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

by Johann Hari

the Hole consists of a series of tiny concrete solitary cells laid out in rows, on two different levels. The cell doors have a tiny slit in them, and as the guards unlock them, eyes peer out. When they see an outsider, they immediately start yelling for help, and their voices have a cracked quality, as though their throats are too narrow to let out their words. They are not allowed to communicate with the guards: they have to put anything they have to say in writing and slide it under the door. They are trying to talk to me. The first thing that hits me as I approach these eyes is the stink, literally, of shit: it is so overwhelming it makes me retch.

The prisoners inside cannot see the sun or the sky or another human face.

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.

This use of solitary confinement is a standard punishment in American prisons.

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.

psychologist named Jorge de la Torre. His job is to provide some counseling for the women here. He has a weary air about him, as if he has misplaced something and can’t quite find it. Some 90 percent of the inmates, he tells me, “are here because of a drug-related problem,” and virtually all of them are from traumatized backgrounds.

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. Now dogs and cats relax in cool rooms while addicts ache in the heat and dust storms outside. The animals, he believes, deserve it.

it slowly became clear to me that this is in fact quite typical of how addicts are treated across the United States and around the world.

The United States now imprisons more people for drug offenses than Western European nations imprison for all crimes combined. No human society has ever before imprisoned this high a proportion of its population. 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.

The rape of Chino’s mother was not, it turns out, an unusual event in the war on drugs—and it happens to both genders.

Nor is the United States alone. In China, addicts are often sent to hard labor camps, where they are forced to do backbreaking manual work as punishment.

As I tried to understand what is really happening to drug users in Arizona, I talked with the handful of people who are working on improving prisoners’ rights in the state, including Donna Leone Hamm, the head of a group called Middle Ground Prison Reform.

the guards took 109416 and put her in an outdoor cage in the desert. The cage was uncovered with the sun raging down. There was nothing in it: no water, no bench, no bed. It was 106 degrees.

The neglect is horrifying

They are supposed to use this cage for a maximum of two hours per prisoner, but in practice, people are sometimes left there much longer.

The prisoner asked for water. The guards mocked her f...

At some point, she collapsed, covered in her own shit. With her face against the floor of the desert, it sustained first-degree burns, as if she was in a fire.

Sixteen different guards had the opportunity to do something. None of them responded.

Watching from a few stories up, the prisoners could see something terrible was happening.

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.

At the hospital, they were legally required to call her court-appointed legal guardian before making m...

Three prison officers were fired soon after the incident. No prison officer involved ever faced charges.

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.

Richard says it should have been clear to the authorities that “she was an addict . . . Addiction can be overcome with proper help. It ain’t a jail thing.”

He believes “if you’re calm and cool and know you’ve got a life ahead of you that’s going up the steps . . . if you know you’re going up in the world, you’re going to stay going up in the world.” Instead, she kept being kicked down the steps by the criminal justice system. One day, she disappeared into a police car, and he never saw her again.

Later, Rich tells me: “If Arizona hadn’t stuck her in jail for 1.5 grams of usable marijuana, we’d be in Illinois living high [that is, well]. I’d be twenty years with the railroad. We had a nice house there, a huge yard. She’d be a mom. Kids raised. Ritchie would have been eighteen now. My kids might still be alive. Just because of a little bullshit.”

Perhaps this is only a comforting myth he uses to deal with his pain, since Marcia had such deep-seated problems; but perhaps it is true. Perhaps that conviction did kick her out of the only trough of stability she ever found.

Many of the prison guards who put Marcia Powell in an exposed cage in the desert and ignored her screams are still at work today.

sixty thousand people had been killed in five years. That 90 percent of the cocaine used in the United States passed through here every year. That Mexican drug cartels make between $19 and $29 billion every year from U.S. drug sales alone.

Juan’s best friend joined for the cash and the sense that, finally, he was part of something.

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.

If you are the first to kill your rivals’ relatives, including their pregnant women, you get a brief competitive advantage: people are more scared of your cartel and they will cede more of the drug market to you. Then every cartel does it: it becomes part of standard practice. If you are the first to behead people, you get a brief competitive advantage. Then every cartel does it. If you are the first to behead people on camera and post it on YouTube, you get a brief competitive advantage. Then every cartel does it. If you are the first to mount people’s heads on pikes and display them in public, you gain a brief competitive advantage. Then every cartel does it. If you are the first to behead a person, cut off his face, and sew it onto a soccer ball, you get a brief competitive advantage. And on it goes.

Prohibition, Bourgois explains in his writing, creates a system in which the most insane and sadistic violence has a sane and functional logic. It is required. It is rewarded.

First the drug dealers bought immunity from the drug laws. Then they bought the law itself. By joining the Zetas somewhere along the line, Sergio had placed himself above the law. This is what the desire to repress drugs has wrought.

Marisela believed she had one card left to play. Go public. Tell the world everything. She went to the state capitol in Chihuahua City and announced to the world’s press everything she had found—that the Zetas now ran the state and could do what they liked.

The governor publicly dismissed her. She had arrived in early December, and she invited the governor to Christmas dinner on the doorstep of the state capitol building, because she wasn’t leaving until Sergio was arrested.

“What’s the government waiting for—that he come and finish me?” she said. “Then let him kill me, but here in front, ...

This was one of the most tightly policed places in Mexico, guarded by the federal police, the local police, and the military. But one night, at eight o’clock, the gates to the capitol started to close,...

A man approached her now, right in front of the security cameras, in the shadow of the offices of the city police. He took out a gun. He put the gun to her head. He pulled the trigger. But the gun didn’t go off. Something had jammed. Marisel...

The hit man ran after her. As they were both running, he pulled out another gun, and this time, he s...

On the morning of her funeral, her business was burned down, and a man who resembled Marisela’s boyfriend was kidnapped off the street nearby, suffocated...

Those searching for the disappeared disappear; those seeking justice for the murdered are murdered, until the silence swallows everything. This is all happening in a city w...

Harry Anslinger himself wrote in the 1960s: “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.”

The U.S. government has approached Mexico with the same threat as the cartels—plata o plomo. Silver or lead. We can give you economic “aid” to fight this war, or we can wreck your economy if you don’t. Your choice. What is never an option is to pursue a rational drug policy.

Why? Why are these people being shot or beheaded or cooked? What is the purpose of this war? I looked again at the official reasons. The United Nations says the war’s rationale is to build “a drug-free world—we can do it!” U.S. government officials agree, stressing that “there is no such thing as recreational drug use.”

It is a war to stop drug use among all humans, everywhere. All these prohibited chemicals need to be rounded up and removed from the earth. That is what we are fighting for.

What Ronald K. Siegel discovered seems strange at first. He explains in his book Intoxication:

After sampling the numbing nectar of certain orchids, bees drop to the ground in a temporary stupor, then weave back for more.

Birds gorge themselves on inebriating berries, then fly wit...

Cats eagerly sniff aromatic “pleasure” plants, then play with...