Just Say Yes?

“We’re here! We’re high! Get used to it!” This was what Garth Mullins’s girlfriend was yelling at a protest in the late 1990s in Vancouver, British Columbia. Mullins—who was, at the time, trying to “keep a low profile,” which “isn’t easy for a six-foot-four albino with a hollering girlfriend”—describes this moment as a turning point. He went from someone who saw “heroin as a medication, not an entire identity,” to someone who wanted to lead a movement for the decriminalization of drugs. The chant, Mullins writes in his book, Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs, “had broken the tension, and people laughed. One by one, then en masse, we took the street. It felt amazing—a legion of drug users—not embarrassed or ashamed, but proudly marching and chanting slogans.”

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