Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (60 page)

One thing has the potential—more than any other—to kill this attempt at healing. It is the drug war. If these people I love are picked up by the police during a relapse, and given a criminal record, and rendered unemployable, then it will be even harder for them to build connections with the world. This is not Arizona, or Russia, or Thailand: the chances of middle-class white British people being busted are slim. But it still takes place—some twenty-four thousand people
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in Britain are cautioned or charged every year for cannabis possession alone, never mind other drugs.

And if that happens? Then they will be lost, like so many of the people I met on the road.

I am trying to learn to apply this lesson to myself. In the past, when I felt inclined to swallow pills and soar off into mania, I reacted with shame and tried to suppress these feelings. It only made my binges deeper. I still have days when I feel the urge to nuke my feelings with a well-aimed exocet of chemicals. When this comes, I try to remember what I learned from Bruce Alexander and Bud Osborn. You don’t need a chemical; you need a connection. So I go to the people I love and sit with them. I listen to them. I try—as hard as I can—to be present in that moment, not someplace in the past or future. And I have found—so far—that the impulse passes, in time.

I have stopped fighting a drug war in my own head. I am conscious—now more than ever—that this is a privilege I get because I am white, and middle class, and I live in a corner of Western Europe where the worst of the drug war is not fired into the faces of people like me. I keep thinking of all the people I have met who didn’t get this privilege, because of the color of their skin, or because they were born in the wrong place. It isn’t right. It shouldn’t be this way—and it doesn’t have to be.

In the 1930s, Harry Anslinger recanted his support for alcohol prohibition. He wrote: “The law must fit the facts.
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Prohibition will never succeed through the promulgation of a mere law if the American people regard it as obnoxious. Temperance by choice is far better than the present condition of temperance by force.” If this logic had been extended to a few more substances, the drug war graveyard would still be a rolling green field.

The day after Christmas in 2013, Billie Holiday’s godson, Bevan Dufty—whom she had suckled, telling his mother with a laugh, “This is my baby, bitch!”—was sitting in a San Francisco clinic. He was in charge of helping the homeless in the city, and he was there to help a heroin addict who was in withdrawal and had just been thrown off his methadone program. The addict turned to Bevan and said he wanted to rip the skin off his body, because he couldn’t bear to be without the drug for one more minute.

When he was a four-year-old, Bevan had seen the cops refusing to let his parents in to see Billie Holiday on her deathbed. Soon after they withdrew her methadone, she died.

Bevan looked around the clinic, at all the people surrounding him in a similar state. “It’s sixty-five years in this drug war, and here I am—looking at all these people whose lives are just shells,” he told me. As he looked from face to face, he said, “all I could do was think—where have we come, in all these years?”

There are days when the fight to end the drug war seems too steep a cliff to scale. But when I feel like despairing, I remember a few things. In his second inauguration speech as president, Barack Obama named the Stonewall riots as one of the great moments in American history. As he spoke, I found myself imagining standing with that small group of drag queens and gay men that night in June 1969 outside the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village as they were tear-gassed and beaten by the police—as they had been beaten by the police so many times before, and as people like them had been beaten for two thousand years.

They were representatives of one of the most despised minorities in the world. Hatred of them was encoded into every major religious text, and in the laws of every nation on earth. Even in liberal New York City, they were pariahs, and people who saw the rioters were disgusted by them. Their fight-back was a cry of desperation—a howl in the dark.

“Listen,” I imagine saying to them that night. “You won’t believe me now, but forty-five years from now, a black president is going to say in his inauguration speech that what you are doing now is one of the greatest moments in the history of America. It will get the biggest cheer of the day. There will be a million people—mostly straight—lining the Mall cheering—just for you. You are going to win. It will happen slowly, in tiny increments, day after day, year after year, and there will be long stretches when it seems that you are losing. But person by person, you will win this argument. You will get there. You will win.”

It would have seemed like science fiction, but many of the men and women who took part in the Stonewall riots that night lived to see it happen. It happened in a single human lifetime, and it happened because they started somewhere, and they fought.

If they had stood apart, as isolated individuals, despairing, nothing would have changed. If they had waited for politicians in Washington to see sense, they would have waited forever. Instead they came together—finding each other, nervously, when it meant risking their freedom and their reputations—and then they went out and persuaded people, street by street, in the face of scowls and hatred, until slowly they transformed the culture and the world.

