Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (72 page)

12
The Safer Colorado website provides sources for these claims. See http://archive.saferchoice.org/content/view/24/53/, accessed January 6, 2014. See also http://jop.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/09/03/0269881111414751, accessed same date.

13
Mason interview. See also Fox, Armentano, and Tvert,
Marijuana Is Safer
, xviii–xix and chapter 3 of the book, where he backs up these statements.

14
Fox, Armentano, and Tvert,
Marijuana Is Safer
, xx.

15
http://archive.saferchoice.org/content/view/1335/10/, accessed January 2, 2014.

16
http://www.cannabisculture.com/articles/4837.html, accessed January 2, 2014.

17
http://archive.saferchoice.org/content/view/24/53/, accessed January 2, 2014; see also http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14656545, accessed January 6, 2014.

18
http://archive.saferchoice.org/content/view/387/38/, accessed January 2, 2014.

19
Steve Fox interview; see also Fox, Armentano, and Tvert,
Marijuana Is Safer
, 125.

20
Later, via e-mail, Mason clarified that this was only one stage in their work. After reading an earlier draft of this chapter, he wrote to me: “We focused on the marijuana-is-safer-than-alcohol message up until the 2012 campaign, at which time we began making the traditional anti-prohibition arguments while still making the SAFER argument, and then for the final few months made only the traditional anti-prohibition arguments. This is really a critical part of the whole thing. The goal was to make sure people understood marijuana is less harmful than alcohol, then push the traditional arguments once they’re primed and more receptive. You make it sound like we completely rejected all standard anti-prohibition arguments.”

21
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA0u98YFq04, accessed February 6, 2014.

22
Mason said this to me via e-mail during my fact-checking process, February 14, 2014.

23
Mason argues that the scientific study indicated that this link is false.

24
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/19/marijuana-legalization-colorado_n_4989191.html, accessed May 6, 2014.

25
Initially, I had taken from our conversation that Mason believed all other prohibited drugs were more dangerous than alcohol. In an e-mail as part of my fact-checking process, he clarified that this is not the case, writing: “I am 100% sure that many illegal substances—particularly psilocybin, MDMA, LSD—are not remotely as dangerous as alcohol.”

26
As part of my fact-checking, I showed this chapter to Mason, as I did with all the major living figures I have written about (except as noted above). I then had an e-mail discussion with him intermittently for quite a long time clarifying his position. I want to lay out the contours of that conversation here, to make it as clear as possible how I reached my conclusions about Mason’s policy positions, and—just as importantly—because I think our conversation reveals something useful about the debate that will happen as the drug war ends.

In my initial interview with Mason, he said other drugs “should” be treated differently from marijuana, because they cause different (and by implication greater) harms. I asked: “Do you think over time the model of regulation that you’ve achieved for marijuana, or other models of regulation, can be applied to other drugs that are currently banned?” He replied: “I don’t think they will be, no.” When I said: “That’s a division within the drug reform movement as well, isn’t it?” he replied: “Well, it’s only a division between reasonable, realistic people, and non.”

I therefore, in my initial draft, presented Mason as opposed to legalization of any drug other than marijuana or alcohol because that was how I’d understood his position, which I described as different to Alison and Tonia’s, since they both said to me that they believe legalization of other drugs can and should happen in time.

When he read this initial text, Mason felt it was incorrect to describe him as having a different position to Tonia and Alison—who believe in more extensive legalization covering other drugs—and reiterated that he believes in reforms like the decriminalization of personal drug use. This disagreement, I soon realized, came in part from a difference between us about what these individual words mean. He wrote to me that “words like ‘legalize’ (and even ‘decriminalize’) are ambiguous to the point of worthlessness.” I didn’t agree: I believe the words “legalize” and “decriminalize” do have quite distinct and clear meanings, and I tried to clarify them.

I was using “decriminalization” to mean the decriminalization of personal drug use by individuals—so you wouldn’t be arrested or jailed for having, say, a bag of coke or some LSD for personal use. And for me, “legalization” means that the sale of the drug would be reclaimed from criminal gangs, and transferred to stores and pharmacies (or some other legitimate route).

So based on my initial interview with him and using these as my working definitions, I couldn’t see how Mason’s position was not opposed to legalization beyond marijuana and alcohol, so I kept asking questions. In response to these requests for clarification, Mason suggested I clarify my description of his position by stating only that he thinks legalization of other drugs is “unlikely.” I asked him to explain his position further. I had taken from our initial conversation that he thought most other drugs
should
not be legalized—but now it seemed he was saying only that they probably
would
not be legalized.

He continued to argue that the term “legalization” is meaningless, and suggested that legalizing a drug is different to regulating a drug. To me, legalization and regulation are synonymous—they mean the same thing. Legalization is a process of setting up a regulatory framework in which a drug can be sold and consumed.

But to Mason they are not. In the end we agreed a form of words that we both believe is accurate to describe his position, and that’s what I use in this chapter—that he thinks other drugs could and should be legalized, but not in the same way as marijuana.

I wanted to lay out all this information here so the reader can reach their own conclusions, but also because I thought it might be useful to explain to readers that even someone as informed and committed and smart on this issue as Mason doesn’t agree with some of the terms I am using here to describe the solutions. One part of the fight to end the drug war, it occurred to me from this email conversation with him, will be getting agreement on how to describe the alternatives. Even people who essentially agree—like Mason and I—can end up having apparent disagreements because we haven’t reached a consensus on what these words mean.

27
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_cause_most_harm, accessed January 6, 2014; http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(10)61462-6/, accessed March 30, 2014.

28
http://www.vox.com/2014/7/3/5868249/colorado-governor-who-opposed-legalizing-pot-now-says-its-going-fine, accessed July 3, 2014.

29
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/28/hickenlooper-signs-colora_n_3346798.html, accessed January 2, 2014.

30
https://news.yahoo.com/colorado-governor-marijuana-legalization-221049661.html, accessed July 4, 2014.

31
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB20001424052748703559504575630760766227660, accessed January 14, 2014.

Conclusion: If You Are Alone

1
I first thought of this image of an alternative drug war graveyard when reading Adam Hochschild’s amazing history of the resistance to the First World War,
To End All Wars
, in which he imagines a graveyard for all the resisters.

2
http://www.release.org.uk/blog/drugs-its-time-better-laws, accessed January 14, 2014.

3
Sloman,
Reefer Madness
, 34.

4
I think I picked up this formulation—don’t give up, get up—from the Australian campaign group Get Up, which was cofounded by my friend Jeremy Heimans.

5
I think it was Julia Blackburn, Billie Holiday’s biographer, who first talked to me about how Billie Holiday’s songs make people strong—it’s a formulation I love and that really stayed with me.

6
Yolande Bavan interview.

7
Julia Blackburn archives, “The Story of Billie,” article V, by William Dufty, box 18, file VII.

8
Interview with Juan Fraire Escobedo, recalling his mother’s words.

9
Anslinger,
Murderers
, 172–73.

10
http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/joe_mccarthy.htm, accessed February 24, 2013.

11
Sloman,
Reefer Madness
258.

12
Anslinger,
Murderers
, 173.

13
http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/history/e1970/drugswashdc.htm.

14
McWilliams,
Protectors
, 187. Even Anslinger’s highly sympathetic biographer, John McWilliams, calls this “an incredible irony for the man who devoted his adult life to the enforcement and control of such narcotics.” See ibid.

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