by Johann Hari
So Edward Williams wrote the prescription. He had done it many times, and he was confident he had the law on his side. He was given even more confidence when the Supreme Court ruled in 192510 that the Harrison Act didn’t give the government the authority to punish doctors who believed it was in the best interests of their addicted patients to prescribe them heroin.
But on this particular day in 1931, the addict was not what he seemed. He was, in fact, working for Harry Anslinger, as one of a flock of “stool pigeons” the Bureau was sending out across the country to trick doctors. They were desperate addicts tossed a few dollars by the bureau to con doctors into treating them. Once the prescription was written, the police burst in to the room, and Edward Williams was busted, alongside some twenty thousand other doctors across the country, in one of the biggest legal assaults on doctors in American history.
Most of the people the bureau had picked on up to now—addicts and African Americans—were in no position to fight back. But Henry Smith Williams was one of the most respected medical authorities in the United States. He was said to know more about the chemistry and biology of the blood cells than any other man in America, and he had written a thirty-one-volume history of science and many entries in the Encyclopedia Britannica, all in his spare time left over from treating more than ten thousand patients.11 So in the aftermath of his brother’s arrest,12 Henry started to investigate—and he uncovered something he didn’t expect.
As he watched his brother’s career being destroyed by the police, Henry remembered something that now seemed to him, for the first time, to be significant.
Before it became a crime to sell drugs, he had many patients who used them—but things had been very different then. They had bought their opiates, including morphine and heroin, at a low price from their local pharmacist. They were sold in bottles as “remedies” or “little helpers,” for everything from a chest infection to the blues. One of the most popular was called “Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup,”13 of which each ounce you bought contained 65 milligrams of pure morphine.14 The vast majority of people who bought them, he recalled, used them without a problem.15 Most people, even addicts, used them in low doses.
“No one thought of the use of these medicines as having any moral significance,” he explained. One famous campaigner against alcohol was addicted to morphine, and nobody thought this was odd or hypocritical. There were many women who used opiates in the form of “syrups” every day who, he said, “would have gone on their hands and knees to pray for a lost soul had they seen cigarette stains on the fingers of a daughter.”16
Just as a large majority of drinkers did not become alcoholics, a large majority of users of these products did not become drug addicts. They used opiates as “props for the unstable nervous system,”17 like a person who drinks wine at the end of a stressful day at work.
A small number did get hooked—but even among the addicted, the vast majority continued to work and maintain relatively normal lives. An official government study18 found that before drug prohibition properly kicked in, three quarters of self-described addicts (not just users—addicts) had steady and respectable jobs. Some 22 percent of addicts were wealthy,19 while only 6 percent were poor. They were more sedate as a result of their addiction, and although it would have been better for them to stop, they were rarely out of control or criminal.20 But in 1914, the Harrison Act was passed, and then Anslinger arrived sixteen years later to rapidly ratchet it up.
Doctors saw the results of the policy changes. “Here were tens of thousands of people, in every walk of life, frantically craving drugs that they could in no legal way secure,”21 Henry wrote. “They craved the drugs, as a man dying of thirst craves water. They must have the drugs at any hazard, at any cost. Can you imagine that situation, and suppose that the drugs will not be supplied? . . . [The lawmakers] must have known that their Edict, if enforced, was the clear equivalent of an order to create an illicit drug industry. They must have known that they were in effect ordering a company of drug smugglers into existence.”
The drug dealer could now charge extortionate prices. In the pharmacies, morphine had cost two or three cents a grain; the criminal gangs charged a dollar.22 The addicts paid whatever they were told to pay.
The world we recognize now—where addicts are often forced to become criminals, in a desperate scramble to feed their habit from gangsters—was being created, for the first time. The Williams brothers had watched as Anslinger’s department created two crime waves. First, it created an army of gangsters to smuggle drugs into the country and sell them to addicts. In other words: while Harry Anslinger claimed to be fighting the Mafia, he was in fact transferring a massive and highly profitable industry into their exclusive control.
Second, by driving up the cost of drugs by more than a thousand percent, the new policies meant addicts were forced to commit crime to get their next fix. “How was the average addict—revealed by the official census as an average person—to secure ten or fifteen dollars a day to pay for the drug he imperatively needed?” Henry Smith Williams asked. “Can you guess the answer? The addict could not get such a sum by ordinary means. Then he must get it by dubious means—he must beg, borrow, forge, steal.” The men, he wrote, usually became thieves; the women often became prostitutes.
“The United States government, as represented by its [anti-drug] officers,” Henry explained, had just become “the greatest and most potent maker of criminals in any recent century.”23 And every time Harry Anslinger created new drug criminals, he created new reasons for his department to be saved—and to grow.
The road to Edward Huntington Williams’s arrest had begun when he became slowly convinced that there was a better way to respond to the problem of drug addiction—one that was already perfectly legal.
When the Harrison Act banning heroin and cocaine was written in 1914, it contained a very clear and deliberately designed loophole.24 It said that doctors, vets, and dentists had the right to continue giving out these drugs as they saw fit—and that addicts should be dealt with compassionately in this way. Yet the loophole was tossed onto the trash heap of history, as if it didn’t exist—until Edward Williams decided to dig it out and act on it. He helped to build a free clinic for addicts, and he volunteered his own time there. He wrote his prescriptions for whoever needed them. And he waited to see the results.
