Pubdate: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA) Copyright: 2015 Hearst Communications Inc. Contact: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1 Website: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388 Author: Barbara Spindel HUNDRED YEARS' WAR President Nixon declared a "war on drugs" in 1971, but the war has in fact been raging in the United States for a century, since the 1914 passage of the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. Johann Hari's "Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs" opens with portraits of three of its early combatants. Harry Anslinger was the zealous head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962; he kept his department well funded by inventing nightmarish visions of African Americans and Mexicans on drug-fueled rampages and, later, of Communists flooding the nation with opiates in a plot to weaken the United States. Singer Billie Holiday, a longtime heroin addict, was hounded for years by Anslinger's agents, who, in a final indignity, made sure she was handcuffed to the hospital bed in which she died of liver and heart disease at age 44. Arnold Rothstein was a fearsome mob kingpin who, during the 1920s, established a brutal reputation in order to secure control of the New York trade in prohibited alcohol and drugs. Anslinger, Holiday and Rothstein - the prohibitionist, the addict and the gangster. Hari returns to them as archetypes as he travels the world researching the global war on drugs and encountering familiar patterns. Prohibition creates a lucrative industry for criminals who rely on violence to maintain dominance. Addicts who would benefit from treatment and compassion are instead shamed, incarcerated and rendered unemployable, responses that further consign them to addiction and criminality. Although more than half of all American citizens are estimated to have violated the drug laws, the penal system continues to target racial and ethnic minorities and the poor. In New York, Hari spends time with Chino, a former crack dealer who controlled his street corner in a rough part of Brooklyn the same way Rothstein controlled his more substantial territory: by building "a name for being consistently terrifying so nobody tries to take your property or turf." When a Texas prison guard, charmed by Hari's British accent, lets him spend four extra hours with an inmate named Rosalio, an American who crossed the border to work for the dread Mexican cartel the Zetas, the author hears a similar story but on a more horrific scale. The cartel "captured the market by violence and maintained it by terror," with gangs of teenagers like Rosalio, known as the Expendables, doing the killing. It's estimated that 60,000 Mexicans have been murdered in drug-related violence in the last five years alone, but as Hari, citing the work of sociologist Philippe Bourgois, notes, under prohibition, "the most insane and sadistic violence has a sane and functional logic." Hari seeks to learn what happens when cities and countries take a different path. He interviews politicians, reformers and addicts in Vancouver, British Columbia, whose progressive drug policies, including a supervised heroin injection facility, resulted in a 10-year jump in life expectancy in the city's indigent Downtown Eastside neighborhood. He details the promising outcomes in Switzerland, where addicts are given free methadone and clean needles; Uruguay, where cannabis has been fully legalized; and Portugal, where all drugs have been decriminalized. The chief of the police's drug division in Lisbon, who had initially opposed decriminalization, told Hari, "The things we were afraid of didn't happen." Along the way, Hari speaks to scientists and other experts about why so many people can enjoy drugs recreationally while roughly 10 percent of users are susceptible to addiction. Many have noted a strong correlation between childhood trauma and addiction, concluding that chemical hooks are only a small part of the story. "What if the discovery of drugs wasn't the earthquake in [an addict's] life, but only one of the aftershocks?" a Vancouver doctor suggests. Hari notes at the outset that he has been close to several addicts - that they "feel like my tribe, my group, my people" - and he confesses that, while not narcoleptic, he for years took "fistfuls" of narcolepsy pills because they enabled him to write for weeks without rest. He structures the book as a personal journey, weighing the pros and cons of legalization himself as he presents them to his readers. (In one typical passage, assessing the rise in addiction to Oxycontin and Vicodin, he writes that this increase "seemed to blast a hole in the case for providing legal access to the most potent drugs in the United States, and I was sent into a spiral of confusion.") This approach is ultimately to the book's detriment, coming off as naive or, worse, manipulative - a gamble for the British journalist, who was fired as a columnist for the Independent and forced to return the prestigious Orwell Prize after admitting to plagiarism and other egregious professional misconduct in 2011. (Knowing that his work here will be heavily scrutinized, Hari has uploaded audio of his interviews to the book's website and has asked readers to e-mail him with any corrections or errors.) "Chasing the Scream" is a riveting book, and Hari is an effective storyteller; he would have been better off keeping the focus off of himself and entirely on Chino, Rosalio and the others. Barbara Spindel has covered books for the Daily Beast, Salon, Details and Spin. Chasing the Scream The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs By Johann Hari (Bloomsbury; 389 pages; $27) - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom