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

by Johann Hari

When Harry and Arnold and Billie were born, drugs were freely available throughout the world. You could go to any American pharmacy and buy products made from the same ingredients as heroin and cocaine.

Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.

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.

After that, 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.

But Harry had glimpsed the Mafia in the flesh, and he was convinced that if he followed the trail from Big Mouth Sam to the thugs above him and the thugs above them, he would be led to a vast global web, and perhaps even to an “invisible world-wide government” secretly controlling events.

Then, when he found out a professor named Alfred Lindesmith was arguing that addicts need to be treated with compassion and care, Harry instructed his men to falsely warn Lindesmith’s university that he was associated with a “criminal organization,” had him wiretapped, and sent a team to tell him to shut up.

When she was ten, one of her neighbors—a man in his forties named Wilbert Rich—turned up and explained that he had been sent by her mother to take Billie to her. He took her to a house and told her to wait. She sat and waited, but her mother didn’t come; as night fell, Billie said she was drowsy. The man offered her a bed. When she lay down on it, he pinned her down and raped her. She screamed and clawed at the man, howling for help, and somebody must have heard, because the police arrived. When they barged in, the officers decided at once what was going on. Billie, they declared, was a whore who had tricked this poor man. She was shut away in a cell for two days. Months later, Wilbert Rich was punished with three months in prison, while Billie was punished with a year in a reform school.

The nuns who ran the walled-in, sealed-off punishment center looked at the child and concluded she was bad and needed the firm thwack of discipline. Billie kept spitting their attempts at control right back at them—so they decided they needed to “teach her a lesson.” They took her to a room that was empty except for a dead body, slammed the door shut behind her, and left her there overnight. Billie hammered on the doors until her hands bled, but nobody came.

Before long, Billie was thrown out, and she was so hungry she could barely breathe without it hurting. There was, Billie came to believe, only one solution. A madam offered her a 50 percent cut for having sex with strangers. She was fourteen years old.

Before long, Billie had her own pimp. He was a violent, cursing thug named Louis McKay, who was going to break her ribs and beat her till she bled. He was also—perhaps more crucially—going to meet Harry Anslinger many years later, and work with him.

Billie was caught prostituting by the police, and once again, instead of rescuing her from being pimped and raped, they punished her. She was sent to prison on Welfare Island, and once she got out, she started to seek out the hardest and most head-blasting chemicals she could.

When Billie sang “Loverman, where can you be?” she wasn’t crying for a man—she was crying for heroin. But when she found out her friends in the jazz world were using the same drug, she begged them to stop. Never imitate me, she cried. Never do this.

She kept trying to quit. She would get her friends to shut her away in their houses for days on end while she went through withdrawal.

“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.”

“Billie ‘paid her debt’ to society,” one of her friends wrote, “but society never paid its debt to her.”

One day, she went out with a teenage friend to Central Park. They fed LSD to the horses and then took a ride. The cabbie was puzzled: Why wouldn’t the horses follow their normal route? Billie cackled with laughter from her carriage.

She began to push away even her few remaining friends, because she was terrified the police would plant drugs on them, too—and that was the last thing she wanted for the people she loved.

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.

It took me a while to see that the contrast between the racism directed at Billie and the compassion offered to addicted white stars like Judy Garland was not some weird misfiring of the drug war—it was part of the point.

In the run-up to the passing of the Harrison Act, the New York Times ran a story typical of the time. The headline was: NEGRO COCAINE “FIENDS” NEW SOUTHERN MENACE. It described a North Carolina police chief who “was informed that a hitherto inoffensive negro, with whom he was well-acquainted, was ‘running amuck’ in a cocaine frenzy [and] had attempted to stab a storekeeper . . . Knowing he must kill this man or be killed himself, the Chief drew his revolver, placed the muzzle over the negro’s heart, and fired—‘intending to kill him right quick,’ as the officer tells it, but the shot did not even stagger the man.” 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.

One medical expert put it bluntly: “The cocaine nigger,” he warned, “sure is hard to kill.”

“Where else [but in the Bureau of Narcotics] could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?” He may well have been high when he busted Billie for getting high.

In the years after Billie’s trial, many other singers were too afraid of being harassed by the authorities to perform “Strange Fruit.” But Billie Holiday refused to stop. No matter what they did to her, she sang her song.

“I’ve always been a religious bitch,” she said, “but if that dirty motherfucker believes in God, I’m thinking it over.”

