Prohibition’s Killing Fields
Journalist Johann Hari disabuses you of everything you know about drugs and the misguided and tragic war against them.
Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 400 pages.
When American bombs began to rain down on Vietnam, the country’s water buffalo reacted queerly. The fields full of opium had always been there, but once the U.S. munitions fell around them, the water buffalo left their pastures and began chewing up the opium fields. The stress and trauma were too much for the creatures, and they wanted to get high and go somewhere else, if only in their minds. That may sound strange, but as American psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel has discovered, the pursuit of mind-altering substances is a well-documented behavior throughout the animal kingdom. He has documented how bees, birds, elephants, mongooses, and monkeys all use intoxicants, sometimes for pleasure and other times to dull the pain.
Human drug use therefore isn’t exceptional. It’s a natural drive that is often satisfied without any long-term adverse effect on the individual or society. Statistics back this up. According to the United Nations Office on Drug Control, only 10 percent of drug users develop a problem with their substance of choice. That may sound crazy to a society that has been fighting the war on drugs for nearly 100 years, but as lefty journalist Johann Hari argues in Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, that’s because we see only “the casualties” of drug use gone wrong.
“The unharmed 90 percent use in private, and we rarely hear about it or see it,” Hari writes. “The damaged 10 percent, by contrast, are the only people we ever see using drugs out on the streets. The result is that the harmed 10 percent make up 100 percent of the official picture.”
Blending historical scholarship with globe-trotting reportage and vignettes of the Drug War’s casualties, proponents, and detractors, Hari weaves a convincing, and at times personal, narrative about the rise of the Drug War in the United States, its global expansion, and, one hopes, its inevitable demise as more and more countries realize its cost in lives, liberties, and legal tender.
It won’t surprise libertarians to discover that the Drug War arose out of a federal bureaucracy trying to justify its existence. When Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the successor agency to the Department of Prohibition, began his three-decade-long reign, he knew there weren’t enough Americans snorting cocaine or shooting up heroin to keep him and his agents in business. The answer was to turn marijuana, which he believed black Americans and Mexican immigrants were using at much higher rates than white Americans, into a threat to (white) civilization itself.
At a House Committee on Appropriations hearing, Anslinger told of “colored students at the University of Minn[esota] partying with female students (white) and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result: pregnancy.” These fears of racial mixing combined with ludicrous stories of how marijuana “turns man into a wild beast,” as Anslinger put it, got him exactly what he wanted. Popular fear translated into bigger budgets for his Bureau of Narcotics, a personal fiefdom he controlled much like his contemporary J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI.
The war Anslinger started has been waged now for nearly a century with catastrophic results. In the United States, the conflict has been waged largely in poor communities of color. Hari draws attention to a disturbing comparison that should be highlighted regularly when discussing the response to drug use. “In 1993, in the death throes of apartheid, South Africa imprisoned 853 black men per hundred thousand in the population,” he writes. “The United States imprisons 4,919 black men per hundred thousand (versus only 943 white men). So because of the drug war and the way it is enforced, a black man was far more likely to be jailed in the Land of the Free than in the most notorious white supremacist society in the world.”
In one particular vignette, Hari tells the story of a drug warrior turned heretic that provides flesh and blood to the Drug War’s racist and counterproductive prosecution. Leigh Madux became a cop to honor a friend who had been raped and murdered by a drug gang. Originally gung-ho, Leigh started to have second thoughts about the Drug War. She was disproportionately arresting and sending to prison people of color, even though white people use and sell drugs too. Once convicted, these people’s lives were ruined, rendering them virtually unemployable and barring them from receiving student loans or living in public housing. She also realized the law-enforcement incentives for the Drug War: A good portion of her department’s budget came from money and property confiscated from drug suspects.
The clincher, however, was that no matter how many people she arrested, the violence never dissipated. Actually it grew. “So what happens is we take out the guy at the top,” she tells Hari; “now, nobody’s in charge, and [so the gangs] battle it out to see who’s going to be in charge.” Communities are plunged into violence, with innumerable innocent casualties, including kids who grow up in war zones. “The kids see it,” she says. “All the kids know this.”
The reason for this isn’t all that difficult to grasp. There’s a market — a human craving, usually harmless, sometimes self-destructive — for drugs that cannot be suppressed. By outlawing these desirable products, governments are handing the market to people who will risk arrest, incarceration, even death for a taste of the great wealth and power prohibition produces by constraining supply. In a cutthroat market, when businesses and entrepreneurs don’t have a legal way to arbitrate disputes, the law of the jungle replaces the rule of law.
There have been two times in U.S. history when the homicide rate spiked; both were during intense periods of prohibition, according to Harvard professor Jeffrey Miron. The first was when alcohol was outlawed between 1920 and 1933; the second was between 1970 and 1990, when the Drug War was stepped up. When the Twenty-First Amendment was passed at the end of 1933, the violence associated with the alcohol trade subsided as the market dictated human behavior rather than immoral and unnecessary government intervention. “That’s why today, it is impossible to imagine gun-toting kids selling Heineken shooting kids on the next block for selling Corona Extra,” observes Hari. “The head of Budweiser does not send hit men to kill the head of Coors.”
