Alison Holcomb, at drug foundation’s parliamentary symposium

SocietyJuly 29, 2017

The ‘pot momma’ who convinced Washington state to legalise weed

Contributing Writer

Alison Holcomb, at drug foundation’s parliamentary symposium

Alison Holcomb is known as the architect of marijuana legalisation in Washington state and was labelled ‘pot momma’ by the press. She spoke to Simon Day about leading Washington state to legalising cannabis.

Because the government wasn’t going to do it, lawyer Alison Holcomb had to convince the public of Washington state to legalise cannabis themselves. In around half the US states, including Washington, voters have the power to pass laws at the ballot box. Her campaign focused on one block of voters. While a third already supported legalisation of cannabis, and a third were vehemently opposed and in fact supported tighter criminal sanctions for drugs. But another third sat in the middle, undecided – aware of the harm drug laws were doing, but unsure what to do about it. She drafted a bill based on alcohol regulation – age limit of 21, strict licensing rules, advertising – that she hoped would help them understand what cannabis law reform could achieve.

“What they understood was that arresting people for cannabis use was a waste of public safety resources that could be used for greater public priorities, and it also enriched the black market,” says Holcomb. “We are sending all of this revenue to people who are dangerous. Being able to undercut the black market was a big one, then finally tax revenues. People were interested in those three messages.”

In November 2012 Washington became the first US state to legalise cannabis, when voters passed Initiative 502, with a 56% majority. It was a hard fought victory after years of education programmes and campaigning. Holcomb faced personal attacks over the concessions she felt she had to make on the bill in order to drag those voters towards drug reform.

“It was a difficult journey, but it continues to be one of the greatest honours of my life to be able to do that work because of knowing who I was doing it for.”

Despite the compromises she had to make, she knows the law is keeping people out of criminal justice system, and changing attitudes about drugs and drug users. She hopes this change in policy, and the evidence of the outcomes, can be the start of the end of the War on Drugs.

You’ve said “the War on Drugs has taken what it means to be an American, to live in hope to live in dignity and live in freedom and turned it on its head.” What does this mean?

I think the story that we tell ourselves about the United States of America, and it’s a story I choose to believe because it’s the essential goodness and hope of humanity, we believe that every individual should have the opportunity to live to their fullest potential. The extent that the government has any intersection with you, should be to help make that easier. Government is essentially there not to hamper you but to help you. To create safety but to enforce freedom. I think the US is a place where we believe in individual redemption. That everyone can make mistakes and work themselves back from it.

The War on Drugs it strips away fairness. There’s no fair response to the individual. Whether you are a young person who is experimenting with drugs and you happen to be in the wrong time and the wrong place, or you have the wrong coloured skin. The response of the War on Drugs is an outsize punitive response that affirmatively derails your life for, simply by charging you with a crime.

The criminal justice system, at some point we believed that it is a correctional facility, and now it is nothing more than a place of degradation and humiliation and permanent trauma. Nobody who comes out of the criminal justice system is better off than when they went in. For a country that wants to hold itself out as inspirational and a place where the full independence of the individual is respected and facilitated the War on Drugs incentivises our government to do quite the opposite. To interfere in people’s lives, to destroys people’s lives and get rich of it in the process.

How did that end up with you in Washington state at the head of the movement to legalise cannabis?

After graduating from law school I went to work for a commercial litigation firm for a couple of years and did not feel as though the work was terribly satisfying. It just so happened that a friend of mine worked for a very small criminal defence firm at the time and they had an opening. This firm focused primarily defending people accused of drug crimes. The overwhelming majority of the cases that they saw were cannabis cases. And through the process of essentially meeting the people who were getting pushed into the system and their families, and learning the personal stories of the impact of the criminal justice system on people who were growing cannabis, selling cannabis, using cannabis, I began to grow increasingly concerned about our government’s decision to use the criminal sanction as the tool to address what was in essence a public health question.

I saw my role when I went to work for the ACLU as being that educator. But really what it was about was raising public awareness first about the harms that were resulting from the laws as they were written and as they were enforced, but also building the demand from within the public for change. Finally, strategising and fashioning the policy and the campaign tactics that would allow people to see that this level of change was possible and within their power to effect it.

