ROLLING STONE TALKS TO ROCKY

Writer 'High On S.L.' After Doing Story About Mayor

Salt Lake teenager and "Almost Famous" star Patrick Fugit and Mayor
Rocky Anderson have something in common: Both received a phone call
from Rolling Stone magazine, and both were almost speechless when it
came.

Fugit's fictional character William Miller, a teenage journalist, got
the call in the movie "Almost Famous." It started the character's
career as a rock 'n' roll journalist, a role that boosted Fugit's
acting career.

But Anderson got it in real life, from a journalist he already admired.

"I was especially excited that (Rolling Stone) sent Dan Baum,"
Anderson said. The mayor had read "Smoke and Mirrors: The War on
Drugs and the Politics of Failure," Baum's book on Drug Abuse
Resistance Education, or DARE, and other efforts to reduce drug abuse
in America.

"Rolling Stone called me and asked me to write a profile of the mayor
of Salt Lake City," said Baum, a free-lance contributor who lives in
Watsonville, Calif. "Now, at the time, I think Rolling Stone thought
of Salt Lake as a pretty conservative place," not someplace where the
city's top politician would drop the DARE program.

"I have since learned," Baum added, "that Utah is a conservative
place and Salt Lake City is its own place."

Baum flew here in early October. He interviewed the mayor, chief of
staff Deeda Seed, police and school district officials, students and
others who disagreed with Anderson's cancellation of DARE last July.
His article, headlined "Salt Lake City Drops DARE: Maverick Mayor
Rocky Anderson Calls the School Anti-Drug Program 'An Absolute
Fraud,' " appeared in the Nov. 23 issue.

"I didn't get my picture on the cover of Rolling Stone," lamented
Anderson. Actually, he suspected he wouldn't be able to compete with
Drew Barrymore, whose tattooed tummy did front the magazine. Seed,
however, said she made quite a few copies of the article about her
boss and distributed them to friends and associates.

Baum's article describes the mayor as "a boyish 49" who "made his
reputation as an ACLU-backed attorney suing the state prison and the
Salt Lake City police for brutality. . . . He supports gay marriage,
abortion rights and stronger gun control, and opposes the death
penalty. That someone of Anderson's politics leads the capital of one
of the most politically conservative states is not so anomalous: Salt
Lake City hasn't had a Republican mayor in 29 years."

Baum goes on to assert Anderson's position against DARE: "Parents
like it because, with its high profile, DARE makes it easy to believe
something is being done to keep kids off drugs. It has not been
shown, however, that the program actually works. A raft of
peer-reviewed studies, one spanning 10 years, have demonstrated that
current and former DARE students are as likely to use drugs as those
who never took the course."

DARE officials declined to be interviewed for Baum's story.

Last week, White House drug policy director Barry McCaffrey visited
Salt Lake City and met with the mayor. McCaffrey, long a DARE
advocate, urged Anderson to find a drug-prevention program to replace
DARE in schools, but the mayor has yet to agree with school district
officials about which programs will be most effective and most
practical. The McCaffrey-Anderson conference was productive,
according to the mayor, but the two men continue to disagree over the
best approach to the nation's drug problems.

Baum quotes Anderson in his article: "It would be preferable to keep
kids from doing drugs, but we're not going to do that in all cases.
For them we ought to do what we can to reduce the harm for everyone."

Back home in California, Baum says his picture of Salt Lake City has
been radically altered, due in large part to his meeting with
Anderson.

"He was well-informed and committed to his positions, without being
knee-jerk ideological," the author said. "He also has a refreshingly
unashamed attitude about the '60s. The tragedy has been that the
legacy of the '60s is either disparaged openly or shied away from.
Rocky takes the attitude that those ideals of peace, harmony and
tolerance aren't anything to shy away from. We should be proud of
them."

And out to dinner at the New Yorker restaurant, "Rocky was working
the room. He obviously loves his job."

"I came back high on Salt Lake," Baum added. He writes nonfiction
articles and books, including this year's acclaimed "Citizen Coors:
An American Dynasty." Now he says, "I'm thinking about writing a
novel with a Mormon theme. The Mormons are pretty fascinating . . .
and the political organization of the LDS Church is admirable. I told
my wife, 'Maybe we ought to move there. There are all these cool
people.' "