It occurred to me when I read the Argus article about Richard Stratton’s talk that the event needed contextualization and explanation. Just what was a supposedly respectable organization doing bringing in the editor of High Times? The reasons behind this decision speak to the very heart of the battle to end the war on drugs.
People who get involved in the drug war reform movement have little in common with each other. We range from addicts to teetotalers, libertarians to socialists, teenagers to grandparents. The common thread that you hear in our stories is that the war on drugs became personal to us; that we saw injustices we could not ignore, that people we love got caught up in some way. For me, it was a series of events: the child of a family friend becoming a junkie and living on the streets of New York; watching the police carry out sting operations on the other side of town, busting my friends and high school classmates, as my white neighbor openly sold coke to his prep school friends. Knowing that the government would be perfectly happy to put my boyfriend in jail for years, but not pay for drug treatment he wanted and needed.
A fundamental problem for the drug policy reform movement is that the war on drugs has far less impact on the most powerful segments of society. If you are middle class and white, it is far less likely that you will have the sort of experiences that force you to confront the fundamental injustices of the war on drugs. Racial profiling, disproportionate incarceration rates, dirty needles spreading HIV and Hepatitis C, a lack of low cost drug treatment, all get reduced to numbers, to intellectual arguments that don’t make the same sort of impression as the stories behind those numbers. Human beings are dying in an unwinnable war. Reducing them to numbers allows that war to be perpetuated.
The challenge for Students for Sensible Drug Policy as an organization is to get that message out there, to make both the intellectual and the emotional case for ending the war on drugs. We’ve had doctors and lawyers and academics come in and speak. But it’s the adventure stories, to borrow a description of Richard Stratton’s talk from the Friday article, that get people: the cops who used to run stings blasting their former occupation; the junkies who started needle exchanges and programs for addicts in prison. They tell the tragedy of the drug war as a story, their own story, riddled with escapes, near misses, brushes with death and the law, heroes, and villains. Even for Wesleyan students, it is a hell of a lot more interesting that way.
Stratton’s story begins like many of your stories. He is white, middle class, from suburban Massachusetts. He started smoking pot in high school and thought the government was full of shit when they told him that it would make him a crazy violent murderer. Just as you got DARE, he got reefer madness. He kept on smoking through college, and started selling. Small stuff at first. The war on drugs was an annoyance more than anything else. But where his story diverges from most Wesleyan students, into founding High Times, becoming a major smuggler, getting busted, going to jail, he had the sort of experience that thrusts you into the political arena as a drug war reformer. He realized that the jails were full of people of color. That the war on drugs was about race, about poverty, about attacking a counterculture he was a part of.
Most people who came out to hear Richard Stratton were probably not there because they wanted to hear about the fundamental injustices of the war on drugs. If that was the reason why people wanted to hear him talk, we would get the same level of turnout when we bring in the ACLU. For most attendees, the draw was his celebrity status, the chance to be in the same room as a hero to pot smokers across America. He delivered exactly what you would expect from the editor of High Times, of a man who is so heavily involved in the entertainment industry. Politics took a back burner to adventure.
But politics were not absent. Just packaged as a personal story instead of a lecture. Told in a way that would bring people out through the slush and cold to a talk that put a human face on the war on drugs. That explained how a white kid from the suburbs got so pissed off about the prison system. That showed the reasons why even a Wesleyan student who has little to personally fear from the war on drugs should be fighting to end it. He drew in the pot smoking kids lucky enough to read “High Times” in their dorm rooms at Wesleyan to hear about the kids sitting in jail for doing the exact same thing: breaking the laws that are wrong.
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