It wasn’t easy for you to get the bill passed, and you faced opposition from what you thought would be friendly faces. There were some pretty nasty things said to you. It must have been emotional?

I think those years of experience in criminal defence witnessing first hand the experiences of the people who were caught up in the system are what continued to serve as my north star during the campaign. There was nothing that people could say to me or about me that ever was as hard as sitting in your office listening to a father tell you the story of the task force that was dressed all in black and took down the front door of their small home just before dawn, and watching his young teenage son run out of his bedroom, and these huge officers pointing semi automatic weapons at his son and yelling at him to get down on the ground, and the father thinking he was about to watch his son get shot in his head. And having the father break down as he is telling you this story.

When you’ve seen that, it really doesn’t matter, because that is what you are doing it for. You’re worried about these families that have been absolutely devastated and traumatised and their lives upended. That made it easy to stay focused and easy to be disciplined. Because it is really not about you and it is really about securing the win.

It was an interesting journey and a difficult journey, but it continues to be one of the greatest honours of my life to be able to do that work because of knowing who I was doing it for.

Why did the law need to change?

Is there a fundamental right to intoxication written into the Bill of Rights to the US Constitution? Arguably no. But a significant collateral consequence, and some people would argue the exact intended consequence of the War on Drugs, is to impact a whole host of other civil liberties: the right to vote; the right to be free from discrimination based on the colour of your skin; the right to have privacy in your home and in your communications; the rights against unreasonable search and seizures; due process; you could even argue cruel and unusual punishments given the state of prisons in the US.

There are two parallel tracts where those indirect violations of civil liberties are happening because of the War on Drugs. One is the issue of race in the US. In essence the War on Drugs is really nothing more than a proxy for the Jim Crow laws and the discrimination and segregation that were explicitly lawful up until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

After the passage of the Civil Rights Act that outlawed discrimination in the US, using drug law enforcement in a racially disproportionate way allows for legal discrimination against people of colour in the US. Drug use rates are roughly equal across all races and ethnicities, but if you look at who gets arrested and who gets prosecuted who gets incarcerated, who winds up with a criminal conviction, that has debilitating collateral consequences for employment, housing, voting, parental rights, and it is disproportionately people of colour and especially black Americans.

In Washington state before we passed initiative 502, and even after passage of initiative 502, data showed that black Washingtonians, were three times as likely to get arrested, three times as likely to get prosecuted, three times likely to get incarcerated. At every stage of the criminal justice system. There are some cities where the disproportionality is like 12 to 1.

The other thread is the nature of drug crimes. Drug crimes are fundamentally quite different from any other act that we call a crime. No one’s complaining about the transaction that occurs there. The only way that police get involved is if judges give them increasingly invasive authority to surveil us, to tap our phones, to pay informants to engage us in transactions.

That is the second area where we have seen civil liberties get violated increasing degrees, because we have decided the criminal sanction is the most appropriate strategy to deal with the fact people explore intoxicating substances.

How surprised were you to encounter the opposition you did from within the cannabis community?

I wasn’t that surprised because the people who attacked me were by and large people who were functioning within the illicit medical cannabis community. There were plenty of people who were making money off of the laws the way that they were and creating a regulatory system was undoubtedly going to cut into their profit margins, and might even result in some of them not getting licences. I think the way that the Washington state regulatory system rolled out was imperfect by a number of different measures, but by in large in the people who had the most complaints and the most vehement attacks, were the people who were self interested.

What would make me angry was the way that some of them would recruit vulnerable patients to their cause by telling that they would no longer have access to medical cannabis and essentially using fear to traumatise patients that were really vulnerable and really concerned that their health was in jeopardy.

A number of people who were my touchstones, people from the community who I thought of as being genuinely committed to the welfare of patients, who understood that as imperfect as this law was going to be – and it had to be imperfect – the only way we were going to be able to get this law passed was to thread the needle between idealism and public opinion, and compromises were made. They understood and saw that for what it was, and saw it as the first step forward.

