Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (56 page)

In Colorado and Washington State, two small bands of friends and allies decided to get the question of whether to legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana onto their states’ ballots, so everyone could vote on it—and within seven years, they had won. I resolved to track down the people who achieved this
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and find out how they did it. And here’s the surprising thing. The different campaigns, it turns out, have different explanations. The men who led
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the victory in Colorado disagree with the women who won in Washington.

By teasing out this difference, I found two different routes out of the drug war—ones we all need to think about now.

Standing on the street, staring intently, Mason Tvert issued a challenge to the mayor of his city—to fight a duel at high noon.
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Back when Colorado was the Old West, these threats of shootouts to the death were as common as cowboys, but the last recorded instance was in a quarry back in 1904.
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Until now. In 2006, standing outside the Denver County Courthouse, Mason was reviving the tradition. It would be seen later by some people as the beginning of the duel that changed the course of the drug war.
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The offer was simple. John Hickenlooper, the elected leader of Denver, was a rich man who made his fortune by setting up a brewpub
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and selling beer to the public—yet he insisted it would be crazy to sell marijuana in exactly the same tightly regulated way. Mason Tvert—a large twenty-four-year-old Jewish American guy with a rhythmic foghorn voice—believed the drug had been proven by scientists to be safer than alcohol. He wanted to prove it again. So he sat next to several large cases of beer, a fake joint in his hand and a real joint in his pocket. For every hit the mayor took of alcohol, Mason pledged, he would take a hit of marijuana—and we would see who died first.
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Hickenlooper announced he would be out of town and so, alas, could not take part.
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He would continue to vehemently oppose legalization for years as he rose to become the governor of Colorado—until something unprecedented in the history of the United States took place.

Mason Tvert first became fired up about marijuana policy when he was subpoenaed before a multijurisdictional grand jury. He was a freshman at the University of Richmond, Virginia, studying political science, and it was the middle of his finals week when the police told him he needed to report to them. Mason knew that all he had done was smoke some marijuana—but he was interrogated like a suspect in a terror plot. It quickly became clear that another student had been busted and had started to give up names. The cops demanded to know: Where do you buy your marijuana? What suppliers to you know? How high up the chain does this go? Mason explained he got it in parking lots after rock concerts, and he knew nothing else of use to them—but he was terrified.
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But as he reflected on his predicament, he remembered that the college would allow and even officially approve of parties where huge amounts
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of alcohol were openly consumed—so he began to ask himself a question. Why is alcohol sanctioned and smiled at, while the police crack down constantly on weed—when it seemed to him that the weed smokers cause a lot less trouble than the drinkers?

After he left college, Mason wanted to change a situation he regarded as crazy, and he began to look at the details. A friend of his, Steve Fox, had noticed a quirk in the opinion polling about the marijuana laws. If you believed that marijuana was more dangerous than alcohol, you were very likely to support banning it. If you believed that marijuana was less dangerous than alcohol, you were very likely to support legalizing it. But the facts showed, he was sure, that marijuana
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safer than alcohol. This, Mason became convinced, was the key to unlocking legalization—so he moved to Denver and set up a group called Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation (SAFER) Colorado. It was designed to explain the facts about marijuana. He raised a banner outside Mayor Hickenlooper’s office. “What is the difference between the mayor and a marijuana dealer?” it asked. “Mayor Hickenlooper deals a more dangerous drug.”
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He was told it was a waste of time, a crazy quixotic quest. “We spent years getting doors slammed in our faces,” one of his closest allies, Brian Vicente, tells me. “Politicians wouldn’t meet with us. They wouldn’t return our phone calls. The police would threaten us from time to time. Our parents and others said, ‘Why are you working on this? It’s a hopeless cause.’ But we just believed in it.” They were determined to be free to use their drug of choice.

Four thousand miles away, in Anchorage, Alaska, Tonia Winchester was sitting in her school’s DARE program—the educational initiative cheerled into existence by Nancy Reagan to make kids pledge to “Just Say No.” She took its message so deeply to heart that she rose to become the president of her school’s chapter. She was convinced that “all people who use marijuana are bad and deserve to be in jail.” She tells me: “I thought that if you used marijuana, the next thing you knew, you’d be addicted to heroin and shooting up every day. That was my upbringing. I avoided drugs.” Tonia had never liked marijuana personally, and she never would—even as she led it to legalization in Washington State.