On the street outside the hospital, protesters gathered, led by a Harlem pastor named the Reverend Eugene Callender. They held up signs reading “Let Lady Live.”

Billie didn’t blame Anslinger’s agents as individuals; she blamed the drug war itself—because it forced the police to treat ill people like criminals. “Imagine if the government chased sick people 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.”

Her best friend, Maely Dufty, insisted to anyone who would listen that Billie had been effectively murdered by a conspiracy to break her, orchestrated by the narcotics police—but what could she do? At Billie’s funeral, there were swarms of police cars, because they feared their actions against her would trigger a riot.

In his eulogy for her, the Reverend Eugene Callender told me he had said: “We should not be here. This young lady was gifted by her creator with tremendous talent . . . She should have lived to be at least eighty years old.”

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.

In the sunshine of Los Angeles, there was a doctor in the early 1930s named Henry Smith Williams, with a long, unsmiling face. He wore small wire-framed glasses through which he peered down on the world and at almost everyone in it. This doctor shared all of Harry Anslinger’s hatreds. He said that addicts were “weaklings” who should never have been brought into the world and wrote that “the idea that every human life has genuine value . . . and therefore is something to be treasured, is an absurd banality. The world would be far better off if forty percent of its inhabitants had never been born.”

While Harry Anslinger was raging against the Mafia in public, he was, in fact, secretly working for them. The drug war had been created, Henry said, for one reason and one reason alone. 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.

Both brothers had seen people like this in their offices for many years. Henry believed, in his Social Darwinist way, that they were weaklings who had survived only because they had been stupidly coddled by society; in a state of nature, they would have died to make way for stronger men with better genes.

But on this particular day in 1931, the addict was not what he seemed. He was, in fact, working for Harry Anslinger, as one of a flock of “stool pigeons” the Bureau was sending out across the country to trick doctors. They were desperate addicts tossed a few dollars by the bureau to con doctors into treating them. Once the prescription was written, the police burst in to the room, and Edward Williams was busted, alongside some twenty thousand other doctors across the country, in one of the biggest legal assaults on doctors in American history.

Before it became a crime to sell drugs, he had many patients who used them—but things had been very different then. They had bought their opiates, including morphine and heroin, at a low price from their local pharmacist.

“No one thought of the use of these medicines as having any moral significance,” he explained. One famous campaigner against alcohol was addicted to morphine, and nobody thought this was odd or hypocritical.

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.

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

An official government study found that before drug prohibition properly kicked in, three quarters of self-described addicts (not just users—a...

Some 22 percent of addicts were wealthy, while only 6 percent were poor. They were more sedate as a result of their addiction, and although it would have been better for them to s...

The world we recognize now—where addicts are often forced to become criminals, in a desperate scramble to feed their habit from gangsters—was being created, for the first time.

The Williams brothers had watched as Anslinger’s department created two crime waves.

First, it created an army of gangsters to smuggle drugs into the country and sell them to addicts. In other words: while Harry Anslinger claimed to be fighting the Mafia, he was in fact transferring a massive and...

Second, by driving up the cost of drugs by more than a thousand percent, the new policies meant addicts were forced to c...

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.

In Portland, Oregon, a doctor stood in his clinic as Anslinger’s men forcibly shut its doors and asked them pleadingly, was there anything he could legally do to help all these addicts? “Yeah, sure: there’s plenty you can do,” the agent told him. “Run the whole bunch of them down to the ocean and kick ’em in. They’ll make fair fish food. That’s all any of them are good for.”

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.

Some twenty thousand doctors were charged with violating the Harrison Act alongside Edward Williams, and 95 percent were convicted. Most were charged massive fines, but some faced five years in prison for each and every prescription written. In many places, horrified juries refused to convict, because they could see the doctors were only treating the sick as best they could.

“The moral effect of his conviction,” Anslinger wrote, “will most certainly result in greater circumspection.” You only have to destroy a few doctors to silence the rest. Go for the top. Maximum intimidation.

“Anybody that came out with any academic work that could be critical of him, his Bureau, or his philosophy, had to go to prison,” Howard Diller, one of his agents, said later. “Or be beheaded.”

At the trial, every single one of the seventeen doctors who testified supported Edward Williams, yet he was found guilty of violating the Harrison Act—in effect, of being a drug dealer—and 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.