Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (59 page)

Governor John Hickenlooper never did accept Mason’s offer of a marijuana vs. alcohol duel—but six months after marijuana was legalized, the governor told Reuters, “It seems like the people that
²⁸
were smoking before are mainly the people that are smoking now. If that’s the case, what that means is that we’re not going to have more drugged driving, or driving while high. We’re not going to have some of those problems. But we are going to have a system where we’re actually regulating and taxing something, and keeping that money in the state of Colorado . . . and we’re not supporting a corrupt system of gangsters.” He began to refer to legalization as “common sense,”
²⁹
and added later, “Let’s face it, the war
³⁰
on drugs was a disaster.”

I think that means Mason did get to fight his duel at high noon in the end—and it is clear who won.

After the people of Colorado had spoken, it was the job of the bureaucrats across the state to figure out how to do something that had not been done for more than seven decades—how to sell marijuana legally. In the fall of 2013, I sat in a café with Barbara Brohl, the head of the Department of Revenue in Colorado, to find out how they plotted their course through this unexpected task.

“It’s a new world,” she tells me, her eyes widening a little. Barbara would not tell me how she voted on the legalization measure, because it is her job to impartially carry out the will of the people of Colorado, whatever that might be. The people told her to figure it out—so here she was, figuring it out. The end vision endorsed by the Coloradan people was pretty simple. Any citizen over the age of twenty-one can buy up to one ounce of marijuana on any given day from one of the 136 licensed stores, and they can consume it at home. They are also allowed to grow a small amount at home for personal use.

For over an hour, Barbara talked me through the questions her department has had to answer in order to get there. Some of them are: Who should be licensed to grow the marijuana? Who should be licensed to sell the marijuana? What should the level of excise taxes be? What should the level of sales taxes be? If you tax the weed based on weight, does that create an incentive to make more potent marijuana to beat the taxes? If your tax is based on THC levels—the chemical component that makes users high and giggly—how do you test that? How do you stop the marijuana from being taken out of state? What kind of edible marijuana products should be permitted? Under federal law there is a strictly limited number of chemicals that can legally be injected into beef—so does a beef jerky with marijuana violate that?

We talked through the dense thickets of bureaucratic bargaining, drinking caffeine to keep ourselves alert. A typical sentence Barbara utters is this: “We needed to address how the state regulatory agencies and the local regulatory agencies were going to work together.” Another one is: “In the medical field, we have early vertical integration, which meant there was common ownership between the cultivation facility and the medical marijuana center where sales occur—and what that meant was we would have to license and approve both facilities before either license could be approved.”

And slowly, while the intricate logistics of marijuana licensing were explained to me, I felt a strange sensation washing over me. I couldn’t quite figure out what it was—and then it hit me. I was bored. For the first time in the entire process of writing this book, my eyes were glazing over. It’s not Barbara, who is delightful. It’s the sudden pressure drop. With legalization, the fevered poetry of the drug war has turned into the flat prose of the drug peace. Drugs have been turned into a topic as banal as selling fish, or tires, or lightbulbs.

As Barbara speaks, all the killing—from Arnold Rothstein to Chino’s gang to the Zetas—is being replaced by contracts. All the guns are being replaced by subordinate clauses. All the grief is being replaced by regulators and taxes and bureaucrats with clipboards.

This, it occurs to me, is what the end of the drug war looks like. It is not a mound of corpses. It is not a descent into a drug-fueled frenzy. It is a Colorado soccer mom talking about excise taxes in a gray conference room long into the night. Brian Vicente, an attorney who played a key role in the Colorado campaign, told an interviewer: “For years, the only discussion was: ‘How long should we be locking people up for possessing marijuana?’ Now we’re discussing what the font should be on the label of a marijuana brownie.”
³¹

I am bored at last, and I realize a tear of relief is running down my cheek.

Conclusion

If You Are Alone

I would pick up the phone and dial their numbers—but then I would hang up before they answered.

Throughout my travels into the drug war, I kept returning to London, and I knew that I should go to see the people whose addictions had propelled me there in the first place, my relative and my ex-boyfriend. But something kept stopping me. I was not ready—despite all I had seen—to finally resolve the conflict within myself between the prohibitionist and the legalizer. I busied myself with other things.

I kept picturing all the people I came across on this journey who lost somebody they loved in this war—and an image occurred to me.

