Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (58 page)

The DJs looked at him, appalled, and said he could not say that on the air. “We don’t want to say that on the radio,” they explained, “because we’re afraid we’re going to get killed.’ ” They were convinced, Brian says, that if they advocated legalization, “there would be some sort of retribution in Colorado” from the Mexican cartels, who have representatives operating in the state, growing marijuana in the national parks, and smuggling hard drugs up into the country.

As he told me this, I remembered that right at the start of the drug war, gangsters supported prohibition, even bribing Harry Anslinger’s agents to impose it more rapidly. Now, at the end of the drug war, they were violently intimidating people who wanted to end prohibition. What, I wondered to myself, does this reveal about who really benefits from this war?

As I talked to people from both Washington and Colorado, I kept asking myself: Which of these campaigns is right? Which approach should people across the world take as we try to end this war?

Instinctively, I agreed more with Tonia and Alison in Washington. If I were a prohibitionist, I’d want to be able to characterize legalizers as a group of angry stoners demanding their right to smoke and saying it’s a good thing if others try it too. But I had a niggling sense that I was being too simplistic in viscerally rejecting Mason’s arguments. Why, I asked myself, are people more receptive to the arguments for legalization and regulation of marijuana today than they were in, say, the 1930s, or the 1980s?

There are many reasons—but one is that they no longer believe the most extreme myths about marijuana. They haven’t just changed their minds about prohibition—they have changed their minds about the drug. If you read out Harry Anslinger’s warnings today that marijuana routinely turns people into slavering murderers, even conservative audiences laugh out loud. That must be a factor in why people chose to legalize—mustn’t it?

Anslinger had to create hysteria about the drug in order to ban it; isn’t an essential part of undoing the ban undoing the hysteria?

When I discussed this with Tonia and Alison, it turned out their view was more complex than I had first understood. They readily acknowledge there is some truth in this argument. Back when she left school, Tonia thought marijuana was evil because it reduced everyone to being a slothful slacker. “Once people started to realize they knew homosexuals who were in wonderful, loving relationships—once the humanization of it happened—people got to accept it a little more in their lives,” she says. “That’s how it was with me and drugs and drug use. I know a lot of incredibly smart, articulate, productive members of society that recreationally use marijuana . . . For me it was just realizing that my ideas of what I thought people were like who used drugs were totally incorrect—and allowing those beliefs to be shattered when facts presented themselves.”

So they acknowledge—at least implicitly—that we need some aspects of Mason’s message. He goes too far, they think, but the message that it is safer than we were told for a long time is an important part of softening public opinion. Perhaps, I wonder, we need Mason’s argument as a long-term cultural undercurrent, and Tonia and Alison’s arguments as the harder seal-the-deal campaign. When I put this to Mason, he argued that this was the plan all along—you communicate that marijuana is safer, and “then push the traditional arguments
²²
once they’re primed and more receptive.”

And yet, and yet—other parts of Mason’s arguments strike me as wrong, both politically and in practice. I try to imagine telling skeptical parents that it’s a good thing if their kid smokes weed rather than drinking beer. I can’t think of anything that would make them run into the arms of the prohibitionists faster. Indeed, if that was really the proposal of the legalizers, I’d be tempted to vote against them: I would rather my nephews drank beer than smoked a drug that really can damage their IQ
²³
permanently.

But here’s the strange thing. For all the differences between the campaigns, both of them won—by big margins. In Colorado, 55 percent voted for it and 45 percent voted against. In Washington, it was almost exactly the same. Both of the campaigns that had been ridiculed as unrealistic at the start won by a 10 percent margin.

Once people in Colorado saw marijuana being sold legally in stores, the support for legalization went up even more. After two months of sale, the gap between support for legalization and opposition to legalization grew from 10 percent to 22 percent, with only 35 percent of people still against it. The fears about legalization
²⁴
began to bleed away once people could see it in practice.

A question hangs on the difference between these two campaigns, and it is the question—perhaps more than any other—that will determine the future of the war on drugs: In time, can we apply this same message to other drugs? Mason has a blunt answer. He says: “Are we just going to see this broad legalization of any other drugs [where they are sold to any adult who can produce proof of age]? No. Absolutely not. It’s not going to happen.”

I can see where he is coming from. Who would want to challenge their mayor to an alcohol vs. cocaine duel? An alcohol vs. methamphetamine standoff?

