It had been more than a year since Ross had failed to make it onto The Amazing Race, but none of that mattered now. Life at Penn State was pretty spectacular, mostly because of the school clubs he had joined.
Drum group was bewitching (Ross had become so obsessed with drumming that he would play the instrument in his head while he lay in bed at night). And then there was the libertarian club, where Ross showed up for every single meeting and had, over the past year, immersed himself in every facet of libertarian political philosophy. He flew around the country to libertarian conferences to hear experts speak (the club paid his way). He also spent countless hours sitting in the Corner Room bar along College Avenue with Alex, the club’s president, and other members, discussing and honing his beliefs about the government’s role in society and how to reduce its unfair and often inhumane heavy-handedness.
While enthralling and stimulating, this was all coming at a price. Ross’s obsession with the clubs was having a negative effect on his schoolwork.
Though that wasn’t the only distraction in his life affecting his studies. There was also his now-girlfriend, Julia. The two lovebirds—it hadn’t taken long for the two to say “I love you”—spent almost every moment together. As this was going to be Julia’s first Christmas without her mother, he invited her to come to Austin for the holidays. Before they left, he snuck into his Penn State laboratory and created a crystal that he fashioned into a ring as a gift for her.
Ross appreciated that Julia would sit for hours and listen to him talk about his beliefs, including one of the topics of tonight’s debate, which Ross knew better than anyone: the reformation of the American drug laws. “Take your seats, please,” the professor managing the discussion croaked to the audience. “We’re about to begin.” Ross, in rare form with his tucked-in shirt, sat down at a desk next to two other College Libertarians. There were some brief introductions from the professor, and then the room fell quiet.
“It is not the government’s right to tell the people what they can and cannot put in their bodies,” Ross began, going on to explain that drugs—all drugs—should be legalized, as it would make society safer and people have a right to do what they want with their bodies.
There were only about forty people in the audience at the debate, and most were in attendance only because it earned them extra credit from their poli-sci professor. But Ross took the discussion as earnestly as if he were about to step in front of the U.S. Congress.
The College Republican responded to his arguments: “How can you legalize something that kills tens of thousands of people a year?” The College Democrat agreed.
Ross calmly countered, “So do you think we should outlaw Big Macs from McDonald’s too, because people gain weight and have heart attacks and die as a result of them?”
As was always the case with the drug debate, Ross’s opponents quickly grew flustered. They tried throwing arguments back at him, but there was nothing they could say that Ross didn’t have a retort for.
“And should we outlaw cars because people get into car accidents and die?” Ross pressed his opposition. He offered arguments defending people who smoked pot, and even those who took heroin in the privacy of their own homes, noting that they were no different from someone who has a glass of wine after work to relax.
As for the violence around drug sales, he argued that this savagery existed only because the government imposed such harsh and evil laws to try to deter the sale of drugs, and dealers had to employ nefarious means to protect themselves in the wars that erupted on the streets. “There are no gang wars over the sale of alcohol or Big Macs, because those are legal,” he continued. And on top of it all, he reasoned, if drugs were legalized, then they would eventually be sold in regulated form. Bad drugs, cut with rat poison or talcum powder, would disappear from the marketplace.
“It’s someone’s body and it belongs to them,” Ross said as he looked out at the audience. “And the government has no right to tell them what they can and cannot do with it.”
Ross knew in his heart that his arguments were sound and that he had thought through every aspect of the war on drugs. What wasn’t clear to him still, and what he kept asking himself in the hours between school, his extracurricular activities, and his girlfriend, was what he could do with those passionate beliefs to help change what he saw as the harmful and tyrannical drug laws in America.
Chapter 5
JARED’S KHAT
No.”
That was it. One word. A nonnegotiable syllable.
“No,” Jared said again.
His supervisor looked at him in disbelief, unsure if he had really just heard a rookie Customs and Border Protection officer refuse a direct order. (Yes, he had. He definitely had.) The peon—five-foot-nothing, twenty-six-year-old Jared Der-Yeghiayan—looked even younger than normal as he sat across from his older, rotund director—like a kid sitting in a principal’s office, his legs swinging back and forth in the chair, his feet never coming close to the floor.
Jared didn’t feel he had much to lose with the answer. Customs and Border Protection wasn’t exactly his dream job. He had ended up here only because he didn’t have a choice if he was going to pursue his dream of working in law enforcement. Either he continued to work in the movie theater down in Lincolnshire, or he could come to Chicago O’Hare and stamp people’s passports for a living.
Jared had tried to get into the Secret Service, his dreamiest dream job. But the examiner, an American-as-they-come questions-and-answers man, had probed Jared about his father, a sitting U.S. judge of Armenian extraction who had fled Syria during the genocide years earlier. At first Jared had answered politely, but few things could rile him up as much as doubts about his family’s allegiance to America. Needless to say, after a heated debate, he didn’t get the job.
Soon afterward, Jared had applied to the DEA, but he’d gotten into another overwrought debate with the polygraph tester over what constitutes a crime. He didn’t get that job either.
The U.S. Marshals Service, Department of Homeland Security, and Federal Bureau of Investigation all said no to Jared because he didn’t have a degree. He had dropped out of college after two weeks, with no patience for being judged by professors, and even less tolerance for the time their classes demanded. Besides, what was the point of four years of school when most of the people he knew who had gone through college still couldn’t get a “real” job? He walked off campus one afternoon and never went back.
At the behest of his father, Samuel, who had once run the agency overseeing Customs and Border Protection, Jared settled for the most monotonous government job, stamping passports day after day.