Two global wars began in 1914. The First World War lasted four years. It came to be remembered as a byword for futility—miles of men killing and dying to seize a few more meters of mud. The drug war has lasted, as I write, for almost one hundred years and counting.

I am trying now to imagine its victims laid out like the dead of that more famous war, concentrated in one vast graveyard.
¹

Who is here, beneath a sea of anonymous white crosses?

Billie Holiday, and all the songs she never got to sing.

The patients from Edward Williams’s shuttered clinic, who Anslinger’s agents said should be drowned because “that’s all any of them are good for.”

Arnold Rothstein, with his fake white teeth and his pledge that if he died, his men would get revenge.

Chino’s mother, Deborah Hardin.

Ed Toatley, the undercover agent shot in the head by a drug dealer, whose death stirred Leigh Maddox to begin her fight against this war.

Tiffany Smith, shot on her front porch before she even knew what a drug was.

Marcia Powell, shut into a cage and cooked.

All the people whose bodies Juan Manuel Olguín stands over, his angel wings fluttering in the Juárez breeze.

All the people Rosalio Reta tortured and killed for the Zetas.

In time, probably, Rosalio Reta himself.

Marisela Escobedo, who walked through the desert and the dust storms to find her daughter’s killer, only to find there was no law left.

Bud Osborn’s friends, overdosing behind dumpsters on the Downtown Eastside, before his uprising began.

Julia Scott, the young mother in Liverpool who said she would die if her heroin prescription was cut off, and was proved right.

João Goulão’s patients back in the Algarve, killed before he could lead Portugal to decriminalize.

And for each of these people, there are many tens of thousands more like them whom I will never know, and whose names will never be recorded.

I forced myself to ring. I knew the people I loved weren’t in that graveyard yet—I would have been told—but I didn’t know if they were still heading toward it.

My relative sat on her sofa and smiled. She had been clean for over a year. She was, she explained a little manically, working for an addiction help line, ten hours a day, every day. She was still finding it hard to be present at times, I could tell. But she was alive, and she was progressing.

A short while later, one afternoon, I met up with my ex in the café at the British Library. He was obviously clean: there was color in his face, and it was rounder and fleshier. He explained he was going to Narcotics Anonymous every day, and he hadn’t used in almost a year, either. Before, he only ever talked about his drug use defensively—it works for me, so fuck off—or in a slump of self-loathing: I am an idiot, I have ruined my life. Now he expressed himself more reflectively. He could talk a little about how he had been using the drugs to deal with the pain from his childhood, which had been unbearable.

So I began to draft a happy ending to this story. Then, a few months later, he texted me, and explained that he had relapsed; he needed drugs, as he put it, that move faster than the speed of his pain. He was in a crack house in East London.

I had been taught by our culture what you are supposed to do in situations like this. I had learned it from endless films, and from TV shows like
Intervention
. You confront the addict, shame him into seeing how he has gone wrong, and threaten to cut him out of your life if he won’t get help and stop using. It is the logic of the drug war, applied to your private life. I had tried that way before. It always failed.

Now I could see why. He coped with his childhood by cutting himself off. He obsessively connected with his chemicals because he couldn’t connect with another human being for long. So when I threatened to cut him off—when I threatened to end one of the few connections that worked, for him and me—I was threatening to deepen his addiction.

The desire to judge him—and my relative, and myself—seemed to have bled away. The old noisy voices of judgment and repression were only whispers now. I told him to call me anytime. I told him I’d go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings with him. I told him that if he was tempted to relapse I’d sit with him, however long it took, until his urge to use passed. I didn’t threaten to sever the connection: I promised to deepen it.

As I write this, he is passed out on my spare bed. He has been bingeing on heroin and crack every other day for the past few weeks: he’s worried he might lose his job, so he wants to break this pattern. He asked yesterday if he could stay here for a little while, to get through at least that first forty-eight hours without relapsing. After that, he says, it gets easier. Maybe it will. I looked him just now, lying there, his face pallid again, and as I stroked his hair, I think I understood something for the first time. The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection. It’s all I can offer. It’s all that will help him in the end. If you are alone, you cannot escape addiction. If you are loved, you have a chance. For a hundred years we have been singing war songs about addicts. All along, we should have been singing love songs to them.