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

by Johann Hari

This is one reason why he now believes “we need to approach drug addiction not as a criminal justice situation but more as a public health situation.”

“In many ways, he was a victim as well,” he says carefully. “It’s rape . . . He had to be a victim at some level in [his] life to have the ability to commit such an atrocious act, or the inability to see it’s an atrocious act. I feel more sorry for him than angry. Do I think what he did was fucked up? Absolutely. But it’s kind of hard to contextualize that because as much as it’s fucked up, it produced me . . . Do I not want to be born? I want to be born. But not in such a horrible way.”

As I traveled from country to country, I started to realize that this story—of a street dealer—is only the story of the first layer of violence and criminality caused by transferring the drug trade into the illegal economy. Beyond Chino Hardin, there is another layer of gangsters controlling the neighborhood. Beyond them is a network of smugglers who transported the drugs from the U.S. border to New York. Beyond them is a mule who carried them across the border. Beyond them is a gang controlling the transit through Mexico, or Thailand, or Equatorial Guinea. Beyond them is a gang controlling the production in Colombia, or Afghanistan. Beyond them is a farmer growing the opium or coca. And at every level, there is a war on drugs, a war for drugs, and a culture of terror, all created by prohibition. I started to think of Chino, and all he has been through, as only one exploded and discarded shell, left behind on a global battlefield.

Arnold Rothstein dreamed of a New York City where the rule of law had been hollowed out and the only true rulers were criminals like him. He wanted to establish power by force, and buy the remaining broken slivers of the state piece by piece until he could use them, too, as weapons. He never got to realize his dream. His bullet hit too soon. But his dream did come to pass. I wanted

The impulse to repress, I suspected, had given birth to all this, but I wanted to see how.

In 2005, Rosalio Reta was at summer camp, like all the other American teenagers his age—a short Texan fifteen-year-old with spiky hair, nicknamed “Bart” because he looked like a less yellow Bart Simpson and loved to skateboard. He was also into the Power Rangers, alternative pop, and Nintendo 64, especially The Legend of Zelda and Donkey Kong. At camp in that particular year, he was learning useful skills, ones he would remember for the rest of his life. Except at this camp, you don’t learn how to canoe, or sing in a chorus, or make a log fire. He remembered the techniques he learned there well. Take beheading, for example. “There’s times I’ve seen it they’ve done it with a saw,” he told me through the prison glass. “Blood everywhere. When they start going they hit the jugular and—” he snaps his fingers—“[it’s] everywhere . . . They put the head right there. The head still moves, makes faces and everything. I think the nerves, you can see inside, the bone, everything’s moving. It’s like they’ve got worms. I’ve seen it move, when it’s on the ground. If he’s making a screaming face, it stays like that sometimes. Sometimes it slacks off.”

This camp was deep in the mountains of Mexico, and Rosalio was there for six months, slowly being turned into a human weapon. “They just teach you everything. Everything you learn at a military camp,” he says. “How to shoot, how to coordinate . . . All kinds of explosives, handguns, rifles, hand-to-hand combat.” The camp’s slogan is “If I retreat, kill me.” He used these skills to murder more people than he can count. He committed industrial killings, threw hand grenades into crowded nightclubs, and shot a man in front of his toddler son and pregnant wife.

A few years before his trip to camp, the United States government—determined to achieve Harry Anslinger’s mission of spreading the drug war to every country on earth—had decided to train an elite force within Mexico to win the war on drugs. The United States brought them to Fort Bragg to provide the best training, intelligence, and military equipment from America’s 7th Special Forces Group. Their motto was “Not even death will stop us.” Once it was over and they had learned all they could and received all the weapons they wanted, these expensively trained men went home and defected, en masse, to work for the Gulf Cartel. The...

Laredo is one of the poorest parts of the United States—a border town where, as he has said, “if you’re not a cop, you’re a drug dealer. If you’re not a drug dealer, you work for a cartel. That’s all there is down there.” He said another time: “A lot of people here [in the United States] want to be an attorney, a lawyer, a judge, a fire-fighter, a policeman. Over there [on the U.S.-Mexico border] they worship the Zetas. The little kids [say] ‘I want to be a Zeta when I grow up.’”

