Amendment 64 Oral History Project Interview
Monday, December 7, 2015
Andrew Livingston
Janet Bishop, Interviewer
JANET BISHOP: And I'm going to introduce... ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Cool. Great.
JANET BISHOP: This is Janet Bishop. And we're continuing with our Stories of Amendment 64, Oral History Project. The date is December 7, 2015. And I'm here with Andrew Livingston, who is the policy analyst for Vicente Sederberg. We're here at the law offices of Vicente
Sederberg.
And Andrew is being a good sport, because we're substituting his oral history with another one we were going to do today. So many thanks, Andrew, for diving in and--
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Of course. Of course.
JANET BISHOP: --agreeing to be an oral history narrator for our project.
As I mentioned to you, Andrew, when we weren't recording-- or I may not have mentioned this to you-- but oral history is a way of enriching and enhancing the text-based documents or the official record. And we've had wonderful narrations from all the individuals we've interviewed so far. I also-- as I did explain to you, sometimes it can be lengthy. Because in this classic oral history style of interviewing, we go backwards and talk about some of your formative
experiences, which of course shape who you are today. ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah.
JANET BISHOP: And your passions and your focus. So with that all said, could you state your full name for me, your date of birth, if you're willing to, and where you were born.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Great. So my name is Andrew Scott Livingston, was born in New Jersey. And I grew up in New Jersey. And I was born on April 22, 1990, which is Earth Day. JANET BISHOP: Very auspicious and just out of curiosity, where in New Jersey did you-- ANDREW LIVINGSTON: I grew up in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. I was born in Summit, New Jersey, just a few towns away.
JANET BISHOP: And as oral history interviewers sometimes inject themselves into the interview, just as an aside, I have family that lives in Princeton, New Jersey. And I attended college there, too, so I'm familiar with that area.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: New Jersey has a long line of drug policy reformers that came from there. Not sure why. But I don't know. It's got some good musicians, bad highways, and lots of good drug policy reformers.
JANET BISHOP: There you go. So what are your parents' names and do you have siblings? ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah. So my father's name is David Livingston. And my mother's name is Debra Livingston. I have one older brother, Jason Livingston. My father is a trauma surgeon. He runs a trauma center in Newark, New Jersey.
And my mother is an artist. My brother, Jason Livingston, currently works up in Boston, Massachusetts, and helped to found what is now the premier 3D printing company in the country, Formlabs, with one of his high school best friends, Max.
JANET BISHOP: Thank you.
Somehow thinking of Robert Wood Johnson, but that's in New Brunswick with Rutgers. So there must be another trauma center.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah, it's UMDNJ, which is the primary trauma center for-- it's one of the main public trauma centers for New Jersey. And that is sort of where I got some of my feelings about the drug war and drug policy in general. But I'll let you ask those questions coming up next.
JANET BISHOP: Certainly. And this may allow you to answer what you were just alluding to in more detail. But what are some of the memories you have of your parents, grandparents, and other family members-- and also you've described in brief the community you grew up in-- but could you describe a little bit more?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah, sure. So I grew up in middle to upper middle class suburban New Jersey on the train line to New York City. So when people talk about the city, it's always New York City is the city, in my mind. Although now it's obviously Denver from where I live. I went to public high school, public elementary school, public middle school.
Really I have an absolutely ideal family situation. Grew up relatively privileged and comfortable. And one of the things I always say is that if everyone was born into my situation there'd be many, many fewer instances in which people have excuse for failures. So to me personally that meant that like any of my own craziness or any of my own failures were my own. Because my home situation was so ideal.
My parents are so loving and provide really good support. And I went to a good school. So that's some of where I grew up.
And one of the things I always remember growing up is my parents teaching me to look at things from multiple perspectives, to question authority. It might be because I'm Jewish. But my
peoples to a certain extent have always kind of a vein in us that question authority-- rightly, I would say. And my father working in a community that is really greatly underprivileged in Newark, New Jersey-- a very poor area-- and he always kind of showed me through his work the importance of reaching out to communities that are less empowered than yourself and having your work be a service to those communities.
And then at the dinner table and things like that, oftentimes it's not dinner table conversation, but he talked about what he did during the day, which most of the time entails sewing up people who get shot or stabbed or car accidents and things like that. So I learned early on don't drink and drive. Because my father said that the worst thing he could ever have in his life would be to see me show up at his trauma center.
But then really from that, he would talk about the generations of people that he worked with. And really when you're talking about a trauma center, you don't want to deal with generations of a family. But these are individuals who-- the uncle would be shot or the grandfather would be shot as part of a drug ring back when he was in his 20s and 30s. And then the uncle and then the father and then the son and the nephews and really just the cycles of drug war violence that occur in areas like Newark, New Jersey.
When I was younger during the same period of time, The Wire first came out-- famous show on HBO.
JANET BISHOP: Covering Baltimore.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah, covering Baltimore. And although Baltimore is not where I live, Baltimore is very similar in some ways to Newark, New Jersey. It's--
JANET BISHOP: That northeast corridor.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Exactly. Yeah it's very poor, primarily African American, very disenfranchised, difficult school systems, mismanagement for long periods of time. And in this case what's most appropriate is-- when we're discussing-- is open air drug markets and drug war violence.
So I learned early on-- this was probably in late middle school to early high school-- about drug war violence, about why the drug trade has killed so many people over some periods of time. And I learned it from a perspective that was not in line with the thinking at the time of the mid-- well I guess it was in the early 2000s, mid 1990s, which was that drugs caused a crime. And then it's not necessarily drug policy's caused the crime. I learned from discussions with my father and my mother-- as well as from HBO, from David Simon, and his show The Wire-- that oftentimes the drug policies themselves can also result in violent markets.
JANET BISHOP: And just the record, you're alluding a bit to your formative years and your middle school, high school education. Just for the record, what elementary school did you go to and middle school?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah, so I went to Coles Elementary School, Terrill Middle School, and then Scotch Plains Fanwood Public High School.
JANET BISHOP: So all public--
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: All public schools from where I grew up.
JANET BISHOP: --education. And was this-- since you mentioned you were relatively privileged-- you were upper middle class and raising-- was this by design of your parents to place you in public middle schools?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Well yes.
JANET BISHOP: As opposed to private schools.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: So the schools that I grew up near were really good, just as good if not better than the private schools. Most of the private schools were Catholic or other Christian religious schools or very expensive and not all that much better. So it wasn't necessarily-- it was probably by design that my parents decided to purchase a home in a community that had good schools. But not necessarily design that they wanted to send me to public school rather than private school so I would meet other people that were not unlike me. Because where I went to public school, most people were middle to upper middle class, white, and suburban. There was no drug violence where I grew up.
JANET BISHOP: Right. It was up the road in Newark. ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So southwest. JANET BISHOP: Down the road.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah southwest of Newark, New Jersey.