When she left school, she trained to become a lawyer and rose to become a prosecutor in Waunakee, a city in central Washington. One of her main jobs was to take on marijuana users and punish them. She had always believed in the cause.

But gradually, she began to notice a few things that were making her feel uncomfortable. Why were the people she was prosecuting overwhelmingly Latino and African American, when “the majority of people who use marijuana are white men”? she asked. Why is “a white man not going to get pulled over and arrested for marijuana possession”? She began to wonder if she was part of a racist system—and then, in dark moments, she started to question something about herself. Were some of her own decisions being driven by unconscious prejudices? If she saw that a defendant had a Hispanic last name, she noticed, she automatically assumed he or she wasn’t a citizen and could be deported. She was starting to ask herself: How did you end up thinking like this? Is this what you want to spend your life doing?

And then she noticed something even worse. The people she was charging weren’t just from ethnic minorities—they were often kids. One day, she was told to prosecute an eighteen-year-old boy who had been smoking a bowl of marijuana with his friends in a parked car in a parking lot. He had a scholarship to college. If he was convicted, he would lose his scholarship, and it would be hard for him to get a job for the rest of his life.

This wasn’t an isolated case. “Have you ever seen large food production plants, where the cows are just coming in—and they come in, and come in, and come in?” she asks me. It was like that: “It’s a conveyor belt of people coming in and out of the system . . . Case called. Sentence entered, paperwork filled out. You go to the bailiff. Next case . . . The drama is afterward, when they go to get a job and they can’t because they have a conviction, when they can’t pay their fines and end up having to spend more time in jail . . . It’s a never-ending spiral of hopelessness.”

Her doubts slowly built up, like polluted water behind a dam—until one day she was working through a pile of marijuana prosecutions and she noticed that there was a pile of domestic violence prosecutions waiting for her that she didn’t have the time to get to. Busting weed was the priority for her bosses, and it carried a mandatory jail sentence—while domestic violence didn’t. In that moment, she made a promise to herself.

I am going to get out of this system, she pledged, and I am going to get rid of this bad law. She hadn’t changed her mind about marijuana. She would never like it. She had changed her mind about the marijuana laws. Not long after, she teamed up with another lawyer—a young mother named Alison Holcomb, who had been working on similar cases, and had resolved to make sure her son would grow up in an America where nobody was treated like this ever again. They were virtually alone in launching this fight at first—almost nobody else was working to get this onto the ballot, because they thought it was a hopeless cause.

Both of these campaigns wanted to undo the work of Harry Anslinger—but in very different ways. Mason wanted to focus on undoing Harry’s claims about the effects marijuana has on its users. Tonia wanted to focus on undoing Harry’s claims about the benefits of prohibition. All the successful drug reform campaigns I had seen up to this point—like the one in Switzerland—had at their heart conservative messages about restoring order, bankrupting criminals, and protecting children. That, Tonia believed, was the right approach for Washington—but in Colorado, Mason was going to try a different way.

Mason believes the main reason marijuana should be legalized is that ever since Anslinger, people have profoundly misunderstood it. It is, in fact, safer than the beer they drink on a Saturday night. “Alcohol is a poison,” he tells me. “It is a toxic substance that can result in overdose deaths. Its use alone—not including accidents and injuries—is responsible for [about] forty thousand deaths in the United States each year. No deaths are attributed
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to marijuana use. [Alcohol has] been found to be a more addictive substance. It is certainly far more problematic socially—in that alcohol has been found to be a major contributing factor in acts of violence and reckless behavior.”

Now look, he says, at marijuana. “There’s no significant evidence showing marijuana is problematic in that way. In fact the evidence suggests marijuana tends to reduce risk-taking behavior and makes people less likely to become violent. It’s less harmful to the body and it’s less harmful to society. So if someone makes the choice to use marijuana instead of drinking, they are making a safer choice.”
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