Doing Things the Righteous Way

An Interview with Shawn Heller- National Director of the Students for Sensible Drug Policy

Shawn Heller
photo- Preston Peet

by Preston Peet-
Special to Drugwar.com

June 20, 2002

P- Hi Shawn. I’m watching the tape of your arrest at the Department of Justice right now.

SH- I still can’t feel part of my hand. I think I’m going to go to the doctor tomorrow. I guess you could say I probably had the harshest situation with the cops. They had me pressed down onto the ground, kneeling on me as well as applying pressure points on my wrists and neck for about 20 seconds. Then they put the plastic cuffs on me and carried me by the cuffs, which made them cinch as tight as they could get. They left the cuffs on me for 3 hours. We were incarcerated for about 8 hours total.

P- Let me get a little background. How many brothers and sisters do you have?

SH- I have one brother, and one sister.

P- Where were you born?

SH- Miami Florida.

P- You’re how old?

SH- 23.

P- Where’d you go to HS and college?

SH- I went to the Maritime Academy of Science and Technology, the M.A.S.T. Academy, on Key Biscayne in Miami, a public school but it’s a magnet school. It’s a neat place. We used to go kayaking and windsurfing for PE instead of playing football. I went to college at George Washington University in Washington DC, and graduated in 2000.

P- You are still working with the Students for Sensible Drug Policy right? And you are president, right?

SH- Actually, that’s national director.

P- What got you interested in the drug reform movement?

SH- I’ve been more or less for the legalization of drugs for quite some time, especially after undertaking lots of research on the subject.

P- That was while you were in the WH?

SH- Towards the end of working at the WH and over that following Summer. I spent my time researching drug policy pretty much day and night for a long period.

P- When were you at the WH?

SH- I was at the WH in 1997-98.

P- What took you there, what did you do?

SH- I worked in the Office of Political Affairs part of the time, and I also worked for WH Advance, the advance team. I’d started doing that back when I was in High School, when Clinton was coming down there for different events in the 1996 campaign. Then I came to DC and continued to work in Advance then got the job in the Political Affairs.

P- What did you do in the Office of Political Affairs?

SH- I did a ton of different things, a lot of lackey type stuff. I worked for Linda Moore, who was deputy assistant to the President. Basically by the end of my time there, I was writing weekly political briefs for the President on over 30 different states. I was also writing trip briefs on about 12 different states, which basically means if he was taking a trip to a state, we would put together a special brief for that trip, who the different politicians in that area are, what races are going on, what are the big topics of the area, basically all the political stuff he would want to know on a trip.

P- So he would seem knowledgeable.

SH- Right.

P- How old were you when you were doing that?

SH- I was 18 and 19.

P- When’s your birthday?

SH- April 7, 1979.

P- Have you ever had any legal problems with the police and drugs?

SH- No. The first time I was ever arrested was on Thursday, June 6, 2002. at the DOJ. First arrest.

P- I would be proud to put that on my resume if I were you.

SH- Oh, as am I. I would do it again. The DEA and the Department of Justice have gone completely out of control, and we have to stop it.

Heller under arrest in Washington DC, June 6, 2002-
photo Doug McVay

P- Are you worried about SSDP being infiltrated by the feds, like they did to the protestors for at least one of the DC protests, where they had people actually in the puppeteers’ building in the week before the protests were taking place, taking pictures and pretending to be protestors themselves. I’ve heard that you were actually followed the morning of the June 6 protest?

SH- I’ll tell you exactly what happened.

P- Hold on a sec. My point is, are you worried about the SSDP becoming, and I know it sounds really conspiratorial, infiltrated? Like what the feds did to the Students for a Democratic Society, (SDS) back in the 60s, and Ramparts Magazine, as well as the news that came out last week that Reagan, the FBI, and the CIA had been targeting students and faculty out in California for years. It’s been known, but they’re just now admitting it after 17 years of federal denials. Are you worried about that kind of thing at SSDP, and I want to hear about being tailed.

