The Scream at the Start of Everything

“Nixon told Congress on June 17, 1971: "If we cannot destroy the drug menace in America, then it will surely in time destroy us."”

In Johann Hari's telling, the American war on drugs began with one man's fixation, and the fixation hardened into law.

Harry Anslinger became the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics when it was founded in 1930, and he held the post until 1962. The bureau was created to take over enforcement of the Harrison Narcotics Act from a narcotics division inside the Treasury's Prohibition Unit, where a corruption scandal had broken. Prohibition ended in 1933. Hari argues that Anslinger inherited men who had spent years fighting alcohol and a bureau that needed a new mission, and that he found it in drugs.

The book's title comes from a story Hari tells about Anslinger as a boy in Altoona, Pennsylvania. A farmer's wife was screaming, the boy was sent to the pharmacy for opiates, which were legal then, and the screaming stopped. Hari treats that memory as the root of a career spent chasing the scream, and he says the chase produced many more screams. No independent record of the incident has been located.

Hari's first long case is Billie Holiday, one of the best-known jazz singers in the country, who used heroin. She was arrested in 1947 on a narcotics charge and sentenced to a year in a federal prison in West Virginia, and she lost the New York cabaret card that let her sing in clubs serving alcohol. In Hari's account, Anslinger assigned an agent named Jimmy Fletcher to follow her, and Hari ties the pursuit to her refusal to stop singing "Strange Fruit." The jazz historian Lewis Porter, who has examined that claim, says no federal campaign against the song has been documented. The drug arrests are on record. Their motive is the disputed part.

In 1959 Holiday collapsed and was admitted to Metropolitan Hospital in New York with liver and heart disease. Narcotics agents arrested her in her hospital room on a heroin charge, and she was placed under police guard. Hari reports that she was handcuffed to the bed, that friends were kept out, and that a doctor brought in by her friends prescribed methadone, which was stopped after about ten days. She died on July 17, 1959, at forty-four.

Hari also draws on Bureau memos that described jazz in racist terms, and he quotes an instruction from Anslinger to his agents to prepare marijuana cases against musicians, which he takes from the journalist Larry Sloman. In his account the Treasury Department told Anslinger the jazz world could not be broken, and Anslinger narrowed his attention to Holiday.

What the era left in law is easier to document. The Boggs Act of 1951 and the Narcotics Control Act of 1956 set mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses. Congress repealed nearly all of those minimums in 1970, in the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, whose Title II is the Controlled Substances Act. Anslinger had left office eight years earlier. The Controlled Substances Act sorts drugs into five schedules. Schedule I covers drugs with a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, and a lack of accepted safety under medical supervision. It lists heroin alongside marijuana, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and peyote. Methamphetamine and fentanyl are in Schedule II.

On June 17, 1971, Richard Nixon called drug abuse "public enemy number one," and in his message to Congress that day he said, "If we cannot destroy the drug menace in America, then it will surely in time destroy us." Dan Baum reported in Harper's Magazine in 2016 on a 1994 interview with John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy adviser. Baum quotes Ehrlichman as saying the White House knew it "couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black," but that by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and Black people with heroin, it could disrupt those communities. The account rests on Baum's notes of a single interview, and it appeared after Hari's book. Ehrlichman died in 1999. His family and three former Nixon aides have disputed it.

Dustin Marlan's 2019 article in the Lewis & Clark Law Review starts from this legal inheritance. He argues for decriminalizing psychedelics on social justice and neurodiversity grounds, notes that psychedelics have long sat in Schedule I, and repeats Ehrlichman's remarks to support his statement that the drug war was a politically motivated effort to discredit the antiwar and hippie movements and to oppress racial minorities. He relies on secondary sources for that and presents no arrest data of his own. He does quote an advocacy group saying that people arrested for psychedelics are more likely to be young, non-white and economically marginalized than other users.

Hari says the book draws on more than 200 interviews, and it follows many lives beyond Holiday's. John Marks was a psychiatrist who prescribed heroin to patients in Liverpool and two neighboring towns from 1982 to 1995, until political pressure closed the clinics. Bud Osborn, a Vancouver poet and a founding member of the drug users' group VANDU, died in 2014. Marisela Escobedo campaigned in Ciudad Juárez for justice for her murdered daughter and was shot dead outside the state government building in December 2010. Parts of the book's sourcing have been challenged, and Hari answers readers on a corrections page.

The scream of the title belongs to the farmer's wife in Altoona, as Hari tells it. Holiday's last weeks, a sick woman under arrest and guard in a hospital room, are among the first cases he sets beside it. His argument is that a chase begun to silence one scream produced many more.

I read the title differently from Hari. For me the scream at the start of everything is also Holiday's: the voice of a sick woman under arrest in a hospital bed, as Hari tells it, and the first case in a long list. Hari does not make that argument, and the facts it rests on are the ones he reports.

Sources

• Hari, Chasing the Scream (2015)
• Hari, The Hunting of Billie Holiday, Politico Magazine (January 2015)
• Hari, Questions and Corrections, chasingthescream.com
• Harwood, One Thing You Can Say for the War on Drugs Is We Gave It a Fair Shot (interview with Hari), ACLU (April 23, 2015)
• Biography.com, Billie Holiday: How the Government Targeted the Strange Fruit Singer with Drug Arrests
• Porter, Billie Holiday: There was Never a Federal Campaign against Strange Fruit, Part 2, Substack (October 31, 2022)
• DEA Museum, Harry Jacob Anslinger exhibit, Narcotics Enforcement in the 1930s
• U.S. Sentencing Commission, Mandatory Minimum Penalties in the Federal Criminal Justice System, ch. 2 (2011)
• Controlled Substances Act, 21 U.S.C. 812 (Pub. L. 91-513, 1970)
• Nixon, Special Message to the Congress on Drug Abuse Prevention and Control (June 17, 1971)
• Nixon, Remarks About an Intensified Program for Drug Abuse Prevention and Control (June 17, 1971)
• Baum, Legalize It All, Harper's Magazine (April 2016)
• Marlan, Beyond Cannabis: Psychedelic Decriminalization and Social Justice. Lewis & Clark Law Review 23(3):851 (2019)
• Seddon, Prescribing heroin: John Marks, the Merseyside clinics, and lessons from history. Int J Drug Policy 78:102730 (2020)
• rabble.ca, Downtown Eastside activist and poet Bud Osborn has died (May 7, 2014)
• Christian Science Monitor, Mexico activists vow to press ahead after mother seeking justice is murdered (December 22, 2010)