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

The Federal Bureau of Narcotics was an agency within the Department of the Treasury. It was formed in 1930 as a continuation of the Department of Prohibition. Harry Anslinger served as the Bureau’s commissioner from its establishment in 1930 until his retirement in 1962. When the US overturned alcohol prohibition in 1933, the Bureau began to focus solely on narcotics that the Harrison Act had outlawed in 1914. The Bureau was dissolved in 1968.

The Harrison Act was a federal law passed in 1914 that registered, regulated, and taxed the production, importation, or distribution of opiates and coca products. The law effectively banned all narcotics yet allowed doctors to prescribe them to patients during treatment.

The iron law of prohibition states that when a substance is prohibited, it becomes more potent. The American opiate drug crisis of the 2000s exemplified this principle: Patients who became addicted to prescribed opiates for pain began using heroin when their original drugs became harder to obtain. The principle was in play on an even larger scale during alcohol prohibition. Hari explains that before alcohol prohibition, beer was the most popular alcoholic drink, but when prohibition started, most drinkers sought hard liquor because they desired not only a stronger drink but also one that was easier to transport and conceal.

The pharmaceutical theory of addiction states that chemicals in powerful drugs are the cause of addiction. This was the standard belief for many years and still is widely accepted, but more recent research has shown that social factors play an important role in addiction as well. 

The Portland Hotel Society is a non-profit charity that provides housing and medical aid to drug addicts and homeless persons in the Downtown Eastside area of Vancouver. Founded in the early 1990s, it was controversial because it openly broke drug laws. 

Rat Park refers to a series of experiments conducted by psychology professor Bruce Alexander in the early 1970s. Before these experiments, the pharmaceutical theory of addiction was widely accepted because of experiments in which isolated rats chose water spiked with morphine over regular water. Alexander tweaked this experiment by placing multiple rats in some of the cages along with food and toys for comparison to the isolated rats. He found that the rats with pleasant cages and the ability to bond with other rats chose the spiked water far less frequently. His conclusion was that social factors, more than chemicals, drive addiction.

Tent City refers to the outdoor jail operated by controversial Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Arizona. The jail was erected in 1993 due to over-crowding at that time, but detractors have argued that it lasted until 2017 solely as Arpaio’s attention-grabbing political statement. As Hari points out in Chapter 8, Arpaio turned a standard jail on the same property into an animal shelter. Tent City became notorious in the 1990s and 2000s not only because of the dangerous heat conditions but also because Arpaio used it to shame drug offenders by issuing standard inmate clothes with degrading slogans printed on them.

The Transform Drugs Policy Institute is a non-profit organization formed in the UK by Danny Kushlick and Steve Rolles in 1996. The organization’s purpose was to answer questions about how drug legalization would work in practice. Kushlick and Rolles advised President José Mujica of Uruguay in 2012 when he took the step of making marijuana fully legal.

The Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, or VANDU, was founded in the late 1990s by poet and heroin addict Bud Osborn. The organization existed to help prevent overdose deaths in the Downtown Eastside neighborhood of Vancouver, Canada. It was responsible for Vancouver becoming the first city in North America with a legal supervised injection site.