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2.4 MILLION GALLONS11.02.14
Deepwater Horizon: Life Drowning in Oil
‘The Great Invisible’ is something of a marvel—a balanced, unabridged document of life before and after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig accident.
On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig bursted into flames in the Gulf of Mexico, claiming eleven lives and causing the biggest petroleum spill in this country’s history. In the following three months, while the sea-floor oil gusher oozed out 2.4 million gallons a day, the accidental tragedy captured this nation’s attention. And for a brief moment before the capping on July 15, it seemed change and progress were not just platitudes propagated by pandering politicians, but genuinely possible.

CEOs from the five major oil companies—Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron—were brought before Congress to confront and reform the incompetence and myopia of their safety prevention and response plans (plans that, unsurprisingly, they spent less than 1/10th of 1 percent of their profits on). Settlements for those affected by the explosion were being slowly, but surely doled out. Concerned citizens took to social media, tweeting photos of animals drenched in oil. Indeed, the collective outrage necessary for advancement was there, until it wasn’t.

Following an all too predictable cycle of the hyperactive 21st century, focus on the explosion was ephemeral. Eager to channel our indignation at the latest and greatest national calamity before actually solving the current one, it seemed just about everyone was content with moving on. That is, except for filmmaker Margaret Brown, who flew down to the South a month after the catastrophe and wouldn’t leave until the completion of her brilliant documentary, four years later.

The Great Invisible is something of a marvel—a balanced, unabridged portrait of life before and after the BP disaster. In an attempt to offer up a thorough document, Brown manages to capture a wide array of people on camera. From impoverished families in bayous around the Gulf to affluent oil executives, she leaves no side of the story untold (save for BP, who repeatedly declined to speak with Brown and her crew).

Our initial entry point is Roosevelt Harris, a seemingly altruistic food pantry volunteer who serves as a beacon of hope to all those he comes into contact with. “The minute he starting talking it was just crazy,” said Brown. “We knew that he was going to be a character. He’s brilliant.”

Speaking in aphorisms, Harris traverses around the community in his cream-colored pickup truck, handing out food, compassion and moral support to anyone who needs it. Since the spill, the number of unemployed residents in Louisiana and Alabama has only increased. “People who were shucking oysters 6 days a week are now doing it 2 days a week,” explains Brown.

Brown proceeds to paint an appropriately dire picture: “Every time we went back down there we kept asking people, ‘How is it going?’ And it was never back to normal. It was always markedly less than it had been.” Most of the residents enveloped in the bayous, where “graduating from Middle School was a pretty big deal,” know how to do little else than crab picking and oyster shucking. Their “livelihoods and harvest,” as Brown describes it, were stripped away from them.

No matter, Harris, a 70-something African-American who emerges as the documentary’s heart and soul, remains optimistic and upbeat, undeterred by his grim surroundings. In one of the film’s more heartbreaking sequences, we see Harris urge his fellow residents in the Bayou La Batre to come to a meeting where a Claimants attorney will be present to take on legitimate cases. Desperate to bring justice to those hurting, Harris even goes so far as to offer transportation to people without means to attend. Unfortunately, Harris’s greatest fear is realized when no one shows up, forcing him to admit, “People around here are skeptical about doing things.”

“The South is where the Gulf of Mexico is, and a third of oil petroleum comes from the Gulf…I think people down there feel a pride in that,” Brown says.
While some may classify that inactivity as laziness or indifference, Brown suggests the contrary. “I don’t think these people are lazy at all. This is a community of hard work and seafood people who started working when they were six years old.”

The bigger problem, Brown insists, is that “Katrina happened right before that and none of those people got help. They just don’t really trust authority or people to help them. they’ve been beaten down.”

But if Harris, a friend and fellow La Batre citizen can’t bridge the gap between local folk and authority, who can? Born and raised in Mobile, Alabama, Brown seems to believe that this is simply another example of a systemic overhaul. “I think people like that have been ignored for so long they’re just hopeless. The way I saw it was a lot of the people at the bottom end of the class system didn’t know or understand how to fill out those forms, and they were told they didn’t really need a lawyer and they don’t really trust lawyers anyway.”

That distrust described by Brown doesn’t end with authority though. In the immediate aftermath of the oil spill, apoplectic Southerners cast their disdain towards the North. Feeling like misunderstood and undervalued pariahs, banners like “Your wallet: the only place Obama want to drill” were created in response to the President’s six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling.