JANET BISHOP: I'm guessing that your father and mother were role models and mentors from what you've just mentioned.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Absolutely.
JANET BISHOP: Were there any role models that you had within your community or outside your community or in the media?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: I would say there was definitely a lot of teachers that I learned from over time-- some economics professors-- one economics teacher in high school, Mr. Higgins,
that I took entry econ from. But really I probably gained most of my economics teachings in high school from listening to "Marketplace" on NPR. So it's not necessarily-- I don't really have-- I wouldn't ascribe any specific teacher as a role model that stood out, that pushed me towards this. It was a combination of early on becoming very interested in drug policy. I've always had a streak in me that is defiant of authority. In some ways that distresses my mother. Now she finally is not as worried about it, because I've gotten out of my period of time in which I'm probably most likely to be harassed and mouth off to a cop in high school. So I luckily got out of that without too many issues.
But it was primarily an interest in drug policy, an interest in taboo subjects. I was the opinion editor for my high school paper. And so I've always been one to dive deep academically into things that are not supposed to talk about in public or private society. Although now you can talk about drug policy a lot more than maybe you could about eight years ago or so.
And so it was really-- the internet was what I grew up on. I'm of the generation in which I've had the internet since I started researching anything, really in middle school or so. And so when I started getting interested in learning about drug policy or the drug war or marijuana policy or other sorts of entheogens, essentially hallucinogenic drugs used for religious purposes, I was able to access an infinite amount of information, which wouldn't have been available to someone had I been about 10 years older. So it was that in combination with a real love and interest in
economics. I was an economics nerd in high school. I was part of an organization called Fake Challenge, which is kind of like Model UN but for the Federal Reserve System. It's for people who are even more nerdy than Model UN.
So I took this all from an academic standpoint. I remember reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World my sophomore or junior year of high school. And then from there I read his long-- I guess it's not a memoir. It's his first person account called Doors of Perception about his use of
mescaline before it became illegal. And so that was the sort of stuff I was reading in high school, which tells you a little bit about who I am, but also is some of my early piques of interest into this subject field.
JANET BISHOP: That answers one of my questions-- the librarian archivist question-- about what formative books did you read or what were your favorite books?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: So that was definitely one of them. Also I read a lot of Erowid, which is an online publication of trip reports-- hallucinogenic trip reports and things like that-- of people saying how they feel on all sorts of different substances. So I learned just how many different hallucinogenic substances occur naturally in plants and the wide array of those. And then at the same time I learned that they were like all illegal. And it's like, well most of these can't-- some of these can absolutely kill you. Some of these can't kill you at all. You can try as hard as you can. You'll lose your sense of self, your ego, and your mind way before you will physically die from Psilocybin mushrooms.
And things like alcohol, of course, can kill you with less than one bottle of grain alcohol. But I would say if you were to point to a specific text early on-- or at least one that I point to-- it was HBO's The Wire and Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception.
JANET BISHOP: Was there a spiritual element to some of your research or questing, shall we say, because some of the natural hallucinogen that you mentioned often are cited by individuals talking about mystical or spiritual experiences?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: So I would say probably not. No. I'm pretty secular. I don't believe in God. Well I'm agnostic about God. I can't prove or disprove.
But I tend to because I can't-- if I can't prove something or know it for a fact, I just don't think about it as much. I tend to not be awful to people-- not because I want to go to heaven or don't want to go to hell. But because in general that means that people are nicer to me, which makes my life easier. And if I get judged, at that point, I hope that my life has proven that it was roughly pretty good.
I've actually never had a religious or spiritual experience on hallucinogens, although I've done them more than handfuls of times. I don't often take the dosages required to sometimes meet those mystical experiences. And certain substances-- like DMT-- dimethyltryptamine, which is probably the one that's like pretty reliably will induce a religious experience-- I've not tried. I've had very emotional and connective experiences but nothing spiritual or religious in a way that I would ascribe to that. And it's not necessarily something I really seek for. I don't feel like I have a hole in my life. Maybe it's because I have such a supportive family structure and grew up on that. But I'm not really looking for a larger religious purpose or driving.
JANET BISHOP: So you mentioned to me before I turned on the recorder that very early in your life-- you're only 25 or so. Which is you may not think so but is young in the scheme of things. ANDREW LIVINGSTON: It is. I recognize that.
JANET BISHOP: You mentioned that very early in your life you decided you wanted to commit your life or at least your professional inquiry into being a drug policy analyst.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah. At that time it was activism, because there wasn't a market to analyze but yes.
JANET BISHOP: So tell me a bit about your drug policy activism and how it manifested itself-- and I'm assuming not in middle school, perhaps in high school.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah so there was definitely some in high school. As I mentioned, I was the opinion editor for my paper, so I would--
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: I graduated high school in 2008.
JANET BISHOP: So going backwards, you're talking about starting high school in roughly 2004. ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah. 2004, 2005.
JANET BISHOP: So as you enter high school-- ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah.
JANET BISHOP: You're the editor of the paper.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah, so I was the editor of the paper in 2007 and 2008, my junior and senior year of high school. I remember covering-- this is quite a while ago. But there's a famous Supreme Court case, Bong Hits. It wasn't called Bong Hits 4 Jesus, but it was the one that was known as Bong Hits 4 Jesus, which was a free speech associated Supreme Court case. When the Olympic torch was going through Juneau, Alaska and some high school students unfurled a big banner that said, Bong Hits 4 Jesus.
And I was, as you could probably assume, one who's probably-- I've always been very in favor of free speech and particularly free speech amongst high school students, of which high school students don't actually have all that much free speech. Variety of court case precedents on that. This was outside of school, but it was kind of a school-ish sponsored event. And the kids got in trouble for it. And they brought it all the way up to the Supreme Court.
So I covered that in my high school paper, wrote a-- JANET BISHOP: And this was '04-- 2004 or five.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah, actually it might have been about 2006. It was probably later on in high school. So I covered issues on drug policy there and really researched a lot of it. JANET BISHOP: And just out of curiosity, I'm sorry-- how did Bong Hits 4 Jesus end up? ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Oh I don't-- this is embarrassing. I don't actually remember. I think they might have lost it, but I don't-- I think it was probably they ruled positively on some parts and negatively on the others. I'd have to look back into the Wikipedia article.
JANET BISHOP: Fair enough.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: So I was definitely interested in it, did some research, learned about what was happening. This was the end of the Bush administration, kind of the middle to the end of the second part of the Bush administration. And I saw what was happening in places like California.
And I was watching people like Mason Tvert on TV and Steve Fox on TV give testimony and talk to the media about how marijuana is safer than alcohol. And I saw how much people were drinking in my high school. I had a few times in high school in which I threw up from drinking too much alcohol. So I definitely got interested in that.