SH- I’ll start with the being tailed. On Thursday, I was the first one to Adam Eidinger’s house in DC that morning to get prepared. After everyone got there, we went to do a practice run in a local park right by Adam’s house. When we did, there was a red Ford Torus with 3 antennas, significantly more antennas than is typical on such a car sticking out the back, that drove by a couple of times while we were out there. When we left, it did a U-turn and followed us. We saw it again when we went a couple miles down the road on our way to the Department of Justice. There is of course no guarantee that vehicle was really tailing us, but it seemed probable that it was. When we arrived to do the demonstration, the police were already there, in presence, and it didn’t take them long tp get a big group of federal police and a SWAT team unit there. We spoke to one of the arresting officers while we were in jail, who said that they were told that morning during the briefing that there would be three protests during that day, one of which would be at the Department of Justice. He said they knew pretty much already what we were going to be doing, which is why they arrived with the clippers, the chain cutters. How true that is, whether they really knew we were going to be chaining ourselves to the door, I’m not completely convinced. It seems to me that at the least they knew we were going to be at the Department of Justice, and that’s what the police officer said. We had not made that public information. We’d let the media know by telephone, and people who were involved in the demonstration, but as far as everyone knew, that was an undisclosed demonstration. We had only publicly disclosed the location of the 4 o’clock demonstration at the DEA headquarters. In addition, the officers had gotten an update, saying that at first we were expected by 10AM but that got bumped back to 11AM. That information was probably from the red Torus, which seemed to be watching our progress.

P- You know that law enforcement nowadays have those directional mics that they can just point right at your car and hear every word you are saying. I know I really sound paranoid.

SH- No, no, I hear you and understand your concerns. For your first question, about infiltration. SSDP is a completely non-violent organization. We have lots of activities that we involve everyone in, but we make sure that everything we talk about and everything we do and present and organize as an organization is all stuff that is either legal or is non-violent civil disobedience. If there are infiltrators in SSDP, and there very well might be but we haven’t found any out to date, that’s not going to change what we do. We’re very conscious of that, so that if somebody suggests something that seems illegal or violent, anything like that, we would immediately step in and say that’s not what our organization is about. If there was an infiltrator trying to convince us to do that kind of stuff, that would immediately be squashed as an idea, While we probably wouldn’t come right out and say, “you’re an infiltrator,” we’d make it very clear that’s not what our organization is about.

P- Because that is exactly what happens. Somebody will come in and make suggestions, say things like non-violence isn’t working, let’s ratchet up some violence.

SH- I think all the SSDP members and leaders across the country know that that sort of stuff is not what we’re about.

P- Is that a subject you might bring up at board meetings? You know, keep in mind we’re a non-violent organization but we know the feds don’t like us and would love to put us out of business so watch for people making untoward suggestions?

SH- Not so much in that we say, “watch out for infiltrators”, but more in the sense of we know Rep. Mark Souder of Illinois very much dislikes us. We know that Joyce Nelepka from Drug Free Kids has twisted statements by SSDP members to insinuate that we’re a militant organization. So we make it very clear that we have to very careful about what we say and how we say it so as not to be misconstrued, let alone suggest something, or deal with a situation where someone had suggested something that is off-color and that is not what we’re about, so in that context, yes. But we don’t say we need to be worried about infiltrators because we really don’t have anything to worry about. I don’t want to put too much focus on giving them that attention…

P- It’s almost like giving them power. We certainly don't want to give the destructive anti-drug grandstanding by evil and twisted people like Rep. Souder or Joyce Nelepka any more attention or power than can be helped.

SH- In a sense, yeah. We’re going to do what we’re going to do. We’re going to do the righteous thing and if we go down for it, we’ll go down doing the right thing.

P- Right on. How many members are in SSDP now?

SH- During this Summer we’re working on improving our member data base. Right now we only have firm numbers on our chapters. We have 200 chapters, and our chapters tend to range from 5 members to hundreds of members, depending on the chapter.

P- SSDP was founded on what date?

