This piece was written for YM in 2001 but did not run. A similar story crediting reporting from this piece ran in 2001. Many thanks to the many teenagers who I talked to for this story and thanks to Norwell Middle School for allowing me to attend the sex ed classes. All statistics are from data available in 2001. New data is now available.
by Margie Borschke
Ashley Ferguson just sat there. Every other girl in the classroom, including her good friend Carolee, stood next to their desks smiling nervously and looking left and right to see who else was standing. Ashley, on the other hand, looked down at the Limp Bizkit scrawls on her blue Trapper notebook and wondered what everyone else was thinking of her. Anne Munson, a cheerful 32 year old woman with curly dark hair, smiled broadly and handed anyone who was standing (that is to say, everyone but Ashley) something that looked like a credit card. "It's kind of cool," Munson squeaked. Ashley knew this was coming. This was the climax of a mandatory five-day course for eighth graders at Norwell Middle School. "You can make a stand for abstinence," said Munson, an instructor from True Life Choices, a group contracted by the public school board to teach "Creating Positive Relationships." And yet Ashley was sitting.
Ashley is 14 and lives in the nearby city of Fort Wayne, Indiana. She's wearing jeans, like every other girl in the class, a t-shirt and strappy platform sandals with no socks despite the frigid mid-western winter day. Her toenails are painted dark blue. She's into cats and hip-hop (not necessarily in that order) and watches a lot of MTV. She hangs out with more boys than girls but doesn't have a boyfriend and worries about what the more popular kids think. According to Ashley, she and her friends are 'known' but not popular. They sit in the back part of cafeteria in between the preps and the freaks. The nerds try to sit close by but they'd rather they didn't.
"Signing this card means you know that you don't want to have sex until your married, " Anne continued solemnly and read aloud the 'terms' printed on the back of the "ATM" (Abstinence 'Til Marriage) card. They included "drawing the line" at kissing and "creat[ing] positive peer pressure by choosing friends with the same values." She also emphasized the expiry date-your wedding day. "That's the day you'll be able to make love to your husbands," Anne promised and the girls who had been silent and reverent for most of the class giggled and blushed. A few looked back at Ashley before they bent over to sign their cards. A girl with bobbed blonde hair mouthed something to Ashley. Ashley stayed put. Ashley didn't take the pledge.
Vanessa Schafer did. She signed a similar pledge card last October in front of her Junior girls Phys Ed. class at Highland High School, a public school in sunny suburban Gilbert, Arizona. She carries the card in her wallet next to her school ID, a picture of her boyfriend Nate and her lunch money. "I see it everyday. It's a little thing to remind me that I'm not going to [have sex,]" she says. The card is white with black and purple lettering and it was given to her by Karie Hughes, a woman who runs a local group called Passion and Principles. It says, "Save Sex For Your Mate: Believing that true love waits I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, those I date and my future mate to be sexually pure until the day I enter marriage." Underneath Vanessa's signature is a quote from the New Testament, "Love is patient, Love is kind." Vanessa is thinking of getting it laminated.
Vanessa and Ashley's classmates are not alone: Well over 2.5 million young people in America have made similar public pledges to abstain from sexual activity until marriage during the past decade. Most have done so with church groups like the Southern Baptists' well publicized True Love Waits program but more and more kids like Ashley and Vanessa are being given the opportunity to take virginity pledges as a part of mandatory sex ed classes at their public schools. True Life Choices and Passion and Principles are just two of hundreds of community based groups who received some of the $450 million in federal and state funds earmarked for abstinence until marriage programs, a peculiar spin-off of welfare reform. The money is currently being spent by all but two states (California and New Hampshire turned it down) and president Bush has said he wants to spend even more.
In the place of condom demonstrations and information about birth control and STD prevention, Ashley and Vanessa's classes talked about church weddings, romantic honeymoons and happy families as the expected way for teenagers to prevent pregnancy and STDs. About a third of high school sex ed classes now emphasize this "abstinence until marriage" message over what's known as comprehensive sexuality education-classes that say teenagers should wait to have sex until their older but if they don't they should use birth control, practice safer sex and get tested regularly for STDs-an approach supported by 81% of Americans. A report by the US Surgeon general David Satcher was similarly wary of the abstinence-only approach, saying there was no evidence such programs were effective.
The abstinence until marriage crowd, a loose knit collection of community-based groups predominately led by evangelical christian parents, feels that comprehensive sex ed classes sends kids the message that they can't control themselves and gives them too much faith in contraceptives, none of which are foolproof. What both sides agree on is that STDs and teen pregnancies are a problem: about 3 million teenagers contract a STD every year and 4 out of 10 teenaged girls get pregnant at least once before their 20th birthday. Though the rate of teen pregnancies has declined steadily throughout the nineties (a trend both sides want to claim responsibility for) the US still has the highest rate in the industrialized world. That's right, number one. America has a problem.
But are virginity pledges the answer?
Vanessa's school district thinks so. Passion and Principles was hired by her school to teach their abstinence-only program. Vanessa, a soft-spoken honors student who lives with her who parents and two brothers said she really liked the class. "I thought it was good. [Miss Karie], showed us virginity rings and stuff," she said. After the class she and a few friends from her cheerleading squad agreed that they'd all get one, although Vanessa is the only one who did. Her ring, bought at a Christian bookstore, is silver etched with a heart, a cross and a key and she wears it everyday on her ring finger on her left hand.
