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by
Johann Hari
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April 2 - December 25, 2024
It turns out that many of our most basic assumptions about this subject are wrong. Drugs are not what we think they are. Drug addiction is not what we have been told it is. The drug war is not what our politicians have sold it as for one hundred years and counting.
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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.
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.
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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,
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.
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The vast majority of people who bought them, he recalled, used them without a problem. Most people, even if they were addicted, used them in low doses.
Pharmacy remedies (up to 65mg morphine)
Just as a large majority of drinkers did not become alcoholics, a large majority of users of these products did not become addicted to drugs. 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.
even among the addicted, the vast majority continued to work and maintain relatively normal lives.
[The lawmakers] must have known that their Edict, if enforced, was the clear equivalent of an order to create an illicit drug industry.
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.
Big Chris
Henry Smith Williams urged the public to ask: Why would gangsters pay the cops to enforce the drug laws harder? The answer, he said, was right in front of our eyes. Drug prohibition put the entire narcotics industry into their hands.
There is no evidence that Anslinger ever worked for the Mafia, and it’s fair to assume it would have emerged by now if he had.
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.
The result is that we are all still stuck at the end of the barrel of Harry Anslinger’s gun.
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.
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?
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.
Arnold tamed the police with an approach that, years later, would be distilled by his successors, the Mexican drug cartels, into a single elegant phrase: plata o plomo. Silver or lead. Take our bribe, or take a bullet.
when a popular product is criminalized, it does not disappear. Instead, criminals start to control the supply and sale of the product.
If somebody comes along and steals it, they can’t go to the police or the courts to get it back. So they can only defend their property one way: by violence.
The drug war analyst Charles Bowden says 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.
prohibition functioned for him as a gateway drug to robbery and assault.
Her demons were way deeper than drugs.
When the government war on alcohol stopped, the gangster war for alcohol stopped. All that violence—the violence produced by prohibition—ended.
Professor Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University has shown that the murder rate has dramatically increased twice in U.S. history—and both times were during periods when prohibition was dramatically stepped up. The first is from 1920 to 1933, when alcohol was criminalized. The second is from 1970 to 1990, when the prohibition of drugs was dramatically escalated.
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.
Milton Friedman
Beyond Chino Hardin, there is another layer of gangsters controlling the neighborhood. Beyond them is a network of smugglers who transported the drugs from the U.S. border to New York. Beyond them is a mule who carried them across the border. Beyond them is a gang controlling the transit through Mexico, or Thailand, or Equatorial Guinea. Beyond them is a gang controlling the production in Colombia, or Afghanistan. Beyond them is a farmer growing the opium or coca. And at every level, there is a war on drugs, a war for drugs, and a culture of terror, all created by prohibition.
Leigh had been busting people for drug possession like this for years. Her cops had clear orders: Go for numbers. Get the maximum possible arrests. Don’t worry about how severe the offense
Leigh Maddox
Her officers all knew they could seize the property of anyone they arrested for drug offenses to be auctioned off, with much of the proceeds— usually 80 percent—going straight back into the local police budget.
Leigh’s support for the drug war was an act of compassion. She genuinely believed that she was making the world a better place by protecting people from drugs and drug gangs. She is a kind and decent person, and that is what drove her to fight the drug war.
If you arrest a large number of rapists, the amount of rape goes down. If you arrest a large number of violent racists, the number of violent racist attacks goes down. But if you arrest a large number of drug dealers, drug dealing doesn’t go down.
He asked himself: “If all those cops and agents couldn’t get this one corner clean, what is the purpose of this whole damned drug war?”
Michael Levine
Why would arresting drug dealers cause a rise in murders? Gradually, she began to see the answer. “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.”
Professor Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University has studied the murder statistics 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.
It is hard to be Harry Anslinger with your eyes and your mind open.
The lesson of ending alcohol prohibition, she had come to believe, is that there is a way to actually stop this violence: legalize and regulate the drug trade.
The 1993 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse found that 19 percent of drug dealers were Black, but they made up 64 percent of the arrests for it.
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).
a Black man was far more likely to be jailed in the Land of the Free than in the most notorious white sup...
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More than 50 percent of Americans have breached the drug laws. Where a law is that widely broken, you can’t possibly enforce it against every lawbreaker. The legal system would collapse under the weight of it. So you go after the people who are least able to resist, to argue back, to appeal—the poorest and most disliked groups. In the United States, they are Black and Hispanic people, with a smattering of poor whites.
We humans are good at suppressing our epiphanies, especially when our salaries and our friendships depend on it.
I 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.
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 addicted women ache in the heat and dust storms outside. The animals, he believes, deserve it.
Alt ved Tent City e fullstendig insane
is in fact quite typical of how addicted people are treated across the United States and around the world.
Tent City
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.
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.”
Mexican drug cartels make between $19 and $29 billion every year from U.S. drug sales alone.
The cartels prefer kids: they don’t understand death, so they are less afraid.
