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

by Johann Hari

I had been taught how to respond—by my government, and by my culture—when you find yourself in this situation. It is with a war.

Treat drug users and addicts as criminals. Repress them. Shame them. Coerce them into stopping.

So even as I criticized the drug war with my words, I was often waging it in my head.

Why did the drug war start, and why does it continue? Why can some people use drugs without any problems, while others can’t? What really causes addiction?

It is a good thing, I know now, that I didn’t book a return ticket. I didn’t realize it on that first day, but this journey would end up taking me across nine countries and thirty thousand miles, and it would last for three years.

I was startled by what I learned from them. It turns out that many of our most basic assumptions about this subject are wrong. Drugs are not what we think they are. Drug addiction is not what we have been told it is. The drug war is not what our politicians have sold it as for one hundred years and counting. And there is a very different story out there waiting for us when we are ready to hear it—one that should leave us thrumming with hope.

When he grew into a man, this boy was going to draw together some of the deepest fears in American culture—of racial minorities, of intoxication, of losing control—and channel them into a global war to prevent those screams. It would cause many screams in turn. They can be heard in almost every city on earth tonight. This is how Harry Anslinger entered the drug war.

In 1904, a twelve-year-old boy

Normally a man with his personality type would end up in prison, but this little boy didn’t. He was handed an industry where his capacity for violence was not just rewarded, but required: the new market for illegal drugs in North America. When he was finally shot—separated by twenty blocks, countless killings, and many millions of dollars from his sleeping brother on that night—he was a free man. This is how Arnold Rothstein entered the drug war.

1900? three-year-old

It gave her a feeling she couldn’t describe—and she was determined, one day, to create this feeling in other people. Even after she was raped, and after she was pimped, and after she started to inject heroin to take away the pain, this music would still be there waiting for her. This is how Billie Holiday entered the drug war.

1920, a six-year-old girl

But they lived at a time when American culture was looking for an outlet for its swelling tide of anxiety—a real, physical object it could destroy, in the hope that this would destroy its fear of a world that was changing more rapidly than their parents and grandparents could ever have imagined. It settled on these chemicals. In 1914—a century ago—they resolved: Destroy them. Wipe them from the earth. Set yourself free.

The audience listened, hushed. Many years later, this moment would be called “the beginning of the civil rights movement.” Lady Day was ordered by the authorities to stop singing this song. She refused. Her harassment by Harry’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics began the next day. Before long, he would play a crucial role in killing her.

Federal Bureau of Narcotics—a tiny agency, buried in the gray bowels of the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C.—and it seemed to be on the brink of being abolished. This was the old Department of Prohibition, but prohibition had been abolished and his men needed a new role, fast.

Harry believed that the response to being dealt a weak hand should always be to dramatically raise the stakes. He pledged to eradicate all drugs, everywhere—and within thirty years, he succeeded in turning this crumbling department, with these disheartened men, into the headquarters for a global war that would last for a hundred years and counting.

Anslinger became obsessed with the Mafia, at a time when most Americans refused to believe it even existed. This is hard for us to understand today, but the official position of every official in U.S. law enforcement until the 1960s—from J. Edgar Hoover on down—was that the Mafia was a preposterous conspiracy theory, no more real than the Loch Ness Monster.

Anslinger’s job was to pose as a German official and convey a message from President Woodrow Wilson: Don’t do it. The United States wanted the Kaiser to retain the imperial throne, to prevent the rise of the “revolution, strikes and chaos” it feared would follow from his sudden departure.

Civilization, he was beginning to conclude, was as fragile as the personality of that farmer’s wife back in Altoona. It could break.

The bootleggers were West Indian and Central American, and he believed they were filled with “loathsome and contagious diseases” that would spread to anyone foolish enough to drink the booze they handled. “Just give me a high-powered rifle. I’ll stop the bastards,” one of Harry’s colleagues said, and in this spirit, Harry announced to his bosses that there was a way to make prohibition work: Use maximum force. Send the navy to hunt down smugglers along the coasts of America. Ban the sale of alcohol for medical purposes. Massively increase prison sentences for alcohol dealers until they were all locked up. Wage war on booze until it was only a memory.

In just a few years, Harry made the leap from being a competent if frustrated prohibition agent in the Bahamas to running a Washington, D.C., department. How did he do it? It’s hard to tell, but it must have helped that he married a young woman named Martha Denniston who was from one of the richest families in America, the Mellons. The treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, was now a close relative—and the prohibition department was part of the Treasury itself.

He believed the two most-feared groups in the United States—Mexican immigrants and African Americans—were taking the drug much more than white people, and he presented the House Committee on Appropriations with a nightmarish vision of where this could lead.

Anslinger was not the originator of these arguments—they had actually been widespread in Mexico in the late nineteenth century, where it was pervasively believed that marijuana made you “loco.” Nor was he the only one pushing them in the United States—the press loved these stories, especially the mass media owned by William Randolph Hearst. But for the first time, Anslinger gave them the backing of a government department that would broadcast them to the nation at full volume, with an official government stamp saying they were true.

Anslinger began to believe all his hunches would turn out like this. He only had to defy the “experts” and keep pursuing his instinct until, finally, he would be shown to be more right than anyone could have predicted. He ramped up his campaign. The most frightening effect of marijuana, Harry warned, was on blacks. It made them forget the appropriate racial barriers—and unleashed their lust for white women.

Harry couldn’t control the flow of drugs, but he was discovering he could control the flow of ideas—and it was not only scientists Harry believed he had to silence.

