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)
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom