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

by Johann Hari

their world of factual claims, saying: “I challenge you to name one doctor who has reported a beneficial effect of marijuana, outside of the backward areas of the world.” He was immediately answered with names: Dr. Lloyd J. Thompson, professor of psychiatry at Bowman Gray School of Medicine, and George T. Stocking, one of Britain’s leading psychiatrists. Again, Anslinger had no response. This kept happening in a strange fox-trot of debunking. Anslinger asserted; the experts rebutted; Anslinger fell silent.

As I sat amid boxes and boxes of Harry’s papers—all that remains of him, except for a global war—I found something sad about this scene. He was clearly an old man in pain, both from the angina he had developed and from no longer having the power to silence this conversation. Still, he tried, raising the rhetorical stakes to claim that the people who disagree with him will cause the death of America: “History is strewn,” he said, “with the bones of nations that have tolerated moral laxity and hedonism.” Dr. Fort looked over at Anslinger’s vast bald head and replied. “You have led this country to treat scientific questions,” he said, “the way such matters were handled in the Middle Ages.”

It was the height of the Jazz Age, and Arnold Rothstein was the most feared man in New York City. After he had shaken down enough cash from people for the day, he would sit until long after dawn in Lindy’s, a café in the throng of Times Square, and orchestrate his network of fraud, theft, and extortion. At the tables around him were the members of the Manhattan underworld and overworld huddled together: actors and songwriters, boxers and their managers, columnists and Communists, cops and criminals. Carolyn said it was like a “water hole in the jungle where beasts of prey and their natural enemies gather under a very real, but invisible, flag of truce for refreshment.” On one of these nights,

Nobody could understand how Arnold got this way. His father—who had witnessed his toddler son standing over his sleeping brother with a knife—was one of the most beloved men in Manhattan’s Jewish community. Avraham Rothstein’s family had fled vicious anti-Jewish mobs in Russia for the Lower East Side in the 1880s;

“There are two million fools to one brainy man.” He was the brainy man, and he was going to get his due from the fools. And the Brain—as he now insisted on being called—soon discovered the greatest truth of gambling: the only way to win every time is to own the casino.

was used to rigging bets. “I knew my limitations when I was fifteen years old, and since that time I never played any game with a man I knew I couldn’t beat,” he said. At the racetrack, he would pay jockeys to throw the race, and gradually, year by year, he took this to a higher level. The bets got bigger and his winnings got more improbable, until he finally reached the biggest, most watched, most adrenaline-soaked game in America: the World Series. Fifty million Americans were following the result in 1919 when, against all the odds and every prediction, the Cincinnati Reds beat the far-and-away favorites, the White Sox. Long after the gasps were silent and the stadium was full only of echoes, the reason emerged: Rothstein had paid eight White Sox players to throw the match. All eight players were charged with fraud—and all were mysteriously acquitted.

man like Arnold Rothstein would always have been able to ferret out some criminal opportunity, but Arnold was handed two of the largest industries in America, tax-free. He immediately spotted that the prohibition of booze and drugs was the biggest lottery win for gangsters in history. There will always be large numbers of people who want to get drunk or high, and if they can’t do it legally, they will do it illegally. “Prohibition is going to last a long time and then one day it’ll be abandoned,”

Under prohibition, dealers were starting to discover, you can sell whatever crap you want: Who’s going to complain to the police that they were poisoned by your illicit booze? Outbreaks of mass alcohol poisoning spread across America: in one incident alone, five hundred people were permanently crippled in Wichita, Kansas. But the market for illegal alcohol would live on for thirteen years, and then Franklin Roosevelt—desperate for new sources of tax revenue—would make it legal again in 1933.

For his system to work, Rothstein had to invent the modern drug gang. There had been gangs in New York City for generations, but they were small-time hoodlums who spent most of their energy beating each other up. Arnold’s gangs were as disciplined as military units, and he made sure they had only one passion: the bottom line. That is how, 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.

We need to freeze the frame here for a moment, as Arnold stands by Times Square in the afternoon of the Jazz Age, looking for people who owe him money. At this moment, the heroin clinics are being shut down by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics across the United States. This is a hinge point in history. It is the moment when the control of drugs is transferred to the most dangerous people.

The World newspaper reported: “For every $1000 spent in purchasing opium, smuggling it into the country and dispensing it, those at the top of the pyramid collect $6000 or more in profit.” Arnold soon discovered that when you control the massive revenue offered by the drug industry, individual police and politicians are easy to buy. His profit margins were so vast he could outbid the salaries cops earned from the state.

Arnold tamed the police with an approach that, years later, would be distilled by his successors, the Mexican drug cartels, into a single elegant phrase: plata o plomo. Silver or lead. Take our bribe, or take a bullet.

He did to law enforcement what he did to the World Series: he turned it into a performance the watching public believed was real, when it was in fact a puppet show. Enough of the players on the field worked for him to guarantee his success every time. But no matter how rich he got, he lived exactly the same, eating at Lindy’s late into every night. There was only one luxury he allowed himself. He paid a dentist to remove every one of his teeth, and insert shiny white ones in their place.

Rothstein got in the deal up front, he kept. As I pieced together Arnold’s story in the shadow of the Capitol, I kept thinking of all the dry sociology studies I had been reading about the drug war—and they began to make sense. They explain that when a popular product is criminalized, it does not disappear. Instead, criminals start to control the supply and sale of the product. They have to get it into the country, transport it to where it’s wanted, and sell it on the street. At every stage, their product is vulnerable. If somebody comes along and steals it, they can’t go to the police or the courts to get it back. So they can only defend their property one way: by violence. But you don’t want to be having a shoot-out every day—that’s no way to run a business. So you have to establish a reputation: a reputation for being terrifying. People must believe that you are so violent and brutal that they are too afraid to even try to pick a fight with you. You can only establish that reputation with attention-grabbing acts of brutality.

Arnold came home every morning around five or six and immediately indulged his only addiction: glugging quarts of milk and eating trays of cakes in a frenzy. A giant leather screen hung in front of the windows to block the light. He woke at three in the afternoon and always groaned the same thing: “I don’t feel well.” He had a headache, or indigestion—his repressed way, perhaps, of dealing with what he must have known: that he could be killed at any moment.

The police didn’t want to investigate the murder—they didn’t want to lift the lid and unleash on themselves all the criminal and official forces swirling around Rothstein’s corpse. “It was as if no one, lawman or criminal wanted to be close to this murder in any way,” Rothstein’s biographer, Nick Tosches, wrote. Eventually, a rival gambler named George McManus was charged with the murder, but he was acquitted by the jury.

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.

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. And I was going to see that, like Rothstein, Harry Anslinger is reincarnated in ever-tougher forms, too. Before this war is over, his successors were going to be deploying gunships along the coasts of America, imprisoning more people than any other society in human history, and spraying poisons from the air across foreign countries thousands of miles away from home to kill their drug crops.

years later I traveled from city to city and realized I had come to understand these dynamics best through the stories of three people. One was trying to be Arnold Rothstein. One was trying to be Harry Anslinger. And one was sitting outside on her porch, playing with a doll.

knew that would seem strange to outsiders; how does becoming a gangster make you safe? But looking out over his block as a kid, he concluded that in East Flatbush, in the crosshairs of both the war on drugs and the war for drugs, you have to feed, or you will be food.

To protect this way of life, you have to be terrifying. As we learned under Rothstein, you can’t go to the police to protect your property or your trade. You have to defend it yourself, with guns and testosterone. If you ever crack and show some flicker of compassion, he tells me years later, “everybody’s going to fucking rob you . . . They’ll just move in on your turf, take over your block, do whatever they want to you. You have to be fucked up to survive in this fucked-up paradigm . . . You got to be violent to not have violence done to you . . . You set examples. You make examples out of people. Some of them are completely justified and called for. A lot of them are not.” So the crew shot at trees, shot in the air, killed animals. Sometimes Chino would shoot in the direction of people—rival crews he needed to scare shitless. He will tell me that his bullets never hit them. He will also tell me there are things he can never tell anyone. Sometimes the gun jammed and everyone else was too frightened to unjam it. Not Chino. “I would cock that bitch back,” he says, “let that bullet come out, put it back in the clip and put the clip back in.” Two of their rival gangs were called the Autobots and the Decepticons, after the Transformer toys that were popular at the time, and that they still played with. 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 lin...

