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Romney and Obama campaigns rally local volunteers

Americans go to the polls to pick a president in three months, and the battle is on in Virginia. New campaign offices for both candidates are springing up on a weekly basis across the state, and in the Charlottesville-Albemarle area, three local campaign offices are currently running at full steam. Obama organizers have a Downtown Mall storefront and another outpost on Greenbrier Drive off 29N, and a Romney Victory Office has set up shop in Albemarle Square.

Neither camp is interested in talking about how many paid staffers and volunteers they have on the ground in the area, because of worries that sharing such information would amount to tipping their hands.

But the volunteer count from the Obama campaign’s July 28 “Day of Action” event in Charlottesville and Albemarle—a day of intense canvassing that was duplicated in towns and cities all over the state—was about 150, according to a campaign official.

Meanwhile, Albemarle County Republicans Committee Chair Cindi Burket said the Albemarle Romney campaign has about 200 volunteers, with 30 to 40 regulars. Victory Virginia Chairman Pete Snyder also said Republicans have the greater share of enthusiastic and willing workers. That wasn’t the case last time around, said Snyder. If you look at the set of Virginians who didn’t vote in 2008, “they’re much more likely to be Republican in leaning. It’s a totally different story in 2012.” Now, Republicans say they’re scoring 20 points higher when they ask Virginians how enthusiastic they are about their candidates, and the campaigns are looking to put that energy to work, Snyder said.

“We’re looking to bring in some of our folks that have sat on the sidelines,” he said. “Base voters, independent voters, and undecided voters.”

They’re canvassing and running a phone bank, soliciting donations, and handing out signs and bumper stickers. “Nothing extraordinarily unusual, but we’re doing it in earnest,” said Burket.
And while the Romney headquarters’ location in the county underscores the fact that consistently left-leaning Charlottesville is unlikely to go red, Snyder said the campaign intends to up its visibility in the city in the coming months. “We’re going to see a much greater presence in Charlottesville, with Romney signs, bumper stickers, and surrogate speakers. Students are coming out as well,” he said.

For its part, the Obama camp isn’t willing to give ground. It opened six new Virginia offices over the weekend, including one in Fluvanna, bringing the total number of campaign hubs in the Commonwealth to 31—two more than Romney organizers could claim as of last week. Jim Nix, a Charlottesville Obama volunteer coordinator, said Democrats had the advantage of not having to fight a primary battle this year, so the organizing started much earlier than in 2008.

“We’ve had more time to hit the ground running,” he said.

Nix and other Obama volunteers in Charlottesville explained that their grassroots effort to rally support for the president involves carefully drawn-up geographical territories called “neighborhood teams,” which work autonomously to decide the best way to connect with potential voters, whether it’s through phone banking, canvassing, or other methods.
It’s largely a field campaign, Nix said, with a major focus on face-to-face meetings with potential voters.

The personal appeal is more effective than a one-size-fits-all approach, said volunteer Camilla Griffiths. “When we talk to them, it’s something they feel isn’t coming from a script or from a Barack Obama website, but something about why you support the president and not why Barack Obama’s campaign says you should support the president,” she said.
As busy as the phone banks may be in central Virginia—and as much as both camps want to tip the swing population of Albemarle their way—the area probably won’t decide Virginia, said Geoffrey Skelley, an analyst for the University of Virginia Center for Politics. Charlottesville represents a solid source of Democratic support, but for both candidates, more densely packed northern areas in the state are the real prize, he said.

“In the urban crescent, there are big populations, so that’s where they’ll have a lot of focus,” said Skelley.

There’s no denying Virginia as a whole is considered a key battleground state in the presidential race—perhaps even more so than in 2008, when Obama succeeded in turning the formerly reliably Republican Commonwealth blue.

Part of the reason for the intense focus on the Old Dominion, said Skelley, is that Virginia was closest to the national popular vote average in 2008. Obama won by 52.9 percent nationally, and took 52.6 percent of the vote statewide.

“Virginia’s 13 electoral votes are really key in Obama and Romney’s campaign,” said Skelly. “Put it this way: it’s hard to see Obama winning without Virginia, but it’s also hard to see Romney winning without Virginia.”

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Chloramine complaints drive decision to go with costlier water filtration

A months-long debate over whether to add a new disinfectant to the area’s water supply or implement a more expensive purification system came to a head last week as elected and appointed officials from four local regulatory bodies heard a final wave of impassioned arguments against the use of chloramines. By the end of the lengthy public hearing at the County Office Building Wednesday, policy makers acquiesced to public outcry, voting unanimously to take the objectionable chemicals off the table and instead explore the more costly alternative of a carbon filter. Chloramine opponents hailed it as a victory. But several on the dais made it clear it was outrage, not evidence, that guided their decisions—and some remain concerned about rising water costs.

The Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority announced earlier this year that it planned to start using chloramines, a compound of chlorine and ammonia, as a secondary disinfectant—the chemical added to water to keep it clean as it travels between the treatment plant and the tap. The EPA is rolling out stricter regulations that scale back the amount of carcinogenic chlorine byproducts allowed in drinking water, and the RWSA said the cheapest way to stay in compliance was to swap out chlorine for the longer-lasting chloramine in the last stage of water treatment and delivery. Switching to the new chemical would cost an estimated $5 million, according to the RWSA.

But local residents began raising concerns, voicing their fears at a series of meetings: The chemicals could cause skin rashes and other acute reactions, can contribute to lead leaching from pipes, and can create harmful byproducts. These include nitrosamines, the same nasty carcinogens that doctors warn are found in much higher levels in cured meats, and hydrazine, used in pharmaceutical manufacturing and as rocket fuel.

A core group of city and county residents urged the RWSA and the elected officials who appoint its members to consider an alternative—a granular activated carbon system that would act like a giant Brita filter—and responded with rebuttals when the authority said such a project would cost more than $18 million.

Last week, with all the decision-makers in one place, the anti-chloramines crowd came out in force. More than 200 people filled Lane Auditorium in the County Office Building, where the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority, the Albemarle County Service Authority, the Charlottesville City Council, and the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors gathered to listen. For about three hours, dozens of people, many toting signs, offered the same concerns about the chemicals.

City resident Colette Hall said there are still too many questions. “The EPA says chloramines are safe,” she said. “But what will they say in 10 years?”

Sarah Vose has heard that argument—and many more. Vose is Vermont’s state toxicologist, and she’s had a front-row seat as the debate over chloramines has unfolded there. When one Vermont water district switched to chloramines in 2006, complaints started rolling in, and vocal anti-chloramine groups started bringing up the same concerns about acute reactions and long-term byproducts heard here.