Here’s where the stories converge again. In both versions, the ranch was a typical Zeta workspace. There were about thirty people tied up. On one side, “they put them in an oil drum and they just burn them burn them burn them and there’s just ashes left.” On the other side, they were being “cut to pieces.” The Zetas usually torture members of other gangs, or anyone who irks them, to find out “safe houses, routes, who they work for . . . About what they do, who they working for, what is he doing?” before the killing starts. After they are dead, “they burn the bodies by [making] guiso [the Spanish word for stew]—throw ’em in there . . . and poke at the body until it dissolves.” This is where Rosalio carried

having been this close to being killed . . .” No, he says, he didn’t enjoy it. He started killing on that day because he realized that once he had seen the ranch, they wouldn’t let him walk away as a witness. He had to either die, or become a participant. From that moment on, “you’re forced to do what they want. You have to do it, whether you want it or not. You’re forced to do it. If you don’t do it, they kill you. It’s just plain and simple. You kill or you get killed.”

For long stretches, he was one of the paramilitary posse living with him in safe houses, by his side, killing on his orders. Treviño and his fellow Zetas refer to kids like Rosalio and Jesse and Gabriel by a name: the Expendables. “It happened so quick, since that first day. From there, everything went”—Rosalio makes a pppppft sound. “That’s when I knew I had stepped over the border already—I was in a different world.” He didn’t tell his parents, because he was convinced if he did, they would be killed. He didn’t tell anyone.

From day to day, “you never know what they’re going to do. They might want to torture somebody to death today, or they might drown him today, they might hang him today, or they’re going to cut him to pieces and burn him alive. You never know what they’re going to do. It depends what they feel like doing.” He added: “Everything was always the same. They killed people on a daily basis. There’s not a day that goes by [that] they don’t kill someone. That they don’t torture someone. That they don’t burn someone alive . . . That’s your daily routine. That’s what they do for a living.” When he was sent to kill a person, “I don’t know the person who was in front of me. I don’t know what they had done. Anything.” He just knew to make sure they died.

The cartels send messages written in human flesh. They have a system of signals known to everyone. If you betray the cartel, they’ll shoot you in the neck. If you talk too much, they’ll shoot you in the mouth. If you are a spy, they’ll shoot you in the ear. Each body is a billboard, advertising that your cartel is the most vicious. His friends, Jesse and Gabriel, started to work with him for the Zetas. He won’t say how this started, but the police investigation—and their subsequent fates—confirm their involvement is real. Did he introduce them? Did he bring them in? It’s not clear. But it was becoming obvious to everyone that, as he said, “it’s not a game anymore.”

couldn’t trust them,” he says. “I’d just stay to myself. You never know if one of them might try to kill you, from the back. I’ve seen it happen so many times. It’s a lot of people over there when you’re working for them, if somebody doesn’t like you, you at the wrong place, they sneak up on you and kill you. The same people you’re working with.” Everybody knew “all [Treviño] has to say is”—he snaps his fingers—“kill him. That’s all he has to do. Just give the order and I’m gone.” He called his mother every now and then to let her know he was still alive. He didn’t tell her what he was doing.

But in the midst of the terror, there were treats. “They were throwing around money, everything you wanted. Everything.” Treviño held raffles. He put everybody’s name in a cup, and the winner—Rosalio!—got a brand-new Mercedes. There were girls whenever you wanted them, and coke. Rosalio was paid $500 a week as a retainer, and much more for big hits: $375,000 for killing one of Chapo Guzman’s associates, at the age of fifteen. Forgetting his story about being forced from the start for a moment, Rosalio told me that when the treats began, “you didn’t have to do anything then and there. But once they lured you in, it was a trap.” Then he seemed to realize what he had said and added quickly that he was talking about his friends, but not himself: he was forced, he insists, he was forced.

Later, as I listened again and again to the recording of this interview, I found myself returning to the work of Philippe Bourgois, the French sociologist whose writing helped me to understand Chino’s story. Under prohibition, he explains, if you are the first to abandon a moral restraint, you gain a competitive advantage over your rivals, and get to control more of the drug market. So the Expendables are sent to butcher not just rival cartel members, but their relatives.

On a wiretap, a conversation between Rosalio and Gabriel was recorded. Gabriel described kidnapping two teenagers who were the cousins of a rival. “They died on their own from the beating,” he said. “They just died. They just died and shit. You should have been there. You should have seen Pancho, dude. He was crying like a faggot—‘No, man, I’m your friend.’ ‘What friend, you son of a bitch? Shut your mouth!’ And poom! I grabbed a fucking bottle and slash! I slit his whole fucking belly. And poom! He was bleeding. I grabbed a little cup and poom! The little cup! Poom! Poom! I filled it with blood and poom! . . . And then I went to the other faggot and slash! I slit him with the same thing.” Rosalio laughed. The local cops disposed of the bodies for Gabriel.

