Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (57 page)

This changes the debate, he believes—because if you legalize, some people will choose to transfer from getting drunk to getting stoned on a Saturday night. Legalization, then, wouldn’t be “adding a vice”—it
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would be “providing adults with a less harmful recreational alternative.” He even argued that, although he is against teenagers using marijuana, if they switch from drinking alcohol to smoking pot, “that’s a net positive.”

So above a liquor store, the campaign to legalize marijuana bought a billboard showing a smiling woman in a white cardigan. She was saying: “For many reasons, I prefer marijuana over alcohol. Does that make me a bad person?”
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A previous billboard showed a girl in a bikini—in a parody of a beer advertisement—saying: “Marijuana: No hangovers,
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no violence, no carbs!” More controversially, Mason had noticed academic research that shows men are eight times more likely
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to attack their partners after drinking, but no more likely to do it after smoking cannabis. That’s why SAFER paid to put up a billboard showing a woman who had been beaten up, and urging people to vote for marijuana legalization to reduce domestic violence.
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At every stage, Mason wanted to underscore that the current laws “steer people toward using the more harmful substance.” When the local cops arrested a ring of marijuana dealers, he stood outside the press conference arranged by the Drug Enforcement Agency with wanted posters of John Hickenlooper, the mayor of Denver, explaining that he had made his fortune selling a more harmful drug and so—logically—he should be busted too. Mason said he had conducted an investigation into all the “alcohol dealers” in town by looking up the licensed stores in the Yellow Pages, and he asked why they weren’t being raided and paraded like the weed dealers.

His campaign called this tactic “marijuana jujitsu”—pushing
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the onus back onto the prohibitionists to justify their crazy system. Mason believes this is the only path to reform. “Until people understand marijuana’s not as harmful as they’ve been led to believe, they’re not going to support making it legal,” he says.

In all the debates during the campaign—all over the rocky and snowy terrain of Colorado—he set himself a rule. He would never make an argument for ending the prohibition of marijuana in which you could simply replace the word “marijuana” with the word “methamphetamine.” He would never solely say, for example, that marijuana prohibition is a waste of resources, or empowers criminal drug gangs, or that it burns through money that could be used for better causes—because if that’s true for marijuana, why not meth? Once you talk yourself into that corner, he says, you have lost the argument with the public. “Marijuana is illegal because of the perception of harm surrounding it,” he says. “Our message addresses that perception
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of harm head-on, whereas traditional messages have avoided that and simply focused on problems associated with prohibition.”

Over in Washington, Tonia Winchester was standing in the snow outside a Cougar football game, trying to gather the three hundred thousand signatures necessary to trigger a statewide ballot initiative to legalize marijuana. Many of the people who passed would smile and thank her—and many of them would snap at her angrily. She heard endless variants on “It’s a devil drug. You’re doing the devil’s work! You’re corrupting our youth!”

When people stopped to talk, she offered a very different message from Mason’s. “I’m not asking you to like marijuana or even think it’s a good thing,” she would explain. “In fact, I don’t use marijuana myself, and I would prefer if people didn’t use marijuana. We’re not talking about liking marijuana or advocating its use. We’re talking about a policy that has not benefited society, and has actually caused more harm than good.”

She would talk about her life as a former prosecutor, how she had seen the marijuana laws wreck people’s lives—and how she should have been spending her time prosecuting people who cause real harm. “In my mind always, no matter who I was talking to, the first fork in the road of discussing marijuana legalization was—Can I get them to the point where they realize we are not talking about liking marijuana?” she told me. “We’re not talking about advocating for the use of marijuana. We’re not talking about enjoying marijuana.”

Only around 15 percent of the people of Colorado and Washington like marijuana enough to smoke it. That means 85 percent don’t like or want it. Tonia thought that trying to mobilize those people in defense of marijuana itself would never work. She wanted to show, instead,
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how marijuana prohibition affects everyone—whether they smoke the drug or not. When you sound as if you are praising marijuana, she believes, you only trigger negative stereotypes in people’s minds. “I saw people’s attitudes toward me change when they saw me walk into the room and I wasn’t wearing Rastafari clothes and dreadlocks,” she says. “I have really successful friends who are smart and brilliant and intelligent, and when they admit to smoking pot, they see people’s opinions of them change . . .
I
still have to combat my own stereotypes of what it means to be a pot smoker.”