Things got so heated that Vermont’s health department invited the Centers for Disease Control to conduct a public health study in the Champlain area. But results were inconclusive, and a survey of 172 area physicians turned up only two who said they believed patients had been affected by the water.

Vose explained that a little understanding of water chemistry goes a long way in dispelling many chloramine concerns. The chemical’s cancer-causing byproducts only form under certain unlikely conditions, she said—specifically, when the pH is about 10 times more alkaline than baking soda. Lead leaching and the formation of potentially dangerous chloramine compounds also only occur at pH levels outside the normal drinking water range, she said.

“There are a lot of things in our environment that we should be concerned about,” she said. But when people go at the issue from the gut, it’s not easy to argue back with science alone. “It’s hard to communicate that when people have already convinced themselves that it’s toxic,” Vose said.

After receiving thousands of complaints and listening to residents for hours last week, some officials said they felt the need to protect against perceived dangers, if not real ones.

Charlottesville Vice Mayor Kristin Szakos said she wasn’t convinced the chemicals were harmful, but said she saw value in paying more for the public’s peace of mind. “It didn’t pose a clear and imminent danger to use chloramines,” she said. “But being known for something different—that is important in this community.”

The more palatable alternative put forward by RWSA director Tom Frederick was a hybrid system in which a limited carbon filter would be used to reduce the need for chlorine in the water, bringing down the total byproducts but avoiding the need for more disinfectant. The vote to explore the alternative with a three-week, $9,500 study was unanimous, but the jury’s still out on how much extra cost officials will be willing to swallow. Frederick said the final tab would likely fall somewhere between the $5 million chloramines would cost and the $18.3 million projected for a full-scale carbon system. The most expensive option would raise the average water bill in the area from $1.20 to $4.83 per month, he said.

Dave Thomas of the Albemarle County Service Authority said that if the estimate comes in on the high end, he’s still going to question the sense of going forward without strong evidence that chloramines cause problems.

“Any time you do a public works project, you’re balancing the best possible outcome with the price the community can bear,” said Thomas, and there are many local families for whom any extra cost is a burden. He offered an analogy: Local officials had the option to go for a cheap sedan or a luxury car. “We went with the Audi A6,” he said. “Look around the parking lot at Western Albemarle, and you don’t see that many Audi A6s.”

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The other border: Immigration policy divides Latino community

Richard and Ena Franco Aguilar at their home in Southwood Mobile Home Park. John Robinson photo.

I arrived at Southwood Mobile Home Park through the back entrance, an unmarked driveway off Old Lynchburg Road just past the Albemarle County Police Department offices. It’s so easy to miss that, even though I’d been there before, I drove past the turn and had to double back to catch the narrow access road, which leads over a rise into a different world. A mature oak grove, dotted with metal-sided trailer homes stretched as far as I could see in every direction.

I hung a right down a side road, past trailers adorned with Mexican flags, home to miniature vegetable gardens and pickup trucks with soccer team stickers in the windows, and stopped at a nondescript rust brown trailer parked next to a derelict food truck.

A young man wearing a dress shirt, slacks, and a tie stepped out on the porch to meet me. Richard Aguilar is a 21-year-old straight-A student going into his senior year at James Madison University. Southwood is where he grew up and where nearly 1,000 Latinos, mostly undocumented, live in Albemarle County.

Richard and I had spoken in person once before, and we would spend the next hour and a half walking around the mobile home park, talking about what it was like to grow up there, and talking about why the place is a living, breathing reason for immigration reform.

“I saw a lot of things. I saw the gangs. I saw the drugs. I saw the prostitution,” Aguilar said. “I don’t blame Southwood for being like that, I actually blame society for letting a neighborhood like that exist.”

Aguilar is a U.S. citizen born in South Central Los Angeles to undocumented immigrants from El Salvador. There are around 11.5 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. today and last year a record 396,906 people were deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The U.S. government spent about $17 billion on immigration enforcement and created a 3 percent dent in the problem. Meanwhile families all over America in places like Southwood, live in total fear.

Doug Ford is the director of the Immigration Law Clinic at UVA School of Law and handles cases for the immigration advocacy program at the Legal Aid Justice Center in Charlottesville. Here’s how he sums up the legal situation facing undocumented immigrants.

“Basically you are deportable every single day you are here,” Ford said. “If an officer doesn’t like you and puts you into the system, unless you have some amazing claim to hold you here, there’s almost no way to get you out. Because you are deportable, it’s just at the discretion of ICE how to use its resources.”

The country is at a decision point. Unemployment is high, politics polarized, and immigration is a touchstone. So often, the conversation around immigration centers on abstract talking points. Amnesty versus the rule of law. Black and white. But the issue already exists in shades of gray, impacting almost every aspect of life in the Latino community.

“I grew up in that lifestyle knowing that my parents weren’t citizens, that they couldn’t live in the United States, that they faced the threat of deportation any day,” Aguilar said. “If my mom got pulled over for running a stop sign, or if my dad did something, I could never see them again, despite the fact that I was born in the United States. That’s a horrible feeling.”

Here are some more numbers to consider. The Pew Hispanic Center (PHC) estimates that there are 200,000 undocumented immigrants in Virginia, 12th most in the nation. According to the U.S. Census, Charlottesville and Albemarle County are home to about 7,000 Latinos, somewhere between 5 and 5.5 percent of the total population. People familiar with the community estimate that between 40 and 60 percent of the adult Latino population is undocumented. Albemarle County schools are already 8 percent Latino, with some schools (Cale, Agnor-Hurt) close to 20 percent. Another number: Pew Hispanic Center estimates there are 4.5 million U.S.-born children with at least one unauthorized parent.

A month ago the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the legality of one major piece of Arizona SB 1070, the most severe immigration law ever proposed, paving the way for state and local law enforcement officers to determine people’s immigration status during stops and to detain them if they are unable to prove that they are legal residents. Prince William County enacted similar legislation in 2007 and proposed its adoption statewide late last year.

Ford: “In some ways, Prince William paved the way to Arizona.”

Corey Stewart, the county supervisor and lieutenant governor candidate who pushed for its adoption, claims that Prince William County law enforcement officers have identified 4,700 “illegal immigrants” since the measure went into effect. If the GOP backs the legislation’s adoption statewide, it would likely have the votes to push the measure through the General Assembly. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down farther reaching components of Arizona SB 1070, including a provision that would have made it illegal for unauthorized immigrants to seek work and for citizens to house them. Polling data shows that nearly 60 percent of Americans approve of the law, but 75 percent of Latinos oppose it.

