Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (10 page)

The Communists, he declared, were clearly flooding America
³
with drugs, as part of a “cold, calculated,
⁴
ruthless, systematic plan to undermine” America. Testifying before Congress, he gave details of a tide of “Communist heroin” flowing from the paddies of China straight into the veins of white Americans. Why would the Chinese do this? They wanted to weaken the white man—and to “build a fifth column
⁵
within the United States,” an army of addicts who would “be willing to pay with treason for their drugs.” Now, 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
⁶
were true. One of them later gave an interview in which he said: “There was no evidence
⁷
for Anslinger’s accusations, but that never stopped him.” But once again, Harry had tapped into the deepest fears of his time and ensured that they ran right through his department, swelling his budget as they went. Whatever America was afraid of—blacks, poor people, Communists—he showed how the only way to deal with the fear was to deal with drugs, his way.

By 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
⁸
.
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.

He stayed in one of the best hotels in Geneva, and he would stare at the representatives of smaller, weaker countries and growl his orders. But just as Billie Holiday was refusing to bow her head, many countries were refusing to bow theirs. Thailand, for example,
⁹
flatly refused to ban opium smoking, on the grounds that it was a long-standing tradition in their country, and less harmful than prohibition. So Harry started to twist arms. One of his key lieutenants, Charles Siragusa,
¹⁰
boasted: “I found that a casual mention of the possibility of shutting off our foreign aid programs, dropped in the proper quarters, brought grudging permission for our operations almost immediately.” Later, leaders were threatened with being cut off from selling any of their countries’ goods to the United States.

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
¹¹
confuse me with the facts.”

And so Thailand caved. Britain caved. Everyone—under threat—caved in the end. The United States was now the most powerful country in the world, and nobody dared defy them for long. Some were more willing than others. Pretty much every country has its own minority group, like African Americans, whom it wants to keep down. For many, it was a good excuse. And pretty much every country had this latent desire to punish addicts. “The world belongs to the strong,”
¹²
Harry believed. “It always has and it always will.” The result is that we are all still stuck at the end of the barrel of Harry Anslinger’s gun.

But something else was frightening Harry—something much closer to home. From the start of his period at the bureau, he was finding that his thoughts were spiraling off into strange, disordered directions. His private files started to warn in frantic tones that addicts were “contagious,” and that any one of us could be infected if they were not immediately “quarantined.”
¹³
And then, quite suddenly, Harry disappeared
¹⁴
from the bureau for months.

Although nobody was told at the time, Harry in fact had a mental breakdown and had to be hospitalized.
¹⁵
When he returned, his paranoia only seemed to have grown. He saw enemies and plots and secret attempts to control the entire world around every corner.

At times, as I read through Harry’s ever-stranger arguments, I wondered: 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 us. The public wanted to be told that these deep, complex problems—race, inequality, geopolitics—came down to a few powders and pills, and if these powders and pills could be wiped from the world, these problems would disappear.

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. It is a logic that keeps recurring throughout human history, from the Crusades to the witch hunts to the present day. 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. That all these problems can be over, if only we listen, and follow.

After Harry finally retired from running the bureau—with a little nudge from JFK—they discovered something odd about Harry’s paranoia. It turns out it had been pointed in every direction except where it would have been deserved—at his own department. Immediately after he finally stood down, an investigation by a special team from the Internal Revenue Service found that the bureau was not free from corruption, leading historian John McWilliams to claim that, “the bureau itself was actually the major source
¹⁶
of supply and protector of heroin in the United States.”

Anslinger had been too busy chasing doctors, jazz singers, addicts, and Chinese dragons to see there were drug dealers in front of him all along.

But no matter. Harry had won. By the time he left office as the only man ever to run a U.S. security agency longer than J. Edgar Hoover, nobody was suggesting disbanding the Federal Bureau of Narcotics anymore. It was an essential part of the government machine.

Years later, in 1970,
Playboy
magazine arranged a roundtable debate of the drug laws and invited him to take part. For the first time since he sat down with Henry Smith Williams in the 1930s, Harry Anslinger was forced to defend his arguments against articulate opponents. They included the psychiatrist Dr. Joel Fort, the lawyer Joseph Oteri, and the poet laureate of narcotics, William Burroughs.