“All drugs,” Mason says, “should be treated based on their relative harms. These are different substances—they demand different treatment.” So while marijuana should be legal and regulated for adult use because it is safer than alcohol, he believes many other drugs are more dangerous—and so the same logic can’t apply.
²⁵
Mason is no conservative on this question, and he is strongly in favor of other kinds of drug policy reform—he wants to see drug use by individuals decriminalized across the board, for example, and he says that other drugs could and should be legally regulated in the future. “But in terms of it being regulated and produced and distributed? I don’t think any other drug
²⁶
would be treated the same way as marijuana.”

Tonia and Alison approach this question differently. Their case for legalizing marijuana was not that it is safe, but that the drug laws do more harm than the drug itself—and this, they believe, is an argument that can and will be expanded to many other chemicals. One by one, they believe, some drugs will be brought into a framework of legal regulation that will look something like marijuana regulation. It will take a generation or more, they say—but the time will come.

All sides of the marijuana debate agree that if this wave of marijuana legalization succeeds, it will break open a discussion about changing our approach to other drugs. Mason thinks we can move a long way—and Tonia thinks we can go further still, to full legalization. If the sky does not fall in Washington and Colorado, this whole debate will radically open up.

As I try to figure out how to advance the next stage of drug legalization, I keep coming back to one of the hardest questions I have come across in writing this book. Mason argued that marijuana is safer than we generally think it is—especially compared to alcohol. So: Are other drugs safer than we think they are, too? Are they, in fact, safer than alcohol? Should that be part of our argument?

When I first came across it, this seemed to me a stupid question—especially with my family’s history. I have seen what these drugs can do. Yet Professor David Nutt, the former chief scientific adviser to the British government on drugs, published a study in
The Lancet
—Britain’s
²⁷
leading medical journal—going through every recreational drug, and calculating how likely it was to harm you, and to cause you to harm other people. He found that one drug was quite far ahead of all the others. It had a harm score of 72. The next most harmful drug was heroin—and it had a harm score of 55, just ahead of crack at 54 and methamphetamine at 32. It wasn’t even close. The most harmful drug was alcohol.

This is so radically counterintuitive that it was only after I talked it over with Professor Nutt in detail, and then Professor Carl Hart and others, that I understood it fully. Nutt points out that the other drugs can be very harmful, too—but it is simply a provable fact that they harm few people, and cause them to harm fewer people in turn. He explains that this doesn’t tell you that these drugs are safe—merely that alcohol is considerably more dangerous than we realize.

So could it be that Mason’s argument might hold for many other prohibited drugs after all—they really are safer than alcohol? This is a complex message, and it is not reducible to a neat sound bite. Try saying: “These drugs can be very harmful—but they are not as harmful as you have been told by your government for years, and they are not as harmful as alcohol.” That’s not a message that I can slip into a five-minute shoutfest on cable TV. It requires lots of unpacking and explanation and qualification. It is easily caricatured as an argument that drugs are in fact safe—which is not at all what this evidence shows.

Yet Professor Hart—a neuropharmacologist at Columbia University—told me it is essential to apply Mason’s argument to other drugs, and he made a strong case. “You cannot vilify marijuana the way Harry Anslinger did” today, he tells me, “because we have this vast experience with marijuana, so if you tell people [that] if you smoke marijuana you’re going to go out and kill your parents—nobody is going to believe that. But if you [said that] in Harry Anslinger’s time, people did believe [it].” Today, if “you tell people [that] if they do methamphetamine they’ll kill someone, people will believe that. Or if you tell people [that] if they smoke crack they’ll go and kill someone, people will believe that—although it’s just not possible.” So until we debunk this “mythical view of drugs,” he says, we will be stuck forever in Anslinger’s war.

I feel divided about this. Part of me thinks Professor Hart is right: people will never choose to bring drugs into the legal realm of regulation so long as they believe they are demonic substances that hijack most of their users and destroy them. When they discover that these drugs are in fact less dangerous than alcohol, and addiction is caused mainly by trauma and isolation rather than the drug itself, they will be more receptive to new approaches. They will think about the drugs differently—and that, in turn, will make them change their minds about the cage we put drugs in.

But another voice within me says: This will seem crazy to many people. These drugs
are
harmful to lots of people. Nobody disputes that. Most of the banned drugs are closer to alcohol, with its massive harms, than they are to marijuana. Why would understanding the horrible damage caused by alcohol change how you think about the only-slightly-less-horrible harm that can be caused by crack or meth? You won’t win an argument about the drugs. You can win an argument about the drug war. Why choose the harder argument, when you don’t have to?

The division between Mason’s approach and Tonia’s is a division that runs through my own mind, and I can’t resolve it. But I know there is one way it will be resolved, in time. Over the next few decades, there will be campaigns that test both of these messages. Some will try to change how we think about drugs, and some will only try to change how we think about the drug laws. Which will succeed? Soon we will know.