock in CCA the man owns. CCA and Wackenhut are the two largest private, for-profit prison corporations in the world. Nearly all law enforcement pension plans are heavily invested in these companies and they are amongst the most profligate lobbyists for increasing penalties for and widening definitions of new crimes.
The entire range of “three strikes” laws that became so popular across the country several years ago was openly promoted in the press, and heavily lobbied for in Congress and the State legislatures by these companies.
Its all about guaranteeing a profit. Its all about manufacturing a market, and then creating the need for private sector investment in that market to meet demand.
Fascism in its purest sense.
1. Freedom wins
If I’m not hurting you, you don’t get to tell me what to do. Freedom should be the default position of any political argument. Just because YOU don’t like eating pork, or god told you not to smoke or drink, great…but I also have freedom to live my life the way I want, just as you do. Isn’t this what the Tea Party is all about, less big government telling us what to do?
2. Drug abuse is no reason to make drugs illegal.
Cigarettes, alcohol and salt can be abused. I’m tired of safety scissoring society and if ANYONE has a problem with something NO ONE can have it. Nuts.
3. Making drugs illegal empowers gangs and mobs.
Making drugs illegal just empowered and enriched gangs and the mob.
4. Putting drug users in jail is costly, wasteful and ineffective.
All of these are arguments conservatives use against government actions they don’t like. Prison for drug users costs more than treatment. It doesn’t work and tends to be more likely to create hardened criminals. Treating a drug “abuser” leads to a productive contributing member of society. Prison creates a negative drain on society. Only violent criminals should be in prison.
5. Use science not magic.
You can’t have cigarettes or alcohol and make marijuana illegal without using magic. There is no science behind this. Alcohol kills more people. Cigarettes are orders of magnitude more physically damaging. Marijuana isn’t magic, or “the devils weed”. It’s just a political football. Stop it and use reason and science not magic to debate this.
O’Callahan’s an asshat (I’ve had a couple of go-rounds with the guy) and the TNT’s editorial page has been going down hill on his watch.
I wouldn’t worry too much about what he says, no one cares.
until pot smokers come forward and demand that all politicians who smoke pot come forward and admit it and talk about it, this kind of mccarthyism will work. you don’t beat it with informed argument. you beat it by having a credible person say “that’s baloney.” A credible person would have to be one who’s smoked pot.
Seriously, about half of all legislators have smoked pot. I bet Callahan has. Why don’t you ask him? If he hasn’t, his kid has or his neighbor has and I’ll bet he saw it a few times without calling the cops to have them arrest someone. Until the pot smokers come forward the uninformed and scare-able voters will not change their minds and you can’t beat the kind of ignorant fearmongering this opinion piece represents.
Look at commenter number 3 above. Hits on all the cogent correct and logical arguments, factually sustained, etc. We’ve been making those arguments for decades, without all that much success. Why not?
Because people who don’t smoke pot continue to think it’s something horrible because the pot smokers stay in the closet. It’s just like gays, when they are in the closet the average nongay person is all afraid they’re all a bunch of weirdos…when they come out of the closet the average person realizes they’re a fairly boring set of people mainly interested in getting the bbq to work and dealing with the kids homework while going to the pra meeting while also volunteering at the book club. Bor-ing. Normal. That’s the level we need to make progress on.
IT’s rather more reptilian brained than all the policy arguments. Essentially, how do you convince someone a boggeyman isn’t scary?
you do it thru knowledge and emotive empathy, not logic. you don’t say “logically, dear, there can’t be any monsters under that bed.” No, you turn on the light and show them. So pot smokers coming out of the closet is turning on the light to let others realize “oh, I get it, it’s actually nothing, it’s certainly nothing like drinking wine or scotch whiskey and I am against the harm cuased by that but I recognize it’s a human and pleasurable thing to do so it shouldn’t be illegal.”
You win debates with Kirk — not Spock. Showing, not telling.
Things that were marginally funny 30 years ago that only lazy writers still find amusing…
All marijuana users live in their parents garage
All marijuana users are bumbling losers a la Cheech and Chong (for fucks sake, it’s been almost 30 Years since they made a movie.)
The only beneficiary of legalized marijuana is the snack food industry.
I propose a new internet law…call it the Ganja rule. Use any of these mental crutches to argue against legalization and your argument is deemed null and if having an opinion is your source of employment,you are summarily dismissed.
@5
Hickenlooper has been honest about his usage and he’s now Governor of Colorado. The tipping point of more Americans who have tried pot vs haven’t is very close.
See candidates for office? Having a relatively harmless history is o.k. Pretending to be Saintly is not.
I’ve long been a proponant of legalizing pot and selling it through the state liquor stores. It’ helps the economy, and state liquor clerks are most effective at making sure it is only sold to adults. This doesn’t mean that I’m in favor of smoking pot – I just think it’s well past time to accept the obvious fact that lots of Americans use pot, whether it is legal or not, and we might as well regulate it, tax it, and cut off the profits of the cartels.