"I don't want to have sex until I'm married because I don't want to get a disease and die or have it for the rest of my life," says Vanessa, adding that pregnancy was also a concern. Her mother got pregnant with her half-brother Chris when she was still a teenager and was unable to go to college because of the responsibilities. Vanessa, who wants to be a dental hygenist and looks forward to living in the dorms at Northern Arizona University, feels that sex, could jeopardize her plans. "Miss Karie told us that [your virginity] is a special gift that you can only give away one time," she said with confidence. Her friends and family, she says, are behind her as is Nate, her boyfriend of a year and a half.
"I think its great," said Nate who is 19 and works assembling circuit boards at a local electronics company and wants to join the marines. "I think you should wait until marriage to have sex because there are so many diseases and you don't want to give them to your spouse." Nate, however, is not a virgin. He says he changed his mind about sex because of the emotional pain he experienced in his last relationship. "I'm a recycled virgin," he laughs adding that he hasn't taken a formal abstinence pledge but says he would if he had the opportunity. Almost all pledges encourage kids who aren't virgins to stop having sex and embrace what they call 'secondary virginity'. "I had sex before and it was a big mistake," Nate continues. "When you're young and you have sex, your whole relationship is based on sex. You can't base a relationship on sex so you might as well not have it."
Vanessa didn't exactly go it alone–pretty much every one who took the Passion and Principles course at her school signed a card. Things were similar at Ashley's school. "I don't know anyone who wouldn't sign them," Ashley told
me a couple weeks before this year's class. She’d signed one every year since the fourth grade. "I didn't want people to think I was easy, " she says of her pervious pledges. This year she and a couple boys were the only kids in the eighth grade who didn't sign. "There are people at my school who are sexually active who sign pledges because they think it might help their reputation," she says, adding that she knew kids who signed the pledges but continued to have sex. "People are going to do what they want. I know some people who are sticking to it but a lot of people are really pressured into doing stuff." Including signing pledges, as it turns out.
Ashley did feel pressured to sign and she worried that deciding not to pledge might give some of her classmates the wrong idea.
"I decided I didn't really care what they thought of me," says Ashley, confessing that she did worry about being called a slut by the more popular kids. "My friends know I'm not having sex and I don't plan on it." And while one such popular girl did a broadcast Ashley's decision around the cafeteria no one seemed too concerned and they continued comparing notes on their sex ed classes over luke warm pepperoni pizza and fried fish sandwiches. Ashley decided to confront the girl: "I said straight up,'You shouldn't be talking about me because I was standing up for what I believed in.'” A couple of her male classmates told her they admired her and said they thought she should be proud of herself. And that was that. A few friends asked her why she didn't sign that weekend, but come Monday, everyone seemed to have forgotten about the pledge entirely.
A recent study by the National Institutes of Health found that kids who took virginity pledges did wait longer to have sex than kids who didn't. But it also found that the more kids in a school that signed them, the less effective they were in delaying sex. Taking a pledge, the researchers explain, creates a clique of sorts, just like being a jock or a raver or whatever. If the majority of kids take a pledge it's no different than if no one took one because pledging is no longer special. This means that Ashley's classmates are no more likely to wait to
have sex until marriage than she is. For that matter, they're no more likely
to wait than kids who took a comprehensive sex ed class are. (Research shows that teaching teenagers about contraception and STD prevention does not make them have sex. Some studies even shows that it decreases the chance a teenager will have sex.)
Plenty of teenagers, pledges or no pledges, are happy to be virgins–more than
half of those 17 and younger to be precise. Including Ashley.
"I know I'm not ready to have sex right now. I'm not ready to settle down if
something happens and, you know, we're still kids ourselves," she says. Pregnancy is something she's seen happen to older teenage friends and relatives and she knows that if that were to happen to her, her plans to go to college, perhaps to study to be a veterinarian would have to be put on hold. Ashley, however, like most kids her age, is pretty curious about sex and while she isn't usually too fond of school she paid close attention to her TLC instructor, taking careful notes and answering questions. Unlike in her science and history classes where she sometimes goofs off, Ashley was quick to raise her hand and was pleased that her questions about sex and relationships were answered first.
This the third year that True Life Choices has come to her school. The group is a non-profit organization run by a veteran of the local Crisis Pregnancy Center, the anti-abortion arm of Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian group with whom many of the abstinence educators contacted had ties. None of the TLC instructors are public health professionals nor do they have teaching credentials. Over the course of a week they go over basic male and female anatomy, the role of respect and commitment in relationships, the consequences of sex (pregnancy, STDs, emotional scars), how to say no to sex and safe dating situations (message: avoid being alone with your love interest and draw a line at sexual activity before what they call "the underwear zone.") Students played a game about STDs (the answer to most of the questions: “abstinence until marriage”) , watched videos about why to choose abstinence ("Just because some of our parents had no self control doesn't mean we don't" scowled the Multi-culti teens in an episode on STDs) and watched demonstrations that likened premarital sex to unwrapped candy bars (message: those who have premarital sex are used and dirty.) TLC also mentions marriage about every five minutes complete with talk of church weddings, string quartets, white dresses and fabulous parties.
"I don't think they really should have been talking about marriage as much," Ashley said. "We're teenagers– we're a long way from getting married." Romance may be TLC's secret weapon but Ashley wasn't buying it.
TLC also says that kids should "check their signals" which mostly means that girls are told to dress in a way that makes boys think they have chosen abstinence. (Tell that to Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson, both publicly professed virgins 'til marriage who will wear what they like, thank you very much!) According to Ashley's instructors this is because guys are turned on by sight whereas girls are turned on by touch. Vanessa's instructor also talked about supposed difference between the sexes. According to Vanessa, "Miss Karie said that guys don't really care much about love they just care about sex and girls are the opposite," a claim that curiously didn't come up in the boy's class.
