Inside the War on Drugs: Interview With Rolling Stone Contributing Editor Ben Wallace-Wells

Rolling Stone contributing editor Ben Wallace-Wells lives in Philadelphia, where he writes about politics and culture for the magazine. Slate.com just called his feature on how America lost the war on drugs the "smartest drug story of the year." Read on for a glimpse on how it was put together, and read the entire feature here or in the December 13, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone.

Where did the idea for this piece come from?

There were a couple of prompts. There used to be a huge amount of attention paid to what was going on in drug traffic and how it was evolving, and a minute point-by-point journalism that tried to account for all these shifts. And since the middle of the 1990s that has kind of dropped off the map. So part of the importance for this was simply that issues had been reported to Rolling Stone's readers and there hasn't been an update accounting for what had happened since. The other was this creeping suspicion that things had frustratingly not gotten better. There are 335,000 men and women in prison for drug crimes, and that level of incarceration hasn't made any perceptible dent in the amount of drugs being sold on the street. The mainstream media has let this issue fall off the table. It's one that still has a lot of great stories in it and it's ruining a lot of lives.

How long did it take to put this piece together?

I spent about 3 or 4 months reporting it. During that time it was all that I was doing. I probably interviewed close to a hundred people. What you're trying to do schematically is construct a history. It's a hugely complex topic and you want to account for how drug trafficking has evolved; for how policy has evolved in Washington; and for the very earnest but sometimes misguided attempts to keep kids from trying drugs. You also want to account for the critically important, real innovations that are taking place: by cops or by treatment professionals who are trying to figure out in a very pragmatic way not how do we stop drug use in this country, but how do we separate out the really damaging drug use, and treat the kind that creates violence.