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.
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