Possibly the most controversial element of these classes is what they teach kids about condoms. Proper use is tossed out in favor failure rates and the instructors seem preoccupied with HPV, an STD that condoms aren't so good at preventing over the infections they can help prevent such as the deadly HIV virus. As a result many kids who take abstinence until marriage classes are left with the impression that condoms don't work. "[Passion and Principles] talked to us about condoms," Vanessa reports. "They told us that they have
tiny holes in them and you can still get a disease or get pregnant with a condom on." Vanessa's class workbook says that “condoms are only 70-90% effective", "They leak!", "They break!", "They deteriorate!" and, cryptically "Naturally occurring defects in condoms are 5 microns-50 times larger than HIV."
Public health officials including the World Health Organization, disagree. While not having sex (as in no intercourse, no oral sex, no anal sex and no genital contact) is obviously a teen's best bet if they want to avoid the question altogether, for teenagers who do choose to be sexually active using a condom as a form of protection is clearly better than nothing. According to the World Health Organization Condoms are 99.9% effective in preventing pregnancy and STDs when used consistently and correctly, something teenagers aren't so good at if they haven't been instructed on how to use them. Not surprisingly, neither Vanessa or Ashley's class showed them how to do so. In fact, when questioned about condoms, the head of TLC told a classroom full of eighth grade boys that the FDA allows 3 out of every 1000 condoms to go to stores with a hole in them, a claim which is simply not true. It's no wonder then that some health providers have reported that sexually active kids are turning down condoms saying that they were taught at school that they don't work. A boy who took the Passion and Principles class said he thought the most effective way to prevent pregnancies and STDs during intercourse was to pull out before ejaculating.
Critics point out that teaching teenagers only about abstinence is not realistic-there are teenagers who are having sex and they need to know how to prevent pregnancy and STDs. Pledges might help some kids avoid sexual activity but, well, promises can be broken. And studies have found that by the time pledgers leave their teens, only about half are still virgins.
"It was on July 28th," says Kirsty Douglas* [not her real name], a 17 year old junior in Greenville, South Carolina. "My parents were at work and we got caught up in the heat of the moment." Kirsty and Taylor* [not his real name], her 19 year old boyfriend, had been dating for 6 months. They were both virgins. "We had talked about it before about how we didn't want to [have sex until we were married] and, I don't know, things just carried on each time we were alone and then it just happened." Kristy was walking on air for the rest of the day. "It was fun," kristy giggles.
But the next day Kirsty felt badly about what she and Taylor had done, not so much because of the sex itself-she loves her boyfriend deeply and expects that they might marry after she finishes college–but because she, along with everyone else on her cheerleading squad, had pledged at a True Love Waits rally at her school. Kirsty told her mom-they're very close-and they decided it wasn't something she should do again. But they found themselves alone again and, well, they did it again. And again. Today, Kirsty seems ambivalent. She and Taylor continue to have sex but not very often (about once a month) and it is by no means at the center of their relationship. Kirsty is happy about this. Still, she says she is disappointed that she broke her pledge.
"Ever since I knew what sex was I always said that I was never going to have sex until I was married, " says Kirsty, an honor student and a cheerleader, who adds that it is also what her church, the Southern Baptists, believe in. "That was my goal. I pledged because I wanted everyone to know that I wasn't going to [have sex] and I was going to stand up for what I believed in."
Kirsty's best friend who also pledged at the rally didn't wait for a wedding ring either. And she has reason to suspect that most of her teammates on the cheerleading squad, all virgins when they pledged, have changed their minds as well. Although more teenagers are putting off having sex until their older by the time their 20, less than a quarter of girls are still virgins.
Kirsty and Taylor used a condom.
"I was kind of surprised that he had one," says Kristy. She now takes birth control pills and they use condoms every time they have sex. But her best friend didn't use anything and the same study that found that pledge takers waited longer to have sex also found that kids who broke their pledges were much less likely to use protection when they had sex than kids who didn't pledge. Some weren't prepared, others didn't know how to get or use contraception and still other's thought that romantic love (the kind they'd heard so much about in their abstinence classes in the place of real information on contraception) would save the day.
"I think that if somebody wants to have sex, for any reason–if they have a long-time boyfriend, say - then they should know where to get protection and how to use it," says Kristy.
Ashley also points out that marriage is simply something that not all adults choose to do.
"At first I was going to stand up and pledge but then I thought, no, go with what you believe," she explains. "I thought about it a lot. I even thought about it at the Kid Rock concert last night. You know, my mom wasn't married when she had me [and she still isn't.] I don't plan on getting married for a long time. I don't think I'll have sex [as a teenager] but I think I'll probably have sex before I get married." Given that only 7% of men and 21% of women were virgins on their wedding night, Ashley's probably being realistic. "I didn't want to look back and say yeah I signed that [virginity pledge] but I went and had sex anyway. Then I
probably would feel bad."
Thursday, November 24, 2005
THE NEW FACE OF DRUG WAR ACTIVISTS
THE NEW FACE OF DRUG WAR ACTIVISTS
An edited version of this story appeared in Details Magazine, November 2001. All facts were checked with data available circa August 2001. I'd like to update and annotate someday soon.