But I was interested in drug policy well before I ever started using drugs, which is kind of the anomaly amongst, I would imagine, most people. I always kind of took this from an economic perspective-- academic and economic perspective kind of early on. But I learned about the organization Students for Sensible Drug Policy at the end of high school and in the beginning of college as well.
Students for Sensible Drug Policy is a national organization formed in the late 1980s, early 1990s. And it's a chapter based network on college campuses-- and there's a few high school chapters as well-- across the country. And I wanted to get involved. I saw just the injustice of the drug war. And I felt as someone who comes from a privileged background and was not going to be arrested and incarcerated and have my life ruined for the marijuana I smoked in high school, that I owed a debt to society to a certain extent in changing these policies.
That and I was also a little selfish. I wanted to be able to buy marijuana from a store. I felt that was stupid I couldn't do that. And I also saw the violence associated from black markets and open air drug markets. And I recognized that the only way to reduce that violence was to take out the economic incentive behind it.
JANET BISHOP: So backtracking what college did you go to?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: I went to Colgate University in upstate New York, which is really just a beautiful campus in the middle of nowhere that is an insular bubble of privilege. JANET BISHOP: And how did you pick Colgate then?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: I fell in love with the campus during a time it was sunny. JANET BISHOP: Ah.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: It's the sort of campus that if you go there on one of those right days, it's so immaculate you can't say no. Granted the school is about 80% really cold and dreary. But it had a-- it was a great education. Wonderful facilities. Absolutely fantastic professors.
And I found a lot of friends. I had a lot of friends there. I wish I could replace about a third of the students with people that were maybe less silver spoon. But it was a great, great place to go. JANET BISHOP: So you joined the Students for Sensible Drug Policy while at Colgate. ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah, so the end of my freshman year and the beginning of my sophomore year, I helped to found the chapter at Colgate University with two other women, a friend of mine, Becca Roberts who actually currently lives in Colorado, and another person,
another woman, Hannah Gordon. They were both my year as well. And they were looking to start this as part of a project that was an end of their freshman-- one of the freshman classes called-- I think it was Whiskey and Cigarettes.
They decided at the end of that-- I wasn't in that class. But at the end of that class, they had to do something that would change policy or whatever, some policy oriented thing. So they decided to start a chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy. And so I got involved with that during the summer between freshman and sophomore year and helped to found that chapter and run it from my sophomore year all the way to my senior year.
And my freshman year I was doing lots of all different sorts of stuff, skiing, and this and that. But I wasn't up to the par yet where I was going to start a club the start of my freshman year. JANET BISHOP: And Whiskey and Cigarettes-- that's an intriguing name for a course. That would imply that--
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah. There was a lot of cool ones. There was also one called Drugs, Sex and Chocolate. But I was not able to get in that class. The waiting list was--
JANET BISHOP: As I would imagine. ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah. JANET BISHOP: Long.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: One of the cool things I did do my freshman year associated with drug policy-- even before I started the club-- was I helped to give a lecture with the professor who taught the Drugs, Sex and Chocolate class. He was a biology professor at Colgate. And another one of my freshman roommates, Matteo-- and we gave a lecture about cocaine markets in Peru and Colombia and the international drug trade of cocaine from South America to the United States, showed a documentary from Vice. This is actually well before Vice ever blew up and became a really big media source. This was back when it was called VBS TV. So this was probably 2009 or so.
And we showed a documentary and gave a little talk. And the professor gave a little bit of a talk about the biology of how cocaine affects you and why you shouldn't drink alcohol and cocaine-- or you shouldn't consume alcohol and cocaine at the same time, which is really relevant to people I went to school with. Because it's the type of school in which people would do-- JANET BISHOP: Was it endemic?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah. Yeah. It was a lot of rich kids who had the ability to do a lot of cocaine and drink a lot of alcohol. But I was very interested in why that black market was so violent. And that's really kind of what drove me in college. I was an economics and
Because I went into college my freshman year still thinking I wanted to do environmental economics. That was kind of my major. That was one of my main passions in high school as well. That was before I-- would I say I kind of came out to my parents as wanting to do drug policy full time in my sophomore year or so? But I kept with that same major because-- it's actually extremely applicable to what I do now.
JANET BISHOP: So you just mentioned letting your parents know about your desired career path. What was their reaction?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: My parents are very supportive. And so it was-- does this make you happy? Do you like doing this? Cool.
Are you happy? That's the most important thing. Second—OK, show us you can make it really happen.
And so then from there it was show that I can turn this into a career, something that can sustain me. I got lucky because, well, legalization happened about the time. Granted when you are watching the waves come and positioning yourself in the right way, when the wave crests, you can hit it really well.
And so I love using extended metaphors. And I grew up in New Jersey. My parents have a beach house. And so I spent a lot of time in the ocean when I was younger.
So lift your feet up. Let the waves rock you. And if you are in the right position at the right time, you can hit it perfectly. And people will look at you and say, wow, you're really good at surfing. I will say, no, just in the right place at the right time. Because I knew where to be.
JANET BISHOP: Very, very good metaphor.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Thanks. I also can't surf. I body board.
JANET BISHOP: That's OK. We won't tell. Just your oral history will tell for posterity. So anything else? It sounds like you were on your path by sophomore year of college. ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Oh yes.
JANET BISHOP: And you were watching the people you now work with-- ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah.
JANET BISHOP: --such as Mason Tvert and others on media. So tell me a bit about your final years of college and how you entered the world after college. And what year? Let's place a year with that.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: My real first kind of serious foray into academic studies-- large scale academic study on cannabis-- came about my junior year, summer of my junior year of college. And so I wanted to make money during my summers of college, which is not all that easy when you're trying to do it in drug policy activism. And it was constantly an internal struggle with myself coming from a privileged background, where I didn't want to just be, like, all right, yeah, parents. Pay for me to live in DC and work for a think tank that was nonprofit, and they won't pay me. But I'll be able to-- because I always felt bad about doing that. Even if they would have been more than happy.
So it was about finding ways to pay me. So I could have at least some justification for what I did over the summer and things like that. So I applied for and got part of a fellowship at my
university known as PPE, or the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. And this is kind of an endowed institution at the college I went to.
JANET BISHOP: At Colgate.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: At Colgate. And gave students money to do research within philosophy, politics, and economics during the summer. And so I worked with a professor-- Michael Johnston, who was one of my favorites-- who is one of the leading experts in political corruption across the globe. And I wanted to study-- one of the things that really piqued my interest in college, and I would say it's probably one of the driving factors that I look at, which is-- keep going?
JANET BISHOP: Keep going.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Which is why are some black markets more violent than others? One of the largest black markets in the United States is not violent at all. That's the one for people under 21 getting alcohol. Right? That's a black market.