Just before the court decision was handed down, President Barack Obama announced that his administration would no longer deport undocumented immigrants under the age of 30 who came to the U.S. before they turned 16, have lived here for at least five years, and possess clean criminal records. The policy will make it possible for between 800,000 and 1.5 million people to obtain driver’s licenses and work legally when it comes into effect, which may happen as early as next month.

In reaching out to the Dreamers—the name for the under-30 group—through his enforcement policy, Obama courted the Latino vote and vocalized a liberal agenda.

“They are Americans in their heart, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper,” Obama said, as he introduced the policy from the Rose Garden.

The undocumented immigrants in Charlottesville are nearly invisible, but they are here. They work cleaning our houses, offices, and country clubs, as roofers and landscapers, in restaurant kitchens. They can’t speak for themselves, because, on the record, they don’t exist. But other members of the Latino community are ready to speak for them, and to explain how immigration reform can bring them out of the shadows.

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Fluvanna women’s prison sued over medical care

Charlottesville’s Legal Aid Justice Center is suing the state Department of Corrections on behalf of inmates at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, claiming poor medical care at the prison has exposed them to cruel and unusual punishment and even resulted in deaths from untreated conditions.

The LAJC filed the class-action suit against officials at DOC and the department’s health care contractor, Armor Correctional Health Services, Inc., on behalf of five named plaintiffs and the rest of FCCW’s prisoners in U.S. District Court July 24. The plaintiffs claim Armor and DOC regularly ignored requests for treatment and dismissed symptoms, resulting in failure to provide constitutionally adequate care.

“The women suffer extreme pain for prolonged periods of time as a result of the refusal to provide for these women who have no other options for securing life-saving medical care,” said Abigail Turner, an attorney with the LAJC. “Almost all the pain and suffering could have been prevented.”

DOC spokesman Larry Traylor said it’s department policy not to comment on pending litigation. But he said many of the inmates enter prison with medical conditions they have neglected.

“Once health care is made available to them, they often want immediate cures, despite their years of self-neglect,” he said. “If a doctor feels a procedure is necessary to preserve life, reduce deterioration of health, and to follow a community standard of care, we will provide it.”

But charges in the lawsuit suggest otherwise.

“It takes too long to diagnose their diseases,” said Brenda Castañeda, an attorney with LAJC.“ Whether it’s cancer or something else, it just gets worse the longer they wait.”

The suit says that inmates wanting medical attention submit written requests for screening by a prison nurse, who determines whether or not to assign her an appointment with a physician. The lawsuit suggests that the nurses employed by Armor at FCCW aren’t qualified to fully determine prisoners’ medical needs, to prescribe treatment, or determine the need for an appointment. Prisoners can also submit emergency requests for care, which the lawsuit says are “virtually never honored.”

Inmates claim their best chance for serious medical attention is being referred to an outside specialist, but say FCCW medical staff often ignore doctors’ instructions for treatment when inmates are returned to prison. Cases cited by the suit range from denial of special diets and a lack of treatment for minor infections to severe complications that the women say were dismissed until it was too late.

According to the allegations, a prisoner named Jeanna Wright complained for months of severe abdominal pain and rectal bleeding. “For at least one year,” the suit says, the staff assured Wright that she was “fine.”

Wright eventually saw a UVA doctor, who determined she had stage IV abdominal cancer. She died weeks later.

The lawsuit says that because FCCW has been identified by DOC as a facility set up to provide the most “heightened level of care” for inmates the situation is even more “disturbing.”
Castañeda said similar problems are widespread in Virginia. “Armor provides health care for seven other prisons (in Virginia), and there are other companies like Armor that provide health care on a for-profit basis.”

Turner said the problem stems from a system that puts “profits over people.”

“The terms of the DOC contract with Armor create financial incentives based on cheaper, reduced levels of care,” she said.

“If they don’t spend the money, they can keep it,” Castañeda said. “It’s a twisted incentive.”
Armor deferred to DOC for comment.

Castañeda said the defendants could have up to 60 days to respond to the suit. She hopes to settle the case out of court. “We’re not asking for any money,” she said. “We’re just asking for the women’s access to health care to be improved. We’ll have to wait and see what their response is.”

Tina Ortiz, a former prisoner at FCCW who was released in February and is not part of the lawsuit, said she experienced the effects of inadequate care firsthand. She couldn’t eat the food, she said, which caused malnutrition and health problems.

“Everything is rotten or frozen there,” said Ortiz. “You couldn’t even stand the smell.” At one point, she said, her liver stopped functioning and she became so weak that she couldn’t walk.

“Every time I would tell [the medical staff] something, they would come back with a rebuttal,” she said. “‘There’s nothing wrong with you’ or ‘There’s something wrong but we need to do further tests.’ And then they never did the tests.”

She had a simple explanation for why the system is so bad:

“They don’t care,” she said. “They just don’t care.”—Ryan McCrimmon

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Environmentalists warn federal bills could threaten public land

In the latest chapter of the debate between resource extraction and conservation, Virginia environmentalists are taking aim at a crop of legislation moving through the U.S. House of Representatives that they say would damage protected wilderness areas in Virginia and around the country.

Advocacy group Environment Virginia held a press event Wednesday at Darden Towe Park to release “Trashing our Treasures: Congressional Assault on the Best of America,” a report taking aim at several Republican-sponsored bills. The event featured members of state environmental groups and local government, who detailed the environmental, social, and economic benefits of preserving wilderness areas and spoke out against the legislation.

Bills cited in the report include the Disposal of Excess Federal Lands Act (HR 1126), which forces the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to sell “excess public lands” to the highest bidder, and the American Lands Act (HR 2588), which requires the BLM and Forest Service to auction off 8 percent of their federal land annually until 2016. This year alone, the bill would result in the sale of nearly 36 million acres of forest and public land, according to the report—“simply landgrabs,” according to Jim Murray of the Virginia Wilderness Committee.

Two bills that would open up protected areas to road building, construction, and logging came under the most fire. Opponents of the Wilderness and Roadless Area Release Act (HR 1581) and the Recreational Fishing and Hunting Heritage and Opportunities Act (HR 2834) said these bills counteract measures in the celebrated Wilderness Act of 1964, which set aside 9million acres to remain untouched by development.

Virginia lands are among those in danger, conservationists warn.

“The wilderness areas in Shenandoah National Park are definitely under threat, as are the two national forests in Virginia,” said David Hannah, conservation director at Wild Virginia. “I feel we should be taking whatever steps necessary to permanently protect these lands.”