But there is a serious problem with this approach while the government still declares pot to be illegal – it exposes state workers to arrest and prosecution by the federal government.
That’s why the medical marijuana initiatives have flourished, ostensibly leaving the feds with the prospect of finding and raiding tens of thousands of homes of glaucoma patients for minimial amounts of pot raised in their own homes. But as the California example shows, it’s an unrealistic scenario, as most aren’t going to be willing or able to cultivate their own plants, and will turn to the dispenseries instead. The dispenseries, and the doctors writing prescriptions for pot use, have a profit motive which means that just about anyone can use them. But the feds can still target the dispenseries.
Anyway, back to squre one. I would have thought that the budget crisis of 2010 would have been enough to get Congress motivated to use legalization and taxation of pot as a means of breaking the logjam, but so far no luck.
Keith Olbermann, impaired by mind-altering substances, will join HorsesAss soon. He is described as a perfect fit into a HorsesAss.
@9 Looks like you already beat him to it.
@10
Roger, I’m not sure I’d question John on anything related to knowing what fits inside the ass of a farm animal.
He makes our trolls look well-informed by comparison.
Eh, we’ve had two Presidents in a row that have used cocaine (though only one of them admitted it), immediately following a president who toked up (but didn’t inhale . . . right). I think we’re a little more accepting of mistakes during adolescence than we used to be, which seems like a good thing to me. The demographic that hates and fears drugs (the elderly) are increasingly baby boomers who grew up around things like pot, so I’d be willing to bet we’re moving towards legalization (or at least de-criminilization) in the next five or ten years.
Of course, there will always be stupid people like O’Callahan who are happy to twist the issue, or like Rush, for whom drug abuse and drug addictions are moral failings in others, but a disease in his own case.
Has anybody else tried to speak to this shill, O’Callahan?
I spoke with him this morning and told him his editorial was so incredibly biased that it bordered on propaganda. In response, he asked me to spell out specifically what parts were propaganda; so, I started to list the lies.
But after I started-in on his first lie, he started to say that he couldn’t hear me and the connection was breaking up…and kept repeating this until there was no point in trying to continue. What a DB. My phone connection has been crystal-clear all day, before and after my call to this jerk.
McClatchy owns the paper; and for a while, they appeared to be trying to be more objective on this issue (Sacramento Bee), after their outlets in MN were key in defeating the medical cannabis initiative there, and the MClatchy Media was put “on notice.” They dropped at least one of the MN papers, perhaps because the paper, also a Tribune, changed their stance on medical cannabis and ended up supporting the attempt to create medical access in MN.
I’ve also called McClatchy Media and left a message for O’Callahan’s boss to call me back…
I’m going to try and post a link to this great response. Thanks for the work. Please keep it up. I don’t know if my link will work, because i can’t put the actual address/site name because of the “ass” part. I’ll try and if it doesn’t work, maybe somebody could help out?
After talking to this guy, I wonder if he somehow benefits from any form of cannabis prohibition. Does he have his life-savings in companies that build prisons, as somebody mentioned earlier, or in companies that own rehab centers?
Or does he have 30 pounds of it in his garage and has been having a hard time getting rid of it, because its schwag and most patients wouldn’t even look at it.
But I’m guessing he’s just a classic Dunce, who refuses to learn new things — especially things that challenge his core values — and he actually thinks his tired, worn-out stereotypes and lies are funny and somehow entertaining and newsworthy.
The laws against cannabis are insane. Just legalize the damn product and end this crazy fucking Prohibition!
For the record, i tried posting a link and mentioned that readers should check out this response, but I had to remove the ass part, which is too bad.
But so far, they didn’t even print the not comment, which didn’t violate their rules.
O’Callahan should just go get drunk for the rest of his life and stop trying to block access to one of the safest therapeutic substances known to man. How’s that for stereotyping?
I typically use real authorities — like the American College of Physicians, the Institute Of Medicine, or the British Medical Association — to tear apart this type of slop; but when the papers are basically “burning” all the real authorities by deleting discussion comments on the issue, it becomes a lot more challenging to counter.
I think a person more credible than myself listing all the medical organizations supporting medical access to cannabis and reading their position statements — on mainstream media, like Oprah or 60 Minutes — would end the 7+decades of lies almost-overnight.