This time, Harry did not run away from defending his views, as he had with Henry Smith Williams. He went on the attack. “A person under the influence of marijuana,” he declared, “can get so violent that it takes about five policemen to hold him down.” He said there is “proof that continued use of hashish results in commitment to mental hospitals.”

Before, he would have been greeted with a respectful silence. Not now. When asked for evidence for these claims, he talked about the Indian psychiatrist Dr. Isaac Chopra, “who has stated flatly and unequivocally that Cannabis drugs lead to psychosis.”

“I got Dr. Chopra on the stand in Boston, under cross-examination,” Oteri replied, “and he admitted his studies did not involve a valid scientific sample and didn’t really connect marijuana and insanity in any cause and effect fashion.” Anslinger had no response.

His opponents offered studies, facts, figures about how prohibition had not worked. Anslinger kept coming back with anecdotes, almost always sexual: “I can tell you about a case in a fraternity house where they were having a weekend party. On a dare, one of the girls took a sugar cube in which there was a drop of LSD. She was out for two days and during that time she was raped by a number of the fraternity boys.”

The other people around the table seemed nonplussed, as sexy stories adapted from the pages of 1930s pulp fiction bumped up against valid scientific studies. It’s as if a Mickey Spillane detective had wandered into a medical seminar and started telling the doctors they were talking bunk because one time he’d followed a blond dame down an alleyway.

Anslinger started to try to compete with their world of factual claims, saying: “I challenge you to name one doctor who has reported a beneficial effect of marijuana, outside of the backward areas of the world.” He was immediately answered with names: Dr. Lloyd J. Thompson, professor of psychiatry at Bowman Gray School of Medicine, and George T. Stocking, one of Britain’s leading psychiatrists. Again, Anslinger had no response. This kept happening in a strange fox-trot of debunking. Anslinger asserted; the experts rebutted; Anslinger fell silent.

When feeling met fact, he was stumped. And then Anslinger snapped. He started calling everybody at the table around him “utterly monstrous” and said they were talking “vicious tripe” and must have a “disordered mind.” Then he compared them to Adolf Hitler, and finally spluttered: “We’ve been hearing some of the most ridiculous statements that have ever been made.”

As I sat amid boxes and boxes of Harry’s papers—all that remains of him, except for a global war—I found something sad about this scene. He was clearly an old man in pain, both from the angina he had developed and from no longer having the power to silence this conversation. Still, he tried, raising the rhetorical stakes to claim that the people who disagree with him will cause the death of America: “History is strewn,” he said, “with the bones of nations that have tolerated moral laxity and hedonism.”

Dr. Fort looked over at Anslinger’s vast bald head and replied. “You have led this country to treat scientific questions,” he said, “the way such matters were handled in the Middle Ages.” Dr. Henry Smith Williams had said this at the beginning of Anslinger’s long career; now another doctor was standing before him saying precisely the same thing, as Harry Anslinger offered his last recorded words.

Chapter 4

The Bullet at the Birth

As I dug deeper, I realized there was a hole in the story of the start of the drug war—a large and cavernous one. It is possible to piece together how this all began through the eyes of the cops, the doctors, and the addicts. But as I read on, I found they were all obsessed with a fourth force—the new army of drug dealers that was emerging all around them. I wanted to know their stories, and how they saw the world. But drug dealers don’t keep records. There is no National Heroin Dealers’ Archive to consult. For a long time, no matter how hard I looked, it seemed that this was a tale that could never be retrieved. Their memories died with the people who knew them, and they are all gone now.

But then I found out there was one exception. The first man to really see the potential of drug dealing in America was a gangster named Arnold Rothstein—and I slowly realized it was possible to piece him back together in quite a lot of detail. He was so egotistical he actually invited journalists to write about him—and he was so powerful he didn’t worry about the police reading it. He owned them. There have been a number of biographies written of him, and even more important, I found out that after he died, his wife wrote a detailed memoir of her life with him, explaining exactly what he was like, in lush novelistic detail.