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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.
He wrote to thirty scientific experts asking a series of questions about marijuana. Twenty-nine of them wrote back saying it would be wrong to ban it, and that it was being widely misrepresented in the press. Anslinger decided to ignore them and quoted instead the one expert who believed it was a great evil that had to be eradicated.
For years, doctors kept approaching him with evidence that he was wrong, and he began to snap, telling them they were “treading on dangerous ground” and should watch their mouths.
The most frightening effect of marijuana, Harry warned, was on Blacks. It made them forget the appropriate racial barriers—and unleashed their lust for white women.
The Bureau believed that marijuana slowed down your perception of time dramatically, and this was why jazz music sounded so freakish—the musicians were literally living at a different, inhuman rhythm.
The arguments we hear today for the drug war are that we must protect teenagers from drugs, and prevent addiction in general. We assume, looking back, that these were the reasons this war was launched in the first place. But they were not. They crop up only occasionally, as asides. 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.
Harry told the public that “the increase [in drug addiction] is practically 100 percent among Negro people,” which he stressed was terrifying because already “the Negro population . . . accounts for 10 percent of the total population, but 60 percent of the addicts.” He could wage the drug war—he could do what he did—only because he was responding to a fear in the American people.
Harry Anslinger did not create these underlying trends. His genius wasn’t for invention: it was for presenting his agents as the hand that would steady all these cultural tremblings.
The drug war was born in the United States—but so was the resistance to it.
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.
“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.
official government study found that 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, while only 6 percent were poor.
The drug dealer could now charge extortionate prices. In the pharmacies, morphine had cost two or three cents a grain; the criminal gangs charged a dollar. If you were addicted, you paid whatever you were told to pay.
while Harry Anslinger claimed to be fighting the Mafia, he was in fact transferring a massive and highly profitable industry into their exclusive control.
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.
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. But Anslinger’s crackdown continued with full force.
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.
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 themselves. They wanted the drug war. They wanted it so badly, they would pay to speed it up.
Drug prohibition put the entire narcotics industry into their hands. Once the clinics were closed, every single person with an addiction became a potential customer and cash cow.
Anslinger really believed he was the sworn enemy of the drug gangs, even as they were paying his officers to enact his policies.
Harry worked very hard to keep the country in a state of panic on the subject of drugs so that nobody would ever again see these logical contradictions. Whenever people did point them out, he had them silenced.
Henry Smith Williams died in 1940. Drug Addicts Are Human Beings remained out of print and largely forgotten for the rest of Anslinger’s life, and ours.
The book contained a prediction. If this drug war continues, 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.
While Harry Anslinger was shutting down all the alternatives to the drug war in the United States, across the rest of the world, drugs were still being sold legally. Over the next few decades, this began to end—and by the 1960s, they were banned everywhere.
Harry warned sternly, every addict was not only a criminal and a thug. He was also a potential Communist traitor. His agents told him none of these claims were true. One of them later gave an interview in which he said: “There was no evidence for Anslinger’s accusations, but that never stopped him.”
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. 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’t confuse me with the facts.”
How could a man like this have persuaded so many people? But the answers were lying there, waiting for me, in the piles of letters he received from members of the public, from senators, and from presidents. They wanted to be persuaded. They wanted easy answers to complex fears. It’s tempting to feel superior—to condescend to these people—but I suspect this impulse is there in all of
It’s hard to sit with a complex problem, such as the human urge to get intoxicated, and accept that it will always be with us, and will always cause some problems (as well as some pleasures). It is much more appealing to be told a different message—that it can be ended.
“the bureau itself was actually the major source of supply and protector of heroin in the United States.”
two men were writing a musical whose main characters were based on Arnold and Carolyn; they were going to call it Guys and Dolls.
He carried the cash on him, up to a hundred thousand dollars at a time, and he obsessively counted the money, by hand, again and again.
One day, a gambler Rothstein knew called him long distance. He said he was broke and desperately needed five hundred dollars to get back to New York and back in the game. “I can’t hear you,” Arnold said into the phone. The gambler kept repeating his request. “I can’t hear you,” Arnold repeated. The caller fiddled with his phone until the operator interrupted: “But Mr. Rothstein, I can hear him distinctly,” she said. “All right,” Arnold replied, “then you give it to him,” and hung up.
Rothstein had paid eight White Sox players to throw the match. All eight players were charged with fraud—and all were mysteriously acquitted.
the prohibition of booze and drugs was the biggest lottery win for gangsters in history.
Under prohibition, dealers were starting to discover, you can sell whatever crap you want: Who’s going to complain to the police that they were poisoned by your illicit booze?
For his system to work, Rothstein had to invent the modern drug gang.
when a popular product is criminalized, it does not disappear. Instead, criminals start to control the supply and sale of the product.
there are in reality two drug wars going on: there is the war on drugs, where the state wages war on the users and addicts, and then there is the war for drugs, where the criminals fight each other to control the trade.
The vast majority is like Chino’s violence—to establish, protect, and defend drug territory in an illegal market, and to build a name for being consistently terrifying so nobody tries to take your property or turf.
the obsession with territory, the constant demand for “respect.” And I began to think maybe they are not so irrational. You have no recourse to the law to protect your most valuable pieces of property—your drug supply—so you have to make damn sure people show you respect and stay out of your territory.
One of the few things that gave him hope was watching the Oliver Stone movie Natural Born Killers.
When the government war on alcohol stopped, the gangster war for alcohol stopped.
the murder rate has dramatically increased twice in U.S. history—and both times were during periods when prohibition was dramatically stepped up.
It’s not just there’s no sense of justice—[there’s] no sense they need justice. They’re so far down on the human level that justice doesn’t even apply to them.
if you arrest a large number of drug dealers, drug dealing doesn’t go down.
“So what happens is we take out the guy at the top,” Leigh explains, so “now, nobody’s in charge, and [so the gangs] battle it out to see who’s going to be in charge.”
“statistical analysis shows consistently that higher [police] enforcement [against drug dealers] is associated with higher homicide, even controlling for other factors.”
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).
Indeed, at any given time, 40 to 50 percent of Black men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five are in jail, on probation, or have a warrant out for their arrest, overwhelmingly for drug offenses.
