The beginnings of the war on drugs

From a long interview with Johann Hari, author of “Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.”

Johann Hari: The most influential person who no one has ever heard of is Harry Anslinger, the man who invented the modern War on Drugs — way before Nixon, way before Reagan. He’s the guy who takes over the Federal Bureau of Prohibition just as alcohol prohibition is ending. So, he inherits this big government department with nothing to do, and he basically invents the modern drug war to give his bureaucracy a purpose. For example, he had previously said marijuana was not a problem — he wasn’t worried about it, it wasn’t addictive — but he suddenly announces that marijuana is the most dangerous drug in the world, literally — worse than heroin — and creates this huge hysteria around it. He’s the first person to use the phrase “warfare against drugs.”

... In 1939, Billie Holiday stands on a stage quite near here [in New York City] and sings this song “Strange Fruit” — a song against lynching. It’s incredibly shocking at the time to have an African-American woman singing a highly political song about lynching at a time when very few songs had any political content. It’s also worth remembering she was standing in a hotel where she wasn’t even allowed to walk through the front door — as an African-American, they made her enter through the service elevator. It was viscerally shocking to people and that night she gets a warning from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics — Anslinger’s men — saying, in effect, stop singing this song. She effectively said, “Fuck you: I’m going to carry on singing my song” — and that’s when the stalking that eventually leads to her death begins. 

Anslinger busts her, and she’s put on trial. She said, “The trial was called the United States v. Billie Holiday and that’s how it felt.” She goes to prison and when she gets out, she can’t perform anywhere because you needed a license to perform, a cabaret performer’s license. This is what we do to addicts all over America: We take away their capacity to work.

And she relapses and after a lot of heavy use, she collapses. The first hospital she’s taken to turns her away. The second hospital she’s admitted, but she’s convinced the narcotics agents aren’t finished with her — and she’s right. She said to one of her friends: “They’re going to kill me in there. Don’t let them. They’re going to kill me.” They handcuff her to the hospital bed, even though they know she’s got liver cancer. They don’t let her friends in to see her, and she goes into heroin withdrawal. One of her friends manages to insist she’s given methadone. She is and starts to recover. Then after ten days, because of the rules introduced by Anslinger, the doctors cut off the methadone and she dies.

And to me, that story tells you so much about the dynamics of the birth of the drug war and what’s happening now. That it was driven by race. At the same time that Harry Anslinger finds out Billie Holiday is a heroin addict, he finds out Judy Garland — the actress who played Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” — is a heroin addict. He tells her to take longer vacations and assures the studio she’s going to be fine.