Chino knew that this situation was potentially fatal for his crew and its reputation. If they could humiliate his number two, the next step would be to humiliate him and take his patch. He would be left with nothing. Carolyn Rothstein said about Arnold: “He never failed to fashion a punishment for the one who had offended against his omniscience.”

Slowly I began to see the patterns underlying it. When we hear about “drug-related violence,” we picture somebody getting high and killing people. We think the violence is the product of the drugs. But in fact, it turns out this is only a tiny sliver of the violence. The vast majority is like Chino’s violence—to establish, protect, and defend drug territory in an illegal market, and to build a name for being consistently terrifying so nobody tries to take your property or turf. Professor Paul Goldstein of the University of Illinois conducted a detailed study in which he and his team looked at every killing identified as “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 the war on alcohol created armed gangs fighting to control the booze trade, the war on drugs has created armed gangs fighting and killing to control the drug trade. The National Youth Gang Center has discovered that youth gangs like the Souls of Mischief are responsible for between 23 and 45 percent of all drugs sales in the United States.

He found out the answer when he was thirteen. He explained his confusion to his aunt, Rose, who then offered, coldly, a story. In 1980, Chino’s mother, Deborah, was raped by his father, Victor. Deborah was a black crack addict. Victor was a white NYPD officer, there to arrest her. So Chino is a child of the drug war in the purest sense. He was conceived on one of its battlefields. Chino had already known the vague

Deborah was abandoned by her biological mother in the hospital as soon as she was born—perhaps because her mother was herself a drug addict, soon to be sent to prison.

But the word in the family was that at some point in her adolescence, Deborah was kidnapped by a group of men and gang-raped. She was never quite the same again. Nobody seems to know the details of it, or when she started soothing the pain it caused with the jab of a needle and the numbing of heroin.

Deborah went into labor in a bar. Chino was born with a severe blood disorder, in a hospital a few blocks away from where Arnold Rothstein died. He weighed only a few pounds, and he had a thin layer of skin over his eyes. The doctors said this was the result of his mother’s drug use

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. She was a strict grandmother: she had grown up in a place and time when disobedient kids were told to go to the woods to find a branch to be beaten with. It was called “picking your switch.” But, at the same time, she was an old woman, and her powers to discipline, or to understand this new little child, were fading.

They hid out for days, not telling anyone where they were. It was a motel. The police arrived. They said they were looking “for Victor’s daughter.” All those years, it turned out, Victor had kept an eye on his child from a distance, and when he heard Chino had been kidnapped, his colleagues rallied to find the kid. Years later, Deborah snatched him again. When I spoke to him about it, Chino remembered playing in a dollhouse with a little girl and eating chips, when—suddenly—a woman Deborah owed money to took him by the hand to another room. Chino saw a blade with brass knuckles on it. It is only years later that Chino would realize where they were: in a crack house.

Deborah was the first person ever to punch Chino in the face. When he was twelve, Chino found his mother sleeping in a bush behind the house, and he was embarrassed and angered—anybody could see her, homeless, openly gay, filthy—and so he turned the hose on her. He figured he had enough time between Deborah getting up and him getting back into the house, but he miscalculated—so Deborah “lumps me up like Mike Tyson,” as he put it.

States, a new blood-borne disease was being uncovered. People were staggering into hospitals and collapsing. It was causing strange symptoms, as if it was a sudden, rapidly killing cancer. Scientists quickly realized the people in most danger were gay men and injecting drug users who shared needles. They recommended handing out clean needles as a matter of urgency. The Scottish city of Glasgow—which had a massive drug injection problem—became one of the first in the world to do this. As a result, fewer than 2 percent of their injectors became HIV positive. In New York City, they refused to do it. So by 1992, 50 percent of the city’s injectors were HIV positive—including Deborah.