Rob Kampia is standing next to the hors d'oeuvres, clutching a bottle of beer, and edging up to a multimillionaire. It’s classic Washington D.C.: Kampia's buttoned into a lobbyist-issued dark gray suit with a crisp white shirt and a silk tie emblazoned with the American constitution. The multimillionaire is in dress-down mode because he can get away with it, even here at the prim Cato Institute, the conservative think tank who is hosting this cocktail party. There in the glass enclosed lobby, beneath palm trees that optimistically and improbably spout from the tile floor, the two carry on in hushed, serious tones. Tax cuts? Hardly. Energy policy? Wrong again. Kampia, 32, is the executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, a small non-profit he co-founded in 1995 that seeks to reform marijuana laws. In order to do so his group needs money, and this is where the cocktail party and the multimillionaire come in. This is what the frontline in the war against the war on drugs looks like? The rebel forces have gone mainstream.
These are by no means halcyon days for the anti-prohibition troops especially in light of President Bush’s choice of John P. Walters, a lock-em up conservative, as drug czar. Nevertheless, activists across the country continue to be invigorated by the recent successes of state medical marijuana initiatives and the public dialogue spawned earlier this year by Steven Sonderberg’s film Traffic. There are now dozens of national organizations pushing the cause–many funded by prominent straight-laced business people such as George
Soros, Peter Lewis and John Sperling–whereas in 1990 there were just two. Though still dominated by the baby boomers who got the ball rolling, the younger generation of activists is a far cry from the flaky hackey-sack spiritualists that are generally associated with the anti-prohibition movement. The new activists are clean cut, middle class, and professional-and their approach tends to be much more conservative than their forebears. They want to change bad laws-not "the system."
Kampia, 32, a committed libertarian, dropped in at the Cato Institute for a reception honoring Gary Johnson, the 48-year-old, apple pie-faced governor of New Mexico, a Republican who freely admits that he is one of the more than 70 million Americans who have smoked pot. More radical still, he thinks it shouldn't be a crime.
Across the room is Allen St. Pierre, the 35-year-old director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws who together with Cato organized the bash for the governor, who is one of the first elected officials in recent years to come out in favor of legalization. (President Carter came close to reforming laws in the 1970s but since then politicians have been wary of the topic, lest they be labeled soft on crime.) St. Pierre has neatly cropped hair and he wears round wire rimmed glasses and a tweed jacket that betrays both his New England upbringing and his young fogeyish tendencies. A small green leaf is pinned to his lapel. It is possibly the only pot leaf at the event, a marijuana rally of sorts, circa 2001. Though the room isn’t entirely free of the tie-dyed cotton or unkempt hair that is expected of marijuana activists, the crowd—a mix of activists, medical researchers, libertarians, democrats, republicans, rich people and policy wonks sipping on martinis and Merlot–is predominately white and male and middle aged dressed in suits and ties. The women wear power suits or twin sets. No one, I repeat, no one is smoking pot and St. Pierre and Kampia stand out only because of their relative youth. When the governor (a tri-athelete who gave up pot and alcohol years ago and encourages others to do the same) addresses the crowd and declares America's war on drugs a "miserable failure," everyone cheers. They're ecstatic that an elected official is finally on their side. "I just had a gush of warm feeling," says St. Pierre. “It’s great to hear someone speak the gospel of reform.”
The new ‘Legalize It’ crew spans the political spectrum and few of the younger agitators have had anything to do with radical politics, or even other political issues. They may have made careers out of drug policy reform but they are not career activists. Sophisticated strategists, they are media savvy and tend to specialize, working on small parts of the drug policy puzzle such as medical marijuana, harm reduction or mandatory minimum sentences. And perhaps most surprisingly, some of the younger activists say they've never used drugs of any sort. Marijuana prohibition, they believe, is simply bad public policy– ineffective, inefficient, racist, and causing more harm than it prevents. Like alcohol prohibition in the twenties, the ban on cannabis has created a criminal black market that has ravaged inner city neighborhoods, they point out. And while African Americans aren’t anymore likely to use drugs they are far more likely to go to jail on drug charges. This is the first generation who has known nothing but the drug war; they are the children in whose name all those new prisons were built. This is their generation's anti-war movement.
Twelve years ago, Kampia was a prisoner of that war. He spent three months in the county jail for "manufacturing marijuana with intent to distribute." He was a junior at Penn State living in his first apartment, a furnished three bedroom that he and his two roommates decorated by tacking blue mesh to the ceiling and a few posters to the walls. He studied engineering and posted straight As. The closest he came to counter culture was his taste for heavy metal and, in sharp contrast to his clean-cut business-like look today, he wore his thick blonde hair long, had a fondness for ripped jeans and a big silver cross hung from his left ear. “I dressed terribly,” he laughs. “It was beyond fashion.” Perhaps, but hardly radical.
He'd tried pot twice in high school but nothing happened. Then as a college sophomore, a friend passed him a corn cob pipe she called “the superbowl.” "It worked," he recalls. "Once I experienced it I really enjoyed it. I found it preferable to alcohol, so I bought my first bag." He smoked on the weekends and bought exclusively from other students in the dorm.
Then, in his junior year he had the kind of brilliant idea thrifty college students specialize in–he would grow his own. He outfitted his bedroom with incandescent bulbs and planted some seeds in pots on the unused bunk bed and in his closet. But someone “narced.” The narc was a guy about his age; A bicycle thief who had been offered a reduced sentence if he could lead the police to three individuals committing drug offenses. When Kampia was busted most of the 96 plants weren't more than two inches tall and none had ever been harvested. "I wasn't a skilled botanist," he says with a laugh. The police said it was their biggest bust that year and even though Kampia had no prior record, he got three months. He considers himself lucky–if the federal authorities got to him he could have served years. He was kicked out of school, dumped by his girlfriend, and missed Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Eve, and his 21st birthday. He was very angry. "I was in jail with people who were in there for either hurting others or hurting property and I did neither," Kampia explains, his voice laced with lingering rage. "That's how my political activism got started. Sitting behind bars.”