And yet almost no one dies from minors-- besides overdrinking, right? The acquisition of that. So I wanted to look at-- in Mexico during the time I was in college, there was huge amounts of violence. So I studied that summer the economics of drug trafficking in Mexico and the
organizational dynamics of illegal drug markets. I wanted to try-- I was obsessed with trying to create an economic equation for violence. And I got close, but I realized it wasn't possible based upon my bachelor's in economics.
JANET BISHOP: So backing up a bit, just for future scholarship, you just stated your feeling that the market for alcohol for under 21-year-olds is a black market. I understand what you're saying. But do you want to expand on that a little?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah, sure. So oftentimes-- and hopefully some researcher will pick this up-- hopefully I actually help to work to write a paper on this beforehand so it can all be cleared up. But people talk about black markets and gray markets and white markets all wrong oftentimes. You have to look at it from a supply chain perspective.
A white market is a market in which it's completely legal throughout the entire supply chain from initial production all the way to final sale. A gray market is a market in which there is some white-- some legal and some illegal aspects of the supply chain. It could be produced illegally and then enter into the legal market. It could be produced legally and exit into the illegal market towards people it can't be sold to. And in some cases with untaxed cigarettes and things like that, it can be produced legally then at some middle point in the supply chain, enter illegally and then enter back into the legal supply chain.
So in this case, actually the, quote unquote, "black market" for those under the age of 21 is actually a grey market. Because it was legally produced, the alcohol. It was legally sent to the store. And then it was potentially illegally purchased by someone who was under the age of 21 or someone who came in there with the express purpose of providing it to someone 21 or under. JANET BISHOP: So what would be an example of a white market in your term?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Where you purchase those recorders is probably a clear, white market. It was produced legally, transported legally, sold legally-- though depending on the metals that are in there. If you look at something like cobalt or others that are produced maybe in certain areas of the Congo or other areas in Africa that are produced and extracted in more dubious ways and may not even be legal. So some of the things we even think about as legal-- some of our computer chips-- are actually a gray market. Because the metals that extracted them could have come from somewhat illegal sources, depending on how you look at them.
JANET BISHOP: OK. Thanks for expanding on that. Very interesting. So you were doing research and writing a paper on this.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah.
JANET BISHOP: Were you making-- were you able to support yourself on this?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah, so they gave-- I think it was $2,000 for the summer, which I thought was going to go really far and just paid for the housing that I had at George Washington University that summer. Because they ripped me off. So I was frustrated about that, but I was able to make some money.
JANET BISHOP: And Colgate sent you to GWU.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: No, they just gave me the money. And I wanted to be in DC, because that's where a lot of the experts that I wanted to interview were. So I did probably a dozen or so interviews with top officials. The school, and me personally, and my parents were unwilling to send me to Mexico, because it was really violent. And also I don't speak Spanish, which I probably should have taken rather than French in high school all things considered, but that's kind of what it was.
So in addition to writing this very large paper on the organizational dynamics of illicit markets in Mexico, reading lots of books, I also worked-- I guess it was a unpaid internship at the Institute for Policy Studies, which is a, kind of a left leaning think tank.
JANET BISHOP: In DC.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: In DC. JANET BISHOP: And this was junior--
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: The summer after my junior year. JANET BISHOP: After your junior year.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah.
JANET BISHOP: So you've had this great experience in DC, able to try out your craft in drug policy analysis. And then you go back to Colgate as a senior. What was your senior year like? ANDREW LIVINGSTON: It was great. I took a lot of really interesting classes, some stuff on political corruption with Professor Michael Johnston. My first semester of my senior year I essentially took three classes, and one of them was my honor's thesis for my environmental studies side of my coursework. And with that I studied the environmental impacts of illegal cultivation operations in California's public lands. So I had a lot of freedom to learn what I want. And I used the fact that I had a college library to my advantage-- and I recognized that I only had about eight more months of that. And so I downloaded every single thing I could. And I read an enormous amount. And I still have papers that I downloaded from-- whether or not this is legal, I think it's legal.
JANET BISHOP: I'm not the electronic resources librarian at CSU, but I-- if you're a student-- ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah, so when I was a student, I downloaded all of these things, these papers, and I built a library, an electronic library of my own interesting papers and things like that. So I did a lot of research on that. Bunch of different courses that I thought were interesting.
My economics thesis with my economics major- my second semester of my senior year I wrote on whether or not there was a connection between brownfield sites, which are environmental waste sites, and gunshot violence in Newark. My dad gave me essentially a virgin data set of drug-- not drug related-- but of gunshot violence in Newark. Spatial location.
And I wanted to see whether or not there was a connection with what is known as broken windows theory, which is that environments in which they aren't being taken care of are more open to violence and invite violence in some ways. So it's the combination of small little crimes
result in bigger crimes with the combination of environmental waste and hazards result in kind of decrepit landscapes. And there are many, many brownfield site locations in Newark.
I'm pretty sure there's actually more brownfield site locations in Newark than anywhere else in the country. What I found was that there was not a spatial correlation, partially because there are so many and there are so many gunshot-- so much gun violence and so many of these brownfield site locations. It may have not been even possible to tease out a correlation there. But that's kind of what I looked at.
I wanted to see whether or not there was a connection to the problems that we have in inner cities when it comes to not cleaning up after industrial waste and how that decreases property values and makes landlords less likely to do tenant's improvements. Because they're looking for either some governmental money to do that and others-- and whether or not that results in the sort of places which would be more open to open air drug markets and thus drug market violence. JANET BISHOP: This research sounds fascinating and very germane to urban planning and policy.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Exactly. JANET BISHOP: So there's another path-- ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah.
JANET BISHOP: --you could have gone down. Backtracking a bit, I have two questions that are sort of divergent. So I'll ask, first one is-- when you were doing your research on illegal grow areas in California, were you interviewing anybody? Or was this based on what your research that you had downloaded?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: It was some interviews with some research scientists out in
California, some interviews with local reporters that were on the ground there. And then it was just a lot of primary source documentation. You would be amazed, but there's a huge amount of information from public testimony and congressional testimony from the late 1980s and early 1990s when they were starting the federal cannabis eradication programs.
JANET BISHOP: So by testimony you mean growers who were--
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: No, these are DEA agents and experts, I guess, from the '90s and '80s. A lot of it is police officials, drug policy people. It was looking at really what the governmental reason behind it was.
And then a lot of it was interviews with people that did the primary research there. I was not able-- both because my school wasn't going to spend the money for me to go out to California and two, there was just risks associated with me trying to find illegal grow operations-- JANET BISHOP: Yes, that would probably not be the right thing to do.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: And research them. But there were some researchers that I had spoken to. Some of this was kind of more secondary sources, who after the police would come through, they would come in and either help to remediate the site or assess its damage. So I was able to speak firsthand with both reporters and academics that looked at these sites right after they were raided.
