Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (8 page)

But sometimes, as a historical trend is forming, there is one person who can see what it will mean for humanity, way ahead of everyone else—and sometimes, these prophets come in the most unlikely form.

Henry Smith Williams was about to announce in a detailed new book that he had made a remarkable discovery, one he believed would make this new war on drugs untenable. While Harry Anslinger was raging against the Mafia in public, he was, in fact, secretly working for them. The drug war had been created, Henry said, for one reason and one reason alone. The Mafia paid Harry Anslinger to launch his crusade because they wanted the drug market all to themselves. It was the scam of the century.
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And it was about, at last, to be exposed.

The long road that led Henry to this conviction began one day in 1931 when a man shivered into the clinic run by Henry’s brother, Edward Williams. He was suffering all the obvious symptoms of heroin withdrawal, so he was in the right place: Edward was the one of the most distinguished experts
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on opiate addiction in the world. “The man is a wreck, at the verge of collapse,” Henry wrote. “He is deathly pale. Sweat pours from his skin. He is all a tremor. His life seems threatened.”

Both brothers had seen people like this in their offices for many years. Henry believed, in his Social Darwinist way, that they were weaklings who had survived only because they had been stupidly coddled by society; in a state of nature, they would have died to make way for stronger men with better genes. Yet Edward couldn’t bear to see their suffering—not when he knew there was a way to stop their pain. That is why he had helped to set up this clinic—and why he was about to be ruined.

“Can the doctor do nothing? Oh yes, the doctor knows just what should be done,” he explained. “He knows that he has but to write a few words on the prescription blank that lies at his elbow, and the patient, tottering to the nearest drug store, will receive the remedy that would restore him miraculously to a semblance of normality and the actuality of physical and mental comfort.”
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He can provide a legal prescription for the drug to which the patient has become addicted. It will not damage his body: all doctors agree that pure opiates do no harm to the flesh or the organs. The patient, after taking the drug, will become calm. He will be able to function again.
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He will be able to work, or support a family, or love.

So Edward Williams wrote the prescription. He had done it many times, and he was confident he had the law on his side. He was given even more confidence when the Supreme Court ruled in 1925
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that the Harrison Act didn’t give the government the authority to punish doctors who believed it was in the best interests of their addicted patients to prescribe them heroin.

But on this particular day in 1931, the addict was not what he seemed. He was, in fact, working for Harry Anslinger, as one of a flock of “stool pigeons” the Bureau was sending out across the country to trick doctors. They were desperate addicts tossed a few dollars by the bureau to con doctors into treating them. Once the prescription was written, the police burst in to the room, and Edward Williams was busted, alongside some twenty thousand other doctors across the country, in one of the biggest legal assaults on doctors in American history.

Most of the people the bureau had picked on up to now—addicts and African Americans—were in no position to fight back. But Henry Smith Williams was one of the most respected medical authorities in the United States. He was said to know more about the chemistry and biology of the blood cells than any other man in America, and he had written a thirty-one-volume history of science and many entries in the Encyclopedia Britannica, all in his spare time left over from treating more than ten thousand patients.
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So in the aftermath of his brother’s arrest,
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Henry started to investigate—and he uncovered something he didn’t expect.

As he watched his brother’s career being destroyed by the police, Henry remembered something that now seemed to him, for the first time, to be significant.

Before it became a crime to sell drugs, he had many patients who used them—but things had been very different then. They had bought their opiates, including morphine and heroin, at a low price from their local pharmacist. They were sold in bottles as “remedies” or “little helpers,” for everything from a chest infection to the blues. One of the most popular was called “Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup,”
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of which each ounce you bought contained 65 milligrams of pure morphine.
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The vast majority of people who bought them, he recalled, used them without a problem.
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Most people, even addicts, used them in low doses.

“No one thought of the use of these medicines as having any moral significance,” he explained. One famous campaigner against alcohol was addicted to morphine, and nobody thought this was odd or hypocritical. There were many women who used opiates in the form of “syrups” every day who, he said, “would have gone on their hands and knees to pray for a lost soul had they seen cigarette stains on the fingers of a daughter.”
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Just as a large majority of drinkers did not become alcoholics, a large majority of users of these products did not become drug addicts. They used opiates as “props for the unstable nervous system,”
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like a person who drinks wine at the end of a stressful day at work.

A small number did get hooked—but even among the addicted, the vast majority continued to work and maintain relatively normal lives. An official government study
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found that before drug prohibition properly kicked in, three quarters of self-described addicts (not just users—addicts) had steady and respectable jobs. Some 22 percent of addicts were wealthy,
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while only 6 percent were poor. They were more sedate as a result of their addiction, and although it would have been better for them to stop, they were rarely out of control or criminal.
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But in 1914, the Harrison Act was passed, and then Anslinger arrived sixteen years later to rapidly ratchet it up.

