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

by Johann Hari

He always wanted boys’ toys, especially GI Joes. He only liked the toy oven he had been given because he could melt the GI Joes’ heads in it. “My grandmother had to beat me into a dress,” he remembers. From about eight years old, he pushed his hair up, demanded to be called Jason, and put socks down his underwear. His grandmother asked him why, and he said that “being a girl sucks. And in my life, it did suck.”

Not long after, Chino found his corner, and started selling his crack. And three years after that, when he was sixteen, he would smoke it for the first time. “I wanted to know,” he would say to me years later, “what she chose over me.” Chino was first put into a jumpsuit and caged when he was thirteen. He was sent to Spofford Juvenile Detention Facility in the Bronx as punishment for his violent “street shit” against other teenagers, which he carried out because “the dealing puts me in positions where my default emotion is anger and my default position is retaliation.”

More than fourteen thousand people are warehoused in its stone cells, and it became a second home to Chino and his crew, as it has to generations of teenagers from his neighborhood. But something strange was happening—his drug charges kept disappearing. He was arrested and charged, but the paperwork seemed to vanish. “If you look at my criminal record on its face,” Chino says, “I got let out of the back door of the courthouse a lot, without even seeing a judge. I got let go from the precinct. I had charges that you cannot believe they still let me go.”

comments on the street, they were too afraid to do it. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

if he was angry with his mother. “I think so,” he said, “even though I constantly try to make peace with it. I do. It’s kind of hard to be angry with someone that’s dead, right? But it’s hard not to be when you only have about ten memories and five of them are fucked up. You know what I’m saying? I don’t have much goodness to reflect on. The only thing I can say is that—she could’ve had an abortion. I was a rape baby . . . She chose to bring me into the world. That speaks to a lot. Everything else was demons and drugs and shit that got in the way.”

Instead, they built the new facilities and reopened Spofford and announced plans for even more youth jails—“even though they were operating between 79 and 81 percent under capacity . . . and at a cost of $64.6 million that was in the capital budget . . . and that didn’t entail what it would cost to operate. It was just the extra hundred jail cells.” Despite all that money, “the recidivism rate was over 80 percent . . . as opposed to an alternative to incarceration program, the chances are they might not come back, and it’s cheaper.”

Go for numbers. Get the maximum possible arrests. Don’t worry about how severe the offense is. If a person is found with any drugs at all, even the tiniest roach, bust them. She was Anslinger’s dream girl made flesh. Her officers all knew they could seize the property of anyone they arrested for drug offenses to be auctioned off, with much of the proceeds—usually 80 percent—going straight back into the local police budget. “So if you stop a car [and search it and find], say, four million [dollars in cash]—not unusual—shit, that’s good,” Leigh said.

drug busts were disrupting the supply routes through Maryland—and this meant there would be fewer gangsters, fewer addicts, less violence, and less misery in the world. This is one of the most important facts about Leigh, and one that it would be easy for somebody like me—with the politics that I have—to ignore. Leigh’s support for the drug war was an act of compassion. She genuinely believed that she was making the world a better place by protecting people from drugs and drug gangs.

If you arrest a large number of rapists, the amount of rape goes down. If you arrest a large number of violent racists, the number of violent racist attacks goes down. But if you arrest a large number of drug dealers, drug dealing doesn’t go down.

“If all those cops and agents couldn’t get this one corner clean, what is the purpose of this whole damned drug war?”

In 1993, in the death throes of apartheid, South Africa imprisoned 853 black men per hundred thousand in the population. The United States imprisons 4,919 black men per hundred thousand (versus only 943 white men).

If we start targeting them, and their children, you know what’s going to happen? We’re going to get a phone call and they’re going to shut us down. You know that, Fogg? You know what’s going to happen? There goes your overtime. There’s the money that you’re making. So let’s just go after the weakest link. Let’s go after those who can’t afford the attorneys, those who we can lock up.”

We humans are good at suppressing our epiphanies, especially when our salaries and our friendships depend on it.

She decided to venture out into the drug war zones of Baltimore, not in uniform this time, but as a civilian. She looked at the kids in the city, and talked with them. She discovered “they are growing up in war zones. There’s no doubt about it.” There were prohibition-related killings almost every night, and “the kids see it. All the kids know this. It traumatizes you to a point you can’t begin to imagine.” But perhaps most important, once you have been busted for a drug offense—at fifteen or seventeen or twenty—you are virtually unemployable for the rest of your life. You will never work again. You will be barred from receiving student loans. You will be evicted from public housing. You will be barred from even visiting public housing. “Say your mother lives in public housing, and you get arrested for possession, and you go visit her,” Leigh says. “If the housing authority find out you’ve been there [they will say] you’ve violated the lease and they’ll kick [the whole family] out.” I kept meeting people like this across the United States—second-class citizens, stripped even of the vote, because at some point in the past, they possessed drugs.

She is up against a legal system in which even a famously liberal judge like Justice Thurgood Marshall would openly brag: “If it’s a dope case, I won’t even read the petition. I ain’t giving no break to no drug dealer.”