Even he was surprised by what he saw. Patients who had come in as unemployed physical wrecks25 were able, slowly and steadily, to go back to work, support their families, and look after themselves again, just as they had before drugs were criminalized. The order and calm that had existed before narcotics prohibition started to return to their neighborhoods. The mayor of Los Angeles26 came out and celebrated the clinic as a great gift to the city, and the local federal prosecutor announced that these clinics accomplished “more good . . . in one day than all the prosecutions in one month.”
Thousands of miles away, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was furious.27 Harry kept picturing the addicts he had seen in his childhood, and in Europe, and he wanted to stop this contagion from spreading. Or did he—as Henry Smith Williams was beginning to suspect—have darker motives?
Harry said that building clinics for heroin addicts was like providing “department stores for kleptomaniacs”28 where they could steal whatever they wanted. The tabloid newspapers, after briefings from the bureau, savaged the clinics as dens of sin,29 and the stool pigeons began their flight. In Portland, Oregon, a doctor stood in his clinic as Anslinger’s men forcibly shut its doors and asked them pleadingly, was there anything he could legally do to help all these addicts? “Yeah, sure: there’s plenty you can do,” the agent told him. “Run the whole bunch of them down to the ocean and kick ’em in. They’ll make fair fish food. That’s all any of them are good for.”30
After the clinic in Los Angeles closed and doctors like Edward Williams were busted, almost all the addicts lost their jobs31 and were reduced once again to constant scrambling for the mo
ney for a fix. They fell into crime and homelessness, and dozens of them died.32 The bureau was defying the clear ruling of the Supreme Court33 that the Harrison Act allowed doctors to prescribe to addicts, but “the Supreme Court has no army to enforce its decisions,”34 the press noted with a shrug.
Some twenty thousand doctors were charged with violating the Harrison Act alongside Edward Williams, and 95 percent were convicted.35 Most were charged massive fines, but some faced five years in prison36 for each and every prescription written. In many places, horrified juries37 refused to convict, because they could see the doctors were only treating the sick as best they could. But Anslinger’s crackdown continued with full force.
Harry wanted Edward Williams to be broken more than any other doctor, because he was widely respected and many people listened to him. “The moral effect of his conviction,”38 Anslinger wrote, “will most certainly result in greater circumspection.” You only have to destroy a few doctors to silence the rest. Go for the top. Maximum intimidation. This was always Harry’s way. “Anybody that came out with any academic work that could be critical of him, his Bureau, or his philosophy, had to go to prison,”39 Howard Diller, one of his agents, said later. “Or be beheaded.”
As he watched the birth of the drug war, Henry Smith Williams—cold, chilly, arrogant—felt a war breaking out within himself. Part of him believed addicts were the result of barbaric genes left over from cavemen, and the sooner they died off,40 the better. But he was also seeing the faces of the individual human beings who were being broken. When he saw the work of Anslinger in the world, he began to question the Anslinger in his own heart.
He went to meet Harry Anslinger41 in Washington, D.C., to plead for his brother’s reputation and freedom. Harry was now confronted with one of his victims face-to-face, perhaps for the first time. He offered no defense of himself, and he put forward none of the arguments he proclaimed so loudly elsewhere. He backed off. He said that he “could not discover that the Bureau had any case against Dr. Williams, and could not understand why such a man had been attacked.”42 He put all the blame on his Los Angeles representative, a big redheaded agent named Chris Hanson. Yet after Williams was gone, Anslinger privately jeered at him, saying that Henry Smith Williams was suffering from “hysteria.”43
At the trial, every single one of the seventeen doctors44 who testified supported Edward Williams, yet he was found guilty45 of violating the Harrison Act—in effect, of being a drug dealer—and sentenced to a year46 on federal probation. This ensured he would never again47 write a prescription for an addict—nor would any other doctor in the United States for generations to come. “Doctors,” Harry boasted,48 now “cannot treat addicts even if they wish to.”
Harry’s own agents began to quit in disgust. One of them, William G. Walker, said:49 “If anyone could see the suffering of these poor devils . . . they would understand why we should have a change.”
One doctor—stripped of his power to prescribe—decided he had to stop this cruelty once and for all. He traveled to Washington, D.C., with a gun stuffed into his coat. He was determined to walk into Harry Anslinger’s office and kill him. He stood outside Harry’s office until he was finally allowed in. Anslinger offered to take the doctor’s coat—and, as he reached for it, snatched the gun. Harry boasted later that even if the doctor had taken a shot at him, he would have “made a sieve out of him”50 by firing first.
