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

Billie Holliday was born in Philadelphia in 1915 but grew up in an area of Baltimore known as Pigtown. When she was 10 years old, a neighbor in his 40s raped her. Holliday left Baltimore a few years later to join her mother in Harlem but was thrown out of the brothel where her mother worked. At age 14, Holliday was starving on the streets and became a prostitute. She later married her abusive pimp and, after a prostitution arrest, began drinking heavily and eventually started using heroin. Desperate for work, Holliday auditioned as a singer at a Harlem bar when she was a young teen, and by age 18, she had recorded a hit song. Holliday began performing her most well-known song, Strange Fruit, an anti-lynching song, in 1939. Almost immediately, Harry Anslinger, the commissioner of the Bureau of Narcotics, began targeting her.

Anslinger began focusing on Holliday as her fame rose and rumors of her heroin usage spread. Holliday was arrested for possession of narcotics in 1947 and served a year in a West Virginia prison. Because of her arrest, she lost her cabaret performer’s license and could no longer perform anywhere that served alcohol, severely limiting her earning potential. She was arrested again two years later but was found not guilty after questions about police procedure arose. In the 1950s, her drug and alcohol use took a toll on her health, and she was diagnosed with heart and liver disease. In 1959, she was taken to the hospital after collapsing, where narcotics officers showed up and again arrested her for possession. In her final few days, she was handcuffed to her hospital bed and given methadone, but Anslinger cut that off after 10 days. Holliday died a week later.

Arnold Rothstein was born to an affluent Jewish family in New York City in 1882. As a child, he had “an astonishing ability with mathematics” (50) and became a gambler as a teenager. This led to Rothstein’s first criminal enterprise: operating illegal gambling dens across New York City. Rothstein was behind the infamous “Black Sox scandal” of the 1919 World Series, when he paid eight Chicago White Sox players to purposely lose. All eight players were mysteriously acquitted of their fraud charges, and Rothstein faced no charges at all. In the 1920s, as a gangster dealing in prohibited alcohol, he was “the most feared man in New York City” (49). Rothstein saw the prohibition of drugs as even more financially profitable for him than alcohol prohibition because he correctly guessed that the ban on alcohol would end while the ban on drugs would continue. Hari describes Rothstein as “the first man to really see the potential of drug dealing in America” (48). Hari also compares Rothstein to the drug dealers, and drug gangs, and drug cartels that came after him.

A former New York City drug dealer and gang member, Chino Hardin is currently an activist who opposes the drug war and youth jails. Hardin’s mother was a drug addict, and his father was a corrupt police officer. At an early age, he began selling drugs and at age 14 became the leader of the street gang known as the Souls of Mischief. He was incarcerated at a youth prison for a time and later began using drugs himself before deciding to move away from that lifestyle in his early 20s. In Chapter 5, Hari discusses Hardin’s life and the culture of violence in which he took part.

Formerly a Baltimore police captain and undercover agent, Leigh Maddox is currently a lawyer working to reform drug laws and fights for justice on behalf of drug offenders. Maddox was motivated to become a police officer after a drug gang murdered her best friend. She spent several years instructing her officers to make as many drug arrests as possible because she firmly believed in the war on drugs. After realizing that her department’s arrests were increasing drug violence and that busts were racially biased, she changed directions to train as a lawyer and work to change drug laws. In Chapter 6, Hari explores her role in the drug war and why she experienced such a change of heart about it.

Born in 1932, Joe Arpaio became an agent under Harry Anslinger in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1957. He later was elected sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona and was re-elected to five more terms. Over his tenure as sheriff, he became highly controversial for his desire for media attention, his tough stance on immigration, and his tactics. Arpaio survived countless scandal over the years, ranging from allegations of election law violations and wrongful arrests to abuse of power and civil rights violations. In 2017, Arpaio was convicted of contempt of court but was pardoned by President Donald Trump a month later, before he was sentenced. In Chapter 8, Hari visits Arpaio’s infamous “Tent City” jail and interviews him about his connection to Harry Anslinger. 

Born in 1990, Rosalio Reta is a convicted murderer incarcerated in Texas who was a member of the Mexican drug cartel known as the Zetas. In 2005, at age 15, Reta was trained to become a hitman for the Zetas. While he spent several years with the Zetas and carried out several murders, he eventually became one of the few members to tell their secrets and remain alive. In Chapter 9, Hari discusses Reta’s story and the control that the Zetas have over the town of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

Marisela Escobedo was a nurse and mother in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. She became a social activist in 2008 after the death of her daughter. Her daughter disappeared shortly after beginning a relationship with a man who turned out to be a member of the Zetas. When her daughter’s murderer was acquitted at trial despite offering a full confession, Escobedo tracked him down a second time, but he was allowed to escape. She then took her story public to seek justice but was murdered by an unknown assassin. Hari uses Escobedo’s story to highlight how drug cartels have become so powerful because of drug prohibition that they can act above the law.

Gabor Maté was born in Hungary in 1944 during the Holocaust. He immigrated to Canada as a child and became a family doctor there in the 1970s. He gave up his practice in the late 1990s to treat drug addicts and work with the Portland Hotel Society in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. At the Portland, Maté pioneered a theory of addiction that runs counter to the more common pharmaceutical theory of addiction. His theory argues that addiction comes from a combination of an addictive substance and a susceptible individual, often one who has experienced childhood trauma. Hari interviews Maté in Chapter 12 and discusses the role that trauma plays in addiction.

Bruce Alexander is a Canadian psychologist who pioneered the Rat Park experiments on addiction at Simon Fraser University in the 1970s. These experiments found that rats isolated in unpleasant cages used a large amount of drugs, but rats housed in pleasant cages with other rats used far less. In Chapter 13, Hari discusses Alexander’s work and his theories on the role of dislocation on addiction.

Born in 1947, Bud Osborn grew up in Toledo, Ohio. His father was a prisoner of war and committed suicide when Bud was three years old. He attempted suicide several times in his youth and eventually moved to Canada to avoid military service during the Vietnam War. Osborn became a published poet but also an alcoholic and heroin addict while living in the Downtown Eastside area of Vancouver. In the late 1990s, Osborn founded the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) to help prevent overdose deaths, which had become an epidemic in the area. Through his work with VANDU, the Downtown Eastside opened a legal supervised injection site and saw its life expectancy rise by 10 years over a decade.

Ruth Dreifuss was the first Jewish and first female President of Switzerland. As the Minister of Home Affairs in the late 1990s, Dreifuss pioneered reforms to drug laws that proved successful at a time when the country was suffering an HIV and heroin addiction epidemic. She instituted a program in which addicts could get prescribed heroin if they were of legal age, had attempted at least two other treatment programs, and forfeited their driver’s license. Her program was intended to help addicts rebuild their lives and get jobs. It achieved great success in terms of fewer HIV infections, overdose deaths, and—most surprisingly—a drop in the number of addicts.

João Goulão is a doctor and the national drug coordinator for Portugal. As a medical student in 1973, he joined the underground movement to liberate Portugal from its repressive dictatorship, which culminated a year later. In the 1980s, when the country’s heroin addiction was among the world’s worst, he was a family doctor and began to notice that the addiction problem had spread even to middle- and high-class citizens. In 1997, Goulão oversaw the treatment of addicts for the entire country, and in 1999, he headed a committee to deal with the issue. Their recommendation, which became policy two years later, was to decriminalize all drugs and work on helping addicts re-enter society without the stigma of being a criminal. After 10 years, the policy proved successful in that the number of problematic drug users had been cut in half.