SH- SSDP was founded in Fall-Winter 1998 at Rochester Institute of Technology.

P- That was with you? Are you one of the original members?

SH- Originally, there was a group of students at Rochester, who created the Rochester Cannabis Coalition, the RCC. They had insane problems with the administration there. The administration wouldn’t recognize them as a student group, gave them all sorts of hard times left and right. It became a very difficult situation for them. The students went to NORML, and didn’t really get too much assistance from them. I think NORML didn’t have the time nor means at that moment to help. At a loss for what to do, they contacted DRCNet, which was able to provide them with some assistance. A lot of students still actually wound up being expelled.

P- Because of their RCC involvement?

SH- There was a quasi-riot at the end of the school year because one of the members of RCC was getting expelled. This was the result of a situation in which he went to a secret board of trustees meeting to appeal to the trustees, due to the President was being so unreasonable. When he wandered into the building where the secret meeting was being held, unbeknownst to him the security had been instructed to detain him. The situation turned ugly and violent, and he was accused of assaulting a campus police officer, when in reality the officer had assaulted him. There was a big trial on campus outside of which other RCC members had a big protest set up, where they had a bullhorn going, speaking to all the students gathering there. They ended up taking over a building. In the end the student got expelled. As a result of that expulsion, the student body, not just members of the RCC, pretty much freaked out. A very large scale disturbance broke out. It was covered by all the local news. There were tons of cops there, and tons of students arrested and expelled. After this situation, Chris Lotlikar, who was there but hadn’t been expelled, found the campus was so unfriendly to him that he couldn’t see continuing to be there. He left RIT and came down to DC, where he started interning for DRCNet. During this internship period, he began creating what became known as U-Net, the University Network, a listserve of kids who were interested in drug policy around the country. That was sort of the impetus for SSDP. U-Net is not used anymore, everything has been transferred to SSDP talk list. Chris helped create U-Net, then got a job with DRCNet instead of returning to school, becoming their campus coordinator. I’d returned to school that Fall, and after researching drug policy all that summer, I’d realized I had to do something. This was in 1998.

I had finished all this research, realizing that the War on Drugs was far worse than I’d ever imagined. I walked into DRCNet, telling them I wanted to intern there. After starting my internship, one of my very first tasks was to write a story for DRCNet's weekly online news serive, the Week Online. I went to my old boss’s office, Senator Bob Graham, and tried to interview them. First over the phone, then they asked me to come in. I took the opportunity and went down there. It was funny, because the interview turned into them more interviewing me. They started grilling me on what I felt at the time were really tough questions, questions for which I really didn’t have the answers for. At the end of that session, they offered me a job there. I decided not to take them up on it. They were trying to get me out of the clutches of the legalization movement. While I didn’t want their job, I also knew that I obviously didn’t know my facts about the Drug War well enough to be all gung ho about it yet. I told DRCNet that I was really sorry, but I needed to be more secure in my position, so I left my internship there at DRCNet.

Chris and I by this time had already become friends and decided to move in together. During this time I had a lot more exposure to Drug War information, and went back over all the stuff I’d read the previous Summer. I realized I was definitely right on about this, that I’d just not been well enough versed in the facts to argue for my position. I went back to work for DRCNet, doing slightly different stuff than I’d originally anticipated doing, working with the students end of things. When the students with the RCC went back to school that Fall of 1998, they decided they wanted to change the direction and ideas behind the organization a little bit. They knew they weren’t going to be officially recognized by the Student Government, but they knew it was important that they existed on campus. Michael Eck created the name Students for Sensible Drug Policy. The idea was that SSDP would take on the War on Drugs as a whole.

For me, coming into things, never having been a drug user or even considered using drugs, looking at the situation from a real policy focus angle, I had always felt that the War on Drugs was wrong, making no distinction between the War on Marijuana and the War as a whole. SSDP wasn’t a marijuana focused organization, but it did still deal with marijuana policy. I felt this was a perfect fit for what I was looking for. I then started the second chapter of SSDP at GW in DC.

