by Johann Hari
But there was another racial group191 that also had to be kept down, Harry believed. In the mid-nineteenth century,192 Chinese immigrants had begun to flow into the United States, and they were now competing with white people for jobs and opportunities.
Worse still, Harry believed they were competing for white women. He warned that with their “own special Oriental ruthlessness,”193 the Chinese had developed “a liking for the charms of Caucasian girls . . . from good families.” They lured these white girls into their “opium dens”—a tradition they had brought from their home country—got the girls hooked, and then forced them into acts of “unspeakable sexual depravity” for the rest of their lives. Anslinger described their brothels in great detail: how the white girls removed their clothes slowly, the “panties” they revealed,194 how slowly they kissed the Chinese, and what came next . . .
Once the Chinese dealers got you hooked on opiates, they would laugh in your face and reveal the real reason they sell junk: it was their way of making sure that “the yellow race would rule the world.”195 “They were too wise, they urged, to attempt to win in battle, but they would win by wits; would strike at the white race through ‘dope’ and when the time was ripe would command the world,”196 explained a senior judge.
At first, ordinary citizens had taken matters into their own hands against this Yellow Peril. In Los Angeles, twenty-one Chinese people were shot,197 hanged, or burned alive by white mobs, while in San Francisco, officials tried to forcibly move everyone in Chinatown into an area reserved for pig farms and other businesses that were designated as dirty and disease-ridden, until the courts ruled the policy was unconstitutional.198 So the authorities did the next best thing: they launched mass raids on Chinese homes and businesses, saying it was time to stop their opium use. The agents built a bonfire of opium-smoking equipment with flames “shooting 30 feet into the air,” as one observer put it: “The choking smoke spread its heavy mantle199 over Chinatown like a pall upon the dead.” The Harrison Act followed soon after.
Harry Anslinger did not create these underlying trends. His genius wasn’t for invention: it was for presenting his agents as the hand that would steady all these cultural tremblings. He knew that to secure his bureau’s future, he needed a high-profile victory, over intoxication and over the blacks, and so he turned back to Billie Holiday.
To finish her off, he called for his toughest agent—a man who was at no risk of falling in love with her, or anyone else.
The Japanese man couldn’t breathe. Colonel George White—a vastly obese white slab of a man200—had his hands tightened around his throat, and he was not letting go. It was the last the Japanese man ever saw. Once it was all over, White told the authorities he strangled this “Jap” because he believed he was a spy. But privately, he told his friends he didn’t really know if his victim was a spy at all, and he didn’t care. “I have a lot of friends who are murderers,”201 he bragged years later, and “I had very good times in their company.” He boasted to his friends that he kept a photo of the man he had throttled202 hanging on the wall of his apartment, always watching him. So as he got to work on Billie, Colonel White was watched by his last victim, and this made him happy.
He was Harry Anslinger’s favorite agent, and when he looked over Holiday’s files, he declared her to be “a very attractive customer,”203 because the Bureau was “at a loose end” and could do with the opportunity “to kick her over.”204
White had been a journalist in San Francisco in the 1930s until he applied to join the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The personality test given to all applicants on Anslinger’s orders found that he was a sadist.205 He quickly rose through the bureau’s ranks. He became a sensation as the first and only white man ever to infiltrate a Chinese drug gang, and he even learned to speak in Mandarin so he could chant their oaths with them. In his downtime, he would go swimming in the filthy waters206 of New York City’s Hudson River, as if daring it to poison him.
He was especially angered that this black woman didn’t know her place. “She flaunted her way of living, with her fancy coats and fancy automobiles and her jewelry and her gowns,” he complained. “She was the big lady wherever she went.”207
When he came for her on a rainy day at the Mark Twain Hotel in San Francisco without a search warrant, Billie was sitting in white silk pajamas208 in her room. This was one of the few places she could still perform, and she badly needed the money. She insisted to the police that she had been clean for over a year. White’s men declared they had found opium stashed in a wastepaper basket next to a side room and the kit for shooting heroin in the room, and they charged her with possession.209 But when the details were looked at later, there seemed to be something odd: a wastepaper basket seems an improbable place to keep a stash, and the kit for shooting heroin was never entered into evidence by the cops—they said they left it at the scene. When journalists asked White about this, he blustered; his reply, they noted, “appeared a little defensive.”210
That night, White came to Billie’s show at the Café Society Uptown, and he requested his favorite songs. She never lost faith in her music’s ability to capture and persuade. “They’ll remember me,”211 she said, “when all this is gone, and they’ve finished badgering me.” George White did not agree. “I did not think much of Ms Holiday’s performance,”212 he told her manager sternly.
Billie insisted the junk had been planted in her room by White, and she immediately offered to go into a clinic to be monitored: she would experience no withdrawal symptoms,213 she said, and that would prove she was clean and being framed. She checked herself in at a cost of one thousand dollars,214 and she didn’t so much as shiver.
