What <em>Atlantic</em> Readers Thought About Marijuana in the ’90s
Letters From the Archives is a series in which we highlight past Atlantic stories and reactions from readers at the time.
In 1994, Eric Schlosser was eating breakfast at home when he received a phone call from the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Bill Whitworth.
“Eric,” Schlosser recalls Whitworth asking, “is there anyone in prison right now for marijuana?”
The call came as a surprise. It had been only a few months since the publication of Schlosser’s first Atlantic article—picked up from the slush pile—on the New York Police Department’s bomb squad.
Whitworth told me that the idea had originated after he saw “a little piece in the Times” about a marijuana arrest in the Midwest. “I had just assumed that marijuana had been de facto legalized,” he wrote in an email recently, “unless you were talking about giant shipments from Mexico, or something like that.”
In fact, nearly 500,000 drug arrests involved marijuana in 1994—and that number would only grow in the coming years.
The “very modest piece” Whitworth expected from Schlosser—“because I thought it was a small story and Eric was a beginner,” he said—snowballed quickly. A two-part series, which comprised “” and “,” was published in the August and September 1994 issues. Schlosser’s investigative reporting won a National Magazine Award; he later used it for his 2003 book on the underground economy, also called .
