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."