Harry Anslinger employed Joe Arpaio in 1957 to be an agent in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and he rose through the bureau over decades. Since 1993, he has been the elected sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. He was eighty when I met him, and about to be elected to his sixth consecutive term.

They are given two meals a day, costing fifteen cents each. It is referred to by guards and inmates as “slop”—a brownish gloop of unspecified meat that Arpaio boasted to a reporter contained “rotten” lumps, and costs at most 40 cents a meal.

No radio; no life. The prisoners inside cannot see the sun or the sky or another human face. Some inmates are given a cellmate, and even though they can barely move with another person in there and have to shit in front of each other, they consider themselves lucky. As an inhabitant of the Hole, you get one hour out of your cell to take a shower and stretch your legs; you can’t communicate during that hour, and no phone calls are permitted.

Not long before this, a mentally disabled man in another Arizona prison called Mark Tucker was kept in solitary for so many years, with his pleas for a cellmate refused, that he eventually set himself on fire. In the hospital, with 80 percent of his body burned, he was informed that the Department of Corrections was charging him $1.8 million to pay for the medical care to treat his injuries.

There is a properly built air-conditioned prison near Tent City, but Joe Arpaio has thrown these prisoners out of it and turned it into an animal shelter.

It is now so large that if all U.S. prisoners were detained in one place, they would rank as the thirty-fifth most populous state of the Union.

When 109416 was put in the Hole in Tent City, she had swallowed a razor blade because—as her former cellmate, Juliana Philips, said—“she wanted to talk. Nobody would talk to her, and the guards treated her like shit. She just wanted a friend.” But the doctor concluded that 109416 was being manipulative and just trying to get herself moved into another, less restrictive cell.

“We said—that girl’s been laying there a long time not moving. We saw guards walk past and nobody stopped,” her former cellmate Juliana Philips tells me. “She was just laying there. Who’s gonna take a nap on the cement in the sun in polyester and no shade?” After the guards finally called an ambulance, the paramedics tried to take her temperature. Their thermometers only go to 108 degrees: she was that hot, or hotter still. Her internal organs had cooked, as if in an oven.

The person in charge of this prison is not Joe Arpaio. This prison is run by the state, not the county: this way of treating addicts is much wider than him. It is statewide, and nationwide, and planetwide.

He told me that at the age of sixteen, “I decided to become an angel.” At first, when the murders began, people would run in panic from the death scenes. Then it changed. They started to stop and stare. Then it changed again. They would just walk on by. As if it was normal. As if it was nothing.

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. These breakaways called themselves the Zetas.

“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.

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.

The pursuit of intoxication by animals seems as purposeless as it is passionate. Many animals engage these plants, or their manufactured allies, despite the danger of toxic or poisonous effects.

Noah’s Ark, he found, would have looked a lot like London on a Saturday night. “In every country, in almost every class of animal,” Siegel explains, “I found examples of not only the accidental but the intentional use of drugs.”

Only 10 percent of drug users have a problem with their substance. Some 90 percent of people who use a drug—the overwhelming majority—are not harmed by it. This figure comes not from a pro-legalization group, but from the United Nations Office on Drug Control, the global coordinator of the drug war.

But if you think about how we are trained to think about drugs, this seems instinctively wrong, even dangerous. All we see in the public sphere are the casualties.

streets. The result is that the harmed 10 percent make up 100 percent of the official picture. It is as if our only picture of drinkers were a homeless person lying in a gutter necking neat gin. This impression is then reinforced with the full power of the state.

“The ubiquity of drug use is so striking,” the physician Andrew Weil concludes, that “it must represent a basic human appetite.” Professor Siegel claims the desire to alter our consciousness is “the fourth drive” in all human minds, alongside the desire to eat, drink, and have sex—and it is “biologically inevitable.” It provides us with moments of release and relief.

The early Christians wanted there to be one route to ecstasy, and one route only—through prayer to their God. You shouldn’t feel anything that profound or pleasurable except in our ceremonies at our churches. The first tugs towards prohibition were about power, and purity of belief.

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.

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.”

“nothing is addictive in itself. It’s always a combination of a potentially addictive substance or behavior and a susceptible individual. So the question we need to keep asking is—What creates the susceptibility?”

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.

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.

“Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause, of personal and social maladjustment.”

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.

Long before, one of Billie Holiday’s friends, 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.”

Don’t you see? You wouldn’t do this to yourself because you don’t have to. You never had to learn to cope with more pain than you could bear. You might as well look at somebody who had their legs amputated in a car crash and declare: “Well, I would never have my legs cut off.” No. You haven’t been in a car crash. These addicts—they have been in car crashes of the soul.

How should the facts he has uncovered change the way we think about the drug war? He has shown that the core of addiction doesn’t lie in what you swallow or inject—it’s in the pain you feel in your head. Yet we have built a system that thinks we will stop addicts by increasing their pain.