The original members of the GW chapter had all met each other working on I-59 medical marijuana campaign here in DC in 1998, volunteering for that, then we formed SSDP shortly thereafter. Chris and I looked at the 2 chapters, and the U-Net, and began coming up with greater ideas for a national organization. That’s when we started to move to increase SSDP, to spread it and get people aware of what we were doing, to get them on board. At the same time, the Higher Education Act campaign came into existence, because we had just found out about the law. By October 1999, we met with Governor Gary Johnson, after he came out for drug legalization, and he joined our board of advisors. Over that entire previous Summer, Chris and I, and a guy named Peter Nelson, who was a campus leader in Colorado and come out to DC to help us put together our first conference, which we held in November of 1999. We had between 200 and 250 attend. we went into the conference with 5 chapters, and came out with 15. The conference was a huge success. We got a grant from DPF to help put it together, and we also got about $20,000 in funding and in-kind donations from GW to get the conference to happen. I worked very hard in the GW bureaucratic quagmire to get it done. GW is an interesting place. You can get them to support you on different things, it just takes a lot of effort.

I’ve been national director since November 2000. The board of directors elected me, and SSDP national Congress confirmed me. The Congress is made up of all chapters, each chapter getting one vote in the Congress.

P- Did your political background working in the WH help you deal with putting together SSDP, and is it helping you now?

SH- It definitely helped me, what I learned while at the WH, in terms of being able to bring that up to people as an experience I’ve had. It definitely sheds a different light for people, especially people who have a one or single dimensional view of who or what should be a drug policy reformer. I think that people like myself, who have a slightly different background, and David Borden of DRCNet, who has yet another different background, helps give the idea that this isn’t just a movement of one particular type of person, it’s made up of all kinds of different people from all kinds of different backgrounds.

P- It’s not just people with pierced faces, or hairy stoner dropouts?

SH- Right, not just people with pierced faces. It’s like the people who focus on the Club Drug issues or Harm Reduction are not only from the Club Drug community.

P- How do your parents feel about what you are doing now?

SH- Well, my parents are definitely supportive of what I’m doing. Prior to the arrest at DOJ, my Dad told me he’d be willing to get arrested with me, but after the arrest he said he was just saying that to be supportive of me. My brother, sister, and parents were all big influences on me and my life. My brother is 11 years older than me, and my sister is 8 years older. Both of them sort of acted like parents in some ways. My brother is liberal in some ways but ultimately he’s a very straight edged, straight laced, regular American dude who is also conservative on a lot of things. My sister on the other hand is very free spirited. She used to go to Grateful Dead shows all the time. They are very different, so I had very different exposure to different kinds of people, at least within my own family. My parents are both from the Bronx, then moved to Long Island, New Jersey, then Miami. The typical migration. Neither of them went to college. My Dad is a self-made business man. My Mom was a housewife for years, until our financial times got tough, so she studied and took an exam to become a stock broker. She’s now been a stock broker for over ten years, and is the vice-President of her small firm. I’m proud of my parents. I think they’re awesome people.

P- So you obviously like and get along with your parents.

SH- Oh yeah. My mom and I were talking about my grandmother’s birthday coming up. My mom has this idea that each family member will give her a different charm to go on a charm bracelet. My mom suggested, “Why don’t you get your grandmother a little marijuana leaf?”

P-What a great idea. Have grandmother walking around with a little pot leaf dangling from her wrist. Would she even know what it was?

SH- Yes. My grandmother has told me she’s been anti-prohibition since the 30s and 40s.

P- Right on. Too bad she’s had to see it continue for so long. How long were you under arrest in DC?

SH- About 8 hours. I was one of the first released, of the group arrested.

P- What time did you go in?