Hari notes that in the mid 1980s, the right-libertarian economist Milton Friedman calculated that drug prohibition led to more than 10,000 murders a year — or more than three 9/11s a year. Miron concludes that the murder rate in America is 25 to 75 percent higher than it would be if the War on Drugs didn’t exist. And yet the modern-day insanity of the Drug War grinds on, producing prohibition’s killing fields in communities across the world.
Humane alternatives
Beyond the unnecessary bloodletting, Hari humanely and effectively shows that criminalizing drug use is an abject failure that leads to state cruelty and violence of the most monstrous kind. During a visit to Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Tents Jail in Arizona, he witnesses how the county humiliates and dehumanizes its wards by making them wear T-shirts that say, “I AM BREAKING THE NEED FOR WEED,” “CLEAN(ING) AND SOBER,” or simply, “METH USER” while they pick up trash along the highway — a surefire path toward rehabilitation.
Hari also learns of Marcia Powell, imprisoned in the Perryville State Prison Complex for her addictions. One day the guards put her in an outdoor cage under the scorching Arizona sun because she said she felt suicidal, which the prison doctor interpreted as a manipulative ploy to get moved into a better cell. The guards left her in the cage for too long, ignoring her screams. Sometime after she collapsed, the guards called an ambulance. The paramedics took her temperature, but “[their] thermometers only go to 108 degrees: she was that hot, or hotter still,” writes Hari. “Her internal organs had cooked, as if in an oven.” Marcia Powell died that night. Three guards were fired. Not one was charged with a crime.
Even without horrific examples like that, it’s important to remember that governments across the United States and the world put nonviolent people into cages for long stretches of time because they made the personal decision to swallow, snort, smoke, or shoot-up substances that certain portions of the population find harmful, immoral, or both. Not content with trying to get people to change their ways through a mixture of shame and love, we as a society not only punish addicts, we destroy their lives. With nothing much going for them, relapse is almost inevitable.
“If I had to design a system that was intended to keep people addicted, I’d design exactly the system that we have right now,” Canadian physician Gabor Maté tells Hari. “I’d attack people, and ostracize them.”
Drug abuse and addiction, Hari convincingly documents, should be dealt with by doctors, not police, prosecutors, and prison officials. By highlighting examples from Canada, Portugal, Switzerland, and England, Hari documents how everyone benefits when drugs are decriminalized and hardcore addicts receive treatment rather than punishment.
When Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001, the country’s top drug cop, João Figueira, predicted disaster, an explosion in drug use, more addiction, more crime. “The things we were afraid of,” he tells Hari, “didn’t happen.” Now, in Portugal, 90 percent of the money that finances drug policy goes to treatment and prevention, while only 10 percent goes to policing and punishment, notes Hari. In the United States, those percentages are flipped, as the War on Drugs continues to fuel the militarization of police inside the United States as well as the other nightmares Hari expertly documents.
Another persuasive tale Hari tells is from North England during the Thatcher years, where a psychiatrist named John Marks expanded a legal drug-prescription program, which prescribed medically pure heroin and crack cocaine to addicts to keep them away from the dealers of black-market narcotics. On the street, drugs are normally cut with harmful substances to spread the product, and addicts engage in high-risk activities, such as using dirty needles. Both increase the chances of death, whether by overdose or disease. In Liverpool, addicts, many of whom led productive lives, were able to use their drugs safely.
Between 1982 and 1995, not one of Dr. Marks’s patients died. After his unorthodox program started receiving attention, which in turn garnered the American government’s ire, the Conservative government merged Marks’s clinic with a health trust run by evangelical Christians who opposed the program. The program ended and so did many of the patients’ lives.
“Of the 450 patients Marks prescribed to, 20 were dead within six months, and 41 were dead within two years,” writes Hari. “More lost limbs and caught potentially lethal diseases. They returned to the death rate for addicts under prohibition: 10 to 20 percent, similar to smallpox.”
Morally speaking, there’s little doubt that many people believed prohibition was the right thing to do to stop people from killing themselves. But evidence is evidence. And if addicts deserve compassion and empathy, as they most certainly do, then prohibition is counterproductive and unethical, as John Marks’s clinic experiment showed.
One solution to drug abuse and addiction is the creation of a decent society where people no longer want to escape reality — whether because of personal traumas or a lack of meaning. And the other, by no means mutually exclusive, is for people to mind their own business. What people do in the privacy of their own homes should be no concern to their neighbors when done responsibly.
Even Anslinger came to some sort of realization of this latter point, even if it was because it affected him personally. Later in life, the great drug warrior developed angina and took daily doses of morphine for the pain. “Anslinger,” writes Hari, “died with his veins laced with the chemicals he had fought to deny the world.” And yet the Drug War rages on, as the prohibitionists continue to deny people the chemicals they crave, sometimes need, no matter how many corpses their policies produce. Hari, however, sees hope that reason and compassion will win out over fear and meanness, no small feat in America today.
Originally published at www.fff.org on July 1, 2015.
