Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (55 page)

But I remained nervous, nonetheless, about expanding legal access to these drugs, for an obvious reason—one I had known since I was a child. Crack and meth contain such powerful chemical hooks that almost everyone who tries them will become addicted. I had learned this—without ever looking at the evidence. When I was shown the actual facts by real experts, I was startled.

As an experiment, I’d like to quickly test how well you know this. Can you stop for a moment and write in the margin of this book what proportion of crack users you think become addicts? Don’t read on until you’ve written down your estimate.

In April 2012, the brilliant drug reformer Ethan Nadelmann appeared on the MSNBC discussion show
³⁹
Hardball
. The host, Chris Matthews, was clearly initially persuaded by Ethan’s case for change—but then he backed off. He explained his worry: “Ten people could have a glass of wine and maybe one in ten or one in a hundred would become quickly addicted to alcohol. But I’m told . . . if you try crack cocaine once, you’re liable to be addicted.” That is what I believed, too.

But then I interviewed Dr. Carl Hart, one of the world’s leading experts on this question, at his offices in Columbia University, and what he showed me was so surprising I had to keep going back to see him repeatedly over the course of a year before I really accepted what he was saying. He talked me through the best scientific evidence, which he later expanded on in his book
High Price
. He showed me that the evidence is that, of the people who have tried crack, just 3 percent have used
⁴⁰
it in the past month, and at most 20 percent were ever addicted at any point in their lives.

Look again at the figure you wrote down. Is the real figure higher or lower than your guess? My initial estimate would have been 90 percent. I was wrong by 70 percent.

Now I know that instead of the vast majority of users becoming addicted, as I and Chris Matthews thought, the vast majority of users—even of these substances—do
not
become addicted. When Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, was revealed to have used crack, and a month later Paul Flowers, the head of a major bank in Britain, was caught buying meth and forced to resign, there was general bemusement. This wasn’t our picture of a crack or meth user—people with responsible jobs, who appeared to have functioned for quite a long time. Clearly, we thought, they were freakish exceptions. But in fact, according to the best available data, they are actually more typical users of the drug than Marcia Powell or Chino’s mom, Deborah.

This feels strange to say. It seems intuitively wrong to me. But it is what the facts show. Why is this so surprising to all of us, me included? It took me a while to puzzle it out, but I think this is the reason.

We still think—as I discussed earlier—of addiction as mainly caused by chemical hooks. There’s something in the drug that, after a while, your body starts to crave and need. That’s what we think addiction is. But chemical hooks are only a minor part of addiction. The other factors, like isolation and trauma, have been proven to be much bigger indicators. Yet the drug war
increases
the biggest drivers of addiction—isolation and trauma—in order to protect potential users from a more
minor
driver of addiction, the chemical hook. If we legalize, somewhat more people will be exposed to the chemical hook in drugs—but the even larger drivers of addiction, trauma and isolation, will be dramatically reduced.

As I try to understand this, I keep picturing the women back in Tent City on their chain gang. Imagine if, instead, you used that money Portugal-style to put them in a lovely clinic, teach them how to cope with pain, and help them get a job. Now imagine that kind of transformation spreading across a society, even one in which more people use drugs. Would addiction go up, or down?

How, in the end, can you decide whether you support drug legalization, and for which drugs? I can’t decide that for you. It comes down to what you, personally, value more. What I did was draw up a balance sheet, and try to figure what I personally value more.

I urge you to draw up your own balance sheet. Here’s mine.

In the column arguing against legalization, I wrote that drug use will probably go up. It won’t be massive—we know that from both of the historical precedents—but it will be real. Some people today refuse to take drugs because it is a crime to do it, and because they fear either getting arrested or buying from criminals in alleyways. The day after legalization, this reason for reservation will no longer be there. That is a significant drawback.

I searched very hard for other arguments to put in this column. I couldn’t find any, but you may have some: please e-mail them to me.

In the column next to it, arguing for legalization, I found myself writing out the following arguments:

Across the world, armed criminal gangs selling drugs will be financially crippled, from the Crips to the Zetas. The survivors will be pushed into much less profitable markets, where they will be able to do much less harm. As a result, the culture of terror that currently dominates whole neighborhoods and countries—from Brownsville, Brooklyn, to Ciudad Juárez—will gradually abate. (This happened after the end of alcohol prohibition.) The murder rate will significantly fall. (This also happened after the end of alcohol prohibition.) Enormous amounts of police time will be freed up to investigate other crimes. Trust in the police will begin to come back to poor communities. (This happened in Portugal.)