Anslinger was insistent that no black man in his Bureau could ever become a white man’s boss. Jimmy was allowed through the door at the Bureau, but never up the stairs. He was and would remain an “archive man”—a street agent whose job was to figure out who was selling, who was supplying, and who should be busted.

“It’s tough enough coming off when you’ve got somebody who loves you and trusts you and believes in you,” she wrote. “I didn’t have anybody.” Actually, she said, that’s not quite right. She had Anslinger’s agents, “betting their time, their shoe leather, and their money that they would get me. Nobody can live like that.”

Now, as a former convict, she was stripped of her cabaret performer’s license, on the grounds that listening to her might harm the morals of the public.

One day, Harry Anslinger was told that there were also white women, just as famous as Billie, who had drug problems—but he responded to them rather differently.

The main reason given for banning drugs—the reason obsessing the men who launched this war—was that the blacks, Mexicans, and Chinese were using these chemicals, forgetting their place, and menacing white people.

Cocaine was, it was widely claimed in the press at this time, turning blacks into superhuman hulks who could take bullets to the heart without flinching.

Harry Anslinger did not create these underlying trends. His genius wasn’t for invention: it was for presenting his agents as the hand that would steady all these cultural tremblings.

George White, it turns out, had a long history of planting drugs on women. He was fond of pretending to be an artist and luring women to an apartment in Greenwich Village where he would spike their drinks with LSD to see what would happen.

As I researched this book, I traveled a long way from the farm fields of Pennsylvania—but at every step, I began to feel I was chasing the scream that terrified little Harry Anslinger all those years ago, as it echoed out across the world.

He can provide a legal prescription for the drug to which the patient has become addicted. It will not damage his body: all doctors agree that pure opiates do no harm to the flesh or the organs.

He was given even more confidence when the Supreme Court ruled in 1925 that the Harrison Act didn’t give the government the authority to punish doctors who believed it was in the best interests of their addicted patients to prescribe them heroin.

Just as a large majority of drinkers did not become alcoholics, a large majority of users of these products did not become drug addicts. They used opiates as “props for the unstable nervous system,” like a person who drinks wine at the end of a stressful day at work.

[The lawmakers] must have known that their Edict, if enforced, was the clear equivalent of an order to create an illicit drug industry. They must have known that they were in effect ordering a company of drug smugglers into existence.”

When the Harrison Act banning heroin and cocaine was written in 1914, it contained a very clear and deliberately designed loophole. It said that doctors, vets, and dentists had the right to continue giving out these drugs as they saw fit—and that addicts should be dealt with compassionately in this way.

The bureau was defying the clear ruling of the Supreme Court that the Harrison Act allowed doctors to prescribe to addicts, but “the Supreme Court has no army to enforce its decisions,” the press noted with a shrug.

sentenced to a year on federal probation. This ensured he would never again write a prescription for an addict—nor would any other doctor in the United States for generations to come. “Doctors,” Harry boasted, now “cannot treat addicts even if they wish to.”

Besides, he said, he had proof that his way worked. Since the bureau’s crackdown began, the number of addicts had fallen dramatically, to just twenty thousand in the whole country. Years later, a historian named David Courtwright put in a Freedom of Information request to find out how this figure was calculated—and found that it was simply made up. The Treasury Department’s top officials had privately said it was “absolutely worthless.”

The story of the Williams brothers, and all the doctors who were crushed alongside them, was so successfully wiped from America’s collective memory that by the 1960s, Anslinger could say in public that doctors had always been his allies in the drug war. “I’d like to see,” he told a journalist, “the doctor who claims he was treated in anything but the kindliest fashion.”

Why would the Chinese do this? They wanted to weaken the white man—and to “build a fifth column within the United States,” an army of addicts who would “be willing to pay with treason for their drugs.” Now, Harry warned sternly, every addict was not only a criminal and a thug. He was also a potential Communist traitor.

Whatever America was afraid of—blacks, poor people, Communists—he showed how the only way to deal with the fear was to deal with drugs, his way.

One of his key lieutenants, Charles Siragusa, boasted: “I found that a casual mention of the possibility of shutting off our foreign aid programs, dropped in the proper quarters, brought grudging permission for our operations almost immediately.” Later, leaders were threatened with being cut off from selling any of their countries’ goods to the United States.

They wanted to be persuaded. They wanted easy answers to complex fears. It’s tempting to feel superior—to condescend to these people—but I suspect this impulse is there in all of us. The public wanted to be told that these deep, complex problems—race, inequality, geopolitics—came down to a few powders and pills, and if these powders and pills could be wiped from the world, these problems would disappear.

At first the street peddlers had controlled the trade, and they got their supply in one of two ways: by staging heists of legal opiates as they were delivered to hospitals, or by ordering in bulk from legal suppliers in Mexico or Canada under fake company names. In 1922, Congress cracked down on this.

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.

Even then, he dressed as a boy and acted like a boy. They called him Jason. They knew he was “biologically” a woman at that point but they treated him as a man, and he was careful to be twice as brave just to underline it. He never told his crew to do anything he wouldn’t do himself: he would always get his hands dirty with you. If the crew had to attack, he would be at the front. And sometimes it was necessary to attack.

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.”

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.

Deborah, he says later, “was my biological mother [and] only in that sense.” Some part of Deborah never forgot her child, and longed for him. One day, she turned up in Flatbush and took the toddler Chino away by the hand, so he could be hers, for once. 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.”