“Our wilderness areas are our greatest natural resource,” said Ari Daniels of Charlottesville’s Outdoor Adventure Social Club. “We can pull various fuel sources or short-term money sources, but those are all extremely short-lived. Unfortunately, the wake of the damage that we do there is much harder to undo.”

Republican Congressman Morgan Griffith of Virginia’s Ninth District is a cosponsor of HR 1581. Maggie Seidel, a spokesperson for Griffith, said the bill would only release lands that the BLM deemed as “not suitable for wilderness designation.” The BLM oversees and evaluates 12 million acres of land, called Wilderness Study Areas, and decides whether or not the land should be made off-limits for development. Seidel said 6.7 million acres that didn’t make the cut would be returned to “local land managers, communities, and stakeholders in and around the areas,” who would determine how to use the land.

“Congressman Griffith has been receiving complaints from constituents about being denied access to certain national forest lands,” Seidel said. “In a number of cases, these lands have been accessed and utilized for generations.”

But opponents of the legislation say protected lands have great economic value just as they are. Shenandoah National Park attracts 1.5 million visitors each year, and contributes about $960 million to the state economy.

“Protecting our national parks isn’t just about protecting jobs, it’s about protecting our tourism economy,” said City Councilor Dede Smith. “That’s why it’s so shocking to see this report about these proposed bills that would threaten such an environmentally and economically important resource.”

Despite the sense of urgency from environmentalists, for now, the bills appear unlikely to pass. The website govtrack.us, which tracks and analyzes pending legislation, gave many of these bills a 5 percent or less chance of success. The other legislation targeted by the report was given similarly slim chances of survival.

“Right now, the Senate is shooting down these bills, but that might not stand in the future, depending on who is elected and what agenda they have,” said Kate Dylewsky, co-author of the report. She said passage of these bills, unlikely as it is, would set a “dangerous precedent of big oil companies, mining companies and logging companies, being more important to our country than our wild places.”—Ryan McCrimmon

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Albemarle approves visitors bureau marketing plan

The Albemarle County Board of Supervisors has backed off its threat to yank hundreds of thousands of dollars in accumulated tax revenue from the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau, instead agreeing to spend the money on a marketing push to draw tourists to the area.

The CACVB is funded by both county and city, which each direct 30 percent of hotel tax revenues to the five-employee department. That money—a little over $1 million per year—is intended for visitor services, promotion, and other efforts to draw tourists to the area. But a big portion of it has instead been rolled over in recent years, leading to a 2011 fund balance of more than $700,000, a snafu director Kurt Burkart said was the result of staff reduction and restructuring since his arrival in 2009.

The county called the department on the carpet last fall—announcing it would scale back the fund balance to 20 percent and use the reclaimed money for its own initiatives—and the city supported the move.

But the CACVB board wasn’t wild about the idea. In December, it presented the Board of Supervisors with an alternative: a marketing plan that would include a website overhaul and rebranding and would, over the course of three years, slash the fund balance to 20 percent of the CACVB budget.

Mollified, the Board agreed to see the plan, and last Wednesday, supervisors nodded approvingly through a presentation by Susan Payne. Her PR firm, Payne, Ross & Associates, has already landed $55,000 in contracts to develop the marketing effort, which will ultimately cost more than $623,000. The vote to leave the fund balance intact was unanimous. The decision goes before the City Council in August.

“I think they’ve come forward with an excellent plan,” said Supervisor Dennis Rooker. “Perhaps the fact that they didn’t spend this money in previous years has turned out to be a blessing.”

Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce Chair and longtime CACVB board member Tim Hulbert agreed. “The bad news is the money didn’t get spent,” he said, “and the good news is it didn’t get spent. Now there can be a really aggressive marketing effort.”

It remains to be seen whether the ambitious return on investment projections that encouraged political support of the plan will come to fruition. State tourism officials say every dollar spent on marketing brings in $5 in tax revenue. According to the 2004 agreement between the city and county to jointly fund the CACVB, the bureau is required to meet a 7 to 1 ratio of direct visitor spending for every dollar of tax revenue pumped in—or run the risk of having either municipality scuttle the funding agreement. According to year-end reports, the CACVB hasn’t quite met the requirement recently—the ratio ranged from 6.56 to 6.96 in the last three years.

BOS chair Ann Mallek said she’s hopeful the payoff will come. But elected officials will be watching to make sure the money gets spent and the returns roll in.

“I think there will be a large amount of oversight,” she said.
“There’s no question that we stumbled, board and staff,” Hulbert said. “But that fumbling came to a halt five months ago. The plan is in place and the team is energized.

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Odd Dominion: Will Cuccinelli and climate skeptics ever learn?

Cuccinelli Odd Dominion
Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. Photo ©Carrie Devorah/WENN

There is, at this very moment, a highly amusing video burning up the YouTubes featuring Aaron Justus, weatherman for Richmond’s CBS affiliate WTVR, delivering an apocalyptic weather report in perfect deadpan. After calmly detailing “a volcanic eruption right near Charlottesville” which will bring local temperatures up to 400 degrees, he explains that the tidewater area will be “a bit more comfortable, with highs near 100 degrees.” The reason? “We’re going to have tidal waves moving in ahead of this: a global superstorm.” But not to worry, viewers; this superstorm will ultimately be deflected by the timely arrival of Godzilla.

Now, there’s a reason that this local-news goof has become a viral hit—and it’s not simply because it’s freakin’ hilarious. It’s because it so eerily mirrors the recent spell of extreme weather that has swept the nation. As any Charlottesvillian who was awake on Friday, June 29, can tell you, the freakish combination of sweltering heat followed by hurricane-force storms (the now-famous “derecho”), which then spawned multi-day power outages, felt every bit like the end of days. In fact, for many local residents, the arrival of Godzilla might have been a distracting relief.

And, let’s face it, we’ve got it easy. All you have to do is glance at the headlines to follow the devastation in fire-ravaged Colorado, or read about the truly extreme temperatures gripping much of the nation (record highs of 109 degrees in Nashville, 108 degrees in St. Louis and, according to the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang, “D.C.’s hottest June temperatures in 142 years of record-keeping”).

Which brings us, as you knew it would, to our main point, which is this: Anyone continuing to refute the scientifically accepted consensus on man-made climate change and its attendant effect on global weather patterns is either willfully ignorant or criminally negligent. We could go over the facts in depth here, but due to limited space, we will simply suggest that you read Eugene Robinson’s excellent editorial in the July 2 edition of the Washington Post (“Feeling the heat”), which lays out the case far more cogently than we ever could.