SH- We went in at 11AM, and got out at 7PM, and others around 8:45PM. Half of us got out at one time, then the other half later. Really, the worst part about the jail, number one, DC jail is just so poorly run. You think the DMV is run badly? DC jail is run so poorly. Beyond the fact that people are treated subhuman, and the guards won’t acknowledge you, they simply had no clue what was going on. If we wanted to ask a question, we’d be told they weren’t the ones to ask, but the one we did need to ask wouldn’t be around. When we first went in, they started finger printing us while watching tv and joking around with their fellow officers, paying no attention to what they were doing. When we were at the federal precinct, where they first took us, they finger printed us and made out this whole form before realizing they had filled out the wrong form. We were like, “haven’t you guys arrested somebody before?”

P- You know that was probably just the run around, to make it as much of a hassle for you guys as possible.

SH- Everybody who was in jail with us in the men’s section, except one guy, was an African-American male. At least 10 were in for basically, as far as I’m concerned, driving while black. All these BS things, like one guy driving in DC with a Maryland temporary tag, which is supposedly illegal, so they put him in jail for that. One guy was driving with a learner’s permit without someone else in the car and he was taken to jail for that. I mean, these are things that, in my experience, white middle class people don’t go to jail for.

P- Yeah, I’ve been caught driving on a suspended driver’s license before, and I didn’t get taken to jail, in Florida no less, and that’s not a good place to get caught out by the police either. Do you have to go back to court?

SH- No, we were charged with incommoding, given a $50 fine and time served. From what I can tell, it’s sort of like loitering.

P- What other organizations are you involved with?

SH- The only other organization I have official ties with besides SSDP at the moment is DanceSafe, where I sit on the national board of directors. I am not opposed to the idea of being in other organizations, there’s just a limit to how many I can join.

P- Or pay dues to.

SH- That true. I’d like to be able to give to everyone, but that’s not possible.

P- Any thoughts about going into politics?

SH- I used to be convinced when I was younger that I was going to be President. That’s what it says in my yearbook, that I’m going to be President by 2024.

P- You’re still young, you’ve got plenty of time to do it.

SH- Whether I can do it or not, my focus has certainly changed. Right now, what makes me feel most fulfilled and happy as a person is doing something in which I feel like I’m helping people. That’s something I wasn’t getting while working in the WH. I felt like I was just turning the wheels of the machine, and to what ends I wasn’t sure. Now I know the work I’m doing, at least my intention, is to help people. That makes me feel totally good. Whether that lands me in public office or not isn’t so important.

P- So you’re enjoying what you’re doing?

SH- Yes, very much so. I feel like so much has changed in just the time since I started as a Drug War reformer. When I got into the movement, there wasn’t this national student group around that was trying to end the Drug War. This was something I thought should happen, but I didn’t know who else thought or felt this way. Back then, whenever I would bring up drug legalization, I’d get “yeah man, puff, puff” but now that’s not what I get from most people.

P- No? What do you get from most people?

SH- Now when I say the War on Drugs has failed, I get a real response, either “definitely,” or “oh I don’t know,” but it’s no longer the joke that people seemed to think it was. It’s worth discussing one way or the other. That’s a big shift.

P- This is true, now that you mention it. I too get responses of a serious, somewhat thoughtful nature for the most part. Anything else you’ve been doing?

SH- I’ve written a chapter on the Drug War for a communications text book that will be published in the next year, that will wind up either as a text book or reader in communications classes all across the country. It doesn’t have a title yet. It’s from a guy named Thomas Steinfatt who’s head of communications at University of Miami. I spoke at a conference he had about nine months to a year ago. He was really into the things I was saying, so he asked me to contribute to the book. I wrote about the ridiculousness of the Drug War, the absurdities.

I talk about how GHB is in your body, yet it’s a Schedule 1 Drug. I talk about the National Institute for Drug Abuse's, (NIDA), Marijuana Facts for Teens and Marijuana Facts for Parents use things that aren’t exactly untrue, but are specifically geared towards making parents believe every kid is smoking pot, and the kids that no one is smoking pot. I talk about one of the things I’ve noticed, that when someone realizes the War on Drugs has failed, they tend not to change their opinion back. It not like I’ve ever met someone who says they think the War on Drugs should be ended, but comes back a couple months later saying something like “If we only had a few thousand more police officers on the street, we could really end the War on Drugs.” That doesn’t ever happen.