I was not able to talk with any illegal growers. Now I know lots of them. Back in college I did not. It was a little more difficult for me to try to attain those contacts. And I wasn't going to go out there and try to hunt down some illegal grows that were being in many cases sadly staffed by Mexican migrants that were essentially forced into servitude by the coyotes, which is the term for the human traffickers that smuggle them over the border. So that's a lot of how that occurred. JANET BISHOP: And what were the environmental impacts that you found in your research? ANDREW LIVINGSTON: So the two primary ones are water diversion. So they tap into local streams and defer the water to the plants, which is a real problem because California doesn't have all that much water. And it dries out a lot of these hillsides, which absolutely need the water. Because the second and the compounding factor is they disturb the topsoil, both by walking over it, digging it, digging these pots, staking out these areas. And what that creates is just a lot of dry dirt and increases erosion. Those two factors compound on each other to increase erosion in ways that just become really, really problematic for the landscape that lives on sometimes these pretty steep hillsides in northern, probably Mendocino, Trinity, and Humboldt County-- the Emerald Triangle up in northern California.
JANET BISHOP: And so was this research what you expected to find? Or--
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah. It was about what I expected to find. I looked into-- I did some economic-- not economic. I did some environmental policy analyses to it by-- honestly I don't remember the exact name for what some of the frameworks of analyses that I applied onto it. But it was just really looking at whether or not the current policy was successful. What other policies may be successful? Whether or not we create like an exclusion zone, where we say we're not going to enforce in this area. Or whether or not we're going to change the whole policy. And maybe I was writing the paper to come to this conclusion. Maybe it was just the obvious conclusion. But the primary way to stop the illegal cultivation in northern California is to allow legal cultivation and to regulate it. And interestingly enough some of the new laws that are coming out of California-- both the medical marijuana law that they finally passed this last September as well as the initiative that's probably going to be on the ballot that's funded by Sean Parker-- have extensive, extensive chapters that deal with environmental regulations to ensure that land and groundwater is not hindered by legal grow operations.
JANET BISHOP: Thank you. And then I also wanted to ask you another question right now. I may be off on this, but my sense is that you allude a bit to your interest in drug policy also as a social justice issue.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah.
JANET BISHOP: I'm just maybe perhaps putting words in your mouth but how you describe your upbringing and then comparing that to those individuals who live in places, say, like such as Newark-- the worst neighborhoods of Newark.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah.
JANET BISHOP: So could you talk a little bit about how and whether that shaped your drive to go into drug policy--
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah. JANET BISHOP: Even in high school?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Definitely. One could ascribe it to I felt guilty that I was a white privileged kid growing up in an area I wasn't going to be arrested for my drug use. That's partially right. The other part of it was-- I didn't-- there was never someone that I became close with that I learned from their experiences about how their life was difficult. I never had those sorts of direct emotional connections with someone who was hurt by the drug war in that way. But it was really seeing and hearing the stories from my father and then recognizing that it's just-- there's nothing worse than a policy pushed by your government to try to protect you that actually kills people. And I've always had a streak in me that is defiant of authority. And so I looked at the way that people see police officers. And what was weird-- this actually came to the conclusion when I was home this last time for Thanksgiving just a few weeks ago-- that I felt about police as a white suburban kid in New Jersey probably about how most African American kids think about police, which is they're there to harass you, steal your things, and try and find some way they can arrest you.
And that was not true for me, because I was a privileged white kid growing up in the suburbs. But I had that kind of-- maybe it's just in my nature. But I always felt as though the drug war had exacerbated a problem in our society in which individuals, particularly young people,
particularly young people of color in the inner cities, do not look at police as there to protect them. And they do not look at police and the criminal justice system as just. Or that they are public servants that are there to serve the community.
In many ways they look at them as an occupying force that is there to make money off of them through fines, court fees, other things of what we see in, like, the Ferguson police department that was quite obviously running its books on the backs of its African American community. And I also saw that as just a significant problem for our criminal justice system-- that people were no longer looking at police as a collaborative force and really more as an aggressive and opposition force. And I recognize that the only way to change this-- one, takes cultural change. But in order to change the culture you need to change the laws which are driving that culture in the opposite direction of more stats and more arrests and more drug stop and frisks and things like that.
That's where I looked at it, and I recognized that the reason that the drug markets were so non-violent where I grew up in high school is because people bought marijuana in someone's house and not in the open air. And the reason they were able to do that was because no one was trying to arrest or harass them. And they didn't have to move around all the time. And it didn't matter whether or not-- even if they did get caught-- because no one was going to try to seize their home. You could not say the same thing if it was a young person of color in the inner cities because of the way of that disproportionate police treatment.
JANET BISHOP: And you've mentioned a couple times-- I'm just asking for the record-- your observation that nobody in your cohort, let's say, was harassed. Did you base that on friends' stories, like, hey a policeman stopped me, but I was let go.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah, I mean, so one of my friends-- JANET BISHOP: [INAUDIBLE]
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: I'll tell some stories. So one of my friends in college was arrested for marijuana. But he was able to get a lawyer. His parents are attorneys. He was able to get over it without too much problems. Probably cost him like $1,000, $2,000. There were many instances where I was pulled over by police. And because I knew the laws I was able to get out.
I had an instance. It was very close in which we went to another friend's college near where I went to school and bought some cannabis and were pulled over by the police and were taken out of the car and frisked. And because I knew the law and had made clear to statement to the rest of the people in the car and to the police officers that they were not legally allowed to go in our pockets and were only able to pat around our pockets. And because it was winter in Colgate and we were very fluffy, big jackets that we were able to get off even though they padded over all of our pockets which had lots of marijuana in it.
And the reason they didn't defy the law and do it anyway is because they knew that one of the four white kids that they pulled over probably had a family member that was a lawyer. And had they done that we would have sued them and made their life difficult. So we were able to get out because of that.
JANET BISHOP: OK.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: So there were some close calls which I recognize were either partially or entirely attributed to the fact that I knew the law and am a young white kid. JANET BISHOP: OK. Thanks for filling in some of my backtracking.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Oh, of course.
JANET BISHOP: So now let's place you at you're about to graduate from Colgate. You've done drug policy research. So where next?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah so I wanted to, again, try to get something to pay me over the summer. And so I was applying for scholarships and fellowships and things like that and found the Koch Summer Fellowship program at the Institute for Humane Studies.
So the Koch Summer Fellowship is a kind of libertarian foundation sort of thing that is through George-- I think it's George Mason University in DC? And they give money to individuals to work at nonprofits. So I worked at the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, which is actually run by an individual Eric Sterling, who's a mentor of mine-- helped to found Students for Sensible Drug Policy. He's been involved with that for a long time.
Helped to found Marijuana Policy Project. He's kind of one of the godfathers of drug policy reform. He's also way more on the left side of things. So it's funny.
