Book Review: Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari (2015)

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Johann Hari's first book offers a critical examination of the harmful results of a century of drug prohibition laws and advocates for an end to prohibition as an essential step in moving toward better approaches to the problem of drug addiction. Based on extensive research and interviews with numerous drug experts and many individuals who have suffered from the regime of drug prohibition - including drug dealers, addicts, law enforcement officers, and many others - Hari makes a strong and compelling case for abolishing prohibition and redefining drug addiction as a health problem that most often results from other problems in the lives of individuals who become addicts.

Hari begins his account with an examination of the career of Harry J. Anslinger (1892-1975), a mostly forgotten figure who played a key role in forging the nationwide architecture of the drug war through his position as Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from its founding in 1930 until his mandatory retirement at age 70 in 1962. The title of Hari's book, "Chasing the Scream," is derived from a traumatic episode Anslinger experienced as a child when he heard the wife of a neighbor in rural Pennsylvania screaming in agony because she was in the throes of narcotic withdrawal. Her husband dispatched young Harry to procure her drugs from the local pharmacist, and by Anslinger's account he remained haunted by those screams for many years.

As a crusader against drugs, Anslinger exhibited several highly problematic tendencies, including a pronounced racist inclination to associate drugs with non-white minorities, a contemptuous disregard for the findings of scientific and medical research into the effects of specific drugs, and an insistence on promoting widespread moral panic over often-fabricated claims about the effects of drugs like marijuana without a shred of evidence to back him up. Manipulating and exploiting public fear over drugs did wonders for the budget of Anslinger's agency, but it also created massive and widespread harm. How?

In the early years of the Bureau Anslinger had every reason to know the likely consequences of drug prohibition because the country had just experienced over a decade of failure in its attempt to wipe out alcohol consumption with the ill-advised 18th Amendment to the Constitution. Not only did alcohol prohibition fail in its goal of eliminating alcohol consumption, but its enactment also resulted in the rise of large-scale organized crime involved in bootlegging and the profits to be had from supplying alcohol. These criminal syndicates were created and sustained precisely because alcohol was prohibited, and the profits bootlegging gangsters could make from their operations were also sufficient to corrupt public officials in city after city. It took the repeal of prohibition - and the elimination of those profits - to curtail this crime wave. As Hari notes, drug prohibition quickly generated its own criminal organizations to reinstate supply and distribution. He details the career of Arnold Rothstein (1882-1928), an established career criminal who quickly seized upon the potential for large profits in the illegal drug trade in its early years. Rothstein was gunned down at age 46 over a disputed gambling debt, but in his wake arose criminal drug organizations on a global scale.

Hari carefully explains how the "logic" of a drug trade in the hands of criminal organizations tends to produce a multiplicity of harmful effects to both individuals and society at large. Those who traffic in illegal substances tend to focus on the most potent (and therefore harmful) of products, as the risks, costs, and profits involved discourage trafficking in more mild versions of drugs. At the same time, however, the distribution process of drugs like cocaine and heroin typically entails diluting or "cutting" them with cheaper substances like baking soda, starch, talcum powder, powdered milk, laundry detergent, laxatives, and other things that can be extremely harmful when ingested or injected, especially over long periods of time. To maintain their control of drug traffic, criminal gangs also engage in the frequent and large-scale use of violence, intimidation, and corruption. Hari uses the example of Los Zetas, one the major drug cartels in Mexico, to illustrate this process.

Among the most sobering sections of the book are those in which Hari interviews highly dedicated law-enforcement officials who spent years as zealous soldiers prosecuting the drug war, only to conclude that it is a futile, hopeless endeavor that produces only misery, suffering, and death. No major arrest and prosecution of a drug organization has any impact other than to set off a new wave of killings as would-be successors battle over who will take over the territory freed up by the arrests. A growing number of law enforcement personnel have concluded the only way to reduce or eliminate drug-related crime is to end the drug war by decriminalizing/legalizing drugs and subjecting them to the same regulations and taxation as now exist for tobacco and alcohol.

Hari agrees that drug addiction is an individual and social problem, but to reduce addiction it is first necessary to treat it as a health problem rather than treating drug addicts as immoral social pariahs. Hari illustrates how drug policies can change toward more effective solutions to the problem of addiction using some different examples. He chronicles the efforts of drug addicts in the Downtown Eastside neighborhood in Vancouver to organize and demand dignity from the local government. Their persistence eventually convinced a conservative mayor to move away from ineffective drug war policies to a more humane policy of support and treatment, and the latter proved highly successful in reducing crime, drug deaths, and addiction levels. He then examines the cases of Portugal and Switzerland, both of which abandoned the drug war in favor of treating addition as a health problem, with similar beneficial results.

Are these, as Hari suggests, really the "last days" of the war on drugs? In the United States, all but 13 states have now legalized marijuana for either recreational or medical use, although the federal laws against cannabis remain in place and there has been little movement toward the decriminalization of other illegal drugs. Hari has provided a grim account of what the drug war has cost in terms of ruined lives and communities, including a great many innocent bystanders who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Harry Anslinger's policy of demonizing drugs as evil, and by extension everyone who consumes them, has produced a global framework of crime, corruption, violence, repression, and misery that has taken an enormous toll on human lives while doing nothing to reduce drug traffic or addiction. If we're going to dismantle this rotten edifice, we're going to need a different perspective. Hari's book offers us many paths out of the drug war’s quagmire. Let's take them.


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