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

“The drug war was born in the United States—but so was the resistance to it. Right at the start, there were people who saw that the drug war was not what we were being told. It was something else entirely.”

Hari explores an early instance of resistance to the drug war. This resistance came from Dr. Henry Smith Williams during the 1930s, after his brother, Dr. Edward Williams, was arrested along with 20,000 other doctors for legally prescribing heroin to addicts suffering from withdrawal symptoms. Williams published a 1938 book in which he alleged that Anslinger and the Narcotics Bureau must have known that prohibition would lead to an illicit “black market” for drugs. Williams correctly predicted that the drug war would create a five-billion-dollar illegal drug industry in America within 50 years.

“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.”

Hari examines how and why the rest of the world adopted the same policies of drug prohibition that the US had. The Harrison Act of 1914 outlawed heroin, but a loophole allowed doctors to continue prescribing the drug as they saw fit. However, Anslinger began arresting those doctors and shutting down their clinics in the 1930s. By the 1950s, when Anslinger saw that his policies were not working in the US, he decided that he needed to go global with his drug war for the policies to work. He went to the United Nations and began applying pressure to other nations to adopt his policies. Although some nations rejected the idea, the US threatened to cut foreign aid and limit trade to force its policies onto others.

“Arnold Rothstein is the start of a lineup of criminals that runs through the Crips and the Bloods and Pablo Escobar to Chapo Guzman—each more vicious because he was strong enough to kill the 

Chapter 4 focuses entirely on Arnold Rothstein, the New York City gangster who fixed sporting events, operated illegal gambling dens, and eventually became America’s first drug kingpin. Rothstein saw that the prohibition of alcohol and drugs was a huge business opportunity in the 1920s, and he came to dominate the East Coast drug trade by establishing a reputation for extreme brutality. After he was shot and killed in 1928, the control of that drug trade became a source of constant conflict for future gangsters.

“There was once only one Arnold Rothstein in New York City. In the seven decades of escalating warfare ever since, there has come to be an Arnold Rothstein on every block in every poor neighborhood in America.”

Hari is referencing how the fight to control the illegal drug trade, which Rothstein once had to himself, is itself a violent war that the government’s war on drugs created. This war is won only through the culture of terror that comes from establishing a reputation for violence like Rothstein’s.

“When the government war on alcohol stopped, the gangster war for alcohol stopped. All that violence—the violence produced by prohibition—ended.”

One of the most profound arguments made by Hari and others who oppose the war on drugs is that the prohibition of drugs creates rather than reduces violence. Statistics and academic studies prove that this is true. The dynamic that Hari is referring to is the same for any illegal “black market.” When something that is in demand becomes prohibited, it disappears from the legal market economy and can then be controlled by criminals who offer it illegally, and a war ensues for its possession and distribution.

“More than 50 percent of American 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.”

This passage touches on one of the book’s minor themes: that the war on drugs started because of racism—and that the way drug laws are applied is racially biased. Many studies have proven a higher percentage of drug use among whites than among minorities, but drug laws are applied much more leniently with white offenders. 

“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. prisons were detained in one place, they would rank as the thirty-fifth most populous state of the union.”

Hari visits a notorious outdoor jail in Arizona that Sheriff Joe Arpaio operates. The jail is known as Tent City, and its primary purpose is to house and punish drug offenders. The prisoners are forced to work as a chain gang while wearing degrading shirts referring to their drug addictions. Hari uses the quote as an example of how the system of prohibition treats even nonviolent drug addicts with cruelty.

“In Mexico, the foundations of law and democracy are made of wood—it was governed by one semidictatorial party for seven decades until 2000, so a culture of feeling that the law is something that citizens write together and should obey together has not yet properly developed.”

Hari is referring to the question of why drug gangs have been able to control Mexico but not the US. He uses the analogy of prohibited drugs as a river redirected to run through a town. If the redirected river runs through a cemented building, it will do damage in the form of erosion and broken windows, but if it runs through a wooden structure, it will wash it away entirely.

“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 with a Wal-Mart and a Pizza Hut and several KFCs.”

Hari tells the story of Marisela Escobedo, a nurse in Juárez whose daughter was murdered by a member of the Zetas. She set out to seek justice but found that the Zetas controlled not only the police but also the law itself. A teenager who testified against the cartel member was murdered, and when Escobedo took her fight public, she too was murdered. Hari alludes here to how this is happening in a city which strongly resembles any American city.

“Only 10 percent 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 global coordinator of the drug war.”

Hari refers to how we are trained think about drug use in a much different way. He argues that the reason is that the 10% of users who become drug addicts are the most visible to us and the ones most often used as examples. 

“Addicts… often grow up in homes that are not homes, with parents that are not parents, [so] they seek escape. Girl or boy, this is a familiar pattern.”

Hari advances the theory Dr. Gabor Maté studied in Vancouver which posits that drug addiction is due to a combination of previous trauma and the powerful chemical substance rather than the substance alone, as has been commonly believed. This quote is from Harry Anslinger, which is surprising given the way he chose to combat addiction.

