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

by Johann Hari

You have that on both legs and your body’s not strong enough—it’ll cut right through. You had situations where people were walking and their legs snapped.” They often looked like survivors of a war, with amputated limbs and flesh that looked charred and scarred. The addicts on prescriptions, by contrast, looked like the nurses, or the receptionists, or John himself. You couldn’t tell them apart. Harry Anslinger thought this contamination of drugs was a good thing, because it would discourage people from using. By 1942, he was boasting: “The addict is now using heroin which is over 99 percent adulterated.” But Allan Parry saw the effects in this clinic. “These shitty drugs—when you try to inject them they block up [your veins] and they really make a mess of you,” he tells me. “The trouble is, with dirty heroin, one vein more or less goes with one hit.”