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

by Johann Hari

The main reason given for banning drugs184—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.

Harry’s wave came in the form of a race panic.

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. It was the official reason why the police across the South increased the caliber of their guns.189

reasoning was simple, he told me in 2013: addicts, he said, “are human beings, just like you and me.”

“Imagine if the government chased sick people248 with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn’t treat them,” she wrote in her memoir, “then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs.”

He was given even more confidence when the Supreme Court ruled in 192510 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.

A small number did get hooked—but even among the addicted, the vast majority continued to work and maintain relatively normal lives.

before drug prohibition properly kicked in, three quarters of self-described addicts (not just users—addicts) had steady and respectable jobs. Some 22 percent of addicts were wealthy,19 while only 6 percent were poor.

“Here were tens of thousands of people, in every walk of life, frantically craving drugs that they could in no legal way secure,”21 Henry wrote. “They craved the drugs, as a man dying of thirst craves water. They must have the drugs at any hazard, at any cost. Can you imagine that situation, and suppose that the drugs will not be supplied? . . . [The lawmakers] must have known that their Edict, if enforced, was the clear equivalent of an order to create an illicit drug industry.

“The United States government, as represented by its [anti-drug] officers,” Henry explained, had just become “the greatest and most potent maker of criminals in any recent century.”

Some twenty thousand doctors were charged with violating the Harrison Act alongside Edward Williams, and 95 percent were convicted.

“The moral effect of his conviction,”38 Anslinger wrote, “will most certainly result in greater circumspection.”

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.”51

Anslinger really believed he was the sworn enemy of the drug gangs, even as they were paying his officers to enact his policies.

“There was no evidence7 for Anslinger’s accusations, but that never stopped him.”

Drug prohibition would work—but only if it was being done by everyone, all over the world8. 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.

And so Thailand caved. Britain caved. Everyone—under threat—caved in the end. The United States was now the most powerful country in the world, and nobody dared defy them for long. Some were more willing than others.

The result is that we are all still stuck at the end of the barrel of Harry Anslinger’s gun.

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.

It is a natural human instinct to turn our fears into symbols, and destroy the symbols, in the hope that it will destroy the fear.

Silver or lead. Take our bribe, or take a bullet.

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.

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.

It was a battlefield onto which he woke and on which he slept.

The National Youth Gang Center8 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.

As a result, fewer than 2 percent9 of their injectors became HIV positive. In New York City, they refused to do it.

“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.”

“A human is capable of anything if you’re in fucked up situations. You’d never drink your piss, but try not drinking anything for twenty days.”

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

So because of the drug war and the way it is enforced, a black man was far more likely to be jailed in the Land of the Free than in the most notorious white supremacist society in the world.

“Fogg, you know you’re right12 they are using drugs there [but] you know what? If we go out and we start targeting those individuals, they know judges, they know lawyers, they know politicians, they know all of the big folks in government. 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.”

Neither can see the other side’s ghosts. They can only hate.

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.

“To those who urge the United States not to wave the white flag of surrender, I say—what white flag?” she asked. “Your white flag15 is now a red flag . . . A red flag, sullied and stinking from countless deaths of good guys and bad guys and simple people caught up in the crossfire.”

They renamed the block3 where she died Tiffany Square. Today, it is a place where dealers openly sell drugs.

No human society has ever before imprisoned this high a proportion of its population. It is now so large that if all U.S. prisoners15 were detained in one place, they would rank as the thirty-fifth most populous state of the Union.

“Prohibition, conceived as a moral attempt to improve the American way of life, would ultimately cast the nation into a turmoil. One cannot help but think in retrospect that Prohibition, by depriving Americans of their ‘vices,’ only created the avenues through which organized crime gained its firm foothold.”

Harry responded by immediately cutting off the entire country’s supply of opiates for pain relief in its hospitals. Mexicans literally writhed in agony.

In 2012, not longer after Marisela was killed, Michele Leonhart, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said that the level of violence and death in Mexico is in fact “a sign of success22 in the fight against drugs.”

Many animals engage these plants, or their manufactured allies, despite the danger of toxic or poisonous effects.

Only 10 percent9 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.

The unharmed 90 percent use in private, and we rarely hear about it or see it. The damaged 10 percent, by contrast, are the only people we ever see using drugs out on the streets.

The U.S. government threatened to cut off funding to the WHO unless they suppressed the report. It has never been published; we know what it says only because it was leaked.

“Far from our drugs controlling us, by and large we control our drugs; as with alcohol, the primary motivation is to enjoy ourselves, not to destroy ourselves . . . There is such a thing as responsible drug use, and it is the norm, not the exception.”13