Prohibition Fighter

Ethan Nadelmann was sitting in a small plane flying low over the remote, hilly farm country of Mendocino County, north of San Francisco, surveying small clusters of marijuana plants scattered among the woods and fields. "You'll see eight plants in somebody's backyard," Nadelmann says. "Or you'll see six or 12 or 22 out in a field. You see greenhouses in the middle of nowhere. You see tarps." (Article continued below...)

You don't see rolling fields of weed, just lots and lots of small clusters—and they're all over the place. Indeed, in California marijuana is a booming business. Some reckon the state's annual harvest is worth $14 billion—more than agriculture and wine combined. The local police know who's growing the stuff but can't or won't stamp it out because, frankly, the local economy depends on it. "It's big enough and legitimate enough that trying to wipe it out doesn't make sense—not from a law-enforcement perspective or a political perspective, and certainly not from an economic perspective," says Nadelmann.

The answer? Regulate it and tax it, he says. As Nadelmann, director of the New York-based Drug Policy Alliance Network, sees it, the entire "war on drugs" is a colossal failure, a waste of time and money that has caused far more harm than drugs themselves.

For the past two decades, Nadelmann has made this argument without much success. But lately people have been more receptive. In California, where medical marijuana is already allowed, there's now a push for full legalization, with proponents arguing that the move could bring in billions in tax revenue to the struggling state. Suddenly, Nadelmann is in demand. Recently he's appeared on The Colbert Report, Fox & Friends, and an Anderson Cooper special about marijuana. He consults with Rep. Barney Frank, who is pushing to relax marijuana laws. The folks at the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws worshipfully refer to him as "our drug czar."

Nadelmann doesn't quite cringe when he hears endorsements like that, but neither does he entirely fit in with his comrades in the drug-legalization lobby. Yes, he admits to smoking pot occasionally. But you won't see him posing in High Times with an armload of giant buds, and he's not some wild-eyed stoner on a quixotic quest to legalize grass. In fact, he's a wonky, 52-year-old former Princeton professor, a studious kid who grew up the son of a respected rabbi in Yonkers, N.Y., and who graduated from Harvard with honors. Nadelmann went on to earn a master's degree from the London School of Economics, returning to Harvard to garner both a doctorate and a law degree before settling into a teaching gig at Princeton.

In other words, he's about as mainstream as it gets. Had he stuck with the law, today he'd undoubtedly be a partner at some big firm. Had he stuck with Princeton, he'd likely be tenured, with an easy courseload and heaps of time to write books. Instead, he's cranking out position papers from a cramped office on 36th Street in New York City, and every time he goes on TV he endures a bunch of stoner jokes so he can patiently explain that his crusade has nothing to do with drugs, per se, and everything to do with civil liberties. "I try to make the jokes work in my favor," Nadelmann says. "It's part and parcel of the evolution of public opinion. If you can joke about something, it's a way of saying it's not a serious issue. And if it's not a serious issue, then why are we arresting 800,000 people a year? Why are there 50,000 to 100,000 people behind bars on any given night for marijuana?"

So he grins and bears the jokes, and then emphasizes, again and again, that his crusade has nothing to do with liking pot personally. The idea is not that drugs are good but that prohibition is bad. Nadelmann argues that marijuana prohibition is as counterproductive as alcohol prohibition was in the 1920s, and that we'd all be better off if the government would just regulate and tax it. Ironically, this would give the government more control over the drug, not less. "It's commonly assumed that prohibition represents the ultimate form of regulation," Nadelmann says. "But, in fact, prohibition represents the abdication of regulation. It's the total absence of it."