Daniel Williams was born in 1950 and raised in the small Ohio town of Fairborn. His first eight years of education by Catholic nuns left him no worse for the wear, and he graduated from Fairborn High School in 1968.

He went to Ohio State University that same year with the single intent of becoming an Air Force fighter pilot. Anti-war sentiment at that time was raging, and walking the campus three days a week wearing his Air Force dress blues gave Daniel a healthy skepticism of the “he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother” mantra. Passing the Air Force Officers Qualification Test and the initial pilot/nav physical, Daniel was rated pilot-qualified. Knowing he would spend his entire career in the Air Force, Daniel opted-out of his last two years in ROTC, deciding to spend them as a civilian.

In the summer of 1971, at a party for a friend just accepted to medical school, Daniel was arrested for the simple possession of marijuana. That queered his deal with the Air Force. To understand how that fogged his thinking, Daniel decided to become a lawyer. But a second drug arrest less than nine months later, during his senior year at OSU, forced Daniel to drop out of college. He never returned.

Both drug arrests were thrown out of court “with prejudice,” legalese for it all never really happened. But the process took over two years, time Daniel spent figuring out what to do next and watching the Senate Watergate hearings from gavel to gavel. Within 90 days of Richard Nixon’s resignation Daniel enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he was awarded the American Spirit Honor Medal for leadership. He completed his duty at a remote nuclear missile site in what was then West Germany.

Upon his honorable discharge in 1976, Daniel entered the consumer electronics business, working first in sales and then solely in management. In 1987 he moved to Florida where he became the third employee in a start-up that built, operated and then sold two very successful regional cellular telephone companies. Daniel retired in 1995 to focus full time on drug policy reform.

Daniel is the author of The Naked Truth About Drugs, and ran unsuccessfully for the 2008 Libertarian Party vice-presidential nomination. He has been a guest speaker at drug policy conferences and on a number of college campuses.

Married for 22 years to a very understanding woman, Melissa, they both reside in Southwest Florida. And Bahama, their 11-year old Lab, pretty much runs the show.