The Koch brothers-- or Charles Koch has so much money that you can actually get paid by him to work at a left leaning criminal justice policy reform organization. So I'm kind of a centrist libertarian. And my main-- the main thing I care about is drug policy politically.
So I worked on that over the summer, and it was great.
JANET BISHOP: And just to place it in a time frame, this is 2008. ANDREW LIVINGSTON: No, no, 2012.
JANET BISHOP: Oh, 2012.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah so this is my senior of college. JANET BISHOP: Senior of college.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Graduated high school 2008. Graduated college in 2012. JANET BISHOP: OK.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: And so that summer was great. It was a lot of fun. Didn't write any very, very large papers. But met a bunch of cool people, actually Cassidy West, one of my colleagues here at Vicente Sederberg-- I was in the same summer program with. And helped to hire her here because I knew her and she was moving out here and has a master's in policy studies and public administration.
So that summer was really interesting. At the very end of that summer, I was just looking for a job, just constantly trying to apply for jobs and get something in drug policy, in politics, in Colorado or California where I could work on a campaign in some way.
JANET BISHOP: So to stop you there, you were already aware that you wanted to move out west. And why did you-- I think I know the answer to this question, but why did you pick Colorado?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: So I picked Colorado because Amendment 64 was going to happen in 2012. So I was graduating 2012 and in November they were going to vote. So with it already on the ballot, striking it very closely, and so I wanted to help out in some way. Get some job that's in some way connected.
So one of the things I was looking at was to do voter registration in either Washington or Colorado. And so I flew-- I got a job at the end of college with Colorado PIRG, the Colorado Public Interest Research Group. And PIRG is a national organization that does left leaning policy and political change.
And they also do a lot of voter registration on college campuses. So I thought if I'm going and I'm helping to register young kids to vote, most of those kids are probably going to vote for legalization. I'm going to be there by helping the campaign.
And they'll pay me. Right? So that's kind of what I did. I flew out here. I did that job for about a month and a half, and it was just awful.
The organization-- don't want to speak too badly of it-- but they have a lot of turnover amongst young people that come in. And it was the sort of culture that I was not willing to spend my weekends and my nights and devote my entire life. I had other friends outside of that
organization. And I wanted it to just be a job and not be my life. It was not what I wanted to do. JANET BISHOP: And you were based here in Denver.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: I was based here in Denver. Yeah, I was registering voters at DU, the University of Denver, the private school in Denver. And there was a bunch of other
organizations, too, that were also registering kids. And there aren't that many kids at DU. And I was not able to be open in public about supporting Amendment 64, because their board of COPIRG hadn't supported it. So I felt like I was tied a little bit.
JANET BISHOP: So you were registering voters. In your mind you were registering young voters who would vote yes on Amendment 64. But ostensibly for the purposes of Colorado PIRG-- you were not just, but just registering--
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: I was just registering voters.
Then I was, like, screw that. I'm quitting. So I quit. Because it was awful.
And I had some friends who worked on the Amendment 64 campaign. One individual, Shaleen Title, who's an awesome, awesome woman, a mentor of mine. Currently works in Boston. And she was working on the campaign. I knew her from Students for Sensible Drug Policy, because she was involved.
And I kind of knew who Brian was as well. And I pretty much just said, hey I'm showing up full time for the rest of the campaign. And that's what I did. I treated it like a job. I walked there every morning, got there around 9:00, 9:30.
JANET BISHOP: There being here?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: No. So we actually passed legalization. You might be able to see it through the window here. But it's across the way at-- I think it's 1177 Grant Street. We're now at 1244.
So that was the building we were in there. So I would walk there every morning and help the campaign and do calls and orchestrate events and build data lists and do canvassing, and things like that.
JANET BISHOP: Were you paid, or were you a volunteer?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: No. I was 100% volunteer. Maybe it was because I said that I was going to do it regardless. And they were, like, eh we don't need to pay you.
It was also because my roommate at the time-- an individual, Chris Wallace, who decided to quit his job about a week and a half before me, got a paid job, paid position. But I was fortunate enough to have parents that were willing to allow me to do this. And they saw it as an
investment. And I looked at it as an investment into my network. And that investment paid off really quick.
So after that passed in 2012 in November, I was kind of like what do I do next? I started
applying to some jobs. And then I was, like, I don't want to work in something else. This is like the craziest thing that's ever happened to me.
That night was insane. It was so, so euphoric. And I had only been doing this for about six years before then. Many people had been doing this for 30 years.
There's a picture of me-- which, shoot me an email. I'll try to send it to you-- it's got to be in there somewhere-- that was taken by-- must've been an ABC or PBS photographer. And it's just like the most ecstatic, guttural scream of a cheer. And it kind of encapsulated that night. It was pretty spectacular. So I--
JANET BISHOP: And were you at Quixote’s?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: No, well I was at Casselman’s. JANET BISHOP: Casselman’s.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Casselman’s was where the Amendment 64 celebration was on win night, on November in 2012.
JANET BISHOP: Did you have-- because to be clichéd, youth sometimes has expansive optimism that once you get older, that gets tempered. So I've heard some people say that they weren't necessarily sure that Amendment 64 was a slam dunk or a done deal. Were you fairly convinced that it was going to pass?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: About two weeks before, looking at all the polling I was about 80% sure. 60% to 80% sure. Maybe not even 80, 60% sure. Like two days, three days before, I was, like, 80% sure it was going to pass.
But throughout most of the campaign, I wasn't sure. I was in Denver most of the time. I was up in Ft. Collins a little bit, in Boulder a little bit. But Colorado is much larger than the liberal bastions of Boulder and Denver and college campuses and Ft. Collins. Right?
So many parts of the state I had not seen in the same way. And so I couldn't attest whether or not the whole population of Colorado supported it. But it turns out they did.
JANET BISHOP: And was-- just as an aside-- was this your first Colorado experience? Had you been to Colorado before?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: I'd been to Colorado before, coming out here going skiing. I started skiing at a very young age. As I said, my father's a trauma surgeon. He's part of an organization called Western Trauma Association. And it basically takes place at a big ski resort out west every single year. It's kind of a family-oriented trauma conference.
So the doctors have meetings in the morning and at night and everyone skis together during the day. So I had skied in places like Crested Butte and Steamboat before. I also love skiing. My favorite things are marijuana policy and skiing. So living in Colorado makes sense.
JANET BISHOP: It's like Reese's Peanut Butter. Chocolate-- ANDREW LIVINGSTON: I also love Reese's Peanut Butter. JANET BISHOP: Ah, chocolate and peanut butter.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah.
