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

by Johann Hari

Harry Anslinger.

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.

This is how Arnold Rothstein entered the drug war.

On yet another afternoon, in 1920, a six-year-old girl lay on the floor of a brothel in Baltimore listening to jazz records. Her mother was convinced

Billie Holiday

This is how Billie Holiday entered the drug war.

In 1914—a century ago—they resolved: Destroy them.

As this decision was made, Harry and Arnold and Billie found themselves scattered across that first battlefield, and pressed into combat.

Agnew. Ghanem. Elvis. Different time.

But Billie did it because the song17 “seemed to spell out all the things that had killed” her father, Clarence, in the South.

Abel Meeropol wrote "Strange Fruit."

Her harassment by Harry’s Federal Bureau of

Narcotics19 began the next day. Before long, he would play a crucial role in killing her.

Indeed, “if the hideous

monster Frankenstein66 came face to face with the monster Marijuana, he would drop dead of fright.”

“The marihuana evil can no longer be temporized with,”67 he explained, and he would fund no independent science,68 then or ever.

The examining psychiatrists thought his cannabis use78 was so irrelevant that it wasn’t even mentioned in his files.

It made them forget the appropriate racial barriers85—and unleashed their lust for white women.

Racism and the War On Drugs

had him wiretapped,90

Harry couldn’t control the flow of drugs,92 but he was discovering he could control the flow of ideas—and it was not only scientists Harry believed he had to silence.

Controlling drugs helps to control ideas.

When I put them together with Harry’s files, what her friends had told me, and the work of her biographers, I began to see this story more clearly.

Connecting the dots.

“It sounded,” his internal memos said, “like the jungles in the dead of night.”94

Familiar?

But when Harry came for them, the jazz world would have one weapon that saved them: its absolute solidarity.

Did rock musicians have that in 1970? No.

“I just plain decided one day I wasn’t going to do anything119 or say anything unless I meant it. Not ‘Please, sir.’ Nor ‘Thank you, ma’am.’ Nothing. Unless I meant it. You have to be poor and black to know how many times you can get knocked in the head for trying to do something as simple as that.”

Interestingly, Elvis took the opposite course. "Yessir." Always.

She sang a moment behind the beat and lived a moment ahead of it.

Her biographer Julia Blackburn

Confronted with a real addict, up close, the hatred fell away.

At first, ordinary citizens had taken matters into their own hands against this Yellow Peril. In Los Angeles, twenty-one Chinese people were shot,197 hanged, or burned alive by white mobs, while in San Francisco, officials tried to forcibly move everyone in Chinatown into an area reserved for pig farms and other businesses that were designated as dirty and disease-ridden, until the courts ruled the policy was unconstitutional.198

Racism at the root of The Drug War.

He knew that to secure his bureau’s future, he needed a high-profile victory, over intoxication and over the blacks, and so he turned back to Billie Holiday.

Billie.

addicts, he said, “are human beings, just like you and me.” Punishment makes them sicker; compassion can make them well.

Harry Anslinger is our own darkest impulses, given a government department and a license to kill.

Until the day that “the Great Judge proclaims: / ‘The last addict’s died,’254 ” the poem said, “Then—not till then—may you be retired.”

The Mafia paid Harry Anslinger to launch his crusade because they wanted the drug market all to themselves. It was the scam of the century.

That city was Baltimore.2

Now, Harry warned sternly, every addict was not only a criminal and a thug. He was also a potential Communist traitor.

Shades of Agnew to come!

By conjuring this Communist conspiracy into existence in the 1950s, Harry found a way to turn his failure into a reason to escalate the war. Drug prohibition would work—but only if it was being done by everyone, all over the world

Anslinger: the force behind Hoover!

So he traveled to the United Nations with a set of instructions for humanity: Do what we have done. Wage war on drugs. Or else. Of all Harry’s acts, this was the most consequential for us today.

Whenever any representative of another country tried to explain to him why these policies weren’t right for them, Anslinger snapped: “I’ve made up my mind—don’t11 confuse me with the facts.”

historian John McWilliams to claim that, “the bureau itself was actually the major source16 of supply and protector of heroin in the United States.”

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.

This was the bullet at the birth of drug prohibition, and nobody knows where it came from, even now.

The policy of prohibition summoned these characters into existence, because it needs them. So long as it lives, they live.

Regarding the War On Drugs

I subsequently interviewed Becker.

Ansliger and the drug war. Howard Becker.