If you are the first to kill your rivals’ relatives, including their pregnant women, you get a brief competitive advantage: people are more scared of your cartel and they will cede more of the drug market to you. Then every cartel does it: it becomes part of standard practice. If you are the first to behead people, you get a brief competitive advantage. Then every cartel does it. If you are the first to behead people on camera and post it on YouTube, you get a brief competitive advantage. Then every cartel does it. If you are the first to mount people’s heads on pikes and display them in public, you gain a brief competitive advantage. Then every cartel does it. If you are the first to behead a person, cut off his face, and sew it onto a soccer ball, you get a brief competitive advantage. And on it goes.

Prohibition, Bourgois explains in his writing, creates a system in which the most insane and sadistic violence has a sane and functional logic. It is required. It is rewarded. In the midst of all this killing, Rosalio and his friends were never once worried about the police, or being caught by them. Why? Rosalio started to notice something strange about Treviño from the first day he worked for him. Carolyn Rothstein said that her husband Arnold would often argue that “probably the best job in public life for which he was fitted was that of Police Commissioner of New York.” Treviño has achieved it. Wherever they went in Mexico, Rosalio observed that the police worked for Treviño: “There’s no police now . . . Everything was under his control. Military. Police. Everything.” He bribed them—he drove everywhere with two million dollars in cash, in case any impromptu payments were necessary.

Treviño’s associates went right to the top of the Mexican state: “They might be working for the president by day, and by night they’re working for the cartels.”

Why have these drug gangs been able to capture Mexico, when drug gangs in the United States can’t? As I tried to understand this, I started to picture prohibited drugs as a river being redirected to wash across a town. If a river washes into a skyscraper, it might erode the walls and break some windows. But if it washes into a wooden house, it will wash it away entirely. In Mexico, the foundations of law and democracy are made of wood—it was governed by one semidictatorial party for seven decades until 2000,

in Juárez, it is believed that 60 to 70 percent of the economy runs on laundered drug money, while drug money represents a vastly smaller fraction of the U.S. economy. Nothing can withstand this force.

cartels’ sadism is unimaginably vicious, but it always has a purpose. If you simply go Jeffrey Dahmer on them, if you are spraying your sadism randomly instead of focusing it where they tell you to, that’s a distraction they don’t need and won’t tolerate.

the past, he had seen people get shot by rival gangs and then put out to pasture, allowed out of the life. So he said that in a moment of desperation, he decided, at the age of sixteen, to shoot himself. He pulled up his trouser leg and showed me the wound. It was large and angry. Some of the nerves were destroyed: he can’t feel much there. After pulling the trigger, he said, he shot himself with Novocain and cleaned the wound up, with the skills he had learned at the training camp. “I was missing a big old chunk of meat so I had somebody help me close it and I sewed it up the best I could. I cleaned it, took some antibiotics.” On the first day, he didn’t feel much. “But the second day—” He sucked his teeth. It didn’t work. “They made me sew my bullet wound up and nurse myself,” he said. Not long after, they sent him on another job, to the nightclub in Monterrey. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t kill anymore. He had had enough. “I was tired of that lifestyle,” he says. “I wanted to be left alone.” That, he says, is the reason they turned on him.

many people over the preceding three years. So he called the American police in Laredo and said he had information for them. He was back in the United States within forty-eight hours. “I didn’t want to die, I didn’t want my family to die, for a mistake that was made when I was thirteen years old,” he says. “I didn’t get caught. I turned myself in . . . Ain’t nobody caught me, no cops went into arrest me. I turned myself in. I just wanted all this to stop . . . I don’t want to live that life anymore. I couldn’t keep on going like that.” He made the right call. Years later, as court evidence, Rosalio would see the pictures of what Treviño’s men did to his best friend Jesse not long after Rosalio fled. “Holes everywhere. He got stabbed all over the place. Neck, head, face, chest, arms, all over his neck, face, and he had a hole right here in his head.” Rosalio looked genuinely moved when he described the images, perhaps for the first time in our conversation. “He was still a human being,” he says. “He was still my brother.” Rosalio is now serving

realize now, has a complex topography, where each wound or mess of scar tissue marks a different part of his life. His ripped flesh is a history of the drug war all by itself. He believes they tried to kill him because one of his victims was a member of their prison gang, and so they are obliged to avenge him. Now, for his own safety, he lives in “administrative segregation.” The guard tells me it “is kinda like solitary, except we don’t call it solitary.” Rosalio explained: “You’re in a room twenty-four seven. Can’t go out anywhere. There’s nothing I can do . . . Just in a single cell. By yourself. I’ve been like that for

me,” he said. He will probably live like this for the rest of his life, entombed from the rest of humanity. He is convinced the cartels could kill his family now. His family, and anyone who comes into contact with him.

