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Dr. Gupta's About-Face on Weed; Baby Kidnapping Mystery; Bush Heart Scare Boosts Awareness; Leah Remini vs. Scientology

Aired August 09, 2013 - 10:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: Ok.

Everything you thought you knew about pot might be wrong -- Dr. Sanjay Gupta on the startling about face that he has on marijuana.

A baby kidnapped then presumed found -- then presumed found now nearly 50 years later the story takes a final twist and a middle age man seeks his true identity.

And California police go looking for the wife of Scientology leader -- of a Scientology leader after actress Leah Remini files a missing person's report.

NEWSROOM continues right now.

Welcome back, everyone. I'm Don Lemon in today for Carol Costello. We want to check your "Top Stories" right now.

There is a new warning in the manhunt for the kidnapping and murder suspect. His name is James DiMaggio and police say he may be armed with improvised explosives or may have booby-trapped his car with them. DiMaggio is wanted in the disappearance of 16-year-old Hannah Anderson and the killing of her mother whose body was found in DiMaggio's burned-outhouse. A third family member Hannah's eight- year-old brother Ethan is missing.

And deadly flash floods wreaking havoc from Oklahoma to South Carolina. Rescue teams working around the clock to save stranded motorists.

And overnight in Oklahoma City, a 60-year-old man was killed when trying to save his stranded daughter. At least two others have lost their lives in Missouri. While a South Carolina man was found dead in floodwaters on his family property.

Meanwhile, Nashville, Tennessee, was one of the hardest hit areas as parts of the city has seen upwards of eight inches of rain.

All right sit tight, everyone. Pay attention to this. Because a new CNN documentary airing this weekend may make you rethink what you thought you knew about pot.

Our chief medical correspondent is, of course, Dr. Sanjay Gupta and he changed his mind after he spent almost a year investigating the impact of marijuana on the body. Sanjay is here to discuss. Sanjay, this is not the first time that you and I have had that conversation. We'll talk about that.

But I want to dive in to more about pot, about something that you thought was bad, a bad drug for a long time that actually surprisingly you say works well as a medicine. So how so? Why did you change your mind?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well you know and let me preface by saying, you know, for a long time we've known that there's been some medicinal qualities to marijuana. And for a thousand years or so it was used as a medicine up until 1943, it was actually on the pharmacopeia which is what doctors used to prescribe medicines. But for the last 70 years it has not been.

And for me, Don, one of the things that happened, if you look at the literature regarding medical marijuana, some 20,000 studies will pop up and you find the vast majority of them are designed to look at harm -- less than 10 percent, around six percent to actually look at benefit.

And I realize now that painted a distorted picture and it distorted my own views on medical marijuana. I was pretty critical of it. It took sort of getting out of the country literally looking at other countries, looking at small labs that don't get nearly enough attention and paying attention to legitimate patients with legitimate problems for whom not only did marijuana work, it was the only thing that worked.

I too easily dismissed them as -- as high visibility malingerers who are just looking to get high. And I think once you start doing all of this and really spending some time investigating this, it -- in my case, it changed my views.

LEMON: Ok. Let's watch a little bit of it, Sanjay and then we'll talk more. I want people to see it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHAZ MOORE, USES MEDICAL MARIJUANA: I always -- I have two sticks.

GUPTA (voice-over): Meet 19-year-old Chaz Moore. He uses many different strains of marijuana, many of them high in CBD, to treat his rare disorder of the diaphragm. That's why he's talking this way, almost speaking in hiccups, like he can't catch his breath. It's called myoclonus diaphragmatic flutter.

(On camera): This fluttering here, it's annoying but it becomes painful pretty quickly, I imagine.

MOORE: Yes. After like 15, 20 minutes, that is when I can really start to feel it.

GUPTA (voice-over): He's about to show me how the marijuana works. He's been convulsing now for seven minutes. (on camera): How quickly do you expect it to work?

MOORE: Within like the first five minutes. And I'm done.

GUPTA: That's it?

MOORE: That's it?

GUPTA: It was actually less than a minute. Depending on the attack in the day --

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GUPTA: That's Chaz Moore, Don. He's 19 years old. He's been seen by lots of different doctors, have been on dozens of different medications, was even in the intensive care unit for this for some time. So, you know, you saw how well that can possibly work for him when dozens of other medications, potentially toxic medications could not.

And that's not just one person. There are hundreds of people like this. I mean there's real science to sort of make this point.

LEMON: You know again and so as you and I have talked about this before on "STARTING POINT" and we had a very interesting exchange then with Soledad O'Brien and a number of people have been saying, "I wish the news media would stop looking at the use of marijuana, especially medicinally as something that's bad and detrimental."

And as I said during that segment, in many ways alcohol can be worse for you than marijuana because of the lingering effects but we don't look at alcohol that way because it's -- because it is legal. And perhaps if we regulated marijuana use in some way we could start to study it and actually find out what good, if any, is in the use of marijuana, medicinally or for pleasure. Do you disagree with that?

GUPTA: Well look, you know it's an interesting question. And I think people always go to this moral equivalency point.

