High Times Interview

The HIGH TIMES Interview With Oliver Stone 

The Academy Award- winning director discusses pot the global drug war and his new movie Savages. Along the way, he samples some of California’s finest herb.

High Times: In his novel The Wild Boys, William S. Burroughs writes, “Under pretext of drug control suppressive police states have been set up throughout the Western world…. The police states maintain a democratic façade from behind which they denounce as criminals, perverts and drug addicts anyone who opposes the control machine.” He wrote this in 1969, as Nixon was just conceiving the early stages of the drug war. Has the drug war become, as Burroughs predicted, an excuse to set up police states both at home and in other countries?

Oliver Stone: It’s a strange usage of the word “war,” because we were coming out of the Vietnam War and all of a sudden we were in the “war on drugs.” Johnson had used the phrase “war on poverty,” so I believe that was where the phrase came from. Seven or eight days after I got back from Vietnam in December ’68 I was busted at the Mexican border carrying some Vietnamese pot back to the U.S. I was facing Federal smuggling charges, a 5-20 year sentence. I was put in jail in San Diego County which had a capacity of 2,000, maybe 2,500, but had 5,000 kids inside—all young, most of them for drugs—and that was when I heard this term used. “There’s this new thing coming…” you know. “The war on drugs.” Because Nixon was coming into office in January ’69 and, sure enough, the guy kept pushing the moral majority and law and order. At that point, the country seemed to be on the cusp of liberalism, with the revolt against the Vietnam War, and the Nixon regime played into it, and was duplicitous in that regard, and then really cracked down. People started to go to jail heavy and the borders were starting to be looked at heavily, and pot became a dangerous “drug.” Then when Nixon got destabilized and was removed from office after Watergate, it felt again like there would be a new liberalism, but that was stunted by the failure of the Carter presidency.

You know, there was a great excitement at that time. I was at the Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York in 1976. It was the 200th anniversary of America and with Carter there was such a sense of liberation. I remember that feeling of anticipation, but it never happened. The country never went that way, it went back to its Cold War roots with Reagan, who cracked down on drugs, and everything was given to greed, privatization and to making money and to saying “no to drugs.” It became a full-scale war and has grown into what is today, essentially, close to a police state. 
But the concept of meddling in other countries and cutting down on their illicit drugs became the next issue, after they realized they couldn’t contain our consumerism here. They went after the South American countries for cocaine and grass.

On newsstands June 12, 2012.