“The South is where the Gulf of Mexico is, and a third of oil petroleum comes from the Gulf…I think people down there feel a pride in that,” Brown says. “And it’s just as old as the hills: the South thinks the North doesn’t understand it.” Of course for most, what is out of sight is also, conveniently, out of mind—a luxury inhabitants of the South can’t afford. “You can’t escape it,” Brown says empathetically. “If you lived on the Gulf coast, it’s still going on. You go swimming and you come out of the water and you have tar on you.”

In most documentaries, this is where The Great Invisible would conclude—offering up a clean and concise, if oversimplified ending in which the powerful are evil and the powerless are virtuous. But Brown has no interest in insularity or convenient resolutions. Interspersed with damning news footage and home videos from Doug Brown, the chief operator on Deepwater Horizon now dealing with post-traumatic stress, the doc then shifts its spotlight onto a group of oil executives from independent companies.

Serving as a sort of Greek Chorus, Brown incorporates these industry veterans who, she insists, “felt like ‘Well why don’t more people understand what we do?’ They felt like maybe the American public should understand how we think and what we do.” And the film delivers, for better or worse, on their desire to be understood.

A more propagandistic documentary would vilify these affluent white men drinking whisky, smoking cigars, and condemning the American populace for believing “cheap gasoline is our birthright.” But Brown sincerely believes all our pain is self-inflicted. “I don’t think those guys are the cause of it. I think we’re the cause of it. It’s a system,” says Brown. Pointing the finger and feeling self-righteous, she believes, “Takes the blame off people for filling up their car and using it. They [the oil companies] are just giving us what they want.”

Before I leave Brown’s home in Laurel Canyon (she’s subleasing it while promoting the movie), she recalls the origins of her political awareness. “I was at a Pixies concert,” she says with a warm smile, “and there was a Greenpeace and Amnesty International booth in the hallway, and it said ‘sign this.’ If I hadn’t had that… I don’t know, maybe I’d be working for the Republican Party.” After we agree about the terrifying alternate timeline in which she works at Fox News, she thoughtfully adds, “It’s weird when you think about what galvanizes people to act, and it’s so weird that that’s what galvanized me to act: a rock concert.”

Whether The Great Invisible will galvanize people into action has yet to be seen, but for those looking to be informed then enraged, it’s a good place to start. As the credits tell us, not much has changed since 2010. Congress has not passed any new safety legislation for the petroleum industry; the U.S., at 4.4 percent of the world’s population, still consumes 21 percent of the world’s petroleum; BP’s current fleet of drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico has expanded to the largest in the company’s history; and Doug Brown is still awaiting his settlement from the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

However, instead of being mired in despondency or complacency, Brown takes a page out of Harris’s playbook of positivity and concludes, “There are so many things that we can do, but it starts with understanding how we’re all connected to this factory under the Gulf of Mexico.”

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MIDTERM DISASTER11.05.14
Inside the Democrats’ Godawful Midterm Election Wipeout
From Arkansas to North Carolina, they crashed harder Tuesday night than they did even in the horror show that was 2010. Why they’re screwed with working-class whites—and Obama is toast.
You knew at 7 p.m., when it took MSNBC (not Fox—MSNBC) all of about 16 seconds to call Kentucky for Mitch McConnell over Alison Lundergan Grimes, that it was going to be a long, hard night for Democrats. And then for a little while, little shafts of light broke through. Jeanne Shaheen held on! Kay Hagan was ahead! That jerk Pennsylvania governor lost! But hmmm, what’s this Virginia business? And then, by 10:30, the proportions of the wipeout, while not yet exactly clear, were enough in view that those of us who do what I do could start writing our pieces for Wednesday morning.

And boy, what an hour it was from 10:30 to 11:30. Suddenly Shaheen didn’t have it in the bag anymore (in the end she did win). Hagan fell behind (and lost). Scott Walker won in Wisconsin. Rick Scott, ugh, won reelection in Florida. So long, Medicaid expansion to 800,000 people (yeah, I know, Scott said he was for it; let’s just see). Illinois tossed out its Democratic governor. Pat Roberts held on by a thread.

Worse than 2010. Yep. Worse than 2010. The Democrats lost the Maryland governorship?!?

There are a lot of choices for where to start surveying the Democratic wreckage, but I want to open with Arkansas, because something interesting happened there that suggests the true depth of the Democratic problem in red states. Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Pryor got hammered by Republican Tom Cotton. It was called for Cotton the instant the polls closed. Ended up around 15 points. Blowout.

