Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (9 page)

Harry wanted Edward Williams to be broken more than any other doctor, because he was widely respected and many people listened to him. “The moral effect of his conviction,”
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Anslinger wrote, “will most certainly result in greater circumspection.” You only have to destroy a few doctors to silence the rest. Go for the top. Maximum intimidation. This was always Harry’s way. “Anybody that came out with any academic work that could be critical of him, his Bureau, or his philosophy, had to go to prison,”
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Howard Diller, one of his agents, said later. “Or be beheaded.”

As he watched the birth of the drug war, Henry Smith Williams—cold, chilly, arrogant—felt a war breaking out within himself. Part of him believed addicts were the result of barbaric genes left over from cavemen, and the sooner they died off,
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the better. But he was also seeing the faces of the individual human beings who were being broken. When he saw the work of Anslinger in the world, he began to question the Anslinger in his own heart.

He went to meet Harry Anslinger
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in Washington, D.C., to plead for his brother’s reputation and freedom. Harry was now confronted with one of his victims face-to-face, perhaps for the first time. He offered no defense of himself, and he put forward none of the arguments he proclaimed so loudly elsewhere. He backed off. He said that he “could not discover that the Bureau had any case against Dr. Williams, and could not understand why such a man had been attacked.”
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He put all the blame on his Los Angeles representative, a big redheaded agent named Chris Hanson. Yet after Williams was gone, Anslinger privately jeered at him, saying that Henry Smith Williams was suffering from “hysteria.”
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At the trial, every single one of the seventeen doctors
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who testified supported Edward Williams, yet he was found guilty
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of violating the Harrison Act—in effect, of being a drug dealer—and sentenced to a year
⁴⁶
on federal probation. This ensured he would never again
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write a prescription for an addict—nor would any other doctor in the United States for generations to come. “Doctors,” Harry boasted,
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now “cannot treat addicts even if they wish to.”

Harry’s own agents began to quit in disgust. One of them, William G. Walker, said:
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“If anyone could see the suffering of these poor devils . . . they would understand why we should have a change.”

One doctor—stripped of his power to prescribe—decided he had to stop this cruelty once and for all. He traveled to Washington, D.C., with a gun stuffed into his coat. He was determined to walk into Harry Anslinger’s office and kill him. He stood outside Harry’s office until he was finally allowed in. Anslinger offered to take the doctor’s coat—and, as he reached for it, snatched the gun. Harry boasted later that even if the doctor had taken a shot at him, he would have “made a sieve out of him”
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by firing first.

None of this gave Harry pause. The doctors were so emotional, Harry insisted, because they were corrupt. Don’t be fooled: they only wanted the money from drug addicts’ prescriptions. They were missing the hard cash, he said, and nothing more. Besides, he said, he had proof that his way worked. 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. The Treasury Department’s top officials had privately said it was “absolutely worthless.”
⁵¹

Back in Los Angeles, after a long period of digging, Henry Smith Williams was finally ready to make his announcement—one he believed would change the course of the twentieth century, and finally end this “American Inquisition.” In 1938, he published a book titled
Drug Addicts Are Human Beings
, laying out his evidence that the entire policy of drug prohibition in America was a gigantic racket—running right up to and including the bald man in Washington, D.C., directing the “crackdown.” Harry, he maintained, was taking his instructions from the Mafia.

If you want to know how this scam works, he explained, you need to look at the story of Chris Hanson.
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He was a thickset man in his sixties, with bright red hair and a strangely smooth and youthful face, known to everyone as Big Chris. He was Harry’s bureau chief in California, and he masterminded the mass round-up of doctors there, including Edward Williams.

And we now know why he did it, wrote Henry Smith Williams. Not long after he shut down the clinic in Los Angeles, it was proven in court that Big Chris was secretly working for a notorious Chinese drug dealer named Woo Sing.
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He was taking bushels of cash from the drug dealers, and in turn he was doing their bidding. The dealers paid Big Chris to shut down the heroin clinics. They wanted him to do it.

I had to read through these files several times before I realized the significance of this accusation. 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
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. They wanted the drug war. They wanted it so badly, they would pay to speed it up.

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. Once the clinics were closed, every single addict became a potential customer and cash cow.

Since his brother’s clinic had been shut down by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics following bribes from the Mafia, Smith Williams reasoned that that must be what was happening at the national level, too. Anslinger must be in their pay: if the drug gangs win from Anslinger’s policies, and nobody else does, the only explanation is that he is one of them.

Henry Smith Williams was, it turns out, wrong on this one crucial detail. 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. Anslinger really believed he was the sworn enemy of the drug gangs, even as they were paying his officers to enact his policies. Henry Smith Williams assumed that Anslinger—and prohibition—were rational, like him. They were not. They are responses to fear, and panic. And nobody, when they are panicking, can see the logical flaws in their thought.

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. He had to make sure there was no room for doubt—in his own head, or in the country—and no alternative
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for Americans to turn to.

Henry Smith Williams was never the same after these experiences. Before, he saw the majority of human beings as feeble dimwits who barely deserve life. But he started to argue that humans didn’t have to be engaged in a brutal Darwinian war of survival after all; instead, we can choose kindness in place of crushing the weak.
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He spent his remaining years setting up a group to campaign for an end to the drug war, but Anslinger’s men wrote to everyone who expressed an interest in it, warning them it was a “criminal organization” that was “in trouble with Uncle Sam.”
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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.
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The story of the Williams brothers, and all the doctors who were crushed alongside them, was so successfully wiped from America’s collective memory that by the 1960s, Anslinger could say in public that doctors had always been his allies in the drug war. “I’d like to see,” he told a journalist, “the doctor who claims he was treated in anything but the kindliest fashion.”
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Chapter 3

The Barrel of Harry’s Gun

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.

At first, I assumed this was because every country had its own local fears and its own local Anslingers—but then I started to notice something odd in Anslinger’s archives, and I didn’t understand it.

In his letters, he was issuing orders all over the world—including to my country, Britain. He acted as the first “drug czar” not just for the United States, but for the world. How? I started trying to figure out the story of how Harry took his war global—and
¹
pushed his views into the laws of everyone reading this book, wherever you are.

Once the doctors were whipped into line, there was one thing left that puzzled Harry. He was doing all the right things. He was cracking down on addicts and doctors and dealers. He held up one city in particular as a model for the whole world of how to wipe out drugs, because it adopted every single piece of hard-line legalization he demanded. That city was Baltimore.
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Yet something, it seemed, wasn’t working. Baltimore was—inexplicably—not becoming a drug-free paradise. Harry said there was only one possible explanation. Just as he had glimpsed the Mafia secretly operating beneath the surface of American society, he now believed he could see another, even more evil force secretly manipulating events.