that moment is true, and he was forced. I realize now I should have told him: It’s not that moment that sealed your fate. It’s the moment when the drug war was launched, long ago. I don’t know if he would have understood. Clearly, Rosalio was a disturbed adolescent, and would have been, whatever our drug policies. But it was the war for drugs that took his adolescent disturbance and gave him huge cash incentives to cultivate it, enlarge it, and live off it. It said: Murder, and we will shower you with money and cars and women. It gave him paramilitary training to carry out those murders as efficiently as possible. And it hollowed out the Mexican police force so he could continue those murders without fear of arrest.

A few months after I met Rosalio, when I was back in New York, it was reported in the international press that Miguel Treviño had risen, through slaughter, to become number one in the Zetas. And then, a few months after that, it was reported that Miguel Treviño had been captured by the Mexican police in Nuevo Laredo—almost certainly because they were paid by a rival drug gang to take him out. Nobody doubts that another gangster now controls the routes through Mexico into the United States, and nobody doubts he has a fresh batch of expendable child soldiers to defend him.

This neighborhood is the end of the line in the city at the end of the line of North America—the terminus of Terminal City. There is nowhere left on the continent to head after here. There are ghosts of what the Downtown Eastside used to be in the names of these buildings. On one street there is the Loggers’ Social Club, a reminder that this was once the place where workingmen would come after chopping down the forests. The logged trees would be placed on skids and dragged through here to be put on the train to travel across America, so this was known as Skid Row: the first and the original. The men would stay, flush with money, for a month or two of partying, and then vanish again.

“People in Vancouver talk about the Downtown Eastside the way that people throughout the Western world talk about Africa. Some call for apolitical charity and aid; others call for armed intervention. Everyone agrees it’s a problem to be dealt with, filled with people who are their own worst enemies and whose lives are a mess.” What good, people wondered, could a doctor do here? But Gabor gave up his practice as a family doctor and went to work with the Portland Hotel Society, a local charity that had begun an experiment that was regarded by the local drug warriors as insane. Routinely in this neighborhood—and across North America—the moment the authorities found out you were an addict, they would throw you out of public housing and cut you off from all social support. Get clean, they would say, or you will never have a home again. Often, even the homeless shelters would then turn you away.

“Our method is—be a human being with other human beings,” Liz tells me. “Be there for them. Don’t judge. Don’t tell them how to live their fricking life. Just be in their life. Be a nice, solid presence. Somebody who isn’t going to bow and bend . . . and walk away. Who’s not going to abandon them. Who’s not going to leave. Who’s not going to kick them out.” The almost universal reaction was that this is mad. Surely the addicts will just drink or drug themselves to death faster if you give them a place to do it, with no critical judgment? One doctor told Liz a better solution would be to drop a bomb on the Portland Hotel and kill everyone in it. But Gabor wanted to be part of this experiment. At the Portland, he was tasked by Liz with doing everything from lancing abscesses to prescribing psychiatric medications. But the core of his

Authority figures with questions have, to them, only ever been people who will take something away or inflict pain.

looked like ghoulish extras in a Fellini film. Alone in his office, he still felt judgmental at times. Why are they doing this to themselves? Why would somebody be so foolish? “I had a somewhat moralistic attitude towards them,” he says.

As he explains in his book, one of the residents who came to talk to Gabor, a thirty-six-year-old man named Carl, began over time to open up. He had spent his childhood shunted from one foster home to another, unwanted. When he got hyperactive, one set of foster parents tied him into a chair in a dark room. When he swore, they poured dishwashing liquid into his mouth. Carl learned from them that you can’t ever express your anger without being punished; so when he felt fury, he took out a knife and started cutting into his own foot. As Gabor wrote later, Carl revealed this in a shamed crouch: he expected to be condemned, just as everyone had always condemned him. 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 first time I did heroin,” one woman told him, “it felt like a warm, soft hug.”

What did they all have in common? Horribly disturbed childhoods, marked by violence, sexual assault, or both. Gabor was finding that virtually all his patients fit this description. And then it occurred to him. Could it be that these hard-core addicts were all terribly damaged before they found their drugs?