"Stop Arresting Responsible Marijuana Users" reads the slogan printed on a banner that hangs across the entry to the conference area in D.C.'s Renaissance Hotel. This is NORML’S annual conference: three days of panel discussions and speeches that attracts drug policy wonks and NORML members from across the country. One floor below Hardee’s franchise owners are fluttering about the hotel’s carpeted depths wearing Uncle Sam hats and Perdue Chicken is holding a luncheon. St. Pierre runs around warmly greeting panelists and desperate to get the 350 attendees to settle in so they can stay on schedule. C-Span is airing Gov. Johnson's luncheon speech and live TV doesn't run late.
The gathering is similar to the one at the Cato Institute-–straight laced and almost entirely white–but with a higher granola factor. There are more 40-somethings who look like they stumbled out of a VW van and a handful of cute girls with blonde dreadlocks and baby faced boys who are probably mourning the breakup of Phish. Jokes about cottonmouth and short-term memory loss are popular as is setting the ringer on your mobile phone to play a tune. The pungent aroma of pot can occasionally be smelled –usually emanating from one of the handful of medical marijuana patients at the conference, including a woman whose MS is so advanced that she's confined to a gurney.
St. Pierre consciously tries to keep hippie stuff to a minimum (the anti-authoritarian youth culture of the 1960s is commonly used to dismiss reformers arguments) but outside the auditorium a few cultural stereotypes prevail. One guy sells hemp products and blasts seventies rock on a boom box; a super-laid-back type sells bike shirts to benefit NORML's mountain biking team. "Pretty much everyone who races smokes pot," he tells me. But near him is a table crammed with weighty policy papers from the Soros-backed Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation led by intellectual powerhouse Ethan Nadlemann. Next door, a young libertarian mans his party's table, looking as young libertarians so often seem to, like a Jehovah's Witness on casual Friday. It's a very open, non-partisan atmosphere. For St. Pierre, who almost single handedly revived NORML in the mid nineties, this makes perfect sense. "It's a non-partisan issue," he shrugs. "The drug war cuts across every strata of American life. It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, black or white, male or female. Its tentacles now reach out so far that every group and sub-group has been affected by it."
Marijuana comes from the flowering tops and leaves of the hemp plant Canabis Sativa and was legal in the US until 1937. It is a mild hallucinogen, that heightens the senses and has been known to make users introspective, euphoric, hungry and prone to watch late night television. It was banned, in part, because it was thought to be highly addictive and a "gateway" drug, but government studies–most recently a 1999 study by the Institute of Medicine–have shown otherwise. No one has ever overdosed–it's
virtually impossible according to that same study–and its use is not associated with increased crime, violent or otherwise. (The legal drug alcohol can’t make the same claim.) It is illegal under the Controlled Substances Act, which classifies it as schedule 1; this means it's considered a dangerous drug that is highly addictive and has no accepted medicinal use.
Yet according to an ACLU poll three out of five Americans do not think marijuana smokers should be sent to jail and other studies have found that about 75 percent think it should be available for medical use. According to the Department of Health and Human Services about 11.1 million Americans smoke pot at least once a month. (By contrast, fewer than two million are regular users of all other illicit drugs combined.) Pot-related arrests have almost doubled in the last decade, but use rates remain stable and joints are passed casually at Upper East Side dinner parties and surreptitiously in big-city nightclubs. Marijuana users span all socioeconomic backgrounds and include hundreds of thousands who use it on recommendation of their doctors, primarily AIDS and cancer patients. In the eyes of the federal government they are all criminals.
"People picture the drug war as federal agents breaking into big meth labs in Montana and spraying the fields in Colombia," Kampia points out. "That's a war, right? Those are 'big bad drugs.' But the war on drugs is primarily a war on marijuana users." Indeed, nearly half the drug-related arrests in this country are for marijuana and the vast majority-almost 90 percent-for simple possession. A system of regulation and taxation, much like the one we have for alcohol, Kampia argues, would not only eradicate the crime associated with it but do a better job of keeping it out of the hands of kids. (According to government studies, teenagers say it's easier to obtain illicit drugs than alcohol and access to drugs of all sorts has remained unchanged throughout the drug war.)
Two blocks away, 33 year old Dave Fratello, political director for the Campaign for New Drug Policies, is sequestered in his room at the Grand Hyatt. He just flew in from L.A. to give a talk at the conference on how to mount a state initiative but unfortunately he is in the middle of one such effort and the deadline is looming. In a plaid shirt tucked neatly into Dockers, Fratello personifies the cautious suburban voters who feel safe with such initiatives. For Fratello, the image of the new, fresh-scrubbed activist is a political necessity for a mature movement. "The counterculture image is counterproductive," explains Fratello. "It doesn't make sense to go with a high profile marijuana enthusiast. We benefit a great deal by running against that image." He admits that for those who have worked on this issue for decades, the new strategy can be a slap in the face. "People feel like you're harvesting the fruits of their labor," says Fratello who also spent six years at the Drug Policy Foundation. "It's hard to look someone in the eye and say ‘If I put you on TV we're going to lose half the votes.’” Proposition 215, the 1996 California campaign that Fratello worked on, made marijuana legal for limited medical purposes in that state (patients still must obtain cannabis on the black market, according to the recent Supreme Court ruling that found a non-profit buying club that operated like a pharmacy in violation of federal law. ) Despite the Supreme Court setback, the passing of prop 215 is still considered a turning point, the moment when the movement went mainstream.