JANET BISHOP: Together again. So it's November 2012. Everybody's euphoric. Amendment 64 passes. Were you given a job here instantly?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: No. No. JANET BISHOP: So what happened?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: So I knew the guys here, which was great. I actually tried to start a side project business with some friends of mine that I knew through Students for Sensible Drug
Policy. And essentially it was some home cultivation grow technology, which I won't go into really great detail. Because I still want to do this as a business. Because no one's done it yet. And now I have more connections and business acumen, which I think I could make it a reality. But it was essentially a home grow technology integrated into an app, a phone app and things like that. That went pretty well for a while. But none of us had run businesses before, and we recognized relatively quickly that we were not going to be able to get the capital investment to make it into a reality.
So I kind of put that on the side and said, when I make this happen, I will give each of you a portion of this even if you don't do anything anymore. I said to all my friends, OK, I was the one who ran this. I'm closing it down. Everyone else started getting jobs after college. I'll let you know if and when we can make this a reality in the future.
And partially I did that because even though I didn't have a job, I started going to all the
Amendment 64 task force meetings. So this is kind of where I really started in what I do now-- or on my path to getting a job here. And so I went to-- I was friends with Christian and Josh and Brian Vicente-- the partners of this law firm. I was also very close with Art Way at the Drug Policy Alliance, and another individual, Harris Kenny, who used to be with the Reason Foundation.
And so what I did was I had three unpaid internships. And what I did is I-- JANET BISHOP: All at once?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: All at once. And what I did was-- this is how I structured it. I went to all the Amendment 64 task force meetings.
So the Amendment 64 task force was put forward by the governor, Governor Hickenlooper. And there was a big group of-- I think it was about 20 or so different individuals of which Christian was one of the members on that task force. And then there were like five different smaller task force. And they had dozens of meetings, probably almost 100 meetings, from December through February.
And I had a car and no job or so. And so I went to every single one of these meetings-- didn't miss one. I went to every single one of these and took notes and sent those typed notes-- transcripts and analysis-- to all three of those people. So it was really easy to have three internships, because I just would mass send it to everyone at once. And they knew that. But I kind of worked out of this office, because I recognize that when after Amendment 64 passed and we moved over here, that in order for me to keep up with these people, I had to be in their face all the time. So I was here. I worked up in the office up on the third floor in what we called then the legislative cave.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: They were enthralled to have me here. Because they saw that I was a hard worker from the campaign. And remember, no one has to pay me anything. Right?
If you have a smart, young kid who's willing to do free work for you, sure, keep him around. So that's what I did for a while. So I went through-- sent all of those. And I probably could have asked for some money.
My first time that I told Josh and Brian and Christian, I was like, OK, I'm going to try to like-- how do I negotiate you guys paying me? So I got them to pay me-- I think it was probably like $250, which is way lower than I should have asked for, to pull all of the Amendment 64 precinct level voter data and compile that in a way that we could assess how many people voted yes or no for Amendment 64 in specific cities.
What you may know is that that's not how it breaks down. Because cities can cover-- like Aurora-- can cover part of a couple different counties. And it's all counted on a county wide level. So it took way longer than I expected to do all that. But I'm pretty good at Excel.
And so I accumulated all that data. And so they paid me some money to do that. But then I kept working for them and kept doing intern work.
I-- over time kind of then turned that so-- worked with Christian when the legislative process was going. And so I was kind of his right hand man reading all of the different edits and providing analysis on that. Because he knew by that time that I knew how to read, actually write, and analyze legislation.
Oh, I also in addition to working here, I actually did sometimes also work at Drug Policy Alliance in their offices.
JANET BISHOP: In Denver.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: In Denver. Yeah they have one-- it's like on York Street.
JANET BISHOP: And Drug Policy Alliance-- is it focused principally on marijuana cannabis? ANDREW LIVINGSTON: No. They're an international organization, primarily US based, but international organization that does criminal justice reform and drug-- they fight to end the drug war. They're a lot more social justice and correcting social inequities in our drug war. So they have a big international reform conference every year, and it's not industry based. It's all really movement. And I kind of came from that movement.
JANET BISHOP: And so we're up to about 2013? ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah.
JANET BISHOP: So how did you become a permanent paid fixture?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: How did I become the first full time, non-previously administrative, non-lawyer at the top law firm for cannabis in the country?
JANET BISHOP: Yes. Yes. You put the words in my mouth. Yes, thank you.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: So here's what you do, kids, those who are reading this. You keep working for someone until you are indispensable. And then you tell them you need to get paid. And they will say, yes, we need to pay you.
I essentially just kept working for them and then started doing-- Brian and others started actually giving me client work, which like--
JANET BISHOP: And what sort of client work were you doing?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Just like regulatory analysis stuff, some compiling this or that, research. And I billed for the client work, because they wanted to bill that to the client. And so I was actually getting some money, but it wasn't enough. But it was probably about-- from starting to work on the campaign to getting more full time-- was about eight or nine months.
So I kept working. So I probably started getting a more frequent paycheck at around, like, the summer of 2013 and became fully, contractually employed at the beginning of the fall of 2013. JANET BISHOP: And your parents continued to be very supportive.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah, so I would say they were able to keep me alive during that point. And they looked at it as I'm working full time. I'm doing something. I'm not getting, quote, "paid" yet. But they saw it as my investment year to building my career. They saw-- if they asked me what I did, I did this and this and this and all this sort of stuff.
I was helping to give tours. I still remember. I helped during the fall of 2013 when the International Drug Policy Alliance conference was in Denver. I helped to get some tours to a bunch of officials from Uruguay as well as Canada with the people in Department of Revenue. I was at meetings. Everyone probably thought I was a full time employee for a while. And they also keep continuing to think I'm a lawyer, but I'm not a lawyer.
JANET BISHOP: Young whiz kid lawyer.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm actually too young for that. And so like after a point in time, by the time I asked them to pay me full time, they were like, yes. We probably should have done this earlier.
And then in like two or three months later, when I was, like, you guys need to double my salary to something normal, they said, yes we do. And they did it.
Yeah, it was kind of like I just kept working, kept doing stuff. They kept throwing things to me. I started up a lot of the compliance things here. I did all of the regulatory analysis in 2013.
JANET BISHOP: By regulatory analysis and compliance, explain a little bit.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: So not only was a new law passed, but about 200 pages of regulation were newly passed. And businesses needed to know how to comply with these laws and new regulations. And I was the one who read all of them constantly. So people would ask me, can I do this? Can I not do this?
And I always kind of had a lawyer over me to a certain extent. But I was a non-lawyer helping to navigate people through the complicated legal path that now is legalization. But my real kind of basis and what I'm best at is economic analysis.
And so just by clients asking and doing more and more and tracking all of the data, I really founded the economic analysis and market analysis division-- it's mainly just me-- in this law firm. And I'm now kind of I guess one of-- it's weird to say this-- one of the preeminent marijuana market analysts in the country.
JANET BISHOP: Back to NPR'S Marketplace.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah. Back to Marketplace. JANET BISHOP: Back to Marketplace.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Hope to be on Marketplace one time. I think it might happen. But gotta try to get in contact with Kai Ryssdal also.