Later that night, there was a call from the hospital. Chino and Mrs. Hardin went to see her. The body in the bed, stuffed with tubes, looked incomprehensible to Chino. Deborah’s tiny body had blown up as if she had already been filled with embalming fluid. Her face and hands were distended and misshapen. The nurses said Deborah had been trying to rob a woman on the bus, and when the police arrived to arrest her, they beat her. But her liver was already destroyed and she had water on the brain. Deborah would never wake up again. She was thirty-three years old. At the funeral, Deborah’s boyfriend sneered at Chino. “So,” he said, “you’ll cry for her now?” Not long after, Chino found his corner, and started selling his crack.

In this child prison, you could watch TV, watch TV, or watch TV. Oh—or you could play Spades. Chino remembers: “To say I felt alone would be an understatement. I felt like an animal . . . When you go to prison, the one thing you got to check at the door is not your wallet or your jewelry. It’s your humanity.” He was being taught, in stages, that life is a series of shakedowns and shoot-outs, punctuated by boredom. In prison, “being humane can get you fucking hurt . . . Simple shit like, [if] you’re home in the world and somebody knocks on your door and says, ‘Can I borrow some toothpaste, a cup of sugar?’ you’re like—why not? It’s fucking sugar. Who cares? Take the whole fucking thing . . . You don’t do that shit in jail . . . You can’t do that shit. That

them and not him? Gradually, Chino believed he had figured out what was really going on. Victor had come looking for him when he was a child. Victor had sent his colleagues to find him when he was kidnapped by Deborah. And now that he was a teenager, Victor was—Chino became convinced—still watching over him from a distance, getting his colleagues to “lose” his drug charges down the back of their filing cabinets.

Is this evidence of more police corruption—or does Chino want so much to believe that his rapist-father loves him, despite everything, that he is seeing his hand in the random glitches and failings of a bureaucratic criminal justice system?

But for Chino, in East Flatbush at fifteen, he was discovering newer and bolder crimes. Now that he had formed his crew to sell crack, they found they worked well together and could push it further: prohibition functioned for him as a gateway drug to robbery and assault. In prison, they were constantly learning about new crimes and new techniques and graduating from this university back onto the streets.

As Chino guided me through his world, I kept thinking about the parts of ghetto culture that seem irrational and bizarre to outsiders—the obsession with territory, the constant demand for “respect.” And I began to think maybe they are not so irrational. You have no recourse to the law to protect your most valuable pieces of property—your drug supply—so you have to make damn sure people show you respect and stay out of your territory. The demand for respect, I began to see, is the only way this economy can function. If enough of the local economy is run by these rules, they come to dominate the neighborhood, even the people who manage to stay out of the drug trade.

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.

That’s when a girl called L.A. approached Chino and told him he could be Blooded in—if he was prepared to work for it. Chino discovered the Bloods were a gang who originated on the West Coast out of the wreckage of the Black Panther Party and its revolutionary goals. The Bloods were “the bastards of the party,” a nickname so pervasive there’s even a movie with that title. To become a Blood he had to learn this history and all their ethical codes, which are written down like laws. You don’t steal from your supplier. You don’t drop a dime (that is, talk to the police) if you get caught. You don’t do fucked-up shit when you are flagging—that is, when you are wearing your official Blood colors. If you break these rules, there are very clear punishments, from lashes to death. Once he learned the codes, nine Bloodettes crowded into a cell to watch Chino take the oath. It began with the words: “Blood is 410 percent gangster.” Now he was Blooded, he had an extra layer of protection. From this day on, when he was locked up and severed from his crew, he had all the other crewless Bloods in the prison watching his back.

But neither the Bloods nor the discovery of love could protect him from the people who seemed, from where he was standing, to be the toughest gang of all—the corrections officers. On the Island, one officer, whenever he saw Chino, started taunting him—you want to be a man, he said, but you’ll never be a man.

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. (This is one of only three places where a name has been altered in this book; the other two are indicated in the text later.) He had learned to love with Nicole, and now it seemed to be coming more easily to him. He could do this. He could care. It incensed the officer. So one day he grabbed Dee, pulled her into a facilities cupboard, and fucked her. There was nothing Chino or Dee could do. I was skeptical about this story when Chino first related it to me, but then I started doing some digging. A few years after the incident Chino was describing, an in-depth investigation by the federal government into the complex where men are held found that there was a “deep-seated culture of violence” towards teenagers, with a “staggering” number of injuries. They didn’t look at the part of the prison complex where Chino was held, but said that these problems “may exist in equal measure” there.

couldn’t take it anymore.” He could feel Deborah’s fate waiting for him. He began to see “it’s like my mother was in a constant battle [with] her trauma, who she is, who she wants to be. All the time. Her demons were way deeper than drugs. Way deeper than prison. I don’t know what they were. They were her demons. I’m pretty sure I carry some from her, and now they’re mine.”