And yet this same Arkansas electorate voted nearly two-to-one to back a minimum-wage increase. How can these two results be reconciled? In part, Cotton played this very slick. He said during the campaign that “as a citizen” he’d vote for the minimum-wage increase, which he called, quizzically, “that initiated act.” But he then went on to signal clearly to the kinds of people who dumped nearly $7 million in dark money into his campaign that they shouldn’t really sweat it, what he’d just said: “The minimum wage should be a floor and a stepping stone to higher-wage jobs, not a ceiling. And the way we create that kind of economy is not through higher taxes and regulations and laws like Obamacare, but through less taxes, through smarter regulations.” In other words, he’s going to do their bidding, he just needed to say this to get elected.

Maybe this was an opportunity for Pryor? OK, he supported the state initiative, like Cotton. But he also opposed the federal minimum wage. I’d love to argue that Pryor should have just had the stones to back the federal minimum wage so he could draw a contrast with Cotton. Would love to. But I honestly can’t. Cotton would have beaten him by more, probably. Because that minimum-wage hike was a project of the federal government, and that means that you-know-who was for it.

I’m not going where you (especially if you’re conservative) suspect I’m going with this—the standard liberal moan that working-class white people are voting against their interests. That’s something Democrats have to get out of their heads and stop saying. People don’t vote against their interests. They vote for their interests as they see them. And right now, working-class and blue-collar whites think the Democratic Party is just implacably against them.

Of course I don’t think it’s true that the Democratic Party is implacably against them. I think they just think the Democratic Party is implacably against them, and part of the reason—not the whole reason, but part of the reason—they think the Democratic Party is implacably against them is that Democratic candidates in red states have no idea how to tell them they’re on their side.

Right now, working-class and blue-collar whites think the Democratic Party is just implacably against them.
Look at this map. This is something The New York Times posted a week ago showing the percentage of people who gained health insurance under Obamacare, broken down into every county in the country. Look at the map, and look at Kentucky. Huge gains. Just huge. Throughout the state, the percentage of insured doubled in many counties. The Democratic Party has been implacably for the people—in this state, most of them white—who got insurance.

And yet, could Alison Grimes go around the state bragging about this? No, she couldn’t. It’s Obama and race, yes. For sure. But it’s more. It’s hatred of government. In a lot of places, you can’t even get people to believe that Washington had anything to do with them getting insurance. So they sent back to the Senate, by a shockingly high margin, the man who has pledged that he’s going to repeal root and branch the law that got them that insurance.

The Democrats are screwed with these people, in these states. And they’re even screwed with these people (and there are plenty of them) in the blue states, and that will keep mattering as long as the blue people don’t turn out in midterm years. That, as I wrote the other day, is a big problem the Democrats have to figure out. This much-vaunted turnout operation turns out not to have deserved much vaunt.

Of course, the Republicans are screwed in a lot of places, too. In fact, they’re screwed in more places, it’s worth remembering, with a lot more people and a hell of a lot more electoral votes. And they’re likely to find that out in 2016.

Yes, 2016. The race starts Wednesday, of course. Maybe with Hillary and Bill, the Democrats can get back some of these voters. Maybe it really is that simple. You get people with white skin and the man has a drawl and reminds them of a time when they were younger and thinner, and some of these voters feel more comfortable with Democrats again. Not enough that Democrats can win Arkansas, God knows, but maybe enough that they can nail down North Carolina again. The media will be full of stories in the next few days about whether Obama will drag Hillary Clinton down for 2016. Could be, but I doubt it. She’s her own brand. As long as the economy isn’t awful, and Benghazi is still a punch line for Jon Stewart, she can survive this.

But what about Obama? He’s done as far as any new initiatives are concerned. He probably can’t do this immigration reform-by-fiat now. They’ll impeach him for sure. All he can do now is try to protect health care and try to make this ISIS war work. There might be some opportunities on trade and tax policy, but those will exist about 75 percent on Republican turf. And emphasis on “might”: The Republicans, McConnell’s pretty speech to the contrary, won’t want to work with Obama on anything. Their interest, as ever, is in pushing the perception that Washington is dysfunctional. It works for them. It worked Tuesday night. It worked in 2010. They want Americans to perceive Washington as broken, especially heading into 2016. There’s no better simplistic argument for “change.” Obstruction has just been rewarded, in a huge way. You expect them to change?