Doctors saw the results of the policy changes. “Here were tens of thousands of people, in every walk of life, frantically craving drugs that they could in no legal way secure,”
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Henry wrote. “They craved the drugs, as a man dying of thirst craves water. They must have the drugs at any hazard, at any cost. Can you imagine that situation, and suppose that the drugs will not be supplied? . . . [The lawmakers] must have known that their Edict, if enforced, was the clear equivalent of an order to create an illicit drug industry. They must have known that they were in effect ordering a company of drug smugglers into existence.”

The drug dealer could now charge extortionate prices. In the pharmacies, morphine had cost two or three cents a grain; the criminal gangs charged a dollar.
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The addicts paid whatever they were told to pay.

The world we recognize now—where addicts are often forced to become criminals, in a desperate scramble to feed their habit from gangsters—was being created, for the first time. The Williams brothers had watched as Anslinger’s department created two crime waves. First, it created an army of gangsters to smuggle drugs into the country and sell them to addicts. In other words: while Harry Anslinger claimed to be fighting the Mafia, he was in fact transferring a massive and highly profitable industry into their exclusive control.

Second, by driving up the cost of drugs by more than a thousand percent, the new policies meant addicts were forced to commit crime to get their next fix. “How was the average addict—revealed by the official census as an average person—to secure ten or fifteen dollars a day to pay for the drug he imperatively needed?” Henry Smith Williams asked. “Can you guess the answer? The addict could not get such a sum by ordinary means. Then he must get it by dubious means—he must beg, borrow, forge, steal.” The men, he wrote, usually became thieves; the women often became prostitutes.

“The United States government, as represented by its [anti-drug] officers,” Henry explained, had just become “the greatest and most potent maker of criminals in any recent century.”
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And every time Harry Anslinger created new drug criminals, he created new reasons for his department to be saved—and to grow.

The road to Edward Huntington Williams’s arrest had begun when he became slowly convinced that there was a better way to respond to the problem of drug addiction—one that was already perfectly legal.

When the Harrison Act banning heroin and cocaine was written in 1914, it contained a very clear and deliberately designed loophole.
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It said that doctors, vets, and dentists had the right to continue giving out these drugs as they saw fit—and that addicts should be dealt with compassionately in this way. Yet the loophole was tossed onto the trash heap of history, as if it didn’t exist—until Edward Williams decided to dig it out and act on it. He helped to build a free clinic for addicts, and he volunteered his own time there. He wrote his prescriptions for whoever needed them. And he waited to see the results.

Even he was surprised by what he saw. Patients who had come in as unemployed physical wrecks
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were able, slowly and steadily, to go back to work, support their families, and look after themselves again, just as they had before drugs were criminalized. The order and calm that had existed before narcotics prohibition started to return to their neighborhoods. The mayor of Los Angeles
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came out and celebrated the clinic as a great gift to the city, and the local federal prosecutor announced that these clinics accomplished “more good . . . in one day than all the prosecutions in one month.”

Thousands of miles away, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was furious.
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Harry kept picturing the addicts he had seen in his childhood, and in Europe, and he wanted to stop this contagion from spreading. Or did he—as Henry Smith Williams was beginning to suspect—have darker motives?

Harry said that building clinics for heroin addicts was like providing “department stores for kleptomaniacs”
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where they could steal whatever they wanted. The tabloid newspapers, after briefings from the bureau, savaged the clinics as dens of sin,
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and the stool pigeons began their flight. In Portland, Oregon, a doctor stood in his clinic as Anslinger’s men forcibly shut its doors and asked them pleadingly, was there anything he could legally do to help all these addicts? “Yeah, sure: there’s plenty you can do,” the agent told him. “Run the whole bunch of them down to the ocean and kick ’em in. They’ll make fair fish food. That’s all any of them are good for.”
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After the clinic in Los Angeles closed and doctors like Edward Williams were busted, almost all the addicts lost their jobs
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and were reduced once again to constant scrambling for the money for a fix. They fell into crime and homelessness, and dozens of them died.
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The bureau was defying the clear ruling of the Supreme Court
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that the Harrison Act allowed doctors to prescribe to addicts, but “the Supreme Court has no army to enforce its decisions,”
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the press noted with a shrug.

Some twenty thousand doctors were charged with violating the Harrison Act alongside Edward Williams, and 95 percent were convicted.
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Most were charged massive fines, but some faced five years in prison
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for each and every prescription written. In many places, horrified juries
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refused to convict, because they could see the doctors were only treating the sick as best they could. But Anslinger’s crackdown continued with full force.