And so—flooded with feeling, violent torrents of feeling—he started to learn and read and think. He began to ask: Had his life been shaped by a policy decision that didn’t have to be made, and didn’t have to continue?

Chino was standing on a New York street corner once again, pacing nervously, and sweating a little. In front of him, there was a crowd of over a thousand people, and standing next to him was a member of the House of Representatives. We were in Foley Square, in lower Manhattan, on a spring day in 2012. Chino gave the word and everybody, including me, marched behind him to One Police Plaza,

He called this protest “a Tale of Two Cities.” Everybody gathered here knew the raw fact that drug use is evenly distributed throughout New York City—in fact, the evidence suggests white people are slightly more likely to use and sell drugs—but in his neighborhood there is crackdown, violence, and warfare, while in the richer, paler neighborhoods there is freedom and rehab for the few who fall through the cracks. Harry Anslinger’s priorities and prejudices are still in place. “Our communities are the one that are targeted,” he said to the crowd. “Our communities are the ones that are locked up and sent to bookings so that they”—he gestured toward police HQ—“can get overtime, because we know that it’s about money, because apparently if it don’t make dollars in New York City, it don’t make sense.”

Until he was twenty-one, Chino regarded the drug laws as a force of nature, as uncontrollable and irrevocable as the weather. But then gradually, in stages, over time, he uncovered something that was buried with Henry Smith Williams but keeps stubbornly rising in the minds of people—that, as he puts it, “there’s nothing natural about this.” The last time Chino got out of Rikers, he was surprised he had lived to be twenty-one. He didn’t expect it, nor did many of the people in his life. He was looking for a job that didn’t involve breaking rocks or flipping burgers when he heard about a summer internship at a local community group that was calling for an end to the seemingly inexorable building of prisons across New York State. He thought it was perfect for his girlfriend at the time, so he called up to get the details for her and started chatting to the staff on the phone—and they offered the internship to Chino on the spot.

On Chino’s block back in East Flatbush when he was a kid, there were no alcohol dealers selling Jack Daniel’s or Budweiser with a 9 mm Smith and Wesson at their side. Yet this happened—this exact process—when alcohol was prohibited in the 1920s. The government fought a war on alcohol, and this led inexorably to gangs tooling up, creating a culture of terror, and slaughtering as they went. I spent weeks reading over the histories of alcohol prohibition, and there it was—this story, repeating right through history. When the government war on alcohol stopped, the gangster war for alcohol stopped. All that violence—the violence produced by prohibition—ended. That’s why today, it is impossible to imagine gun-toting kids selling Heineken shooting kids on the next block for selling Corona Extra. The head of Budweiser does not send hit men to kill the head of Coors. Chino begins

As he explained this, I started to think of so much of the academic research I had been poring through. Professor Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University has shown that the murder rate has dramatically increased twice in U.S. history—and both times were during periods when prohibition was dramatically stepped up. The first is from 1920 to 1933, when alcohol was criminalized. The second is from 1970 to 1990, when the prohibition of drugs was dramatically escalated.

Professor Miron argues this is an underestimate. Take the drug trade away from criminals, he calculates, and it would reduce the homicide rate in the United States by between 25 and 75 percent.

But the role of the drug war went deeper into Chino’s story than that—to its very start. In the midst of all this violence—gang-on-gang, gang-on-police, police-on-gang, police-on-anyone-in-gang-areas—the rape of an addict like Deborah became something that passed unpunished. It was “not only normalized,” Chino said, “but accepted. And accepted in such an insidious way that it’s almost overlooked . . . There’s no level of humanity that it’s acceptable for these people to be treated” with. Instead, they are viewed “in this very degrading, almost animalistic way . . . It’s not just there’s no sense of justice—[there’s] no sense they need justice. They’re so far down on the human level that justice doesn’t even apply to them.