None of this gave Harry pause. The doctors were so emotional, Harry insisted, because they were corrupt. Don’t be fooled: they only wanted the money from drug addicts’ prescriptions. They were missing the hard cash, he said, and nothing more. Besides, he said, he had proof that his way worked. Since the bureau’s crackdown began, the number of addicts had fallen dramatically, to just twenty thousand in the whole country. Years later, a historian named David Courtwright put in a Freedom of Information request to find out how this figure was calculated—and found that it was simply made up. The Treasury Department’s top officials had privately said it was “absolutely worthless.”51
Back in Los Angeles, after a long period of digging, Henry Smith Williams was finally ready to make his announcement—one he believed would change the course of the twentieth century, and finally end this “American Inquisition.” In 1938, he published a book titled Drug Addicts Are Human Beings, laying out his evidence that the entire policy of drug prohibition in America was a gigantic racket—running right up to and including the bald man in Washington, D.C., directing the “crackdown.” Harry, he maintained, was taking his instructions from the Mafia.
If you want to know how this scam works, he explained, you need to look at the story of Chris Hanson.52 He was a thickset man in his sixties, with bright red hair and a strangely smooth and youthful face, known to everyone as Big Chris. He was Harry’s bureau chief in California, and he masterminded the mass round-up of doctors there, including Edward Williams.
And we now know why he did it, wrote Henry Smith Williams. Not long after he shut down the clinic in Los Angeles, it was proven in court that Big Chris was secretly working for a notorious Chinese drug dealer named Woo Sing.53 He was taking bushels of cash from the drug dealers, and in turn he was doing their bidding. The dealers paid Big Chris to shut down the heroin clinics. They wanted him to do it.
I had to read through these files several times before I realized the significance of this accusation. At the start of the drug war, the man who launched the drug crackdown in California did it because he was paid to—by the drug dealers themselves54. They wanted the drug war. They wanted it so badly, they would pay to speed it up.
Henry Smith Williams urged the public to ask: Why would gangsters pay the cops to enforce the drug laws harder? The answer, he said, was right in front of our eyes. Drug prohibition put the entire narcotics industry into their hands. Once the clinics were closed, every single addict became a potential customer and cash cow.
Since his brother’s clinic had been shut down by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics following bribes from the Mafia, Smith Williams reasoned that that must be what was happening at the national level, too. Anslinger must be in their pay: if the drug gangs win from Anslinger’s policies, and nobody else does, the only explanation is that he is one of them.
Henry Smith Williams was, it turns out, wrong on this one crucial detail. There is no evidence that Anslinger ever worked for the Mafia, and it’s fair to assume it would have emerged by now if he had. Anslinger really believed he was the sworn enemy of the drug gangs, even as they were paying his officers to enact his policies. Henry Smith Williams assumed that Anslinger—and prohibition—were rational, like him. They were not. They are responses to fear, and panic. And nobody, when they are panicking, can see the logical flaws in their thought.
Harry worked very hard to keep the country in a state of panic on the subject of drugs so that nobody would ever again see these logical contradictions. Whenever people did point them out, he had them silenced. He had to make sure there was no room for doubt—in his own head, or in the country—and no alternative55 for Americans to turn to.
Henry Smith Williams was never the same after these experiences. Before, he saw the majority of human beings as feeble dimwits who barely deserve life. But he started to argue that humans didn’t have to be engaged in a brutal Darwinian war of survival after all; instead, we can choose kindness in place of crushing the weak.56
He spent his remaining years setting up a group to campaign for an end to the drug war, but Anslinger’s men wrote to everyone who expressed an interest in it, warning them it was a “criminal organization” that was “in trouble with Uncle Sam.”57 Henry Smith Williams died in 1940. Drug Addicts Are Human Beings remained out of print and largely forgotten for the rest of Anslinger’s life, and ours.
The book contained a prediction. If this drug war continues, Henry Smith Williams wrote, there will be a five-billion-dollar drug smuggling industry in the United States in fifty years’ time. He was right almost to the exact year.58
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The story of the Williams brothers, and all the doctors who were crushed alongside them, was so successfully wiped from America’s collective memory that by the 1960s, Anslinger could say in public that doctors had always been his allies in the drug war. “I’d like to see,” he told a journalist, “the doctor who claims he was treated in anything but the kindliest fashion.”59
Chapter 3
The Barrel of Harry’s Gun
While Harry Anslinger was shutting down all the alternatives to the drug war in the United States, across the rest of the world, drugs were still being sold legally. Over the next few decades, this began to end—and by the 1960s, they were banned everywhere.
At first, I assumed this was because every country had its own local fears and its own local Anslingers—but then I started to notice something odd in Anslinger’s archives, and I didn’t understand it.
In his letters, he was issuing orders all over the world—including to my country, Britain. He acted as the first “drug czar” not just for the United States, but for the world. How? I started trying to figure out the story of how Harry took his war global—and1 pushed his views into the laws of everyone reading this book, wherever you are.
Once the doctors were whipped into line, there was one thing left that puzzled Harry. He was doing all the right things. He was cracking down on addicts and doctors and dealers. He held up one city in particular as a model for the whole world of how to wipe out drugs, because it adopted every single piece of hard-line legalization he demanded. That city was Baltimore.2 Yet something, it seemed, wasn’t working. Baltimore was—inexplicably—not becoming a drug-free paradise. Harry said there was only one possible explanation. Just as he had glimpsed the Mafia secretly operating beneath the surface of American society, he now believed he could see another, even more evil force secretly manipulating events.