“In order to punish addicts, the drug warriors have in fact built the very conditions that will be most likely to produce and deepen addiction.”

This quote refers to the Rat Park experiments that Bruce Alexander conducted in Vancouver in the 1970s. The experiments found that isolated rats in unpleasant cages used the drugs provided, while the rats in pleasant cages with other rats used much less. Hari concludes that the system of prohibition that punishes addicts by locking them away rather than providing help furthers the problem of addiction.

“Human beings need to bond. It is one of our most primal urges. So if we can’t bond with other people, we will find a behavior to bond with, whether it’s watching pornography or smoking crack or gambling. If the only bond you can find that gives you relief or meaning is with splayed women on a computer screen or bags of crystal or a roulette wheel, you will return to that obsessively.”

Hari is referencing Bruce Alexander’s theory about the role of dislocation with addicts. He argues that addiction worsens when a drug user is cut off from meaning. Bonding, in this theory, doesn’t necessarily mean with other people but rather with a way of life.

“Gandhi said one of the crucial roles for anyone who wants to change anything is to make the oppression visible—to give it a physical shape.”

Hari quotes Gandhi in reference to the drug addicts’ protest in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, when they displayed wooden crosses to represent all the drug overdose deaths during the previous four years. The addicts believed that if the citizens in the area knew how many people were dying, they’d care and respond.

“If you give hard-core addicts the option of a safe legal prescription and allow them to control the dose, the vast majority will stabilize and then slowly reduce their drug consumption over time.”

Hari explores the reforms to drug prohibition that took place under President Ruth Dreifuss in Switzerland in the late 1990s. She introduced a program of heroin prescription for addicts, and the country saw these results.

“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.”

Hari is referencing what’s known as the iron law of prohibition, which states that the potency of prohibited substances increases when they are banned. This was true during alcohol prohibition, when Americans went from wanting beer to wanting hard liquor. Likewise, it’s true in the drug war, when Americans who become addicted to opiate medication move to heroin when drugs like OxyContin become impossible to get.

“In the United States, 90 percent of the money spent on drug policy goes to policing and punishment, with 10 percent going to treatment and prevention. In Portugal, the ratio is the exact opposite.”

Hari references how when Portugal decriminalized all drugs, it also decided that “all the money spent on arresting, trying, and punishing addicts should be transferred to educating kids and helping addicts to recover” (238).

“Prohibition is based on externally preventing people from using drugs through fear and force; the Portuguese alternative is based on the belief that drugs aren’t going away, so you need instead to give people the internal tools—the confidence, the knowledge, the support—to make the right decisions for themselves.”

Hari explores the revolution that occurred in Portugal when the country became the first in the world to decriminalize all drugs. Rather than treating drug addicts like criminals, Portugal decided to focus energy on treatment and life improvements for existing users and on educating kids.

“Government regulation can provide a product that is cheaper, higher quality, and not sold in dark alleyways. The drug dealers would go the way of alcohol-selling gangsters into the dustbin of history.”

When Uruguayan President José Mujica decided to fully legalize marijuana in 2012, this was his thought process. He’d been concerned that cartels could take over his country, as they’d done in Mexico, because it’s part of the transit route for cocaine and marijuana into Europe.

“Previously, presidents across the world had held back from legalization because of two fears. The first was the United States. The second was their own people.”

Hari previously showed how the US and Harry Anslinger used threats to apply pressure to other nations to follow his blueprint on the war on drugs. Here, he’s referencing how presidents around the world, before Mujica in Uruguay, feared taking such a bold step because of the backlash that they might face from voters.

“They haven’t just changed their minds about prohibition—they have changed their minds about the drug. If you read out Harry Anslinger’s warnings today that marijuana routinely turns people into slavering murderers, even conservative audiences laugh out loud.”

Hari examines the successful 2006 campaigns to legalize marijuana in Colorado and Washington. Hari suggests that public opinion had much to do with the passage of legalization. The scare tactics that worked in the 1930s no longer work because people realize the absurdity of some of the claims. 

“Two global wars began in 1914. The First World War lasted four years. It came to be remembered as a byword for futility—miles of men killing and dying to seize a few more meters of mud. The drug war has lasted, as I write, for almost 100 years and counting.”

Hari expresses the disgust that he and others who want to reform drug laws feel. By comparing the drug war to World War I, which came to be considered a futile exercise in needless deaths, he makes the point that the drug war has been similarly futile and fatal but has lasted for nearly a century. 

“The law must fit the facts. Prohibition will never succeed through the promulgation of a mere law if the American people regard it as obnoxious. Temperance by choice is far better than the present condition of temperance by force.”

In his conclusion, Hari includes this shocking quote from Harry Anslinger in the 1930s, after it was clear that the alcohol prohibition would not work. By using it, Hari is pointing to the hypocrisy of holding that opinion about banning alcohol but not drugs.