How did you convince the public that drug reform was the necessary and legalisation was the right way to proceed?

The Washington ACLU executive director Kathleen Taylor she was a visionary she knew back in 2000 that it was time to end the war on drugs. She has very clear vision that the way we end the war on drugs is we have an incremental strategic approach and we start with cannabis. She knew that in order for this to work you were going to have to meet voters where they were. She knew that legislators weren’t going to take the lead on this, the only way that the laws were going to change was through a ballot initiative. That is an important factor, Washington is one of about half of the states in the US that have the ability for the voters to actually pass a law themselves.

Our research was telling us was that Washington state voters broke down into about a third. One third already supported us and wanted to go fully to legalisation and regulation. You had another third at the opposite end of the political spectrum, that were the hardliners that thought if anything our cannabis laws need to be harsher. And then you had the middle third who were our targets, who we needed to move closer to the liberal end of the spectrum, who knew the laws as written weren’t working, who knew they were doing more harm than good, but they didn’t know what to do. They were really nervous about what change would look like and those were the people who we had to draft our law to. They were concerned about youth use, they were concerned about stoned driving, they wanted to know what are the limits on this going to be, who can buy it, who can sell it.

What we discovered when we started talking about something that looked very much like the alcohol regulatory model that they were very familiar with in Washington they could get head around that. That was how we started to craft the policy and we found the people who could talk to them about public safety and protecting youth in a way that is convincing.

Alison Holcomb buys marijuana at the Cannabis City, the first retail cannabis outlet in Seattle, in 2014.

The middle ground that you had to reach, how has it worked in practice? Chair of the Canadian task force for drug reform, Anne McLellan, talked about visiting Washington and realising mistakes will be made, and they will have to be ironed out. How is that process going?

There are still quite a few creases that need to be ironed out. The two biggest policy compromises that we made were to include a per se standard for driving while impaired. The per se standard means that if you are pulled over driving while impaired and the officer has reason to believe that cannabis is the main cause of the impairment you can be asked to provide a blood sample, and if the test comes back at or above a certain level of THC, that evidence in and of itself is sufficient to find you guilty. But, cannabis does not have the same impact on people, the same linear progression of intoxication isn’t tied to THC as alcohol for example. Arguments have been made, the science is not solid yet, but there is definitely an argument to made that heavy daily users, like patients for example, might be at or above the legal level of THC and not actually be impaired.

The probably more problematic compromise that we chose to make was not to allow for personal growing. Washington state is now the only state of those that have legalised cannabis to not allow personal home growing by adults. That most significantly impacts patients. Those who have spent a lot of time figuring out how to grow exactly what they need don’t have protection.

There is still a separate medical cannabis law in Washington state, but it is restrictive and patients who want to be able to grow for themselves at home and not risk arrest have to register with the state. The reason that is important is because cannabis use and cannabis growing of any kind still remains illegal under federal law. Patients are understandably concerned about having to provide their information to a government database as potential evidence of growing cannabis at home. That is the fix that I would most like to see is for Washington to simply legalise growing a limited number of plants for all adults, so that patients don’t have to worry about registering with a government database.

That is quite fascinating for us in New Zealand where we don’t have federal and state law. So in place like Washington state where the local government have legalised cannabis, could the FBI show up and arrest people for possession?

Yes.

But there is an unspoken agreement that this won’t happen at the moment?

Yes…. well….

When Washington and Colorado both legalised cannabis back in 2012, we didn’t know what the federal response was going to be. It wasn’t until August of 2013 that we heard from the former Deputy Attorney General Cole, that in fact the federal government would allow these experiments in Washington and Colorado to proceed. He outlined eight different policy points that the federal government would be watching carefully to see whether or not the states were living up to their promise to keep cannabis out of the hands of children and from crossing state lines. The current attorney general could very easily renege on that. It was nothing more than the executive branch saying this is the gentleman’s agreement that we are willing to strike at this moment.

Could federal drug law change?

Polarisation in the US has increased tremendously over the last four decades, and Congress is the place where good ideas go to die. So I don’t see federal law changing any time soon. I think we will continue to see change happening at the state level. This past election cycle with California, Massachusetts, Maine and Nevada all moving to legalisation and regulation, it was huge.