All over the Western world, people are being given very powerful opiates every day, legally. If you have been badly injured in a car crash, or had a hip replacement, or had significant dental surgery, you have probably been given opiates, perhaps for quite a long time. These are pretty much the same opiates taken by Gabor’s patients (except yours didn’t have the contaminants added by drug dealers). So if the pharmaceutical theory of addiction is right—if the drugs are so chemically powerful they hijack your brain—then it’s obvious what should happen. You should, at the end of your treatment, be an addict. When you are discharged from the hospital, you should be looking to score on the streets, because now you need your fix.

You can take the same drugs as an addict for long periods of time, and not become addicted at all. And at the same time, you can take no drugs whatsoever—and become just as severe an addict. If that sounds odd, go to any meeting of Gamblers Anonymous in your town this evening.

found—just like you will—that they were indistinguishable from those of alcoholics or heroin addicts in their essentials. But you don’t inject a deck of cards into your veins; you don’t snort a roulette wheel.

Adverse Childhood Experiences Study.

It looked at ten different terrible things that can happen to a kid, from physical abuse to sexual abuse to the death of a parent, to track how it shapes that child over their lifetime. These scientists discovered that for each traumatic event that happened to a child, they were two to four times more likely to grow up to be an addicted adult. Nearly two-thirds of injection drug use, they found, is the product of childhood trauma. This is a correlation so strong the scientists said it is “of an order of magnitude rarely seen in epidemiology or public health.” It means that child abuse is as likely to cause drug addiction as obesity is to cause heart disease.

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.

This is one reason why Dr. Vincent Felitti—one of the key figures in the Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey—concluded, as Gabor writes, that “the basic cause of addiction is predominantly experience-dependent during childhood, and not substance-dependent. The current conception of addiction is ill-founded.” This fact forces us to radically reconsider many of the stories we are told about drug epidemics—including, I was to learn later, the prescription drug epidemic in the United States.

Even Harry Anslinger had noticed the connection with addiction. Addicts, he noted, often “grow up in homes that are not homes, with parents that are not parents, [so] they seek escape. Girl or boy, this is a familiar pattern.”

Hannah stammered that she had been beaten and raped. “And I remember just listening to her say to me, over and over again, ‘It’s my fault. I deserve this. It’s my fault. I’m a bad person.’ ” And on the little table beside Hannah, there was her alcohol, and her heroin, and a needle. And Liz—who has never wanted to use drugs—looked at them and looked at Hannah and thought: “Which of these things on your bedside table can I give you to take your pain away?” “And that was the moment I understood what addiction did for people,” she tells me. “It was like, in an instant, I made a connection to those black moments in my life where I felt that way . . . when I wanted to die, when I felt that I was a bad person.” The survivors of childhood trauma are often left with that sense of self-hatred all their lives, Liz saw now, and that is why so many of them turn to the strongest anesthetic they can find. It’s not a spasm of irrationality. It meets a need. It takes away the pain, for a while. As Liz told me this, I thought about how fiercely critical I had been of the people I love for their addictions over the years, and I realized I was crying.

Memry Midgett, told an interviewer: “The reason for her being an addict was because she had a tremendously poor threshold of pain.” Another of her friends, Michelle Wallace, said: “People think sometimes people use drugs because they’re bad or evil. Sometimes . . . the softest people use drugs, because they can’t take the pain.”

“The childhood trauma makes you feel bad about everything. Bad about your family, bad about life,” he said. “And then when you take drugs, they make you feel good about your life, about yourself, about being in the world . . . [People] wonder—why do [addicts] keep doing it? Because it makes them feel good, and the rest of their life doesn’t make them feel good.”

He understood how these emotions intrude on the public debate about addicts because even he, after all he has uncovered, couldn’t scour them out of himself. But, he added, “Once I calmed down, shame comes into it, and I want to apologize.” Some days, Ralph was quiet and reflective and recited passages of Goethe’s poetry to Gabor. The next week, he was back to muttering “Heil Hitler.”

Quite often, he would be in the middle of his medical duties when he would feel an overpowering urge. It was a compulsion that forced him to drop everything. He would rush to music stores and compulsively spend hundreds of dollars on CDs. Usually, he didn’t even listen to them: he simply stashed them. This might sound harmless, until you hear that he was in the middle of delivering a baby one time when he felt the compulsion and had to run away to binge on CD buying. When his kids were still small, he abandoned them in public places to rush away to buy music.