Teenagers will find it harder to get drugs. (This happened in the Netherlands.) Overdoses will significantly decline, and the rate of HIV transmission will fall dramatically. (Both happened in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Vancouver.) The drugs people use will, in the main, be milder than today. (Remember the iron law and the end of alcohol prohibition.) There will be a lot more money to spend on treating addicts and dealing with the underlying causes of addiction. Many addicts who currently get worse behind bars will get better in hospitals and then in new jobs. This means addiction will fall. (This happened in Portugal.)

Millions of people who are currently imprisoned for nonviolent offenses, at great expense to the taxpayers and to their communities, will walk free. Huge numbers of African American and Latino men who are currently locked out of the workforce, student loans, and public housing will be allowed back in. Shaming addicts will be replaced by caring for addicts.

Once I had drawn up my list, I compared the pros and cons of each side. Your calculation of the benefits may well vary from drug to drug. Mine did. When it comes to marijuana and the party drugs like ecstasy, up to and including cocaine, I think the harm caused by a small increase in use is plainly outweighed by all these gains. That’s why I would sell them in regulated stores, like alcohol. And with drugs like crack and meth? I am inclined to the middle option—allow safe regulated spaces where users can buy and take them, supervised by doctors.

I can’t support a policy that sacrifices people like Chino Hardin and Marcia Powell and Marisela Escobedo in order to prevent people who want to use drugs from taking them. I don’t want to live in that world

When Danny and Steve arrived in Uruguay, they showed President Mujica how to begin to build this better path.

Their blueprint—along with the advice offered by other drug reform groups—showed Mujica how to set up a legal, regulated framework for selling marijuana. After all the controversy, the proposals were pretty straightforward. In 2014, a legal structure was set up to let pharmacies across Uruguay sell marijuana to people over the age of twenty-one who produce a valid ID. The crop will be grown legally across the country, and taxed. Each home is also allowed to grow a small number of marijuana plants for personal use.

Nobody will ever be imprisoned for using this naturally growing plant again. Adults will be free to choose marijuana or alcohol on a Saturday night without any risk of punishment. Maybe, Mujica tells me, this policy will fail—but what we are doing now under prohibition “is a failure every day.” It is hard to see, he says, how the new policy could fail worse.

Seen in the long sweep of human history, Danny says, it’s not this new wave of legalization of drugs that is radical. “The radical move,” he tells me, “was prohibition”—the experiment that lasted a century and was based on the idea that it could eradicate entire plant species from the face of the earth and stop humans from getting high.

When Danny launched Transform in the mid-1990s, he named 2020 as the year he believed would mark the end of the global drug war. He always said presidents would be coming to his door, asking how to do it. People laughed. They’re not laughing now.

On the sunlit winter’s day when I visit the presidential shack, the first thing I noticed is President Mujica’s underwear, flapping in the wind on a clothesline. His wife, Lucia, is standing by the door. There is not, she explains, much to see. It is, indeed, a shack, with a rather rickety-looking iron roof. There are three rooms: a tiny bedroom, a tiny kitchen, and a narrow living space that connects them, with some books, a small wood fire, and a painting that was given to them by Evo Morales, the Bolivian president. That’s it. The tour of the Uruguyan equivalent to the White House takes all of ninety seconds. It occurs to me that my own prime minister, David Cameron, would not keep his shoes here.

Mujica “would be different if he weren’t kept prisoner,” Lucia tells me, “because he had so much time to think, it became clear to him what was important in life.” He learned “to live with light baggage in jail. He learned that happiness doesn’t come from what you have, but from what you are.”

Later, when I speak to him on the telephone, Mujica tells me: “If I have too much luggage, too much property, too many material goods, that makes me worry I have to defend this stuff—then in that case I will not have time left to take care of the things I really love, and then I lose my freedom.” He is in a philosophical mood. “I am seventy-eight years old,” he says. “I had a dream of changing the history of man—the possibility of creating a humanity where men don’t exploit each other. A utopia that we call socialism. We thought it was much closer in time . . . Many decades have gone by, and without renouncing our dreams, we learned that the impossible takes a bit longer.”

Outside the entrance to their shack, staring back at Mujica every morning as he leaves to run the country, there is a well. It provides the water for the flowers that grow all around him. Mujica grows his flowers, and he allows others to grow theirs.

Chapter 18

High Noon

So I had learned how drug legalization could work practically, but now I wanted to know—how do you make it work politically? How do you go to the heart of the country that has been imposing the drug war on its citizens and on the world for a hundred years, and persuade people there is a better way? I kept thinking of the line from the old song: If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere.