by Johann Hari
This difference in philosophy didn’t just produce different campaigns—it produced different models of legalization.
In Washington, the model was built on the conviction that marijuana causes harm and we need to counteract those harms. So they decided to earmark the tax revenue from selling marijuana for drug prevention programs in schools and drug treatment for addicts. In Colorado, they didn’t—the money is going toward building new schools instead. In Washington, the legalization legislation introduces a strict new ban on driving while stoned. In Colorado, they resisted this proposal. In Washington, you are not allowed to grow it at home. In Colorado, you are.
Both campaigns argued that legalization would improve public health—but in contrasting ways. In Colorado, it seemed to me they primarily argued that it would make people healthier by getting them to transfer from alcohol to marijuana. In Washington, they argued it would make people healthier by making it possible to raise taxes to undo some of the harm caused by their marijuana use. It was a subtle—but crucial—difference.
One night, in Washington, the campaigners finally got confirmation that their initiative was going to be on the ballot, and they threw a big party at the home of a local travel writer. Alison Holcomb—the leader of the campaign alongside Tonia—was exhausted, and she wandered out and went to sit for a moment, alone. The sky was glowing pink and purple, and it was the first time in months that she had time to take off the blinders, and think about what they were really doing.
“That was when I finally realized that Washington State voters,” she told me, “were going to have the chance to change the world. I remember when I was looking up at the clouds thinking—that is the same sky that is over Mexico, the same sky that is over Europe, the same sky that is all over the world—and there were so many people worldwide that were waiting to see what would happen. To see if we would do it. I had that little moment . . . when I realized how big it was.”
As the war on marijuana was drawing to a close in both these states, I kept hearing strange echoes of the start of this war.
Marijuana was first banned by Harry Anslinger as part of a racist panic against Latinos: they are coming up into the United States, he warned, and bringing their “loco weed” with them. It was an argument that mobilized the public to back him. Now, all these years later, Tonia and Alison were explaining to the public that Latinos were still the focus of this crackdown. Yet this time—after decades of change—the public saw this not as a reason to support the war, but as a reason to oppose it. The country had become more compassionate.
Yet I could feel the habits of the early drug war coming back again and again, like acid reflux. At the start, Harry had used the full force of the law to intimidate and silence dissenters like Henry Smith Williams. It was still happening. One evening, one of Mason’s closest allies—an attorney with Latino roots named Brian Vicente—drove out to a county on the eastern plains of Colorado, to give a presentation on their arguments.
Suddenly, the local sheriff burst in with his officers. “If I had my way,” he yelled, “I would pull marijuana users out of their cars as they were driving by and shoot them”—and he mimed shooting them with his fingers.
Brian sped out of the county, terrified. But the intimidation didn’t only come from law enforcement. Later, Brian went to one of Denver’s leading Latino radio stations to make the case for legalization. He knew the state has many citizens who came from Mexico, some fleeing the drug war violence—so he wanted to explain to them that legalization would strip the cartels of a large part of their income and begin the process of bankrupting them.
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 arguments22 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 IQ23 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 legalization24 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 drug26 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’s27 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.
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 that28 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 war30 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 ag
e 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.