"It changed the zeitgeist," comments Kampia, who unsuccessfully ran for congress in DC last year and is now working on medical marijuana campaigns in Maryland and Massachusetts. "It makes it O.K. for anybody to talk about marijuana, whereas before if you brought it up in certain circles you might have been suspected of smoking it."
Back at the Renaissance, Fratello's friend Dave Borden is nibbling on a crab quesedilla at NORML's opening night fundraiser. Borden is a soft-spoken 34-year-old who holds an undergraduate degree in astrophysics from Princeton and a Masters in Jazz Composition from the New England Conservatory of Music and is the man who sat down at his home computer in 1994 to created the Drug Reform Coordination Network. "The idea was to provide this flow of information that supports and promotes the work of all the other groups," explains Borden whose sharp intellect and dry wit makes the newsletter a must-read. Identifying the power of the Internet to unite activists in those early days of its existence was truly innovative. The mailing list has grown to 25,000 and DRCNet was instrumental in organizing the new student group Students for Sensible Drug Policy. Borden also happens to be representative of the many young drug policy reformers who have never inhaled. He's never tried an illicit drug of any sort. "I never had the inclination,” he says, and tells me he clued his parents in on his interest in Drug policy by showing them an editorial he wrote on the subject. “I established an intellectual basis for the cause,” he explains. Did his parents think this meant he was a drug user? “I think at this point they assume I’m not interested,” he laughs. “The great majority of American recognize that what we're doing isn't working. One need not have tried cocaine to understand how the cocaine trade is destabilizing Colombia," he says. The effects of a drug, he explains, are not relevant to understanding the effects of a criminal trade.
"It's a hard issue to organize around," says Kampia, who is trying to get celebrities to join MPP (Angelica Huston became MPP’S most recent celebrity supporter) and was co-hosting a fund-raising party in LA with Michelle Phillips that weekend. "Your most obvious constituents–people who have either been arrested or those who use marijuana–don't want to speak out because they're actually criminals." And while NORML isn't afraid to defend marijuana users, most organizations including MPP shy away from talking about drug use and stick to drug policy. "People ask me if I'm for or against marijuana and I say neither," says Kampia (he no longer smokes pot, he says, because it makes him anxious. "Our position is we're against jail. We convict prohibition."
An edited version of this story appeared in Details Magazine, November 2001. All facts were checked with data available circa August 2001. I'd like to update and annotate someday soon.
Rob Kampia is standing next to the hors d'oeuvres, clutching a bottle of beer, and edging up to a multimillionaire. It’s classic Washington D.C.: Kampia's buttoned into a lobbyist-issued dark gray suit with a crisp white shirt and a silk tie emblazoned with the American constitution. The multimillionaire is in dress-down mode because he can get away with it, even here at the prim Cato Institute, the conservative think tank who is hosting this cocktail party. There in the glass enclosed lobby, beneath palm trees that optimistically and improbably spout from the tile floor, the two carry on in hushed, serious tones. Tax cuts? Hardly. Energy policy? Wrong again. Kampia, 32, is the executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, a small non-profit he co-founded in 1995 that seeks to reform marijuana laws. In order to do so his group needs money, and this is where the cocktail party and the multimillionaire come in. This is what the frontline in the war against the war on drugs looks like? The rebel forces have gone mainstream.
These are by no means halcyon days for the anti-prohibition troops especially in light of President Bush’s choice of John P. Walters, a lock-em up conservative, as drug czar. Nevertheless, activists across the country continue to be invigorated by the recent successes of state medical marijuana initiatives and the public dialogue spawned earlier this year by Steven Sonderberg’s film Traffic. There are now dozens of national organizations pushing the cause–many funded by prominent straight-laced business people such as George
Soros, Peter Lewis and John Sperling–whereas in 1990 there were just two. Though still dominated by the baby boomers who got the ball rolling, the younger generation of activists is a far cry from the flaky hackey-sack spiritualists that are generally associated with the anti-prohibition movement. The new activists are clean cut, middle class, and professional-and their approach tends to be much more conservative than their forebears. They want to change bad laws-not "the system."
Kampia, 32, a committed libertarian, dropped in at the Cato Institute for a reception honoring Gary Johnson, the 48-year-old, apple pie-faced governor of New Mexico, a Republican who freely admits that he is one of the more than 70 million Americans who have smoked pot. More radical still, he thinks it shouldn't be a crime.
Across the room is Allen St. Pierre, the 35-year-old director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws who together with Cato organized the bash for the governor, who is one of the first elected officials in recent years to come out in favor of legalization. (President Carter came close to reforming laws in the 1970s but since then politicians have been wary of the topic, lest they be labeled soft on crime.) St. Pierre has neatly cropped hair and he wears round wire rimmed glasses and a tweed jacket that betrays both his New England upbringing and his young fogeyish tendencies. A small green leaf is pinned to his lapel. It is possibly the only pot leaf at the event, a marijuana rally of sorts, circa 2001. Though the room isn’t entirely free of the tie-dyed cotton or unkempt hair that is expected of marijuana activists, the crowd—a mix of activists, medical researchers, libertarians, democrats, republicans, rich people and policy wonks sipping on martinis and Merlot–is predominately white and male and middle aged dressed in suits and ties. The women wear power suits or twin sets. No one, I repeat, no one is smoking pot and St. Pierre and Kampia stand out only because of their relative youth. When the governor (a tri-athelete who gave up pot and alcohol years ago and encourages others to do the same) addresses the crowd and declares America's war on drugs a "miserable failure," everyone cheers. They're ecstatic that an elected official is finally on their side. "I just had a gush of warm feeling," says St. Pierre. “It’s great to hear someone speak the gospel of reform.”