Even well-informed people don’t realize how vast the medical support is. Here’s a list of medical organizations that support access to medicinal cannabis (this small but formidable list buries the “no medical support” or “not good medicine” myth that has been perpetuated by the mainstream media for decades):
American Academy of Family Physicians, American College of Physicians, American Medical Student Association, American Nurses Association, American Preventive Medical Association, American Public Health Association, American Psychiatric Association Assembly, American Society of Addiction Medicine, Medical Student Section of the American Medical Association, Arthritis Research Campaign (United Kingdom), Australian Medical Association (New South Wales), Limited Australian National Task Force on Cannabis, Belgian Ministry of Health, British House of Lords Select Committee On Science and Technology (First & Second Report), British Medical Association, Canadian AIDS Society, Canadian Special Senate Committee on Illegal Drugs, Dr. Dean Edell (surgeon and nationally syndicated radio host), Health Canada, Kaiser Permanente, Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Lymphoma Foundation of America, Multiple Sclerosis Society (Canada), The Multiple Sclerosis Society (United Kingdom), National Association for Public Health Policy, National Nurses Society on Addictions, Netherlands Ministry of Health, New South Wales (Australia), New England Journal of Medicine, AIDS Action Council, AIDS Treatment News, Parliamentary Working Party on the Use of Cannabis for Medical Purposes, Dr. Andrew Weil, Alaska Nurses Association, Being Alive: People With HIV/AIDS Action Committee (San Diego, CA), California Academy of Family Physicians, California Nurses Association, California Pharmacists, Colorado Nurses Association, Connecticut Nurses Association, Florida Governor’s Red Ribbon Panel on AIDS, Florida Medical Association, Hawaii Nurses Association, Illinois Nurses Association, Life Extension Foundation, Medical Society of the State of New York, the Minnesota AIDS Council, Mississippi Nurses Association, New Jersey State Nurses Association, New Mexico Medical Society, New Mexico Nurses Association, New York County Medical Society, New York State Nurses Association, North Carolina Nurses Association, Rhode Island Medical Society, Rhode Island State Nurses Association, San Francisco Mayor’s Summit on AIDS and HIV, San Francisco Medical Society, Vermont Medical Marijuana Study Committee, Virginia Nurses Association, Whitman-Walker Clinic (Washington, DC), Wisconsin Nurses Association, etc..
Just a little sunshine on some serious b.s.
Again, thank you for your great response, Lee.
@14
Thanks for the great follow-up. I’d considered contacting O’Callahan, but I know that a few others have already spoken to him. He’ll probably see this and just ignore it. I’ve been at this long enough to know that people who write editorials like this have little interest in debate. They’re either indebted to the special interests who benefit from sending drug users to jail or ideological driven to believe that the sky will fall without prohibition.
sounds like a bunch of crying just because someone doesnt agree with your point of view.
eh, some ole same ole…..
What exactly is your chronic medical condition that you need to use medical marijuana for again Lee?
Oh, wait….
(Cough! Hack! Whoa! Dude!)
@20
I’ve never used marijuana for medicinal purposes, and use it recreationally about once or twice a year these days.
If there was a point to your comment, you’re welcome to try again, but if there wasn’t, I guess it’s time once again for everyone to point and laugh at the funny monkey.
It’s so interesting to me how some people will stick with their disinformation, which usually comes from propaganda-producing researchers or propaganda groups, like CASA; instead of actually looking at the medical support, the medical evidence, and the several thousand year medical history.
It appears we have a few things going on (at least):
1. Some people don’t realize what “credible sources” mean; so they actually believe the DEA/ONDCP/CASA propaganda, and have been motivated by fear to keep the devil weed from killing their children, who they fear will go through some “gateway” and then die with a needle in their arm. And once these people get these myths swirling around long enough, they actually will debate people’s access to medical cannabis, using info from the DEA or the ONDCP, and thinking their sources are better than the American College of Physicians, British Medical Association, or the American Nurses Association.
2. Some past cannabis recreational users or “experimenters” have not been exposed to the actual history or to the science; so, they “conflate” their recreational experiences — good or bad — with the medical use of cannabis. There are a lot of Democrat-Nannies in this boat, who want to keep this medicine from patients; because when the Nannies tried pot brownies in college, they ended up getting too intoxicated and they believe that is what the average medical user experiences. So, they feel users need to be protected from themselves and from their doc’s recommendations — even though the Nanny doesn’t know squat about medical cannabis. Some of these nannies think their stance against medical cannabis will help establish their “goodness,” but they don’t realize they are “light years” behind their constituents on the topic, and the Nanny is coming across to many as a classic Dunce.
3. Then, there’s the “it-doesn’t-matter-what-the-evidence-is, I-KNOW-it’s-bad-because that’s-what-I’ve-been-told-and-I’ve-never doubted-it, because-my-brain-can’t-handle-too much-dissonance-and-because-I-KNOW” die-hard propagandist-prohibitionists.
Lots of Republicans are in this boat, but there are also a ton of Dems too, who think opposing access to medical cannabis will help them win “tough on crime” points with the Republicans or with the medicine-undermining and medicine-stealing thugs from the DEA and ONDCP.
And what’s really messed up, is the people who run these agencies,, like the ONDCP, know the truth; but refuse to be honest because they get paid quite a bit to perpetuate lies and conceal VITAL MEDICAL INFORMATION, and opposing medical cannabis initiatives is a very real part of their job description.
This guy, O’Callahan, is definitely a shill. He thinks patients who use cannabis are “dope-heads” and that the underprivileged and working poor are all drug dealers and prostitutes.