George White, it turns out, had a long history of planting drugs on women. He was fond of pretending to be an artist215 and luring women to an apartment in Greenwich Village where he would spike their drinks with LSD216 to see what would happen. One of his victims was a young actress217 who happened to live in his building, while another was a pretty blond waitress in a bar. After she failed to show any sexual interest in him, he drugged her218 to see if that would change. “I toiled whole-heartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun,” White boasted. “Where else [but in the Bureau of Narcotics] could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage219 with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?” He may well have been high when he busted Billie for getting high.
The prosecution of Billie went ahead. “The hounding and the pressure220 drove me,” she wrote, “to think of trying the final solution, death.” Her best friend said it caused Billie “enough anxieties to kill a horse.”221 At the trial, a jury of twelve ordinary citizens heard all the evidence. They sided with Billie against Anslinger and White, and found her not guilty.222 Nonetheless, “she had slipped from the peak of her fame,” Harry Anslinger wrote. “Her voice was cracking.”223
In the years after Billie’s trial, many other singers were too afraid of being harassed by the authorities to perform “Strange Fruit.” But Billie Holiday refused to stop. No matter what they did to her, she sang her song.
“She was,” her friend Annie Ross told me, “as strong as she could be.” To the end, Billie Holiday kept the promise she had made to herself back in Baltimore when she was a little girl. She didn’t bow her head to anyone.
When Billie was forty-four years old, a young musician named Frankie Freedom was serving her a bowl of oatmeal and custard in his apartment when she suddenly collapsed.224 She was taken to the Knickerbocker Hospital in Manhattan and made to wait for an hour and a half on a stretcher, and they said she was a drug addict and turned her away.225 One of the ambulance drivers recognized her,226 so she ended up in a public ward of New York City’s Metropolitan Hospital. As soon as they took her off oxygen,227 she lit a cigarette.
“Some damnbody is always trying to embalm me,”228 she said, but the doctors came back and explained she had an array of very serious illnesses: she was emaciated because she had not
been eating; she had cirrhosis of the liver because of chronic drinking; she had cardiac and respiratory problems due to chronic smoking; and she had several leg ulcers229 caused by starting to inject street heroin once again. They said she was unlikely to survive for long230—but Harry wasn’t done with her yet. “You watch, baby,”231 Billie warned from her tiny gray hospital room. “They are going to arrest me in this damn bed.”
Narcotics agents were sent to her hospital bed and said they had found less than one-eighth of an ounce of heroin232 in a tinfoil envelope. They claimed it was hanging on a nail on the wall,233 six feet from the bottom of her bed—a spot Billie was incapable of reaching. They summoned a grand jury234 to indict her, telling her that unless she disclosed her dealer,235 they would take her straight to prison. They confiscated236 her comic books, radio, record player, flowers, chocolates, and magazines, handcuffed her to the bed,237 and stationed two policemen at the door. They had orders to forbid any visitors238 from coming in without a written permit, and her friends were told there was no way to see her.239 Her friend Maely Dufty screamed at them240 that it was against the law to arrest somebody who was on the critical list. They explained that the problem had been solved: they had taken her off the critical list.
So now, on top of the cirrhosis of the liver, Billie went into heroin withdrawal, alone. A doctor was brought into the hospital at the insistence of her friends to prescribe methadone. She was given it for ten days and began to recover: she put on weight and looked better. But then the methadone was suddenly stopped,241 and she began to sicken again. When finally a friend was allowed in to see her, Billie told her in a panic: “They’re going to kill me. They’re going to kill me in there. Don’t let them.” The police threw the friend out. “I had very high hopes that she would be able to come out of it alive,”242 another friend, Alice Vrbsky, told the BBC, until all this happened. “It was the last straw.”
One day, her pimp-husband Louis MacKay turned up at the hospital—after informing on her—and ostentatiously read the Twenty-Third Psalm over her bed. It turned out he wanted her to sign over the rights to her autobiography to him, the last thing she still controlled. She pretended to be unconscious. As soon as he was gone, she opened her eyes. “I’ve always been a religious bitch,”243 she said, “but if that dirty motherfucker believes in God, I’m thinking it over.”
On the street outside the hospital, protesters gathered, led by a Harlem pastor named the Reverend Eugene Callender. They held up signs reading “Let Lady Live.” Callender had built a clinic for heroin addicts in his church,244 and he pleaded for Billie to be allowed to go there to be nursed back to health. His reasoning was simple, he told me in 2013: addicts, he said, “are human beings, just like you and me.” Punishment makes them sicker; compassion can make them well. Harry and his men refused. They fingerprinted Billie on her hospital bed. They took a mug shot of her on her hospital bed.245 They grilled her on her hospital bed246 without letting her talk to a lawyer.
Billie didn’t blame Anslinger’s agents as individuals; she blamed the drug war itself247—because it forced the police to treat ill people like criminals. “Imagine if the government chased sick people248 with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn’t treat them,” she wrote in her memoir, “then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs.”
Still, some part of Billie Holiday believed she had done something evil, with her drug use, and with her life. She told people she would rather die than go back to prison, but she was terrified that she would burn in hell249—just as her mother had said she would all those years before, when she was a little girl lying on the brothel floor, listening to Louis Armstrong’s music and letting it carry her out of Baltimore. “She was exhausted,” one of her friends told me. “She didn’t want to go through it no more.”