Suffice it to say that the broad preponderance of evidence is irrefutable, and that those who continue to deny it are fighting a losing battle against extinction. Unfortunately for Virginia, one of the nation’s most prominent climate-change skeptics, Ken Cuccinelli, is currently making a very credible run for the governor’s office.

But as vast swaths of Virginia recover from the most recent outbreak of abnormal weather, we can only hope that the true precariousness of our position becomes apparent. At the very least, we can take solace in the fact that Cuccinelli’s years-long suit against the Environmental Protection Agency—in which he attempted to argue that the EPA had no standing to regulate greenhouse gases—was recently struck down by a federal appeals court in the most humiliating way possible.

Ruling that the EPA’s position was “unambiguously correct,” the court pointedly noted that this “is how science works. EPA is not required to re-prove the existence of the atom every time it approaches a scientific question.”

Of course, legal setbacks and simple logic have never stopped the Cooch before, so why should this time be any different? In the end, all we can do is batten down the hatches and wait for Virginia’s populace to finally vote this guy out of office.
Or, barring that, the inevitable arrival of Godzilla.

Photo ©Carrie Devorah/WENN

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Bypass opponents study plans, await environmental assessment

After decades of controversy and an unexpected revival, the Route 29 bypass project hit a key milestone earlier this month with the Virginia Department of Transportation’s release of contractor Skanska-Branch’s detailed plans for the 6.2-mile route around the traffic-clogged arterial. And while the road is closer than it’s ever been to becoming a reality, bypass opponents are putting the plans under a microscope, and waiting for what may be a last chance to stall the project.

Jeff Werner, the Piedmont Environmental Council’s land-use field officer, has spent much of the last week-and-a-half poring over the plan, printing out and taping together the Skanska engineers’ detailed drawings of the road to get a better idea of what the project will look like.

A key concern is the northern terminus, he said, where the bypass will join up with Route 29 just south of Ashwood Boulevard and the Forest Lakes development. VDOT’s initial concept for a grade-separated interchange at the north end of the bypass, released in September of 2011, provided for more lanes of travel than the current plans, and that raises concerns of bottlenecks at one end of the roadway, Werner said.

The Skanska proposal provides two lanes for through traffic approaching the intersection from the south on Route 29, instead of three, as the original concept plans show. Vehicles exiting the bypass join northbound cars in a third lane, but the three abruptly become two north of a stoplight at Ashwood Boulevard. And the on-ramp for southbound bypass traffic is down to one lane instead of two.

“Given that saving time is the issue here, the question is, ‘What’s the clock running now for this trip?’” Werner said.

That concern and others will help fuel a continuing push to shift public opinion about the project, Werner added. But when it comes to a policy fight, opponents have only one real foothold: a pending environmental assessment.

Morgan Butler, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Charlottesville office, said it’s been 20 years since VDOT conducted an Environmental Impact Statement, or EIS, on the complete project —a thorough examination mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA.

Since the project roared back to life last summer, there’s been an expectation that VDOT will reevaluate all the documentation from the EIS, in a process called an Environmental Assessment, or EA. The agency will have to determine if its old data still applies, and make its case for carrying on to the Federal Highway Administration. If the review shows there are a lot of new factors affecting environmental impact of the road, it’s back to the drawing board for VDOT.

“If FHWA determines that to be the case—and we think it clearly is, considering how outdated parts of the earlier studies are and how much work the community has put into developing less damaging alternatives for improving 29—then the project cannot proceed until the new information is thoroughly analyzed and considered,” Butler said.

If there’s a true revisiting of the impact of the project, agencies will have to use a whole new set of metrics, said Butler. “A lot of what we know about the environmental impacts of a project like this has changed,” he said, including the compounding effects of urban sprawl on the environment and human health.

Butler was careful to point out that legal action from his group and its allies is far from a given. Opponents can’t raise their shovels until the EA currently underway is complete and the FHWA has given its opinion on whether or not the old data is acceptable, he said.
“It would be like grading a test before it’s been turned in,” he said.

VDOT spokesman Lou Hatter said there will be a public information session* once the EA is completed, but it hasn’t yet been scheduled. The Commonwealth Transportation Board has indicated it will likely be in September.

In the meantime, many in Charlottesville will keep scrutinizing the plans, trying to make sense of the pages of maps and grade diagrams. To Werner, the picture that’s emerging is one of a project that’s going to cause more problems than it solves. But he’s worried the wheels of bureaucracy will keep grinding.

“You would hope people at the FHWA would say, ‘This isn’t a good way to spend $200 million in federal dollars, and we need to take a hard look at this,’” he said. “But on the other hand, there’s this tendency to say, ‘Well, they’ve checked off A through Z.’”
Whatever the outcome of the EA, Butler said a close to the seemingly endless controversy is probably near. “I think this whole saga is about to reach a critical stage,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to drag on for years and years.”

*This story originally reported that there would be a public hearing on the Environmental Assessment once it’s filed. VDOT actually plans to hold a public information session, not a hearing.

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Blunt truth: marijuana dealers are people you already know

He isn’t nervous yet, because there isn’t any reason to be.

Is there?

Nothing in the car. Nothing in his pockets. Expired tags. Just popped into the office to grab something, his wallet with his ID left at home.

A cop asks him to step out of the car, please, sir.

Another officer says he smells pot and asks if they can search his person. Yes you can, officer, because he knows he’s got nothing on him. Can we search the car? The car is a mess, boxes of stuff from the move, clothes all over the place, it’ll take forever for them to go through it. No, you can’t search the car. It’s Saturday. He works full-time. Wants to get home and enjoy his weekend. The cops take their sweet time filling out the ticket and as he’s signing it, a K-9 unit pulls up. The dog sniffs around outside the car and then sniffs around inside. When it gets to the back, it starts to paw at the seats, scrabble, scrabble, skritch, skritch, and so now too bad, sucker, we’re gonna search the trunk. And they find a backpack and look inside.

Shit.

A half-pound of weed and a half-ounce of mushrooms, the irony being the shit in that bag was well over 18 months old, so moldy it was useless, couldn’t smoke it or sell it, and he’d been meaning to throw it out. But he’d forgotten. So now he’s handcuffed and seated on the curb and they go through everything in the car while a tow truck is called an

d it starts to get dark.

He’s taken to the drug task force office, Mirandized and interrogated.

 

Name and address?

My name is ___________, and I live at ___________.

Got any priors?

 

A misdemeanor possession charge in Richmond. Not gonna say anything else without a lawyer present.