LEMON: Right.

GUPTA: You know marijuana, alcohol. I mean which of these is worse? I think a lot of the points you make are correct. I mean I think if you look at addiction or dependence, marijuana, closer to nine percent, alcohol closer to 15 percent. If you look at long-term impacts, I think you know alcohol can lead to all sorts of problems. And people can actually die from overdosing on alcohol. I haven't found any evidence of that with marijuana.

But look, Don, for me, you know the medical marijuana part of this is enough to stand alone. I don't think people need to co-mingle this other issue, it's not as bad for you as alcohol. I'm looking at it from a doctor's -- neuroscientist standpoint.

There is a therapy out there that can help people who are suffering now and they can't get it. That's wrong. They can't get a medication that can help them, they can't get a medication that could help them when other things don't? And if you want to talk about what they're getting now the real comparison in some ways is pain pills. I mean marijuana can work well for neuropathic pain, for example a very difficult to treat pain. Patients right now will try all sorts of different meds eventually end up on narcotics such as oxycontin, vicodin, percoset. They don't work very well for them either and a person dies in this country every 19 minutes of a prescription drug overdose.

That's -- that's abysmal, that's a horrifying statistic. And again marijuana can work well and they work better than those other drugs and I couldn't find anybody who had died from overdosing on it. So the safety from a macro standpoint it's got to be part of this discussion.

LEMON: That was a very profound thing that you just said. And we do that not only with marijuana but with a bunch of different subjects where we want to do this false equivalent. And you know that narrative that you have to compare it to alcohol or some other drug. It stands alone on its own and the conversation is very important as is, talking about medical marijuana.

GUPTA: Yes.

LEMON: I think that's very profound, Dr. Sanjay and the fact that you changed your mind, bravo.

GUPTA: Thank you. I think being a scientist involves continuously looking at the science. And I do apologize to people who maybe because they've been misled could not get treatment for them and they suffered needlessly. That's not acceptable. That's why I apologized.

LEMON: Check out Sanjay, it's on CNN.com your op-ed. Sanjay thank you. I look forward to seeing this and talking to you more in-depth about this. Thank you Sanjay we appreciate it.

GUPTA: You got it. thanks a lot Don.

LEMON: Don't miss Dr. Gupta's special, "Weed" that's Sunday night 8:00 p.m. Eastern only on CNN. We'll be right back.

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LEMON: It is a mystery once believed solved but now being revisited half a century later. The elements: a baby's kidnapping, a child found and a middle-age man's quest.

Here's CNN's Ted Rowlands.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PAUL FRONZAK, SEEKING IDENTITY AFTER DNA TEST: Well I think it would be a great thing in the end.

TED ROWLANDS, CNN CORESPONDENT (voice-over): Paul Fronzak is determined to find out who he really is. His story goes back to April 1964 at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. Chester and Dora Fronzak were celebrating the birth of their baby boy Paul when a woman posing as a nurse kidnapped the one day old newborn. It was front page news and as police search the heartbroken parents could do nothing but wait.

Then just over a year later this little boy was found abandoned in Newark, New Jersey. Investigators thought he might baby Paul because his ears were similar. But with DNA test unavailable, they couldn't just hand him over. The Fronzaks were sure it was baby Paul so they adopted him.

FRONZAK: And they are great parents.

ROWLANDS: The boy in this home video grew up as Paul Fronzak, living a great life in the Chicago suburbs. But as an adult, decades later living in Las Vegas with a family of his own, Paul decided to take a DNA test because he always had questions.

FRONZAK: And I started thinking honestly, what are the chances that out of the kidnapped baby from Chicago that I am their kidnapped child found in New Jersey two and a half years later. It's pretty wild.

ROWLANDS: The results confirmed that Paul actually wasn't the baby stolen from the hospital. He now wants to find out his true identity. And now nearly 50 years later, because of Paul's DNA test, the FBI has reopened the case in an effort to possibly find the real Paul Fronzak, the little baby stolen in 1964.

FRONZAK: I just -- I mean I just think it would be really cool if we actually found the real kidnapped baby.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROWLANDS: And Don, so it leaves really two mysteries here. Paul Fronzak wants to know who he really is. He's working with ancestry.com and they apparently have already located a couple distant cousins who he's going to connect with and then the other side of the equation is, where is the baby?

And the FBI is reopening the case they went into the vaults here in Chicago, they did find the old case files. They are going to start making phone calls and try to retouch with some witnesses and they do say they have some physical evidence that they are going to use as well hopefully to solve this mystery.

LEMON: Ted Rowlands in Chicago, thank you, Ted. We'll be right back, everybody.

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LEMON: President George W. Bush is still recovering from a medical procedure earlier this week to clear a blockage in the circulatory system leading to his heart. The news came as quite a shock to many who regard him as a model of physical fitness. But as some health experts or officials are pointing out, there may be good in the doctor's discovery and not just for the former commander-in-chief.

CNN's Tom Foreman covers that in this week's "American Journey".