The new ‘Legalize It’ crew spans the political spectrum and few of the younger agitators have had anything to do with radical politics, or even other political issues. They may have made careers out of drug policy reform but they are not career activists. Sophisticated strategists, they are media savvy and tend to specialize, working on small parts of the drug policy puzzle such as medical marijuana, harm reduction or mandatory minimum sentences. And perhaps most surprisingly, some of the younger activists say they've never used drugs of any sort. Marijuana prohibition, they believe, is simply bad public policy– ineffective, inefficient, racist, and causing more harm than it prevents. Like alcohol prohibition in the twenties, the ban on cannabis has created a criminal black market that has ravaged inner city neighborhoods, they point out. And while African Americans aren’t anymore likely to use drugs they are far more likely to go to jail on drug charges. This is the first generation who has known nothing but the drug war; they are the children in whose name all those new prisons were built. This is their generation's anti-war movement.
Twelve years ago, Kampia was a prisoner of that war. He spent three months in the county jail for "manufacturing marijuana with intent to distribute." He was a junior at Penn State living in his first apartment, a furnished three bedroom that he and his two roommates decorated by tacking blue mesh to the ceiling and a few posters to the walls. He studied engineering and posted straight As. The closest he came to counter culture was his taste for heavy metal and, in sharp contrast to his clean-cut business-like look today, he wore his thick blonde hair long, had a fondness for ripped jeans and a big silver cross hung from his left ear. “I dressed terribly,” he laughs. “It was beyond fashion.” Perhaps, but hardly radical.
He'd tried pot twice in high school but nothing happened. Then as a college sophomore, a friend passed him a corn cob pipe she called “the superbowl.” "It worked," he recalls. "Once I experienced it I really enjoyed it. I found it preferable to alcohol, so I bought my first bag." He smoked on the weekends and bought exclusively from other students in the dorm.
Then, in his junior year he had the kind of brilliant idea thrifty college students specialize in–he would grow his own. He outfitted his bedroom with incandescent bulbs and planted some seeds in pots on the unused bunk bed and in his closet. But someone “narced.” The narc was a guy about his age; A bicycle thief who had been offered a reduced sentence if he could lead the police to three individuals committing drug offenses. When Kampia was busted most of the 96 plants weren't more than two inches tall and none had ever been harvested. "I wasn't a skilled botanist," he says with a laugh. The police said it was their biggest bust that year and even though Kampia had no prior record, he got three months. He considers himself lucky–if the federal authorities got to him he could have served years. He was kicked out of school, dumped by his girlfriend, and missed Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Eve, and his 21st birthday. He was very angry. "I was in jail with people who were in there for either hurting others or hurting property and I did neither," Kampia explains, his voice laced with lingering rage. "That's how my political activism got started. Sitting behind bars.”
"Stop Arresting Responsible Marijuana Users" reads the slogan printed on a banner that hangs across the entry to the conference area in D.C.'s Renaissance Hotel. This is NORML’S annual conference: three days of panel discussions and speeches that attracts drug policy wonks and NORML members from across the country. One floor below Hardee’s franchise owners are fluttering about the hotel’s carpeted depths wearing Uncle Sam hats and Perdue Chicken is holding a luncheon. St. Pierre runs around warmly greeting panelists and desperate to get the 350 attendees to settle in so they can stay on schedule. C-Span is airing Gov. Johnson's luncheon speech and live TV doesn't run late.
The gathering is similar to the one at the Cato Institute-–straight laced and almost entirely white–but with a higher granola factor. There are more 40-somethings who look like they stumbled out of a VW van and a handful of cute girls with blonde dreadlocks and baby faced boys who are probably mourning the breakup of Phish. Jokes about cottonmouth and short-term memory loss are popular as is setting the ringer on your mobile phone to play a tune. The pungent aroma of pot can occasionally be smelled –usually emanating from one of the handful of medical marijuana patients at the conference, including a woman whose MS is so advanced that she's confined to a gurney.
St. Pierre consciously tries to keep hippie stuff to a minimum (the anti-authoritarian youth culture of the 1960s is commonly used to dismiss reformers arguments) but outside the auditorium a few cultural stereotypes prevail. One guy sells hemp products and blasts seventies rock on a boom box; a super-laid-back type sells bike shirts to benefit NORML's mountain biking team. "Pretty much everyone who races smokes pot," he tells me. But near him is a table crammed with weighty policy papers from the Soros-backed Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation led by intellectual powerhouse Ethan Nadlemann. Next door, a young libertarian mans his party's table, looking as young libertarians so often seem to, like a Jehovah's Witness on casual Friday. It's a very open, non-partisan atmosphere. For St. Pierre, who almost single handedly revived NORML in the mid nineties, this makes perfect sense. "It's a non-partisan issue," he shrugs. "The drug war cuts across every strata of American life. It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, black or white, male or female. Its tentacles now reach out so far that every group and sub-group has been affected by it."