And, like, eight cop cars drive over to his apartment. Please don’t knock the door down, BAM! Too late. Guns drawn, bulletproof vests secured, 12 cops spread through the rooms, CLEAR, CLEAR….

And lo…a big ol’ bag of weed, digital scales, another bag of weed, and another, and another. We got ’im! And about $1,700 cash, and he is processed, photographed a

nd locked up in jail with the late night drunks for two days.
He is 26 years old and has been selling weed for over 10 years.

“Mr. Dealer” grew up in Charlottesville, bought and sold and smoked weed in Charlottesville, and got busted in Charlottesville. He is a soldier in the War

on Drugs, specifically the war on marijuana, which the U.S. has been officially fighting for over seven decades.

Around 69 million Americans 12 and older have tried marijuana at least once. Last year, 356,472 kilos were seized nationwide, nearly 174 

 

of them in Virginia, with almost nine kilograms of processed marijuana and 486 plants taken by Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement Task Force (JADE) in our area. So far this year, JADE has confiscated just under 3 kilos. In 2007, 34 percent of Albemarle High School students admitted to having smoked pot, according to the Albemarle County Youth Risk Behavior Survey.

Seems like a lot of us are buying weed. So I ask you, how well do you know your dealer? How well do you know what he goes through? (How much do you really want to know?)

 

Buying harder drugs is furtive and illicit and feels a little dirty. Coke dealers often don’t do coke and despise the very people they serve. Some dealers dabble in everything. What do you want? Coke? Pot? X? Pills? Those dealers tend to have very short careers. They rent a hotel room every weekend to serve the parade of unknown users. Those dealers see you only as a source of cash.

But pot dealers are somewhat different. They sell to their friends and smoke with their clients. There’s a ritual to it.

Sometimes buying drugs isn’t that different from buying coffee. You bring a little gossip to the counter because you want the barista to think of you as more than just “Double Americano with room for cream.” And you want your dealer to know that you’re not just some stoner.

So you chat a little bit.

You hang out before exchanging money. Make awkward small talk.

Pot deals have a weird vibe of familiarity between rank strangers. If you’re a frequent smoker, you see your dealer with some regularity, know his name, maybe where he lives, maybe even a little bit about his nondealing life. But you’ve probably never visited when you didn’t want something.

When it comes to drugs, how well does anybody know anybody?

Mr. Dealer, (friends call him “D”), started smoking weed when he was 13. He was in eighth grade, at a county middle school, driven by life situations he needed to escape. Growing up with divorce, growing up poor. Driven by a general teenage sense of rebellion. In the ’80s, when I was going through the local schools, it was rare to find kids smoking weed, but by the ’9

0s there were definitely stoners amongst the “Saved by the Bell” set. You usually got your weed from somebody’s older brother, maybe the wealthier kids living out in Forest Lakes or Farmington. The STAB kids always had a lot of weed. So did the hippie-spawn who pinched it from their parents’ stash.

“I had a friend whose parents smoked,” Mr. Dealer says, “and he figured out where their stash was and when his parents would leave we’d run up to their closet.” It was mostly weekend smoking, and strictly scrounging—“no one was peddling at school or like, you know, selling dimes in class or anything like that.”

Just the same, someone wrote a letter to the assistant principal naming names, and Young D was called with 10 or 12 others into the office and grilled. It was then that his mom began to be suspicious, but he said, ”No, no, I only tried it once. It hurt my throat…”

It’s a’right, ma, I didn’t inhale.

He did inhale, of course. So did Mom. Rifling around in her glove compartment one day, he found an envelope down in the bottom all rolled up. “I wonder what this is?” he thought, and opened it. A week later his mom and her boyfriend have every door in the car open, and the contents spread out on the ground and they’re searching through it like mad.

When she finds a bag of pot in his closet, she picks him up from school and sits him down for a serious talk.

“Think carefully before answering me, young man. Where did this come from?”

“Your car.”

She grounds him for two weeks.

By ninth or 10th grade, Mr. Dealer and the childhood friend with whom he’d begun smoking were running out of sources of free pot and beginning to buy it. “Initially we’d just buy $10 worth, just enough to roll up and smoke that afternoon. But you know a month or two after that it was kind of like, ‘Well I don’t have $10 to spend on this shit.’” Both lived with single mothers and weren’t exactly rich: “We were the kids at the bottom of the barrel in terms of, you know, the brand-name clothes.” Somewhere along the way the realization came that if they were to buy a little bit more, they could sell some and pretty much smoke for free. “So we throw together, you know, $25, buy a quarter of schwag and break it up into as many dimes as we could muster out of it and sell that to make the money back. And then whatever we had left over we’d share, smoke for the afternoon.”

At Albemarle High School, plenty of kids were getting high. “Looking back, the only kids that didn’t smoke were, like, the kids that only did schoolwork and were in the AP classes and were, you know, like, really into consciously trying to advance themselves for college.” Not that D wasn’t doing well. He was an honor roll student throughout high school, but by 10th grade he was also smoking every day, before school, after school and on weekends. So many people he knew smoked, and needed weed, that, well, how could he not sell it? “It went from buying a quarter and selling a couple dimes to, like, throwing in on an ounce.”

Things began to escalate.

D needed more than he could get from his old friend. He was looking for two or three ounces now. He met a new friend whose cousins lived in town and could get them what they needed. “We kind of formed a little partnership,” D says, “and that just opened the floodgates.”

Yeah, so now Mr. Dealer is the man at AHS. His new friend had gone to another middle school, so when the stream of kids got dumped into Albemarle, well, between the two of them they had a lot of acquaintances eager to become customers. Not that they were the only dealers around. Wealthier kids had access to better weed, buying and selling kind bud to those who could afford it. D and his buddy were selling schwag and they sold it mostly to middle- or lower-class kids who just didn’t know where else to go.

Once or twice a week they’d drive to Orangedale, where the friend’s cousins lived in the projects, and they’d buy weed, starting with a quarter pound, two ounces each—cheap enough to make good money on.

Things began to heat up. They started buying half-pounds.

“Hey,” the cousin said, “next time you can just take a pound. Buy the half up front and I’ll front you a half with it and you can work that.”

At 13, his mom told him he had to pay for things on his own—even, like, dental bills. Selling weed began as a way to pay for what he smoked, but it easily and quickly became a way to make a little money as well. He wasn’t rolling in dough. The cousins down in Orangedale, selling in much larger quantities, made better money. D was buying a pound of not-so-great weed for $1,100 to $1,200, and selling it for $100 an ounce. That doesn’t pay for diamond pendants or tricked-out rides, “but I mean when you’re 16 and you’re making $6.50 an hour at the mall, it’s a considerable help.”

