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

by Johann Hari

One New Year’s Eve, a sailor saw her being served in a bar and asked: “When did you start serving nigger bitches?” She stabbed a bottle into his face.140 Another time in another bar,141 a group of soldiers and sailors started stubbing out their cigarettes on her mink coat. She handed the mink coat to a friend to hold, picked up a diamond-shaped ashtray, and laid the sailors out flat.

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.

“Can the doctor do nothing? Oh yes, the doctor knows just what should be done,” he explained. “He knows that he has but to write a few words on the prescription blank that lies at his elbow, and the patient, tottering to the nearest drug store, will receive the remedy that would restore him miraculously to a semblance of normality and the actuality of physical and mental comfort.”8 He can provide a legal prescription for the drug to which the patient has become addicted. It will not damage his body: all doctors agree that pure opiates do no harm to the flesh or the organs. The patient, after taking the drug, will become calm. He will be able to function again.9 He will be able to work, or support a family, or love.

At the start of the drug war, the man who launched the drug crackdown in California did it because he was paid to—by the drug dealers themselves54. They wanted the drug war. They wanted it so badly, they would pay to speed it up.

Henry Smith Williams wrote, there will be a five-billion-dollar drug smuggling industry in the United States in fifty years’ time. He was right almost to the exact year.58

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.

As the result of the Harrison Act and its subsequent hard-line interpretation by Harry’s bureau, it is passing from Henry Smith Williams and his colleagues to Arnold Rothstein and his thugs. It wasn’t by the law of nature. It was by political decree.

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.

“everybody’s going to fucking rob you . . . They’ll just move in on your turf, take over your block, do whatever they want to you. You have to be fucked up to survive in this fucked-up paradigm . . . You got to be violent to not have violence done to you . . . You set examples. You make examples out of people. Some of them are completely justified and called for. A lot of them are not.”

Just as the war on alcohol7 created armed gangs fighting to control the booze trade, the war on drugs has created armed gangs fighting and killing to control the drug trade.

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.

Scientists quickly realized the people in most danger were gay men and injecting drug users who shared needles. They recommended handing out clean needles as a matter of urgency. The Scottish city of Glasgow—which had a massive drug injection problem—became one of the first in the world to do this. As a result, fewer than 2 percent9 of their injectors became HIV positive.

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 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 begins to conclude there wouldn’t have been “the same culture of violence—absolutely not” if other drugs were brought back into the legal economy.

Take the drug trade away from criminals, he calculates, and it would reduce the homicide rate in the United States by between 25 and 75 percent.

Professor Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University has studied the murder statistics4 and found that “statistical analysis shows consistently that higher [police] enforcement [against drug dealers] is associated with higher homicide, even controlling for other factors.” This effect is confirmed in many other studies.5

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). 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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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. This figure comes not from a pro-legalization group, but from the United Nations Office on Drug Control,

the American writer Nick Gillespie puts it: “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

“Our method is—be a human being with other human beings,” Liz tells me. “Be there for them. Don’t judge. Don’t tell them how to live their fricking life. Just be in their life. Be a nice, solid presence. Somebody who isn’t going to bow and bend . . . and walk away. Who’s not going to abandon them. Who’s not going to leave. Who’s not going to kick them out.”

“there was no significant risk15 of addiction, a finding common to all studies that examine the relationship between addiction and the use of narcotics for pain relief.”

“Their relative maladjustment,” the study found, “precedes the initiation of drug use.” Indeed, “Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause,20 of personal and social maladjustment.”

“the basic cause of addiction is predominantly experience-dependent during childhood, and not substance-dependent. The current conception of addiction is ill-founded.”

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.

There was no heroin in the city—but all the heroin addicts were carrying on almost exactly as before. They were still scrambling desperately to raise the money—robbing or prostituting—to buy this empty cocktail. They weren’t in agonizing withdrawal. They weren’t getting gut-wrenchingly sick. They thought the “heroin” they were buying was weak, to be sure, and they were topping it up with heavier drinking or more Valium. But the core of their addiction didn’t seem to be affected. Nothing had changed.

The real pain of withdrawal is the return of all the psychological pain that you were trying to put to sleep with heroin in the first place.

The only people who can be killed by withdrawal, it turns out, are people who are already very weak: withdrawal helped to kill Billie Holiday when she was terribly sick with liver disease, for example, in the same way that ordinary flu can kill a ninety-five-year-old.

It isn’t the drug that causes the harmful behavior—it’s the environment. An isolated rat will almost always become a junkie. A rat with a good life almost never will, no matter how many drugs you make available to him.

As Bruce put it: he was realizing that addiction isn’t a disease. Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you—it’s the cage you live in.

“Take a man out23 of a pestilential jungle where people he can’t see are trying to kill him for reasons he doesn’t understand, and—surprise!—his need to shoot smack goes away.”