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NEW ENERGY ECONOMY11.03.14
Parks and Regeneration
In 21st century parks, trees are powering power wi-fi routers and benches charge smartphones.

Open spaces, parks, nature preserves, and other patches of green are supposed to be places for resting, relaxation, and respite. But the reality is that in our 24-7 hyper-connected world, powering down often requires powering up. After all, with books and magazines losing market share and tablets in the ascendancy, reading is an activity that is increasingly powered by electricity. What’s more, Wi-fi is now seen as a human necessity. And whether you’re a kid playing on a basketball court or a lawyer taking a few minutes off in Central Park, keeping smartphones charged at all times is a necessity. All of which means that in order to truly enjoy the great outdoors, people increasingly need access to something they used to only get in the not-so-great indoors: electricity.

And that’s happening. Around the world, smart entrepreneurs and engineers are introducing aesthetically-pleasing structures that can produce and provide juice in public parks in unobtrusive ways.

In Israel, where planting trees has long been a national project, the first eTree has been planted. The brainchild of a company called Sologic, the eTree looks like a basic tree with a wooden trunk. But the leaves and branches – the canopy it effectively creates -- is made up of solar panels.

Like trees, these structures provide shelter and serve as attractive pieces of natural sculpture. But this one does more. The panels produce electricity, which can charge phones and laptops through USB ports embedded in the surrounding benches. What’s more, the installations house and power wi-fi nodes, which effectively turns a cool shady place into a hotspot. The power can also chill drinking water. And a small battery hidden in the structure can store power, which can be used to keep highly efficient LEG bulbs lit at night. These eTrees aren’t cheap. The basic Acacia model, equipped with seven branches that have a combined capacity of 1.4 kilowatts, costs $100,000. The first “tree” has been planted in a public garden in Zichron Ya’akov, a city about an hour north of Tel Aviv.

Meanwhile, in public parks in Massachusetts, visitors may be noticing a new wrinkle in the sturdy, dowdy park benches they have come to rely on. On July 4 – fittingly enough – a company called Soofa installed a piece of equipment that will allow people to declare independence from the electricity grid on the historic Boston Common – one of the nation’s first great public parks.

Soofa, a Cambridge-based start-up founded by three women, Jutta Friedrichs, Sandra Richter, and Nan Zhao, makes what it calls smart benches. They’re low-slung benches with wooden slates. But in the middle, there’s a square container with a solar panel on top. It produces electricity, which it can then channel to devices like phones or laptops through USB ports.

Soofar first unveiled its product at a White House event in June. Each Soofa has a proper name – the one on Boston Common is called Boris. And as this map shows, there are now five Soofas in Boston proper as well as two in the suburb of Babson. “Computers took people off the streets,” notes Jutta Friedrichs, co-founder and designer of the smart urban furniture. “We envision Soofas acting as magnets that invite people to enjoy the outdoors while reading the news, sharing a video, or catching up on email without fear of running out of power. The company’s website documents how much sun power each has collected and how many hours of charging it has provided.

These “smart benches” can do more than simply serve as passive producers of electricity. Equipped with sensors, the benches will be able to provide data on weather conditions, noise, and air quality.

Both the eTree and the Soofa represent an important trend. With people expecting that energy will be available to them at all times, and at all places, we have to rethink the way that electricity is generated, distributed, and stored. Building such capacity into our public urban “furniture” is one smart of way guaranteeing access. And these initiatives represent an effort to fundamentally rethink our landscape. “Your cell phone doesn’t just make phone calls,” as Boston Mayor Marty Walsh put it. “Why should our benches just be seats?”

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COMPLEX10.31.14
Washington’s Wheeler-Dealer Patriotism
His support for the Constitutional Convention was what sold it to his countrymen, but Washington’s motives, as always, had more than a touch of self-interest.
George Washington wanted to die rich, and we have that to thank for the Constitution.

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, George Washington was keen to rebuild his personal finances. At the same time, the new nation’s leaders were equally eager to create a strong central government. That pair of impulses, one private and one public, lie entwined together at the center of a fantastic new biography by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edward J. Larson, The Return of George Washington: 1783-1789.

The book traces Washington’s life from the end of the Revolution through his emergence from retirement to head the Constitutional Convention, his behind-the-scenes role in the ratification process, and his election as the first president.

