Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

by Johann Hari

was only a year after I first learned about this, on the streets of the deadliest city in the world, Ciudad Juárez, that I realized the significance of that moment. This was the bullet at the birth of drug prohibition, and nobody knows where it came from, even now. It is like the bullet that claimed the Archduke Ferdinand at the start of the First World War: the first shot in a global massacre. Rothstein’s domination of the East Coast drug trade shattered as that trigger was pulled—from that moment on, drug dealers would be engaged in a constant conflict to control the distribution of drugs. The drug war analyst Charles Bowden says there are in reality two drug wars going on: there is the war on drugs, where the state wages war on the users and addicts, and then there is the war for drugs, where the criminals fight each other to control the trade.