“today’s flood of addiction27 is occurring because our hyperindividualistic, frantic, crisis-ridden society makes most people feel social[ly] or culturally isolated. Chronic isolation causes people to look for relief. They find temporary relief in addiction . . . because [it] allows them to escape their feelings, to deaden their senses—and to experience an addictive lifestyle as a substitute for a full life.”

The horrifying fact is that, as Bruce puts it, “it’s a lot better to be a junkie than to be nothing at all, and that’s the alternative these guys face—being nothing at all.” So when the heroin was cut off, “They maintained the essence of their heroin addiction—which is a subculture addiction.” When you have been told you are a piece of shit all your life, embracing the identity of being a piece of shit, embracing the other pieces of shit, living openly as a piece of shit—it seems better than being alone.29 As one addict told Bruce: “This is a life. It’s better than no life.”

“Human beings only become addicted when they cannot find anything better to live for and when they desperately need to fill the emptiness that threatens to destroy them,” Bruce explained in a lecture in London31 in 2011. “The need to fill an inner void is not limited to people who become drug addicts, but afflicts the vast majority of people of the late modern era, to a greater or lesser degree.”

This point is worth underscoring. With the most powerful and deadly drug in our culture, the actual chemicals account for only 17.7 percent of the compulsion to use. The rest can only be explained by the factors Gabor and Bruce have discovered.

As a culture, for one hundred years, we have convinced ourselves that a real but fairly small aspect of addiction—physical dependence—is the whole show.

“People overdose because8 [under prohibition] they don’t know if the heroin is 1 percent or 40 percent . . . Just imagine if every time you picked up a bottle of wine, you didn’t know whether it was 8 percent alcohol or 80 percent alcohol [or] if every time you took an aspirin, you didn’t know if it was 5 milligrams or 500 milligrams.”

The average life expectancy29 on the Downtown Eastside, according to the city’s medical health officials, had risen by ten years. One newspaper headline30 said simply: LIFE-EXPECTANCY JUMP ASTOUNDS. The Province newspaper explained: “Medical health officer Dr. John Carsley said it is rare to see such a shift in a population’s life expectancy.” Some of this improvement is due to the fact that the neighborhood is no longer seen as a disaster zone, so some wealthier, healthier people have started to move in; but the Globe and Mail newspaper reported,31 using figures from the British Columbia coroners’ office, that drug-related fatalities were down by 80 percent in this period. To find a rise in life expectancy this drastic, you’d have to look to the end of wars—which is what this is.

Henry Smith Williams’s policies prevailed in Britain, and nowhere else on earth. The result was that while heroin addiction was swelling into the hundreds of thousands in the United States, the picture in Britain was different. The number of addicts never exceeded a thousand, and, as Mike Gray explains,13 “the addict population in England remained pretty much as it was—little old ladies, self-medicating doctors, chronic pain sufferers, ne’er-do-wells, ‘all middle-aged people’—most of them leading otherwise normal lives.” British doctors insisted there was such a thing as a “stabilized addict,”14 and they said that when you prescribe, this was the norm rather than the exception.

Newcombe found that none of these addicts had the HIV virus, even though Liverpool was a port city where you would expect it to be rife. Indeed, none of them had the usual problems found among addicts: overdoses, abscesses, disease. They mostly had regular jobs and normal lives.

Doesn’t heroin inherently damage the body? Doesn’t it naturally cause abscesses, diseases, and death? All doctors agree21 that medically pure heroin, injected using clean needles, does not produce these problems. Under prohibition, criminals cut their drugs with whatever similar-looking powders they can find, so they can sell more batches and make more cash.

Users can stay on this program for as long as they want, but the average patient will come here for three years, and at the end of that time, only 15 percent67 are still using every day.

Outbreaks of drug addiction have always taken place, he proved, when there was a sudden rise is isolation and distress—from the gin-soaked slums of London in the eighteenth century to the terrified troops in Vietnam.

The harder you crack down, the stronger the drugs become. The crackdown on cannabis in the 1970s triggered the rise of skunk and superskunk. The crackdown on powder cocaine in the early 1980s led to the creation of crack, a more compact form of the drug. Many drug users want and prefer the milder forms of their drug—but they can’t get them under prohibition, so they are pressed onto harder drugs.

Just as when all legal routes to alcohol were cut off, beer disappeared and whisky won, when all legal routes to opiates are cut off, Oxy disappears, and heroin prevails. This

The war on drugs makes it almost impossible for drug users to get milder forms of their drug—and it pushes them inexorably toward harder drugs.

So when the panel reported, it made recommendations based on these insights. It said that “drug users should be treated9 as full members of society instead of cast out as criminals or other pariahs.” Instead of “striv[ing] toward an unachievable perfection such as zero drug use,” they would decriminalize all drugs.