Tonia Winchester Character Analysis in Chasing the Scream

Tonia Winchester is the former prosecutor who led Washington state’s successful marijuana legalization campaign along the fellow lawyer Alison Holcomb. She focused on the harms of drug prohibition, which sustains racial inequality and ruins young people’s lives over victimless crimes. Unlike Mason Tvert’s arguments in Colorado, Hari believes that Winchester’s can also help persuade the public to legalize other drugs besides marijuana.

Tonia Winchester Character Timeline in Chasing the Scream

The timeline below shows where the character Tonia Winchester appears in Chasing the Scream. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.

Meanwhile, in Alaska, Tonia Winchester was going through a high-school antidrug campaign called DARE. She hated drugs, including marijuana, and... (full context)

Mason Tvert and Tonia Winchester attacked Harry Anslinger’s war on drugs from completely opposite angles. Tvert defended marijuana as a... (full context)

In Washington, Tonia Winchester avoided talking about marijuana itself and clarified that she wasn’t advocating actually smoking it. Instead,... (full context)

...the harms associated with its use. When they got their initiative on the state ballot, Winchester and her campaign co-leader Alison Holcomb realized that the changes they were pioneering could eventually... (full context)

...a century after Harry Anslinger used racist arguments to ban marijuana for the first time, Winchester used anti-racist arguments about creating a more equal legal system in order to legalize it.... (full context)

...about the drug (like Anslinger’s warning that marijuana turns people into psychotic killers). And Tonia Winchester agrees: she tells Hari how meeting marijuana users helped her overcome her prejudices about the... (full context)

When choosing between Tvert and Winchester’s approaches, there’s one more key question: which can be applied to other drugs besides marijuana?... (full context)

...“only-slightly-less-horrible harm.” In the future, Hari concludes, citizens and activists will determine whether Tvert or Winchester’s approach is more successful. (full context)