It is a treacherous time to try and guess what our federal government will do on any issue now. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has not been a reasonable person at all on drug law enforcement. I don’t think we will see any progress towards explicit reform of federal laws in the near term; my hope is that there will continue to be a tolerance of choices that are made at the state level. That’s where we will continue to see evolution and expansion of liberties.

Despite your concerns about how the law was rolled out, is it achieving the things you hoped it would?

Yes. Because what I wanted to achieve was to crack open the possibility that moving in this direction would happen outside of Washington. We now have 20 per cent of the US population living in states that have legalised and regulate cannabis.

For me the policy goal was to stop treating people like criminals and ultimately I want to see the US roll back the War on Drugs, across the board for all substances, and start to repair some of the damage it has caused worldwide. The fact that we seem to continue to move in that direction tells me that the policy has succeeded.

And Washington state has become a safer place? It’s resulted in less arrests related to cannabis?

In absolute numbers yes. But the racial disparities are still there. There are a lot fewer – we went from 9000 arrests for possession every year to 200. The numbers were staggering in terms of the drop. But if you dig into that small sample size you still see that black people are much more likely to be arrested and prosecuted for these crimes than white. So there is still a lot of work to be done on that front. The movement towards a public health oriented approach across the board is continuing to gain traction.

The idea that the criminal sanction might not be the best tactic for addressing drug use is the most important idea that we can plant in people’s minds, that there are others ways to prevent people from progressing to problematic drug use. To minimise the harms that attach to drug use of any kind. We have the ability to do things much better than the way we have been doing things up until this point.

A fresh way to deal with drugs is needed more than ever in New Zealand. The Drug Foundation’s roadmap for reform Whakawātea te Huarahi – A model drug law to 2020 and beyond is available online.

Keep going!

Overweight woman pinching a roll of fat on her side

SocietyJuly 28, 2017

Enough with the shame. Let’s start celebrating fat bodies

Catherine Trundle

Guest writer

Overweight woman pinching a roll of fat on her side

Plenty of attention is given to the health implications of obesity, but much less thought is given to how a fat-stigmatising culture damages people – women especially. Why can’t all bodies, not just slim ones, be allowed to feel comfortable in their own skin, asks Catherine Trundle.

This week a new report reminded us that New Zealand has the third highest obesity rates in the OECD. It highlighted our rising levels of childhood obesity, and the lack of appropriate policies to address it. The health consequences of our enlarging nation are, the report said, potentially catastrophic.

I’m not here to dispute the links between illness and obesity, although I might quibble with the blunt BMI instrument that draws lines between unhealthy and healthy bodies. And many of the policy ideas the report suggests are sound, such as getting rid of junk food in schools. But I do want to offer an important caution to any newfound enthusiasm in the fight against fat. However we go about tackling this problem, we need to consider the cultural way we currently regard fatness.

This means thinking about how medical attention towards obesity might get used to justify more hostility towards women’s bodies that don’t conform to our skinny beauty norms. In other words, how might we stop this medical concern from reinforcing our fat shaming ways? For just as obesity might be a growing health problem, living in this fat stigmatising culture in a widespread wellbeing problem for most women. But there has been little widespread outcry about the negative social effects of living within a fat shaming society, and few policy proposals to try to confront it.

This is an issue worthy of attention because regardless of size, most women in our society feel fat, some of the time, most of the time, or all of the time. Fatness is for many women a constant unwanted companion. To focus on women’s experiences here is not to say that men don’t suffer in a fat shaming culture and are never its targets, but that women suffer in a particularly sharp way thanks to our uneven standards of beauty and our gendered expectations about bodily control.

I’m using the word fat here as the fat acceptance movement does, as a reclaimed insult, as a matter-of-fact description of a big body. The bodies labelled fat in our society vary significantly in size. Many so-called fat bodies are not particularly physically large. They are not targets of medical intervention. They are simply bodies that exceed our impossibly tiny ideals of beauty. Fatness is always relative to a standard. And our standard is an insane one, wide enough to catch most of us in its net.