It’s always tempting, however, to spend it if you’ve got it. Mr. Dealer bought a big down-filled winter jacket for, what, 200 some bucks, and his mother found the receipt in his room and began to wonder.

“How’d you get the money for that?”

“Well, you see, that receipt was from me and my friend buying stuff together, and they put it all on one receipt. He bought the coat.”

“Uh huh. We’ll see about that. ‘Hello, my son has this receipt for a $200 coat, and I was wondering…’”

“Yes ma’am, I remember him….”

“So, where are you getting this kind of money?”

“ …”

And it’s Suspicion City from then on out. Checking up, poking around, not fully trusting you. Kids aren’t exactly criminal masterminds, and it’s inevitable that Mom finds another bag of pot. She makes him flush it down the toilet. She gets really watchful.

She finds digital scales and a whole lot of empty plastic bags. She takes him to the Juvenile Court to try and head off disaster, get him drug tested regularly, scare him straight. But then she finds a quarter pound of pot and so she calls the cops on her son and has him arrested.

He’s 16, bigger and stronger than the child she used to know. Her son, this drug dealer. The cops ask him if he’s angry with his mom, if he resents her invasion of his privacy.

Yeah, he does. He’s pissed that she entered his room and rooted through his stuff and then turned him in.

But he’s not going to hurt her, if that’s what you’re thinking!

Jesus. She’s his mother.

Before the court date, he’s sent to Region Ten for an after-school drug treatment program. The threat of random testing looming, he manages to stay clean for a while. But spring break rolls around and his buddy lights a joint.

“Now, you know you don’t have to smoke this.”

“…”

“But if you want to you’re more than welcome.”

“…”

“…”

“Fuck it. I don’t have to go in for a week!”

He fills a Poland Springs water bottle with his fresh, clean piss. He’s stoned for the rest of break.

And the piss trick works for a while. You take a pocket hand warmer, and during the 10-minute break at the meeting you rip it open and shake it and rubber band it to the little squeeze bottle of piss. They call you for the test, and you go into the bathroom with this guy who stands right behind you while you unzip your pants, reach in, pull out the little squeeze bottle and aim the warm stream into the cup. And then you tuck it back inside and hand over the cup like you got nothin’ to worry about.

Mr. Dealer washes his hands. The guy is just staring at him in the mirror, and he’s still staring when D turns around, just standing there still holding the cup.

“I think I’m going to need another urine stream from you.”

“What are you talking about? You know I just peed in the cup. Obviously I don’t have to go to the bathroom again. I’ve to be at work in 30 minutes.”

“If you leave right now I’m going to mark you down as dirty.”

“How are you going to do that? I just peed in a cup for you.”

“If your urine was this warm you’d be dead.”

“Oh, fuck.”

A few weeks later he does coke for the first time and tests positive for that, too.

Defense: He has voluntarily entered drug treatment, your Honor. He is a promising young man. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
Prosecution: He tested positive for marijuana. He tested positive for cocaine. QED and Boo-ya.

Things are not looking good. The judge, unhappy with the lack of seriousness with which Mr. Dealer is taking this whole thing, sends him to juvey in Staunton. He has just turned 17.

”You go in, you’ve got to strip in front of this guy, you know, hold your balls and cough and make sure that you’re not trying to smuggle anything in or whatever. I was there for two or three nights and at some point during that time I think my mother just felt so bad about the situation…I don’t think that she thought it was going to go that far.”

Yes, well. Things escalate.

The War on Drugs was taking hold at Albemarle High School. Gates popped up to keep students from leaving during school hours and cops with dogs came in to sniff around the parking lot. By the time Mr. Dealer got to 11th grade, students were regularly doing coke on weekends, and the school seemed to have a good-sized population of drug users. D made no real effort to hide the fact that he had become a drug dealer, despite the beefed-up security. He wore a pager openly and did crazy shit like packing dime bags in the middle of class, hidden in the Kangaroo pocket on the front of his jacket.

The Teacher is at the blackboard.

“Yo.”

“… the quadratic equation. Let’s try it with this…”

“Yo! B____!”

B____ turns around and the small bag of pot hits him smack in the forehead.

Gasps and giggles ripple through the students.

“…and so what is the value of X in….”

Another bag goes whipping at B____’s head. He ducks this one and scrambles to pick it up, looking to retaliate.

The Teacher turns around, sensing a disturbance in the force.

“What is going on here? B_____, do you have something you’d like to share with the class?”

Or maybe something the class would like to share with him…

•

Before Mr. Dealer graduated, he was buying his weed from another kid over in Mallside, the neighborhood across Rio Road from Fashion Square. So there’s D, a white kid dressed like a dealer—baggy clothes, pager—walking through the house with his black friend, and he’s introduced to his friend’s mom and she rolls her eyes as they walk through the living room. She knows exactly what’s going on.

D heads off to college in Richmond. “O.K.,” he thinks, “I’m going to get rid of the last of what I have and then I’m going to be a college student. I’m going to go to school, going to learn and get my degree. And then I’m not going to have a reason to have to do this anymore.”

Richmond seems flooded with weed. It doesn’t take long for D to find someone in his dorm, this hippy kid, who’s selling better shit than D ever did, shit that D’s old customers can’t get back in Charlottesville, and it doesn’t take long before Mr. Dealer is back in the game, selling the better weed to people making the hour drive down I-64, and about two pounds or so a week starts moving through Charlottesville because of D and the Phish phan.

Eighty percent of the marijuana that Mr. Dealer sold came from New York City. There might be, every once in a while, a shipment brought cross-country from California or Oregon, five or even 10 pounds maybe, but the risk involved was too great. Better to stick with the long-established and steady connection between the Northeast and the South, deeply rutted like ancient wagon trails, the path of all East Coast vice: New York, Philly, D.C., Richmond, Florida.

The hippy kid would drive his ghetto mobile with tinted windows and big rims, happy, hippy music blaring, up to New York and bring back 25 to 30 pounds of pot, sometimes as much as 60.

It took two to three weeks to move it all, and not wanting to keep that much weight at his house, he started paying D to store it for him.

Mr. Dealer begins to see this as a serious business.

“I really kind of remember being surprised that he would be willing to pay me that much just to keep shit at my house. …For every pound that he was going to leave there he would pay me 50 bucks for the first night…and then $25 per pound for however long it needed to stay there after that.” Twenty-five pounds times 50 bucks. That’s $1,250 for a night’s work, maybe $2,500, depending. “And, you know, it adds up.”