There would likely be no Constitution as we know it if it were not for Washington. His maneuvering outside the public eye, his acquiescence to presiding over the convention, and his Cincinnatus-esque reputation all played a large part in the shaping of a new centralized government with a strong executive. The widely accepted notion that he would be the first president in the new government, argues Larson, increased support for the new government in the states, but also made it so that those who questioned how close the new role veered toward monarchy were seen as insulting the hero who had already once relinquished power.

While Washington influenced countless thousands, what brought him to see the need for such a powerful new government that pushed aside the states, including his beloved Virginia?

The answer lies in Washington’s realization through his own attempts to increase his wealth, that without a strong government, it was extremely unlikely the states and their inhabitants would flourish economically.

At the end of the war, there were two figures in American life unparalleled in terms of stature in the former colonies—Washington and Ben Franklin. While Franklin became bogged down in Pennsylvania while serving as its first president, Washington famously turned in his commission and retired to his farm.

However, nine years of war had left Washington’s finances and lands in a state of disarray. As he set about to not only to repair them but to increase the value of his investments, he ran into serious problems.

As he set about trying to revitalize his tidewater plantation and neighboring farms at Mount Vernon, Washington proved a stern taskmaster.

It would appear that when it came to the bottom line, Washington was not overflowing with sympathy.
“He did not trust his slaves and regularly complained that they shirked work, stole supplies, and broke tools,” writes Larson. “He felt a need to watch them daily to keep them on task.” He notes that Washington even went so far as to record how much work they did in his presence, and then extended that amount as what would be required for the entire day—from sunup to sundown, six days a week. He also watched his overseers intently.

But the real money, Washington believed, lay in the western land investments he had made at the outset of the war.

“His long journey back from retirement to the Constitutional Convention and the presidency,” writes Larson, “began with his trip to the frontier in 1784.”

Just nine months into his retirement, Washington set out to check in on land investments he had made in Virginia and what is now West Virginia.

The journey began well, as Washington managed to collect some rent from war-ravaged tenants in Cumberland. However, that would be the high point of his trip. Farther west along Braddock’s Road, he had a 1,644 acre tract managed since 1772 by a man named Gilbert Simpson. Washington, “rarely charitable when it came to business,” according to Larson, thought Simpson was defrauding him as Simpson had produced not a single profit from the lands. Washington found a mill he paid for to be virtually nonexistent, farms to be producing little of value, and the lands full of “people of a lower order.” Squeezing what rent he could from the tenants, Washington moved on.

The next two legs of his journey would be the game-changers. On a 2,813-acre tract roughly 30 miles west, Washington found a Calvinist sect called the Seceders squatting on his land. These settlers argued that they did not need to submit themselves to Washington’s claim as Christ had called them to this land. Washington, claims Larson, “was in no mood to extend Christian charity to a band of self-righteous freeloaders.” The Seceders then offered Washington a small sum to prevent a fight, but Washington saw himself more as a landlord/developer than land speculator, and refused. Washington, who is said to have been fined for swearing while in negotiations, ended up taking them to court and winning, even though his claim was weak.

Before doing so, however, Washington began a great American tradition of real estate braggadocio. Waving a silk cloth, he declared, “Gentlemen, I will have this land just as surely as I now have this handkerchief.”

When Washington was finished with the squatters, he headed farther west to the 30,000 acres he owned near the junction of the Ohio and Great Kanawha rivers. However, Native Americans unhappy about the white settlers pouring into the Ohio Valley were reportedly waiting to attack him. Indeed, Washington’s local agent, William Crawford, had been captured, scalped, and roasted alive just two years earlier. Washington now found himself unable to even see the lands he was banking on to leave a lasting fortune.

“The trip,” reckons Larson, “disoriented and disconcerted Washington. It was as if the frontier and its people were conspiring” to prevent him from rescuing his personal wealth. Frauds, squatters, and dangerous natives stood in his way.

“Removing them,” Larson writes, “would require government action.”

But Washington was no ordinary citizen investor. Troubles that plagued him, he seems to have concluded, plagued the nation as a whole. So his issues, he believed, signified a national crisis in which the frontier could swing toward Spain, the natives, or lawless frontiersmen. “For the good of the country and his personal financial well-being,” says Larson, Washington began to argue that a new national power was needed to secure the frontier.

Around the same time, he turned to another of his long-term investment dreams—canals.

