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

Did you channel the past season of Entourage for your portrayal of Pablo Escobar? There are images from the piece that mirror the show, and vice versa.

I was definitely aware that this was a sexy character. He was a man that was at once enormously problematic and enormously honest about what he did. I think the reason to start with Escobar was that he had these guys who have been doing this stuff for 25 years. What we wanted to do with that beginning was go back to a moment in time when these huge Colombian cartel leaders are sitting up in their weird mountain retreats and our job is to get them. To illustrate the ways in which drug traffic and drug policy have changed, you have to start at the moment when it seemed like this was winnable and everything was possible — if there was just this one bad guy who had figured it all out?if you could just put your hands around his neck — which we did — then you could end the whole thing.

Was it hard to get people to talk to you?

As crass and politically motivated as some law-and-order drug warriors seem from the outside, these are people who really believe in what they are doing. People were really eager to make their case. Having spent half a trillion dollars on this stuff, what have we actually gotten? I think that opens people up.

Also, these guys have been fighting this for decades; these are their war stories. So it's not like you have to twist arms to get people to tell you cool stories about the parties the Cali cartel threw in Guadalajara. People sit around and when they get drunk, they tell anyone in sight about it. There are all these amazing stories just waiting to be told.

How has your thinking about the drug war changed since you started the piece?

When I got into it I was conscious that it was hard to write about this subject and not sound either like a ridiculous DEA flack who freaks out about candy flavored meth or something, or on the other hand some crazy, lusty loon screaming at the gates that the whole system's fucked.

What was fascinating to me was the degree to which how smart and sensibly reported middle ground exists on this stuff. Even if you're completely skeptical about any kind of decriminalization of anything harder than marijuana, there are still many ways in which drug policy could be made better.

Are you optimistic that we're moving in the right direction?

I'm optimistic. What we've seen in the last couple of years is a kind of growing sensitivity to the fact that what we've tried hasn't worked. That's something you see from Republicans and Democrats. I don't know exactly how that'll play out, but any political feelings that lead to the broadening of the possible ways in which we could deal with drugs in this country are productive.