At college, much more so than when he was in high school, it felt to D that he was living two lives, or at least concealing a large part of his one life. He was a student, going to classes and doing his work. And like a lot of students, he smoked pot. But he was also a professional drug dealer and his dealing was a much larger part of his life than his education.

Graduation. D moves back to Charlottesville. Finds a full-time, legit job and an apartment.

(He’s still got the job. That’s why you can know his story, but you can’t know his name. At work they know his name, but they can’t know his story.)

In fundamental ways he was different than his peers. The character traits a drug dealer needs to thrive were deeply ingrained in him, a unique set of survival skills.

Secrecy, an underlying paranoia, mistrust.

“It was becoming more and more clear to me,” D says, “that a lot of who I had become was going to be detrimental to pursuing anything in the real world.”

It was a strange transition for a 25-year-old, one that few, if any, of his co-workers could have understood. “I wonder,” he thought, sitting in his cubicle, “if it’s obvious that up to this point, I’ve only sold drugs to support myself.”

He was still dealing, but was trying to operate at a lower level. More people knew him, however, than he would have wanted. Walking down the street, friends of his friend’s younger brothers would come up to him and say, “Hey, I remember when so-and-so’s brother was driving to Richmond to see you…” Or people he barely knew would see him in the restaurant where they worked and say, “Hey, do you think you can help me out?”

And if he said:

“Yeah, I can help you out.”

Then the next time they would say:

“I’ve been buying extra for a friend. Maybe it would be better if he just met you….”

But he really didn’t want to meet your friend, didn’t want more customers or more risk than he already had. He wanted things to no longer escalate.

“I don’t want anything to do with you,” he said when the scene got too sketchy.

“I don’t want you to know who I am. I don’t want you to know my name. I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want you to talk to anyone I know.”

This was not an attitude common around the office.

Risk is a funny thing. It can be calculated only so far. By it’s very nature, it’s uncertain, unknowable in its entirety. When he moved back to Charlottesville, he brought with him a large amount of weed that hadn’t been cured properly, and was unsellable. It was too much to just toss in the trash, so he decided to deal with it later. He threw it in a backpack, and that backpack sat, forgotten, on a shelf at a friend’s house where he crashed for a while, and then got stuffed, with a bunch of clothes, etc., in the trunk of his car.

It’s Saturday.

He wakes up in the afternoon, throws on some shorts and a shirt (forgets to grab his wallet) and runs over to the office to finish up a few things. On the way home, he’s pulled over for expired tags, and the lack of a license and the way he’s dressed, makes the officer ask him to step out of the vehicle, please sir. The car’s a mess, filled with shit from the move. He isn’t nervous yet, because there isn’t any reason to be.

Is there?

Marijuana Possession with Intent to Distribute. Psilocybin Possession with Intent to Distribute. Both felonies in the State of Virginia.

Mr. Dealer, D, had been smoking weed every day, multiple times a day, since he was 16.

He got a lawyer.

Fighting the charges would have cost, like, over two grand. And he still might have lost.

A deal was offered. Plead guilty, and the marijuana charges are gone. The Intent to Distribute on the ‘shrooms is gone. He takes a simple possession charge on the ‘shrooms. Four years suspended sentence, 18 months probation, five years good behavior, and a felony on his record.

He took the deal.

“I was never into sports. I wasn’t one of the jocks. I didn’t have that kind of close-knit group of like teammates. I kind of hated all those kids for that because they were all a bunch of pompous asses anyway, or so I felt like at that time. You know, [dealing] kind of gave me a one up on everybody else… it allowed me to kind of pick and choose who I wanted to be accessible to. …I think during that time in my life, there was a lot of things going on in my personal life, in my family life, that I didn’t have any control over and [dealing] gave me this definite sense of something that was all mine, that I was in complete control of.”

After that real bad Saturday night, Mr. Dealer came home one day to find a girl he knew standing at the top of his stairs, staring curiously at the recently busted-down door.

“Oh, hey,” she said, “did someone break into your apartment?”

“Yeeaaah, um….”

“I’ve been trying to call you, but your phone’s been off.”

“JADE broke into my apartment and they took my phone.”

Her face got that deer-in-the-headlights look.

“Oh. O.K., well, I was just stopping by,” she said, and bolted down the stairs and out the front door.

“This was someone who used to come by and sit around for, like, 45 minutes to an hour just to buy an eighth,” D says, “and we’d shoot the shit about work and life. Just talk about what had been going on in our lives a few weeks earlier when we last saw each other, whatever. There was no, like, ‘Oh, god! I’m so sorry, are you O.K.?’ It was like, ‘Oh. Cool.’ Voooom! All those kind of clichés like, ‘You’ll see who your friends are.’ It’s all true.”

“There’s a certain relationship, a certain ceremonial aspect of smoking weed,” D says, “a level of bonding with someone…seeing eye to eye on art and music and kind of opening up that sort of lateral thought process that isn’t really as awake when you’re not high.”

The light, dim now that it’s evening, insinuates itself through the venetian blinds as we sit in Mr. Dealer’s apartment. His girlfriend, young and pretty, hovers protectively behind us. I feel like she doesn’t really approve of all this interviewing.

Does he still get high?

“Am I going to smoke while I’m on probation? Hell no! It’s not worth four years of my life.”

Will he ever sell pot again?

“I’d like to say no, but once I’m in the clear, and I don’t have this sort of storm cloud looming over my head all the time, I may feel differently about it. If I were to go back to that, it definitely would not be anywhere near what it was before.”

He laughs.

“The, sort of, cardinal rules of the game that I’ve found myself lectured on so many times recently—don’t keep it at your house, don’t travel with it, don’t give them a reason to pull you over—obviously would be adhered to more strictly.”

“I’d been doing this shit a long time, and I got really comfortable. Free use, always having money in my pocket, never having to question dropping $30 to $50 dollars on clothes or food. It creates a very, sort of, ingrained thought process.”

(And as he talks, it comes to me that interviewing D about selling drugs feels eerily similar to buying them. We are co-conspirators, sharing his secrets. He has shared a lot of his life with me, but the real question is, once I get his story published, will I ever visit his apartment again?

How well do I know Mr. Dealer?)

“Ever since this happened, its been like, ‘What do you mean I can’t buy a $3 latte on the way to work every morning?’”

He stubs out a cigarette.

“You stock up on the beans, you wake up, you grind some, you make a pot, and take it in a thermos to work, just like everybody else.”