When we talk about ending the drug war, we are a little like the gay activists of 1969—the final end to the war is so distant we can’t see it yet, but we can see the first steps on the road, and they are real, and they can be reached.

So when I feel depressed, I say to myself: It seems tough today? It seemed a whole lot tougher for the first generation of openly gay men and women. The cost for their taking a stand was a potential prison sentence. They didn’t give up;
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they got up.

And then I think of the people I met on this journey, who have already begun the fight against the drug war. Chino was a convicted drug dealer who nobody wanted to hear a word from. He didn’t give up; he got up and demanded the closure of the child jail he was tossed into—and he won. Bud Osborn was a homeless junkie nobody wanted to even look at. He didn’t give up; he got up—and as a result of his decision, people survive, on average, for ten years more of life in his neighborhood, and they sealed off the streets to celebrate his life when he died.

When I learned from Chino and Bud is—whoever you are, if you are a human being with a voice, you can start to persuade people, and if your arguments are good enough and you never stop, you will make converts, and they will join you, and you will win. And even when you appear to be losing, you might be starting a process that will win further down the line. Edward Williams was defeated—his clinic was closed and he was driven out of public life. But seventy years later, I found his story, and it inspired me to finish this book. Billie Holiday was defeated—they put her in jail and helped cause her death. But seventy years later, all over the world, every day, people listen to Billie Holiday’s songs, and it makes them feel strong.
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In the last years of her life, Billie Holiday was convinced she would be forgotten.
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If you are brave, if you refuse to be defeated, there will be a ripple effect from your actions that you may never see—but it will be there, transforming lives.

Any individual can start the fight, and any country in the world can break the chain and start the process of legalization. If Uruguay—a tiny nation of three million, led by an anarchist dissident—is brave enough, why isn’t Britain, or Australia, or any other nation? They will be—if we make them.

Not long before she died, Billie Holiday said: “One day, America is
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going to smarten up . . . It may not happen in my lifetime. Whether or not it does is no skin off mine, because I can’t be hurt any more than I have been.” Not long before she was murdered, Marisela Escobedo appealed to us all to join her. “If you are alone,”
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she said, “you’re not going to achieve anything. If we are together,” she said, we can win.

If you are alone, you are vulnerable to addiction, and if you are alone, you are vulnerable to the drug war. But if you take the first step and find others who agree with you—if you make a connection—you lose your vulnerability, and you start to win. You can put down this book and make that connection now.

Before we part, there are two last things you should know about Harry Anslinger. That he became a drug user—and that he became a drug dealer.

In the 1950s, Harry became aware that an extremely important member of Congress was a heroin addict. “He headed one of the powerful
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committees of Congress,” he wrote. “His decisions and statements helped to shape and direct the destiny of the United States and the free world.”

Harry went to this man in the corridors of Washington, D.C., and told him sternly he must stop using the drug. “I wouldn’t try to do anything about it, Commissioner,” replied the legislator. “It will be the worse for you.” He would go to the gangsters to get it whatever Harry did, “and if it winds up in a public scandal and that should hurt this country, I wouldn’t care . . . The choice is yours.”
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All over America, Anslinger had cut off legal avenues to drugs and forced addicts to go to gangsters for a filthy supply. But he had always pictured it being done to the “unstable, emotional, hysterical,
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degenerate, mentally deficient and vicious classes.”

Now, before Harry, there was a man he respected, and he was an addict. So he assured the legislator that there would be a safe, legal supply for him at a Washington, D.C., pharmacy so he would never have to go to the gangsters or go without. The bureau even picked up the tab until the day the congressman died. A journalist uncovered the story and was about to break it. Harry told him that if he published a word, Harry would have him sent to prison for two years. He smothered the story.
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Years later, when everybody involved was dead, Will Oursler—who wrote Anslinger’s books with him—told the
Ladies’ Home Journal
who this member of Congress was: Senator Joe McCarthy. Anslinger had admitted it
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to him and then looked away. McCarthy—the red-faced red-baiter—was a junkie, and Anslinger was his dealer. Nobody ever believes the drug war should be waged against somebody they love. Even Harry Anslinger turned into Henry Smith Williams when confronted with an addict he cared about.

Years later, after Harry retired, he developed angina, and he began to use the very drug he had been railing against: he took daily doses of morphine.
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Anslinger died with his veins laced with the chemicals he had fought to deny to the world.