Marijuana comes from the flowering tops and leaves of the hemp plant Canabis Sativa and was legal in the US until 1937. It is a mild hallucinogen, that heightens the senses and has been known to make users introspective, euphoric, hungry and prone to watch late night television. It was banned, in part, because it was thought to be highly addictive and a "gateway" drug, but government studies–most recently a 1999 study by the Institute of Medicine–have shown otherwise. No one has ever overdosed–it's
virtually impossible according to that same study–and its use is not associated with increased crime, violent or otherwise. (The legal drug alcohol can’t make the same claim.) It is illegal under the Controlled Substances Act, which classifies it as schedule 1; this means it's considered a dangerous drug that is highly addictive and has no accepted medicinal use.
Yet according to an ACLU poll three out of five Americans do not think marijuana smokers should be sent to jail and other studies have found that about 75 percent think it should be available for medical use. According to the Department of Health and Human Services about 11.1 million Americans smoke pot at least once a month. (By contrast, fewer than two million are regular users of all other illicit drugs combined.) Pot-related arrests have almost doubled in the last decade, but use rates remain stable and joints are passed casually at Upper East Side dinner parties and surreptitiously in big-city nightclubs. Marijuana users span all socioeconomic backgrounds and include hundreds of thousands who use it on recommendation of their doctors, primarily AIDS and cancer patients. In the eyes of the federal government they are all criminals.
"People picture the drug war as federal agents breaking into big meth labs in Montana and spraying the fields in Colombia," Kampia points out. "That's a war, right? Those are 'big bad drugs.' But the war on drugs is primarily a war on marijuana users." Indeed, nearly half the drug-related arrests in this country are for marijuana and the vast majority-almost 90 percent-for simple possession. A system of regulation and taxation, much like the one we have for alcohol, Kampia argues, would not only eradicate the crime associated with it but do a better job of keeping it out of the hands of kids. (According to government studies, teenagers say it's easier to obtain illicit drugs than alcohol and access to drugs of all sorts has remained unchanged throughout the drug war.)
Two blocks away, 33 year old Dave Fratello, political director for the Campaign for New Drug Policies, is sequestered in his room at the Grand Hyatt. He just flew in from L.A. to give a talk at the conference on how to mount a state initiative but unfortunately he is in the middle of one such effort and the deadline is looming. In a plaid shirt tucked neatly into Dockers, Fratello personifies the cautious suburban voters who feel safe with such initiatives. For Fratello, the image of the new, fresh-scrubbed activist is a political necessity for a mature movement. "The counterculture image is counterproductive," explains Fratello. "It doesn't make sense to go with a high profile marijuana enthusiast. We benefit a great deal by running against that image." He admits that for those who have worked on this issue for decades, the new strategy can be a slap in the face. "People feel like you're harvesting the fruits of their labor," says Fratello who also spent six years at the Drug Policy Foundation. "It's hard to look someone in the eye and say ‘If I put you on TV we're going to lose half the votes.’” Proposition 215, the 1996 California campaign that Fratello worked on, made marijuana legal for limited medical purposes in that state (patients still must obtain cannabis on the black market, according to the recent Supreme Court ruling that found a non-profit buying club that operated like a pharmacy in violation of federal law. ) Despite the Supreme Court setback, the passing of prop 215 is still considered a turning point, the moment when the movement went mainstream.
"It changed the zeitgeist," comments Kampia, who unsuccessfully ran for congress in DC last year and is now working on medical marijuana campaigns in Maryland and Massachusetts. "It makes it O.K. for anybody to talk about marijuana, whereas before if you brought it up in certain circles you might have been suspected of smoking it."
Back at the Renaissance, Fratello's friend Dave Borden is nibbling on a crab quesedilla at NORML's opening night fundraiser. Borden is a soft-spoken 34-year-old who holds an undergraduate degree in astrophysics from Princeton and a Masters in Jazz Composition from the New England Conservatory of Music and is the man who sat down at his home computer in 1994 to created the Drug Reform Coordination Network. "The idea was to provide this flow of information that supports and promotes the work of all the other groups," explains Borden whose sharp intellect and dry wit makes the newsletter a must-read. Identifying the power of the Internet to unite activists in those early days of its existence was truly innovative. The mailing list has grown to 25,000 and DRCNet was instrumental in organizing the new student group Students for Sensible Drug Policy. Borden also happens to be representative of the many young drug policy reformers who have never inhaled. He's never tried an illicit drug of any sort. "I never had the inclination,” he says, and tells me he clued his parents in on his interest in Drug policy by showing them an editorial he wrote on the subject. “I established an intellectual basis for the cause,” he explains. Did his parents think this meant he was a drug user? “I think at this point they assume I’m not interested,” he laughs. “The great majority of American recognize that what we're doing isn't working. One need not have tried cocaine to understand how the cocaine trade is destabilizing Colombia," he says. The effects of a drug, he explains, are not relevant to understanding the effects of a criminal trade.
"It's a hard issue to organize around," says Kampia, who is trying to get celebrities to join MPP (Angelica Huston became MPP’S most recent celebrity supporter) and was co-hosting a fund-raising party in LA with Michelle Phillips that weekend. "Your most obvious constituents–people who have either been arrested or those who use marijuana–don't want to speak out because they're actually criminals." And while NORML isn't afraid to defend marijuana users, most organizations including MPP shy away from talking about drug use and stick to drug policy. "People ask me if I'm for or against marijuana and I say neither," says Kampia (he no longer smokes pot, he says, because it makes him anxious. "Our position is we're against jail. We convict prohibition."
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