Washington had long dreamed of a canal running along the Potomac to connect the West with the East. Not only would it allow him better access to his land, but coincidentally would place Mount Vernon right at the heart of such a lucrative route. Nudged by Thomas Jefferson to get involved, Washington agreed to lead a project to develop such a canal. His campaign to raise funds and public support for the canal thrust him back into public life. He called the canal “the cement of interest, to bind all parts of the Union together by indissoluble bonds—especially that part of it, which lies immediately west.”

There were just a few obstacles.

First, Washington had no desire to go to debtors prison if the project went belly-up (there was no debt forgiveness), so he needed to negotiate a limited-liability corporation with both Virginia and Maryland. This, argues Larson, would not be an issue if interstate commerce was in the hands of a single national government that had an interest in public improvement projects.

The second obstacle was yet another state—Pennsylvania. Wealthy merchants and landowners in Philadelphia wanted to build along the Schuykill and Susquehanna rivers to put trade through Philadelphia. Washington would eventually need Pennsylvania for the western reaches of the Potomac, and have to compete with those local interests.

The final challenge was labor. While this obstacle had little to do with national problems, it represents Washington’s hard pursuit of commerce over other concerns. During construction, many men, indentured servants in the beginning, were blown apart during the blasting and digging. As a result many ran away instead. To replace them, Washington seemingly had no compunction about turning to a labor force that would be less troublesome—slaves, a population he had used previously when he needed teeth for implants in his own mouth. The dangerous work did not stop him, of course, from criticizing, writing in his diary, “To me it seemed as if we had advanced but little, owing to the fewness, and sickliness of the hands.”

It would appear that when it came to the bottom line, Washington was not overflowing with sympathy.

The canal project required a push by Washington to get Virginia and Maryland to agree on tariffs, taxes, currency, and regulation. This effort would end up kicking off the race to the Constitutional Convention.

“Without one government possessing authority over interstate commerce,” notes Larson, Washington and allies became convinced that “local interests could raise” an endless number of challenges.

So, Washington’s nationalist ally James Madison capitalized on the success of a commission created to resolve issues between Maryland and Virginia to launch a convention for other states with similar commercial disputes. That convention, though poorly attended, was the precursor to the Constitutional Convention.

The book then races through the Constitutional Convention and the ratification. In the convention, Washington scrupulously followed the gag rule, so his thoughts on the proceedings are somewhat unknown. During the ratification, he largely removed himself from the public debate, opting instead to exhort allies and fund publications that advanced their arguments. He did not want to appear unseemly as he would be the man with the most to gain if the new government was approved.

However, what is clear in Larson’s telling is that Washington hangs over it all. The convention only gains legitimacy when Washington agrees to not only attend it, but preside over it. During the convention, debates about the executive were shaped by the belief that Washington would be its first office-holder. The ratification process on the proposed government became in large part a referendum on Washington.

There were other influences besides his own pocket that pushed Washington. He was certainly among the elite horrified at the perceived unruliness of the mob in the aftermath of Shays’ Rebellion.

Larson, however, draws a link between what motivated Washington to go to war against England and what motivated him to push for a new central government. While writing about the Potomac River project, Larson argues that for Washington, it “was a viable and worthwhile enterprise precisely because it benefited private investors and the country as a whole.” That belief in the intersection of personal and common wealth “was how he had seen the American Revolution and that would be how he would see the Constitution.”

Larson has produced a nuanced vision of his subject in The Return of George Washington. He does not shy away from issues that today would be seen as flaws (especially Washington’s attitude toward slavery), and there is none of the excessive genuflecting rampant today when talking about a Founding Father. The Washington who emerges in these pages is always human, flaws and all, and yet he still manages to be a figure worth revering for his unwavering sense of duty.

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Abby Haglage
STONED CAPITAL11.05.14
D.C. Legalizes ‘Grow and Give’ Policy
If Washington D.C.’s newly legalized ‘grow and give’ pot law works, it could be the turning point for marijuana legislation in the U.S.
Four places in America just made pot legal, but D.C. is the one to watch.

With narrow majorities in most, two states, one district, and one city passed legislation that makes marijuana legal. Washington, D.C. approved Initiative 71 by a margin of 69-31, Oregon passed its Measure 91 by 55 percent, Alaska’s Ballot Measure 2 won 52-48, and a local initiative in South Portland, Maine won 52-48.