When NIDA's information is not deliberately misleading, it is often inaccurate. In fact, inaccuracy permeates government information, even when no ideological agenda seems to be at stake. For example, a publication from NIDA claimed that MDMA may stimulate the release of neurotransmitters similar to serotonin from the brain’s neurons, producing a high that lasts anywhere from several minutes to an hour. You and I both know that MDMA highs can last far more than one hour. Who knows what reason they had for saying that, but it’s inexcusable.

On the DEA website, they have these graphs showing the Drug War budget, and DEA budget, and as the DEA budget goes up, the prison population goes up, first time drug use goes up, by very similar percentages which is about 20 fold. There’s no thought among them to the possibility that they are responsible for increased incarceration and first time drug use.

P- I’m looking at the DEA’s appalling website right now. The very first thing that pops up is “Marijuana- The Facts”, about how drug legalization advocates are portraying marijuana as a harmless drug that “even has medicinal value.” They allege that more than people can become dependent on marijuana, and that more than 200,000 Americans entered drug treatment for marijuana abuse “in the latest studies” without saying what years those studies might cover. What do you think of that number?

SH- It seems to be very vague as to where and when this number comes from. So many people go into treatment because they have to, because of either their work or being arrested. I don’t know if those numbers include those people…

P- I’m sure they do.

SH- …but it would be interesting to see how many went in voluntarily for marijuana treatment as opposed to being forced into treatment.

P- They also say here that scientific research has concluded that smoking marijuana is not recommended for the treatment of any disease or condition. What do you say to that?

SH- I say that’s hogwash. There’s been the Shafer report, the Institute for Medicine report, countless studies that have been done in and out of the government, plenty of doctors’ opinions, and patients’ testimonies that say marijuana is helpful in treating different conditions from cancer, to Crones condition, to AIDS. It so sick to me that the government is trying to tell people what medicine they should be taking, what is appropriate. They’ve had no medical training, they know nothing about the real effects of these drugs, and they don’t suffer from these conditions. So how can they tell people who are suffering what is and what isn’t helping them? It’s just like with my insurance carrier. I got prescribed a drug for my stomach acid. I went to get it filled only to be told at the pharmacy that my insurance company had to approve the prescription. This was for a nothing drug, so I was very surprised. The insurance company told me when I called that my doctor had to call them and explain why I needed the drug. I’m asked him, “are you a doctor? You’re just some guy on the other end of the phone. How are you going to know better than my doctor what I need? I know nothing about alternatives, this is what my doctor told me I should take.”

P- What was their response?

SH- They said it was on the list of drugs that you should be substituting something else for.

P- WHAT??!!

SH- I said that my doctor had already prescribed something. This was Care First PPO, supposedly the best health provider Blue Cross, Blue Shield has. PPOs are supposed to be better than HMOs. I asked, if my doctor had written a prescription for Viagra, would they have needed to speak to my doctor then? They said no, that’s not on the list, we would have filled that. Does that make sense? I don’t have a prescription for Viagra. They’d have filled that without comment, but not my stomach acid medicine. Maybe I should get one.

P- Here’s another one from the DEA website. High Court upholds marijuana as a dangerous drug. This judge in Washington DC ruled against High Times magazine and Jon Gettman, saying marijuana will remain in Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act. The DEA press release bluntly states that marijuana has a high potential for abuse, and that there’s no safe or effective medical uses for it. Although the ruling came down on May 24, the DEA issued this crowing press release on June 6, coincidentally the same day as the nationwide protests calling for an end to the US War on medical marijuana and users thereof. What do you have to say in response to this, both the ruling and the timing of the press release?

