Pubdate: Sun, 15 Feb 2015 Source: Buffalo News (NY) Copyright: 2015 The Buffalo News Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/GXIzebQL Website: http://www.buffalonews.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/61 Author: Lee Coppola, News Book Reviewer Note: Lee Coppola is a former print and TV journalist, a former federal prosecutor and the retired dean of St. Bonaventure University's Journalism School. A TOUGH NEW WAY OF LOOKING AT THE 'WAR ON DRUGS.' Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs By Johann Hari Bloomsbury 389 pages, $27 Johann Hari spent three years gathering material for "Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs." Most of it was traveling the world and talking to people connected with the drug trade. Through them, and through his research, he tells the story of drugs, their maladies and benefits. And through them, he formulates two surprising conclusions. Meet Chino. a she who wanted to be a he. She/he was abandoned by her mother, then raised by a grandmother who fought her granddaughter's gender confusion. So Chino turned to drugs, then to dealing. The he in she was Brooklyn street-tough, and Chino formed the Souls of Mischief, a crack-dealing gang. She/he was 14. Meet Leigh Maddox, a streetwise Baltimore cop who infiltrated the local Ku Klux Klan but then turned to the drug war in tribute to her best friend, who was waylaid by a drug gang, sexually assaulted and left in a vacant house for animals to ravage her body. Meet Juan Manuel Oguin, who knew death from the moment of birth in Cuidad Juarez, where violence reigns among the drug cartels. Juan is an "angel." He wears feathered wings and roams the streets of his native city urging the drug lords to seek forgiveness for their crimes. He knows he'll probably meet a horrible demise for his efforts, but he doesn't care. Meet Gabor Mate, a Vancouver doctor who helped change the mindset of his city's drug enforcers by convincing them it was far better to treat addicts as humans than to revile them as society's dregs. Chino, Leigh, Juan and Gabor and others all play an important part in Hari's storytelling. But the major roles belong to what the author calls the Mount Rushmore of the drug war - Harry Anslinger, Billie Holiday and Arnold Rothstein. Anslinger was the nation's drug czar long before the term had been created. As head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, he ruled ruthlessly - J. Edgar Hoover-style - over a cadre of agents with the premise that all illegal drugs and those that sell and use them are evil. But it was through Anslinger that Hari found a thread in the fight against drugs that persisted throughout his research. Simply put: it was not a war against drugs, it was a war spawned by racism. Writes Hari: "The arguments we hear today for the drug war are that we must protect teenagers from drugs, and prevent addiction in general. But they were not. They crop up occasionally, as asides. The main reason given for banning drugs - the reason obsessing the men who launched the war was that the blacks, Mexicans and Chinese were using these chemicals, forgetting their place, and menacing white people." Anslinger's mantra, in his words, was, "The increase (in drug addiction) is practically 100 per cent among Negro people. The Negro population ... accounts for 10 per cent of the population, but 60 per cent of the addicts." Enter Billie Holiday, the raspy-voiced singer whose fame as an entertainer paralleled her fame as a drug user. She was a slow moving target for Anslinger's crusade. Born in a Baltimore slum to a prostitute, Holiday was raped by a neighbor when she 10, then told she tricked the man into having sex with her. She was sent to a reform school, then to a convent tended by nuns stricter than prison guards. It didn't take her long to become defiant. And that defiance led her to a stint as a prostitute and to saloons where she found she could sing ... and people listened and wanted more. It was a world of blues and booze with drugs as an ever present companion. To Anslinger, taking down Holiday meant taking down a culture he abhorred. He assigned his only black agent to track her every move, then a band of agents in support, following her from club to club and from hideaway to hideaway. They eventually succeeded and Holiday spent a year in prison. But that wasn't enough for Anslinger. As she lay dying in a Manhattan hospital at 44, Anslinger's agents paid her a visit and said they found a small packet of heroin in her room, hanging on a nail in a wall six feet and out of reach from her bed. They charged her with possession but she avoided prosecution ... by dying. If Anslinger was the nation's first drug czar and Holiday the symbolic prey, then Arnold Rothstein was the first drug lord and the third prong in the author's drug triumvirate. Rothstein reigned over a criminal empire in the 1920s during the height of Prohibition and the millions in illegal profits it provided the underworld. But Rothstein's bailiwick was drugs, specifically the organized receipt and distribution of drugs. He ran his operation like a Fortune 500 business, suffocating the petty drug gangs that warred each other over minimal quantities. Rothstein, who fixed the 1919 World Series and kept police and prosecutors in his back pocket, bought in bulk and employed a disciplined cadre of hoodlums who ensured his investments were protected. His organization controlled the drug trade throughout the eastern seaboard and, in Hari's analysis, forged the template for drug distribution in future decades. But the author does not limit his work to illegal drugs. He also delves into the increased use of prescription drugs, the ones that dull the pain and give relief to the suffering. But, he asks, why do some grow addicted to the pain killers while the vast majority don't. His answer: the addicted turn to them to relieve the stress of daily life, especially, he writes, a middle-class life that's been crumbling even before the economic crisis pick-axed it. And he looks for solutions in places where drugs have been legalized, places like Portugal and even Washington state and Colorado, albeit only marijuana there. But he has a simple premise for legalizing drugs, a premise built around allowing medical professionals to determine the need for drugs, thereby eliminating the need for drug dealers to find customers so they can make money. After all, he muses, it worked in a drug clinic in England, where prescribing drugs destroyed the network that sold them illegally amid violence and turmoil. "When you prescribe heroin, fewer people are recruited to use heroin," he writes. And "when you prescribe cocaine, fewer people are recruited to use cocaine." So back to his major conclusions. The first, already mentioned, that the drug war was initiated in the United States to root out minorities, especially blacks. The second the author determined from his visits to clinics, his research and his meetings with drug users and those who treat them. Addiction, Hari surmises, stems from troubled upbringings. troubled encounters, troubled lives. The solution, if there is one, he opines, comes in recognizing the circumstances of addiction, in treating addicts like humans rather than criminals. His travels, he writes, convince him that once they feel worthwhile, they change. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom