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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Johann Hari
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January 31 - February 27, 2019
Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger believed in. It is improvised, and relaxed, and free-form. It follows its own rhythm. Worst of all, it is a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean, and African echoes, all mating on American shores. To Anslinger, this was musical anarchy, and evidence of a recurrence of the primitive impulses that lurk in black people, waiting to emerge. “It sounded,” his internal memos said, “like the jungles in the dead of night.” Another memo warned that “unbelievably ancient indecent rites of the East Indies are resurrected” in this black man’s
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The main reason given for banning drugs—the reason obsessing the men who launched this war—was that the blacks, Mexicans, and Chinese were using these chemicals, forgetting their place, and menacing white people.
[The lawmakers] must have known that their Edict, if enforced, was the clear equivalent of an order to create an illicit drug industry.
When the Harrison Act banning heroin and cocaine was written in 1914, it contained a very clear and deliberately designed loophole. It said that doctors, vets, and dentists had the right to continue giving out these drugs as they saw fit—and that addicts should be dealt with compassionately in this way.
Thailand, for example, flatly refused to ban opium smoking, on the grounds that it was a long-standing tradition in their country, and less harmful than prohibition.
It’s hard to sit with a complex problem, such as the human urge to get intoxicated, and accept that it will always be with us, and will always cause some problems (as well as some pleasures).
Franklin Roosevelt—desperate for new sources of tax revenue—would make it legal again in 1933.
by the mid-1920s, Rothstein and his new species of New York gang controlled the entire trade in heroin and cocaine on the Eastern seaboard of the United States.
Arnold Rothstein is the start of a lineup of criminals that runs through the Crips and the Bloods and Pablo Escobar to Chapo Guzman—each more vicious because he was strong enough to kill the last. As Harry Anslinger wrote in 1961: “One group rose to power over the corpses of another.” It is Darwinian evolution armed with a machine gun and a baggie of crack.
These child soldiers lived in a mental landscape they constructed from scraps of TV cartoons, hip-hop, and a policy decision that handed them a crucial place on the delivery line for one of the biggest industries in the world.
“drug-related” in New York City in 1986. It turned out 7.5 percent of the killings took place after a person took drugs and their behavior seemed to change. Some 2 percent were the result of addicts trying to steal to feed their habit and it going wrong. And more than three quarters—the vast majority—were like Chino’s attacks. They weren’t caused by drugs, any more than Al Capone’s killings were caused by alcohol. They were, Goldstein showed, caused by prohibition.
Just as her mother had abandoned her, Deborah immediately abandoned Chino—and the same Mrs. Hardin, now in her sixties, took in the baby and raised him, too, as her own.
Indeed, the people who tried to get Deborah and all the users like her clean needles were threatened with arrest.
Bloods were a gang who originated on the West Coast out of the wreckage of the Black Panther Party and its revolutionary goals.
I went into her cell and started talking to her.
Was this a women’s prison? Could inmates just walk around and chat with other inmates in their cells???
The officer was especially incensed when Chino started going out with one of the most beautiful women on the island, a stripper who I will call—to protect her identity—Dee.
Going out? What is “the island”? Rikers?
[by his grandmother],
Mrs. Hardin
Maybe she would have dealt with her trauma as a patient, like she should’ve. Maybe I wouldn’t have been a product of rape.”
Does he mean his mother should have had an abortion rather than having given birth to him?
I don’t have much goodness to reflect on. The only thing I can say is that—she could’ve had an abortion. I was a rape baby . . . She chose to bring me into the world. That speaks to a lot.
But on I-95, Leigh began to see the act of pulling over a car to search it in a new way. Once, she saw this scene as a soldier in a just war approaching the enemy. Now she sees it as a meeting of people who are surrounded by ghosts. As he approaches the car, the police officer has ranged behind him the ghosts of all the cops he has known, “all the funerals he’s been to, all the people who’ve been killed in traffic stops—because it’s a lot,” she says. And then “there’s also this poor black kid” in the car. Sitting in the passenger seats behind him are his ghosts—all of his relatives and friends
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once you have been busted for a drug offense—at fifteen or seventeen or twenty—you are virtually unemployable for the rest of your life. You will never work again. You will be barred from receiving student loans. You will be evicted from public housing. You will be barred from even visiting public housing. “Say
watched as Chino and Leigh tried to be Anslinger and Rothstein, and failed—but I kept hearing about people across the world who had in fact succeeded in becoming these founding fathers, and then went further than they ever dreamed.
Does this make sense?
That’s what everybody’s fighting for: that I-35.” If your cartel controls that interstate highway, you control the flow of billions of dollars.
Gabriel had eyeballs tattooed on his eyelids, so it looked as if he was always awake, always watching.
Harry Anslinger himself wrote in the 1960s: “Prohibition, conceived as a moral attempt to improve the American way of life, would ultimately cast the nation into a turmoil. One cannot help but think in retrospect that Prohibition, by depriving Americans of their ‘vices,’ only created the avenues through which organized crime gained its firm foothold.”
Only 10 percent of drug users have a problem with their substance. Some 90 percent of people who use a drug—the overwhelming majority—are not harmed by it. This figure comes not from a pro-legalization group, but from the United Nations Office on Drug Control, the global coordinator of the drug war.
The annual ritual in the Temple at Eleusis, eighteen kilometers northwest of Athens, was a drug party on a vast scale. It happened every year for two thousand years, and anybody who spoke the Greek language was free to come.
Gabor heard a variant of this story over and over again. The addicts had been made to feel disgusting and ashamed all their lives—and only the drug took this sense away. “The
Gabor came to suspect that it means, as he told me, “nothing is addictive in itself. It’s always a combination of a potentially addictive substance or behavior and a susceptible individual.
Do other scientific studies agree with Gabor’s conclusion?
It turned out the kids whose parents had been either indifferent or cruel were dramatically more likely to heavily use drugs than the others. They had grown up, they found, less able to form loving relationships, and so they felt more angry and distressed and impulsive a lot of the time.
Gabor says that since child neglect and abuse is a major cause of addiction, if we were serious about reducing the number of addicts, we would start “at the first prenatal visit, because already the stresses on the pregnant woman will have an impact on the potentially addictive propensity of the child.”
The real pain of withdrawal is the return of all the psychological pain that you were trying to put to sleep with heroin in the first place.
Bruce came to believe, as he put it, that “today’s flood of addiction is occurring because our hyperindividualistic, frantic, crisis-ridden society makes most people feel social[ly] or culturally isolated. Chronic isolation causes people to look for relief. They find temporary relief in addiction . . . because [it] allows them to escape their feelings, to deaden their senses—and to experience an addictive lifestyle as a substitute for a full life.”
“Human beings only become addicted when they cannot find anything better to live for and when they desperately need to fill the emptiness that threatens to destroy them,” Bruce explained in a lecture in London in 2011.
Unless we learn the lesson of Rat Park, Bruce says we will face a worse problem than the drug war. We will find ourselves on a planet trashed by the manic consumption that is, today, our deepest and most destructive addiction.
Physical dependence occurs when your body has become hooked on a chemical, and you will experience some withdrawal symptoms if you stop—I
But addiction is different. Addiction is the psychological state of feeling you need the drug to give you the sensation of feeling calmer, or manic, or numbed, or whatever it does for you.
Ethan Nadelmann, one of the leading drug reformers in the United States, had explained: “People overdose because [under prohibition] they don’t know if the heroin is 1 percent or 40 percent .
Bud managed—after a lot of arguing and lobbying—to get some small funding for VANDU from the health board, over the protests of Mayor Owen, and the group’s members voted for a detailed agenda. Their first demand was simple: establish a safe, monitored place where people could go to inject their drugs. That would mean they would live, and not die.
Because of the uprising by VANDU, and a conservative mayor who listened to the facts, opened his heart, and changed his mind, Vancouver now has the most progressive drug policies on the North American continent.
The British government, unsure of how to proceed, appointed a man called Sir Humphrey Rolleston, a baronet and president of the Royal College of Physicians, to decide what our policy should be. After taking a great deal of evidence, he became convinced that the doctors were right: “Relapse,” he found, “sooner or later, appears to be the rule, and permanent cure the exception.” So he insisted that doctors be left the leeway to prescribe heroin or not, as they saw fit.
In private, however, he worked hard to shut down the British system. In 1956, the British health secretary told the House of Commons that, under pressure from the United States, he was going to have to cut off the manufacture of heroin.
I.e. Anslinger.
All doctors agree that medically pure heroin, injected using clean needles, does not produce these problems. Under prohibition, criminals cut their drugs with whatever similar-looking powders they can find, so they can sell more batches and make more cash.
Most addicts will simply stop, whether they are given treatment or not, provided prohibition doesn’t kill them first. They usually do so after around ten years of use.
Oxycontin and Vicodin addictions are indeed spreading in the United States, and they are causing more criminality and overdose. The cause, everyone seems to agree, is that doctors have prescribed the drugs too freely.
Nobody, she explained to me, swallows 80 mg of Oxycontin prescribed by their doctor and goes out to commit a crime, or dies of an overdose. No: it’s when the doctor realizes the patient is an addict and cuts them off that all the trouble begins.
Then the legal routes to the drug were cut off—and all the problems we associate with drug addiction began: criminality, prostitution, violence.
Why did the prescription drug crisis radically accelerate in the past decade? There are two possible explanations. The first is the only one any of us have ever heard. It says that doctors—urged on by the greed of Big Pharma—have been handing out these legal opiates for conditions such as back pain without properly warning their patients about the risk of addiction, and as a result, lots of people are becoming accidentally addicted.
Has anything happened in the United States in the past decade that could be the deep driver of the prescription drug crisis? It’s not hard to find the answer. The American middle class had been painfully crumbling even before the Great Crash produced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Ordinary Americans are finding themselves flooded with stress and fear. That, Bruce’s theory suggests, is why they are leaning more and more heavily on Oxycontin and Vicodin to numb their pain.
But if no mild intoxicants are available, plenty of people will use a more extreme intoxicant, because it’s better than nothing. Prohibition always narrows the market to the most potent possible substance.