There are many plot lines in our culture to explain fat bodies. There is the story of our gluttonous, processed, sedentary age. One that creates the perfect conditions for an epidemic of obesity. One that requires us to get out of our cars and up from our desks and away from the fast food outlets and chocolate aisle.

We also talk about fat bodies as poor bodies, as revealing the ravages of financial poverty and time poverty and nutritional poverty. Obesity can signify the stresses and strains of social and economic marginalization writ large on the body.

Then there are the stories women tell that describe eating as a way to deal with trauma. Food comforts, so it can work to displace something uncomfortable. Some women seek to be nurtured, to build themselves up through food when they feel parts of their lives are numb or depleted. Or they eat because their bodies have been violated. Fat can feel like protection, like presence.

These are among the many explanations to account for the rising ‘problem’ of fatness. They are all useful in countering the simplistic thinking of people who blame fatness on women who just don’t have enough self-control to choose the salad, every single time, like some robotic rabbit. But I’m not satisfied with these stories alone.

For must we always see fat bodies as broken, as in need of cure? As lacking an intervention. Why are they always the result of a social ill? Can we ever see them, celebrate them, as whole?

Not all fat bodies eat ravenously, compulsively, addictively, or poorly. Many just refuse to eat sparingly. And combined with a naturally slowing metabolism, and having kids, and caring less about what other people think, and putting families first, and taking certain medications, and years gone by, they gradually become soft and floppy and fat. They refuse to be calcified into some scrawny teenage form forever.

And what if a fat body is the result of trauma, or self-protection, or struggle? Surely that body, especially that body, deserves to be accepted and appreciated. Why must we always demand of people that they erase their scars and make themselves anew? Why must our stories about fatness always end in an expectation for transformation?

There is nothing natural about fat shaming. People have to be taught to hate fatness. Babies and toddlers love their mothers’ fat bodies. They relish being able to snuggle into big pillowy breasts, or press their heads against soft tummy rolls, or hide shyly behind the reassuring legs of a woman with wide hips and thighs.

But this sense of comfort and safety in their mothers and grandmothers’ bodies is often gradually eroded, replaced with a sense of revulsion towards fatness. Heartbreakingly, children often pick this up first within their families, as they begin to observe the struggles adults have with fat bodies. Then later, society, with its limitless ways of signalling its hatred for fat bodies, takes over the task.

To keep a body small that wants to be bigger requires an extraordinary, iron fist of will and effort. It is impossible to describe to a person who is naturally, effortlessly skinny, who has never viewed their body as fat, just how much energy and monitoring many women expend to enact this work.

Some women describe this work as hinged to a necessary and conscious feeling of self-hatred. They describe it involving a jolting ‘waking up’ moment. Perhaps it was a photo of their fat body that induced a sense of revulsion. They suddenly think, “That is not me. What a monster, I can’t live with this body one minute longer!”

Then begins the brutal self-talk that propels a woman towards thinness, telling her fat body that what it thinks it wants is deluded, an unhealthy pattern, that it had been lazy, that it must now comply, that it must under no circumstances give in to temptation. The fat body subdued this way must constantly be told it is an illusion and an intruder, that the real body is inside, waiting to be release and revealed. And the irony here is that the weight loss industry often describes this process as one of self-love, as about gaining some self-respect, as about being ‘worth’ this effort.

Older women, increasingly fed up with caring about weight, often share this reflection with me: Years spent fighting their fat bodies is often precious time not spent cultivating their talents, or attending to friendships or just relaxing and having fun. Or it is time spent feeling like they are doing all these things in spite of the challenges of living with their fat bodies. In our society, fat bodies are rarely seen as allies to living a full life.

In a fat shaming culture like ours, fat bodies often feel they must do less. Swim less, go out in public less, reveal their skin less. For fear of drawing attention or breaking the rules about bodies that shouldn’t be seen or celebrated. It can mean always trying to take up less space, to think about how one’s elbows and hips might intrude on the person in the next seat. Being big means having to try to be tiny and unseen.

