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

In the opening chapter, Hari introducing three people whom he considers the most important figures in the history of the war on drugs: Harry Anslinger, who spearheaded the drug war as the commissioner of the Bureau of Narcotics; Arnold Rothstein, an organized crime boss who became America’s first drug kingpin; and Billie Holliday, the heroin-addicted jazz singer who became a prime target of Anslinger. He argues that these three Americans would be immortalized “if there was a Mount Rushmore for drug prohibition” (7). Anslinger served as an agent in the US Treasury Department during alcohol prohibition and was appointed as the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics when the agency was formed in 1930. Although cocaine and heroin had been outlawed since 1914, Anslinger determined that cannabis should be prohibited as well. He came to this decision after learning that African Americans and Mexican immigrants were using marijuana much more than whites. Anslinger himself previously acknowledged that marijuana was not addictive and did not lead to violent crime—but almost overnight his view changed and he began to use the fear of violent racial minorities to galvanize public support for the drug’s prohibition.

In addition, Anslinger discovered that marijuana usage was widespread among jazz musicians, so he began to have his agents target this community heavily. Because the agents could not force the community of jazz musicians to inform on one another, Anslinger instead focused on one famous singer in particular: Billie Holliday, the rising star vocalist, who he had heard was a heroin user. Holliday raised herself on the streets of Baltimore and was raped at age 10. When she was 14, she had no choice but to become a prostitute and ended up marrying her abusive pimp, a man who later acted as her manager and eventually sought revenge for being cut out of her life by helping Anslinger set her up for drug offenses. After serving a year in a West Virginia prison, Holliday lost her cabaret performer’s license, so she could no longer perform anywhere that served alcohol.

In 1949, Holliday was again arrested by one of Anslinger’s agents and charged with possession, but a jury found her not guilty. A few years later, at age 44, Holliday collapsed and was taken to the hospital, where a doctor explained that she had cirrhosis of the liver and heart disease. Narcotics agents turned up in her hospital room, claiming to have found heroin in her possession once again, and a grand jury indicted her. She was handcuffed to her bed and not allowed visitors. A doctor prescribed methadone to curb the heroin withdrawal, but Anslinger made sure that it was stopped after 10 days, and she died in her hospital bed. Hari argues that Anslinger’s laser focus and pursuit of Holliday was because “he knew that to secure his bureau’s future, he needed a high-profile victory, over intoxication and over the blacks” (28). 

This chapter examines one of the most disturbing contradictions of the war on drugs: Total prohibition creates an illegal “black market” that benefits only criminal drug dealers. Hari details the story of Edward Williams and his brother Henry Smith Williams, Los Angeles doctors who became vocal opponents of the drug war and targets of Anslinger. Their conflict with Anslinger began in 1931, when Edward treated a man in heroin withdrawal at the clinic that he had set up for this purpose. Although the Harrison Act of 1914 outlawed the sale of heroin, the Supreme Court ruled in 1925 that doctors could still prescribe the drug to treat patients. Hari explains that in the years before selling drugs became a crime, opiates were cheap and widely available at local pharmacies, marketed as remedies for a range of ailments. Hari points out that most used these products without a problem, arguing “just as a large majority of drinkers did not become alcoholics, a large majority of users of these products did not become drug addicts” (36). Additionally, research showed that among the few who did get hooked, “the vast majority continued to work and maintain relatively normal lives” (36).

The patient whom Edward treated turned out to be one of many addicts across the country being paid by the Bureau of Narcotics to go to clinics such as this and seek out prescriptions from doctors. This resulted in Edward and some 20,000 other doctors being arrested in what Hari describes as “one of the biggest legal assaults on doctors in American history” (35). As his brother’s career was being destroyed, Henry began to realize that the budding drug war was creating two separate crime waves: an army of gangsters smuggling drugs into the country to sell to addicts at far higher prices, and addicts in turn committing crimes to feed their addiction. In his 1938 book on drug addiction, Henry wrote that the male addicts “usually become thieves; the women often become prostitutes” (37). Although Hari dismisses the notion, Henry even began to suspect that Anslinger himself was working for the mafia because he must have known that his bureau was creating an illicit drug industry. Henry’s book predicted that the drug war, if it continued, would create a $5 billion drug smuggling industry in the US within 50 years. 

In this chapter, Hari focuses on Harry Anslinger’s final years with the Bureau of Narcotics and his role in expanding the war on drugs to a global scale. Hari explains that when the US was ratcheting up its drug war in the 1930s and 1940s, drugs were still sold legally across the rest of the world, but “by the 1960s, they were banned everywhere” (42). Anslinger played a critical role in this change, and according to Hari, “he acted as the first ‘drug czar’ not just for the United States, but for the world” (42). Just as he previously created the race panic that helped galvanize public support for marijuana prohibition, Anslinger used the fear of communism during the 1950s to argue that America was purposely being flooded with heroin from communist nations.

This gave Anslinger the reason he needed to escalate the drug war globally, and because the US was the most powerful nation, he had the power to enforce it. He accomplished this by threatening that the US would cut off foreign aid and not allow the sale of foreign goods in the US. After three decades, in 1962, Anslinger retired from his position, but by this time the Bureau of Narcotics was firmly entrenched in the bureaucratic machine of government. Hari shares an anecdote from 1970, when Anslinger joined a Playboy magazine roundtable debate concerning American drug policy. Hari argues that “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” (45). 

This chapter explores Arnold Rothstein’s role in the drug war. According to Hari, Rothstein was the most feared man in New York City during the height of the Jazz Age and “the first man to really see the potential of drug dealing in America” (48). He bought New York City police officers and politicians alike, and his reach went even beyond the realm of the drug and alcohol “black markets.” Rothstein operated underground gambling dens across the city, rigged horse races by paying off jockeys, and was the man responsible for fixing the infamous 1919 World Series when he paid eight Chicago White Sox players to purposely lose. While Rothstein’s criminal enterprises went in many directions, it was sale of illegal alcohol and drugs that made him one of American history’s wealthiest gangsters. Hari argues that Rothstein “immediately spotted that the prohibition of booze and drugs was the biggest lottery win for gangsters in history” (52).

For Rothstein, the prohibition of heroin and cocaine meant big business, and the political decree that created the Bureau of Narcotics transferred the drug trade from doctors and clinics to gangsters. The by-product of this transfer was violence. As dealers had no legal remedy to protect their product, they had to establish a reputation for violence. As Hari explains, two separate drug wars have persisted over the last century: “[T]here 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” (58). After Rothstein was murdered in 1928, domination of the East Coast drug trade became a source of constant conflict for new gangsters. According to Hari, “the war for drugs was launched in earnest in the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan as Arnold Rothstein lay bleeding” (58).