So the Washington campaign made a conscious decision not ever to argue that marijuana is safer than alcohol, because, as Tonia puts it, “it’s a stupid argument and it doesn’t persuade people . . . [They] have a visceral negative reaction to marijuana, and it’s only by overcoming that that you can actually get them voting for legalization.” If you try to tell people that marijuana isn’t bad, most of them—even people who could be persuaded of legalization—will quickly come back at you with all their negative thoughts about marijuana. “And I’m not sure there is anywhere to move from that argument point to then get somebody back to supporting legalization,” Tonia says. “You’ve backed yourself into a corner.”

But it is not just that they doubted that Mason’s argument would persuade people—they also doubted it was true. Professor Roger Roffman, an expert on addictive disorders, was one of the leading figures in the campaign, and he had been campaigning for marijuana legalization since 1967, ever since he returned from Vietnam. But when he heard people during the campaign saying the drug is “safe,” he felt obliged to explain: “This is perhaps what you’d like to believe, but the science doesn’t support it. Dependence is a risk. Driving accidents are a risk. Teenagers using marijuana early and regularly and becoming derailed . . . is a risk, and to say marijuana is harmless is misinformed, and it’s misinforming those people you’re talking to.”

The Washington campaign argued that drugs should be legalized not because they are safe, but because they are dangerous. It’s precisely because they are risky that we need to take them back from the gangsters and cartels, and hand them to regulated stores—and use the tax money we gain to pay for prevention and treatment. They wouldn’t have dreamed of telling parents their kids would be better off using marijuana rather than alcohol. Instead, they would explain: “Street dealers don’t check ID.” Legalization, they said, would restrict access to weed for teens. The Children’s Alliance—the major children’s charity in Washington State—came out for a yes vote on legalization.

This difference in philosophy didn’t just produce different campaigns—it produced different models of legalization.

In Washington, the model was built on the conviction that marijuana causes harm and we need to counteract those harms. So they decided to earmark the tax revenue from selling marijuana for drug prevention programs in schools and drug treatment for addicts. In Colorado, they didn’t—the money is going toward building new schools instead. In Washington, the legalization legislation introduces a strict new ban on driving while stoned. In Colorado, they resisted this proposal. In Washington, you are not allowed to grow it at home. In Colorado, you are.

Both campaigns argued that legalization would improve public health—but in contrasting ways. In Colorado, it seemed to me they primarily argued that it would make people healthier by getting them to transfer from alcohol to marijuana. In Washington, they argued it would make people healthier by making it possible to raise taxes to undo some of the harm caused by their marijuana use. It was a subtle—but crucial—difference.

One night, in Washington, the campaigners finally got confirmation that their initiative was going to be on the ballot, and they threw a big party at the home of a local travel writer. Alison Holcomb—the leader of the campaign alongside Tonia—was exhausted, and she wandered out and went to sit for a moment, alone. The sky was glowing pink and purple, and it was the first time in months that she had time to take off the blinders, and think about what they were really doing.

“That was when I finally realized that Washington State voters,” she told me, “were going to have the chance to change the world. I remember when I was looking up at the clouds thinking—that is the same sky that is over Mexico, the same sky that is over Europe, the same sky that is all over the world—and there were so many people worldwide that were waiting to see what would happen. To see if we would do it. I had that little moment . . . when I realized how big it was.”

As the war on marijuana was drawing to a close in both these states, I kept hearing strange echoes of the start of this war.

Marijuana was first banned by Harry Anslinger as part of a racist panic against Latinos: they are coming up into the United States, he warned, and bringing their “loco weed” with them. It was an argument that mobilized the public to back him. Now, all these years later, Tonia and Alison were explaining to the public that Latinos were still the focus of this crackdown. Yet this time—after decades of change—the public saw this not as a reason to support the war, but as a reason to oppose it. The country had become more compassionate.

Yet I could feel the habits of the early drug war coming back again and again, like acid reflux. At the start, Harry had used the full force of the law to intimidate and silence dissenters like Henry Smith Williams. It was still happening. One evening, one of Mason’s closest allies—an attorney with Latino roots named Brian Vicente—drove out to a county on the eastern plains of Colorado, to give a presentation on their arguments.

Suddenly, the local sheriff burst in with his officers. “If I had my way,” he yelled, “I would pull marijuana users out of their cars as they were driving by and shoot them”—and he mimed shooting them with his fingers.

Brian sped out of the county, terrified. But the intimidation didn’t only come from law enforcement. Later, Brian went to one of Denver’s leading Latino radio stations to make the case for legalization. He knew the state has many citizens who came from Mexico, some fleeing the drug war violence—so he wanted to explain to them that legalization would strip the cartels of a large part of their income and begin the process of bankrupting them.