Fat might look like it is a type of ruinous excess, but much of the time it results in scarcity. Like receiving too little respect in public. Or having a diminished sense of entitlement to demand what one needs. It often means settling for less.

And even those who win the battle against fat lose something, beyond pounds. To keep a once fat body at a smaller size long term requires coming to terms with the loss of old habits that mustn’t ever be repeated. Sometimes these are happily discarded. But often it means living with a new type of vigilance towards the body, to stop it sneaking back to its old pleasures. To never quite trust it again. We must now treat it as a problem child we’ve outgrown, but who nonetheless we’re stuck with. Whose wayward behaviour we have under control, for now at least.

Fighting our fat bodies requires separating them off from ourselves, as objects subordinate to the mastery of our minds. The word master here is apt. To become thin often involves treating our bodies like some sort of slave-like underling. They get no say. They’ll be punished if they don’t comply. We want to bend them to our will, trick them if necessary into our idea of happiness. But bodies always end up being lousy slaves. They have sneaky ways of staging rebellions. Of raiding the pantry late at night and hosting parties when the master lies asleep.

In reality, many fat bodies are bodies that just crave to be allowed to feel comfortable in their skin. We now know that at the cellular and molecular level, bodies work hard after weight loss to return to a weight that feels like it fits that body.

This is why for the most part, fighting against the fat body results in failure to rein it in, to make it live in a smaller space. Very few people achieve and sustain thinness through these terror tactics. The body just won’t stand for it. Most of the time, that is. Occasionally, the body simply crumples, and the mind, euphoric in its total control, gives birth to an eating disorder.

So, what then is to be done about this never-ending futile battle against fat? Let’s start by acknowledging the harms of a fat shaming culture. Our approach to fatness is so unnecessarily destructive, so ineffective at making people healthy or happy.

To fight against our fat shaming culture doesn’t mean we must now rail against women who want to lose weight. It doesn’t mean, for example, rejecting a person or family’s efforts to get fit, or deal with diabetes. People have various ways that they care for and protect their bodies across their lives. Sometimes these include eating in new ways or moving more, and sometimes it involves losing weight. Some bodies also expand and contract at different points in the life course without purposeful, hell-bent effort.

But I am against the way we muster such contempt for fatness, that we approach the task of crafting an ideal body with such disrespect for that body, that in response our bodies have to quietly plan counter-coup attempts. I hate that we turn our bodies into battlegrounds in the process. And any women bigger than our beauty norms who feel quite happy with themselves, just as they are, must fight against a social tide of disapproval so strong that to be content in a fat body has become a radical act of cultural defiance.

And I wish the medical profession would think harder about what it means to pathologise obesity in a society that already hates fatness, and particularly hates it in women. For to tell a woman she has a ‘problem’ with her body is to give her one more reason to turn against it as the enemy. And It’s not to ask her what she needs in life, whether she feels safe, or seen, or loved, or to enquire about the conditions she would need to flourish in the way she wants to flourish. Couldn’t we let her body, in whichever shape it settles, be the outcome of attending to these questions first, rather than the problem in need of fixing in order to address them?

I wish that after over 60 years of women complaining about the pressure to be unrealistically thin something would actually change. I’m sick of how intractable this crap is. I’m sick of how resigned we’ve become to expecting this pressure to surround us like oxygen.

I’m talking actual, real change. Not little tokens, or exceptions that prove the rule. Like banning French catwalk model who look like they haven’t eaten in a year while still normalizing models that look like they haven’t eaten in a month. Or the rise of the new ‘niche market’ in plus size models, still perfectly proportioned and only ever a little bit fat.

I wish I could offer a pithy solution to this crazy mess. I haven’t got one. It’s certainly no use telling a woman who believes she’s fat to just be body positive and love herself, when everything around her is saying the opposite. In most instances, that’s just setting her up to fail with her fatness, once again. The issue of fatness and its consequences have to stop being simply a task for individual internal effort.

Maybe we just need to collectively rage against the skinny machine. Whenever we come across it. Calling it out. Being louder. More indignant. All of us. All the time. Maybe that would be a good place to start. Let me put this simply. Women do not need to hate themselves this way. It is not inevitable.

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