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

by Johann Hari

Arnold Rothstein was a psychopath. He found it easy to play the role prohibition had handed him as the amoral terrorizer. Chino said to me one afternoon: “I’m pretty sure people will read this and think, damn, Chino had borderline sociopathic tendencies.” But as he tried to play the role prohibition required of him, Chino found something awkward and unwanted breaking through. It disrupted his ability to carry out his function in the drug delivery chain. It was empathy. One day, the mother of one of his crew approached them and asked to buy crack. Chino recalls: “Seeing the look in my boy’s face when his mom came to buy from us . . . It wasn’t like a look of embarrassment. It was a look of hurt. Sometimes you can see the hurt on somebody.” He said later: “It’s hard to not feel compassion for somebody . . . We are born with compassion . . . What breaks loose is my ability to feel not just what’s happening to me, but what is happening to someone else.” They sold her the crack. But it’s hard to be Arnold Rothstein with a conscience. The more the pain of what he was doing intruded into his consciousness, the more he jabbed it away with violence, or drugs. Chino wasn’t a psychopath, but the prohibition system we have created required him to be one to play his role in it. So he drugged himself into psychosis.