SH- Let me answer this question in the broad sense. Drug laws as a whole are not only un-American, they violate the essence of the Constitution, whether marijuana should be Schedule 1 or not. Marijuana certainly shouldn’t be Schedule 1, but the idea that Schedule 1 even exists, I mean, that the Department of Justice is determining what legal status is for possessing a chemical either in your body or on your person, this is just a crazy idea. This is what originally got me upset about the War on Drugs, one of the things that made it seem ridiculous. As our friends at Alchemind talk about, we have something called cognitive liberty. Richard Glen Boire runs Alchemind, a non-profit group that basically is working for what they call cognitive liberty. Their idea is that we have freedom of thought, that we have the freedom to alter our thoughts by whichever way we choose. One of their thoughts on why drugs are illegal is basically that thoughts people have while under the influence of illicit substances are not exactly conducive with corporate America, and spending our time going to K-Mart or the Sports Authority and buying stuff. I feel strongly that when it comes down to it people have the right to consume substances they choose. It’s our own body, our own mind, we’re the one that has to deal with the ramifications.

Now if you do something that is violent, that hurts somebody else while you are intoxicated, that’s the same thing as if you did it while not intoxicated, and should suffer the penalties regardless. To get to the point here, that’s always been a strong feeling of mine. When I then look at how this been so used and manipulated to become what I call the third wave of social control and others do as well, you know, slavery, segregation, and now the War on Drugs, it’s really asinine. So what I have to say about the DEA, and the court’s decision to keep marijuana a Schedule 1 substance with no medical benefits is it’s a complete lie. It’s a ridiculous thought in its essence to assume there are no medical benefits when doctors all around the country and patients all around the country are saying there is.

P- Here’s yet another gem. DEA Director Asa Hutchinson said that accurate drug scheduling is important. “Drugs sold lawfully in the United States are the safest in the world. This is because our nation through our laws insists on careful deliberation before allowing drugs to be sold as medicine. To date marijuana does not meet the scientific requirements.

SH- There are so many drugs sitting in the pharmacy next door to me here to could kill me, and marijuana has never killed anyone. These drugs range from Viagra, which is in my mind mostly a recreational drug and one that can give you a heart attack, to morphine and morphine derivatives, and Oxycontin. Marijuana is a plant. The idea of making a plant illegal is so absurd. If we’re going to make any plant illegal, why not make it Poison Ivy? I was at a festival this weekend, the Smile fest in North Carolina, and this poor girl had to leave early because she’d gone into the woods to pee and wiped herself with poison ivy, so it’s on my mind.

P- That’s way too horrible. I’m going to have that image in my mind for the next week at least.

SH- Here’s an example of the hypocrisy behind the whole War on Drugs. I went to this festival recently, the Smile Fest. There were about 8,000 people there. Near Ashville, western NC. It was pretty much an open air drug market. I’m sure there were undercover cops around, and a uniformed police presence, but I saw nobody get arrested for drugs, even with such large amounts of sales and drugs going on. This was all happening out in the open at a festival.

P- Did you see any fights or violence?

SH- Nope, neither. Meanwhile, in inner cities across the country street sweeps are going on where one doesn’t see obvious open air drug use, but still the excuse is the cops know those people have drugs, so they’ll look to see if they can find those drugs. Not that they should be going and increasing their festival raids. This in fact is exactly what they did down at the University of Viginia, when people made similar complaints about what was happening on the campus there, cops started going on campus and arresting white students there. In other words, boosting up the War rather than stopping arresting the black students. At this festival, other than for a handful I saw, everyone pretty much was white. I go out and see this, how that can work, that people can use drugs and not be problems and not have any situations, and at the same time the cops go and find situations that they don’t need to.

Another thing I want to mention is that last Fall at Hookaville in Ohio, we did a joint event with MAPS and DanceSafe, a bad trip or emergency tent. Normally at these festivals when people have a bad trip, they get strapped down and sent to a hospital where they get their stomach pumped. Here we had a last line before that step, a much more human way of dealing with a bad trip, of doing things in general. The worst thing to do to someone on a bad trip is strap them down and throw them into the back of an ambulance with sirens screaming for a trip to the hospital.

P- Have you ever traveled outside of the United States?