And so, when she died on this bed, with police officers at the door to protect the public from her, she looked—as another of her friends told the BBC—“as if she had been torn from life violently.”250 She had fifteen fifty-dollar bills strapped to her leg. It was all she had left. She was intending to give it to the nurses251 who had looked after her, to thank them.
Her best friend, Maely Dufty, insisted to anyone who would listen that Billie had been effectively murdered by a conspiracy to break her, orchestrated by the narcotics police—but what could she do? At Billie’s funeral, there were swarms of police cars,252 because they feared their actions against her would trigger a riot. In his eulogy for her, the Reverend Eugene Callender told me he had said: “We should not be here. This young lady was gifted by her creator with tremendous talent . . . She should have lived to be at least eighty years old.”
The Federal Bureau of Narcotics saw it differently. “For her,” Harry wrote with satisfaction, “there would be no more ‘Good Morning Heartache.’ ”253
It is easy to judge Harry Anslinger. But if we are honest, I suspect that everybody who has ever loved an addict—everybody who has ever been an addict—has this impulse in them somewhere. Destroy the addiction. Kill the addiction. Throttle it with violence. Harry Anslinger is our own darkest impulses, given a government department and a license to kill.
As I researched this book, I traveled a long way from the farm fields of Pennsylvania—but at every step, I began to feel I was chasing the scream that terrified little Harry Anslinger all those years ago, as it echoed out across the world.
In his private files, Harry kept a poem that had been sent in by an admiring member of the public, addressed directly to him. It defined for Harry his mission in life. Until the day that “the Great Judge proclaims: / ‘The last addict’s died,’254 ” the poem said, “Then—not till then—may you be retired.”
Chapter 2
Sunshine and Weaklings
In Harry Anslinger’s files I began to notice a few names that he raged against repeatedly, as monsters who were trying to sabotage his work and spread drugs throughout America. This intrigued me. Who were these people? Who, for example, were Edward Williams and Henry Smith Williams?
I began to follow a paper trail through file folders, old court records, and yellowing books, and I uncovered a story that, as far I can tell, has been almost entirely forgotten1 for more than sixty years now—yet it has the power to transform how we see this whole war.
The drug war was born in the United States—but so was the resistance to it. Right at the start, there were people who saw that the drug war was not what we were being told. It was something else entirely.
Harry Anslinger wanted to make sure we would never put these pieces together.
In the sunshine of Los Angeles, there was a doctor in the early 1930s named Henry Smith Williams, with a long, unsmiling face. He wore small wire-framed glasses2 through which he peered down on the world and at almost everyone in it. This doctor shared all of Harry Anslinger’s hatreds. He said that addicts were “weaklings”3 who should never have been brought into the world and wrote that “the idea that every human life has genuine value . . .4 and therefore is something to be treasured, is an absurd banality. The world would be far better off if forty percent of its inhabitants had never been born.” In his view, drugs led only to destruction,5 and nobody should take them, ever.
But sometimes, as a historical trend is forming, there is one person who can see what it will mean for humanity, way ahead of everyone else—and sometimes, these prophets come in the most unlikely form.
Henry Smith Williams was about to announce in a detailed new book that he had made a remarkable discovery, one he believed would make this new war on drugs untenable. While Harry Anslinger was raging against the Mafia in public, he was, in fact, secretly working for them. The drug war had been created, Henry said, for one reason and one reason alone. The Mafia paid Harry Anslinger to launch his crusade because they wanted the drug market all to themselves. It was the scam of th
e century.6 And it was about, at last, to be exposed.
The long road that led Henry to this conviction began one day in 1931 when a man shivered into the clinic run by Henry’s brother, Edward Williams. He was suffering all the obvious symptoms of heroin withdrawal, so he was in the right place: Edward was the one of the most distinguished experts7 on opiate addiction in the world. “The man is a wreck, at the verge of collapse,” Henry wrote. “He is deathly pale. Sweat pours from his skin. He is all a tremor. His life seems threatened.”
Both brothers had seen people like this in their offices for many years. Henry believed, in his Social Darwinist way, that they were weaklings who had survived only because they had been stupidly coddled by society; in a state of nature, they would have died to make way for stronger men with better genes. Yet Edward couldn’t bear to see their suffering—not when he knew there was a way to stop their pain. That is why he had helped to set up this clinic—and why he was about to be ruined.
“Can the doctor do nothing? Oh yes, the doctor knows just what should be done,” he explained. “He knows that he has but to write a few words on the prescription blank that lies at his elbow, and the patient, tottering to the nearest drug store, will receive the remedy that would restore him miraculously to a semblance of normality and the actuality of physical and mental comfort.”8 He can provide a legal prescription for the drug to which the patient has become addicted. It will not damage his body: all doctors agree that pure opiates do no harm to the flesh or the organs. The patient, after taking the drug, will become calm. He will be able to function again.9 He will be able to work, or support a family, or love.