But while Oregon and Alaska overcame what some considered unbeatable odds, their programs closely resemble the legalizations currently underway in Colorado and Washington. D.C.’s initiative, on the other hand, is uncharted territory. Allowing residents to grow, smoke, and gift weed, it legalizes participating in the weed community, but not profiting from it. If the “grow and give” policy works, D.C. may usher in an entirely new—and arguably safer—way to legalize marijuana in America.

The initiative, classified by experts as “soft legalization,” removes all penalties for possession and home cultivation of limited amounts of marijuana by adults 21 years of age and older. In other words, residents can get stoned as long as it’s their marijuana, or free.

Allowing residents to grow, smoke, and gift weed, it legalizes participating in the weed community, but not profiting from it.
In many ways, the experiment makes more sense than previous marijuana legislation.

“D.C. is the one I’m most excited about,” Mark Kleiman, one of the leading drug policy experts in America told me days before the election. “This could work.” In an article for Slate last week, Kleiman elaborated on the concept, calling the idea to keep ganja out of the marketplace a potentially “big improvement” on the current prohibition.

“It wouldn’t generate any tax revenue, or offer consumers the same convenience or product variety as a commercial system, and of course policing the boundary between “giving” and “selling” would be virtually impossible,” he says. But while the drug may not morph into a money making machine, it may work to maintain the safety of residents. “Eliminating organized marketing would likely lead to a much smaller increase—if any—in cannabis abuse than we would expect if we sell pot the way we now sell beer,” writes Kleiman.

Legalization in the first two states in America to do so has been highly criticized. In the Centennial State, anti-legalization proponents called the effort chaotic and damaging, pointing to studies that show increases in fatal traffic accidents and a 7 percent increase in crime since legalization. While it may be too soon to claim these as fact, or know for sure exactly what impact legalization had on public safety in CO, its new identity as the golden child of the marketplace is evident.

In the weeks following Colorado’s legalization, the drug used by college students and cancer patients alike become a full-blown—and hugely valuable—commodity. Weed pioneers with little knowledge of the drug and huge desires for profit flocked to the state for a “green rush” motivated by estimates of billion dollar profits.

From cheesy, expensive “pot tours” consisting mostly of hot-boxing buses on empty interstates to college grads turned “marijuana marketing professionals,” everyone rushed to cash in on the bud. Candy-flavored edibles and silly TV ads served to mask its identity as a drug that—while more benign than others—is not without risks. Manifestations of this normalization cropped up across both states, including a poll out of Denver this August showing that fewer kids in the capital view marijuana as “risky.”

Oregon and Alaska, like Colorado and Washington, will try their hand at regulating weed like booze. A lot has been learned from mistakes made by the first two states, so it’s arguable that their movements may be less chaotic and dangerous. But as we’ve seen with the alcohol industry, the private profit-driven market of a drug can be dangerous. While the end of prohibition brought an end to the alcohol black market in America, the ubiquity of it brought its own problems. “Alcohol now accounts for more substance use disorder, more violence (especially sexual assault and domestic violence), more health damage, more injury, more death, and even more arrests than all illicit drugs combined,” writes Kleiman.

Although many studies on marijuana have shown it to be less dangerous and addictive than alcohol, a compelling 20-year study released this October shows that this new version of marijuana—with anywhere from 10-30 times the THC level—may be more dangerous than we thought. Among the study’s most jarring statistics were that one in six teenagers who smoke the drug become dependent—which doubles their risk of developing psychotic disorders.

Whether or not the new pieces of legislation will pass, pro-legalization groups view the victory as an important reflection of the changing landscape of marijuana in America.

Tom Angell is the founder of the Marijuana Majority—a website that went viral last October by culling public figures who support legalization. From Lil’ John tweets (““I #CareLikeCrazy bout legalization cause an American is arrested every 42 secs on marijuana charges”) to an official statement from President Obama (“Middle-class kids don't get locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do.”), the website aims to spotlight the prevalence of support for marijuana that has emerged in the U.S.

Tuesday night, Angell’s work paid off. "With Oregon and D.C. coming on board, it's clear that Colorado and Washington voting to legalize in 2012 was no anomaly,” he says. “The trend is clear: Marijuana prohibition is coming to an end.” Angell believes the three wins bode well for pot’s role in the next major election, too. “As 2016 approaches, we can expect to see many more ambitious national politicians finally trying to win support from the cannabis constituency instead of ignoring and criminalizing us."

As the four regions begin using marijuana legally, Americans should pay close attention to what unfolds in D.C. With Congressmen now legally able to get stoned, someone’s got to.

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