SH- I lived in Holland for 6 months, in the Winter and Spring of 2000. While living there I got a real perspective that policies other than US policy can work. So many people say it can’t or won’t work here, and I say that’s horse crap. Because when have we tried anything else? In Holland it’s very civilized. Everything is much more friendly. When the police were out and about there, I felt they were my friends, people that I could go to if I needed help. I didn’t feel they were there to intimidate anyone. It seems as though they like to solve a situation before resorting to violence.

P- Are you feeling positive about the growth of the Drug War reform movement and on the obverse, does the increase in federal volume about the need to really, really crack down on drugs, trying to tie their old War with their new War on Terror, concern you? It seems they’re getting almost frantic in their repeated bleating about how drugs and marijuana are dangerous, and terror-connected. Both sides seem to be growing.

SH- I definitely feel that little steps are important. Achieving small victories here and there are definitely helpful, and spur growth of the movement. I think the size, the type, the amount of things we do as a movement, as the movement increases, are perhaps the most important things. I think that in the long term we really need to end the War on Drugs as a whole, and the little steps are important.

The only way we’re going to end the War on Drugs is for our movement to increase, for the things that we do to garner increased attention and notoriety, increased publicity, and increased awareness so that the discussions reach the point where they are actually happening versus being laughed at. We want to take it to the next step where most everyone is saying no, this is wrong and it needs to end. Getting it to where people are not going to support other people because they are tough on drugs. When the students set up political action committees, when that continues to happen and politicians start to loose elections because they’re too tough on drugs, when our movement has grown so much that we are on every college campus and tons of high schools, and all the young people and their parents are talking about this issue, that’s when we’re going to see the really big, monumental changes. Ultimately, that is the more important thing. I can’t be anything but optimistic after doing this for three and a half years and seeing this discussion, first undertaken sitting out on a porch just talking, turn into 200 hundred chapters of the SSDP so far. Seeing us go from just trying to get some media coverage, then having that media coverage turn into a CBS news story within our first year of being an organization, when we met with Gov. Gary Johnson, to now being featured in Rolling Stone 4 times, a 5th coming up this Fall. Seeing these articles and appearances upping the respectability of everything makes me extremely optimistic about our future.

Now, am I optimistic about the short term future? I mean, it’s looking very grim from what the federal government is looking like they want to try to do, what they actually are doing and saying about drugs. In a sense I think that is a sign of desperation. People are beginning to think the government has better things to worry about than drugs after September 11, so the government is trying to link the two.

P- In my opinion, one step towards ending the war would be for people to come out of the closet like that couple, Jeff Jarvis and Tracy Johnson, did in Oregon, the ad saying “Hi, we’re your good neighbors, and we smoke pot.” Do you see a positive side to coming out and saying yes, I am a pot smoker and still a hard working, tax paying member of society who loves my family and they love me?

SH- I think that coming out of the closet for certain people can be very effective, and I think it’s very important in letting people know that not all drug users are crazy criminals, they are often simply your neighbors that you wave to on your way to work. Right now, the political climate is such that people in DC and across the country use drug use to completely discredit people, to completely take away their forum. They say that what drug users have to say doesn’t matter precisely because they are drug users. In my case, with SSDP, it’s much more important that I take my personal background completely out of the picture, whether I use drugs or I don’t. Prohibitionists will use whatever they can to allege that reformers are only in the movement to increase access to drugs. You and I both know that’s utter horse manure.

P- Yeah, especially since illegal drugs are widely available as it is now.

SH- Some people take that seriously though. I think that as an organization and as an individual, right now we want to be able to appeal to a broad base of people. We welcome drug users into our organization, we welcome non-drug users too. As a whole, being representative of this big constituency that’s made up of users and non-users alike, if I were to talk about my own personal choices when it comes to drugs I could possibly take the emphasis away from one side of my constituency and have it more focused on the other side, making neither side very effective at being able to disseminate our message.

P- Ok, thanks for speaking with me Shawn.

SH- No, thank you. Anytime.