JANET BISHOP: By the time we transcribe this oral history, it will happen. ANDREW LIVINGSTON: OK. It might take a while.
JANET BISHOP: So by economic analysis, do you do it for the state, for-- ANDREW LIVINGSTON: For clients.
JANET BISHOP: Who want to go into the industry?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah people that are already in the industry or want to go into the industry. So I'll look at new markets whether or not it's a place like Hawaii or Massachusetts or Maryland. And I'll do demand projections and look at their patient base.
I did the epidemiological analysis, which is to determine how many patients there are of certain of the qualifying conditions for both of our winning clients in New York and Florida. So I do a lot of that. I'm also very close and work with an individual, Adam Orens, who is the one who does all the market analysis for the state of Colorado. He's the one who does the state contracts. JANET BISHOP: And are you doing market analysis just for medical marijuana or--
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: No. Medical and adult use. JANET BISHOP: OK. All right.
And then for-- as you say, adult use or recreational marijuana, would it be-- what would you be doing for clients? Looking at the demand?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yes, so this is kind of funny. So most of the studies I use are from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health from the NSDUH studies, which is a study that's been put out by SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, for decades. And so the NSDUH-- National Survey on Drug Use and Health-- tries to understand trends in drug use and drug abuse of all different sorts, from tobacco and alcohol to inhalants and methamphetamine and heroin. And the same studies you use to track how problematic drug use is and how much people are smoking marijuana, you learn to figure out how much demand there is for marijuana.
Granted now, people are not always honest on these surveys. But there's a long length of studies of these analyses for looking at demand. Primarily that's been done by the Rand Corporation out of California and Beau Kilmer, who is an excellent, excellent researcher, as well as some of his colleagues-- Jonathan Caulkins, Angela Hawkens, Rosalie Pacula-- and really the individuals from Rand, Mark Kleiman who has been studying drug policy for a long time. And these were a lot of people I read in college and others. So I kind of knew what to look for. I knew how to do this analysis. I have an economics background from my major there, so I knew how to
understand markets.
You figure out how many past-month marijuana consumers there are in a state, figure out if they're certain age brackets, how many past year consumers there are, the frequency of use, the volume of use, market value of-- you can figure out what the demand looks like.
JANET BISHOP: Gotcha. Thank you. So I'm going to-- I haven't really looked at my questions for a while. And I think actually we can--
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Probably have to keep going to work. I can keep talking with you for a while, but bosses might get mad at me.
JANET BISHOP: If you have 15 more minutes, I have about 15 minutes’ worth of questions. ANDREW LIVINGSTON: OK let's cut it off at 15 then.
JANET BISHOP: Cut off at 15. So hopefully we can do this. I'm just looking at the last four questions I have. You're new to Colorado, so I'm not sure if you can answer-- and Andrew’s taking a water break.
Do you think even as a relative newcomer to Colorado-- do you think there were unique elements in the state that made Amendment 64 successful in Colorado?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Absolutely. JANET BISHOP: And what were they?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: So I came from New Jersey. I was constantly-- and still today-- amazed by how not corrupt your state institutions are and your bureaucracy in Colorado. Now, you may look at it and go, oh it's still corrupt. Go to New Jersey.
I was astonished that a governor that was opposed-- his people who ran the Department of Revenue, Barbara Brohl, who is amazing. Barbara Brohl-- if you have ever met Barbara Brohl, the head of Department of Revenue.
JANET BISHOP: Not yet.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: She's amazing and really you need to interview her as part of this oral history. Because she was at the helm. So Barbara Brohl and Jack Finlaw, the governor's chief legal counsel, were the two ones who ran the Amendment 64 task force. And they thoroughly wanted to see this succeed, even though Governor Hickenlooper was maybe tepid about whether he wanted it to succeed and didn't want it to pass.
But they were not for or against marijuana, but the voters wanted to pass this. And we want to make it work. If that happened in New Jersey-- and it did with medical marijuana being passed-- Governor Christie would say, nope, I want this to fail. Because it's a difference in-- well one, he's probably not the best example because he's more so on the political side of politics. Let's just keep it to that.
But it was just the desire to bring stakeholders together and to come to a common ground and make things pass and work even if people didn't agree with the premise was astounding. And the good faith effort that was put forward by government officials across the state in all different organizations to make this happen was really what made this work so well.
What Christian will probably talk about-- and he probably had talked about-- is that the Colorado model is one of stakeholder processes and collaboration. And that's why Colorado is successful. Because when Washington did this, they had public forums and they had lots of people from the public come and shout about how they hated marijuana, or how they hated marijuana over-regulation, and how this should be a free and open market. And anyone should be able to grow. And licenses should be available.
And they got nothing done from anyone. Because they didn't have kind of this stakeholder
process in which there were representatives of different interest groups. And the groundwork was set in which if you're here to re-litigate Amendment 64 or to shout about how there shouldn't be any regulation at all, you are going to be either kicked off the working group or not listened to. And that set the groundwork for what has now become a successful rollout.
And what will be successful in other states or not successful in other states is whether or not they implement a similar sort of collaborative process. Most states won't. The reason they won't is because they care more about providing political favors to the people who help to run their campaigns and give them money than they do in Colorado. Because the reason this is more corrupt in a state like Illinois or Florida or Massachusetts than it is in Colorado, it's because those states are more corrupt. Their cultures are more corrupt.
And because this is a highly regulated product, the initial giving out of those limited licenses is going to have a corrupting influence going forward.
JANET BISHOP: So that may point to the recent unsuccessful bid in Ohio to pass similar-- ANDREW LIVINGSTON: That really demonstrates the height of corruption, which is individuals seeing that they can make a lot of money from this. And so they don't really care about the movement. They don't care about the underlying causes. They don't care about the people who allowed them to get to the point where now a marijuana campaign is possible. And they looked at this, and they said, OK, we can get as much money as possible.
JANET BISHOP: And that was limiting production to 10.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yeah. But in other states like New York, there's only five licenses. In a place like Minnesota, there's only two. That's like, Florida there's only five.
JANET BISHOP: Within the whole entire state? So these are large-- forgive me-- mega farms? Mega production areas?
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: Yes, they are large farms. But also most of these markets are very small, because they have a very limited number of qualifying conditions.
JANET BISHOP: And this is for medical marijuana.
ANDREW LIVINGSTON: It's for medical. And so the business people who go into them recognize that they want to get a foothold, so when it opens up to a wider medical program or to full legalization, that they'll be able to make a lot of money. Because they think that they'll have a-- it'll be open up to legalization. And they'll only be five businesses. And they'll be able to rake in millions.
JANET BISHOP: So mindful of time, I'm going to skip over a couple of my last questions. But what do you think is most important for marijuana legislation in the next 10 years? I'm giving