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): In office and out, George W. Bush has been regarded by many as the most fit president ever -- mountain biking, running, swimming, golfing, weight-lifting and laboring on his ranch. His annual physicals while in office found him in excellent health with no history of hypertension or diabetes and low to very low coronary artery disease risk.

So when physicians found a heart blockage and inserted a stent to re- open an artery some people may have been stunned but not Dr. Barron Lerner.

DR. BARRON LERNER, PROFESSOR, NYU SCHOOL OF MEDICINE: I think it is an instructive case that people should go to their doctors and not assume for example that just because they exercise a lot they don't necessarily have a heart problem.

Lerner wrote a book on the impact of celebrity health issues called "When Illness Goes Public". And he says when famous people face illness, this is the good that almost always follows. Public awareness and action rise sharply.

When former first lady Betty Ford for example disclosed she had breast cancer, the number of women seeking screenings rose.

When Katie Couric's husband died of colon cancer, screenings for that disease increased too.

LERNER: I think the best thing that comes out of this is that somebody reads about this and then they pursue it more.

FOREMAN: Over the past half century or so, each president has maintained some sort of physical fitness during and after his term.

Nixon bowled, Ford golfed, Carter jogged, Reagan rode horses, Clinton ran, too, Obama plays basketball and the first President Bush even jumped out of an airplane. Each one a living reminder of how much watching your health matters whether you're famous or not.

Tom Foreman, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

LEMON: Let's check your top stories right now on CNN.

In Southern California, one of the fastest moving wildfires in half a century still out of control. The fire near Palm Springs has scorched more than 14,000 acres since Wednesday. So far it has destroyed more than two dozen homes and businesses. And seven communities have been ordered to evacuate.

Oprah Winfrey says she was a victim of racism on a recent trip in Switzerland. The media mogul told "Entertainment tonight" she was in a Swiss shop and asked to see a bag but that the clerk refused to show it to her saying it was too expensive. The shop manager has responded saying it was just a misunderstanding and had quote, "nothing to do with racism".

In sports, Tiger Woods has a lot of work to do if he wants to take the PGA championship. He's nine shots back as today's second round gets under way. Tiger tees off at 1:45 Eastern, 1:45 Eastern.

Australian Adam Scott is on top of the leader board with a stellar 8 under par.

You can catch all the action from round 2 on TNT this afternoon starting at 1:00.

Don't miss CNN's all access pass to the PGA championship. A CNN's "Bleacher Report" special, Rachel Nichols, takes you behind the scene with Tiger Woods and more of golf's big names. That's tomorrow morning 10:30 a.m. that's Eastern time. Tomorrow 10:30 Eastern time right here on CNN.

A bizarre battle between an actress and the Church of Scientology. According to reports Leah Remini filed a missing person's report on the wife of the Scientology leader but the church is calling the move a publicity stunt.

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LEMON: Remember that show "King of Queens"? It was very popular. One of its stars, Leah Remini is now in a bizarre battle with the Church of Scientology. Have you been reading about this? It's really odd. There are reports that the actress filed a missing person's report for the wife of the church's leader.

Entertainment correspondent, Nischelle Turner has been following this story for us. You know, she made this very dramatic break from the church and then this and then the wife is responding and then it's just really odd. What is going on here?

NISCHELLE TURNER, CNN ENTERTAINMENT CORRESPONDENT: Well, any break from the Church of Scientology, Don, is going to be viewed as dramatic, you know. The church though is now lashing out at Leah Remini after she cut ties with the church and also after she cut ties with the church reports have surfaced saying that she filed a missing person's report for Shelly Miscavige, the wife of the head of the church, David Miscavige.

Now the Los Angeles Police Department has confirmed for us that they did receive a missing person's report for Mrs. Miscavige at some point this week. They are not saying though who filed this missing person's report. We tried to reach Leah Remini for comment but she has not replied on whether or not she actually did file this missing person's report.

She left the church back in July. But early Friday morning a commander with the LAPD told CNN that they followed up on this report and that Shelly Miscavige is, quote, fine. Detectives had a face-to- face with her. They say she is not being held against her will and that case is now closed -- Don.

LEMON: And, you know, I started reading this and I think that the response from the church was that Ms. Miscavige had been working, busy working on church, making the church better and inside the church with women and all of those things. That was their official response, right?

TURNER: Yes. You know, she hadn't reportedly been seen in public for several years and Leah Remini's sister has said on a radio interview last month that her sister's problems with Scientology started when she asked David about his wife's whereabouts at Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' wedding. But yes, they did release a statement and they said that -- this is from the Church of Scientology.

They said that, "The entire episode was nothing more than a publicity stunt for Miss Remini." They said that "Rather than move on with her life and career, Miss Remini has aligned herself with a handful of untrustworthy, lunatic tabloid sources people who obsessively harass the church to advance their selfish agendas. So it's a back and forth, for sure.

LEMON: All right. We'll leave it there for now. Thank you very much, Nischelle -- see you soon.

TURNER: Thank you.

LEMON: Thanks for joining us today, everyone. CNN NEWSROOM continues right after this quick break. I'm Don Lemon.

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