Chasing the Scream

by Johann Hari

  The cops were waiting in line to see Ed’s body, and Leigh joined them. His head was wrapped in an improvised turban to keep his brains from spilling out. His body was still warm and soft when she touched it.

  Years from that day, Leigh would explain in a speech: “As I rested my hand on his chest, I said a prayer—for his family, his friends, and for myself. And as I did so, I felt the presence of every police officer who had lost [their] lives to the war on drugs. I felt the presence of my dear friend Lisa and every other victim caught in the crossfire of our failed policies. I felt them in that darkened hospital room with me. Their spirits were careening down from the walls. Their spirits were jeering and mocking me. Justice? Justice? What is this of your justice? It was,” she says, “my Damascus moment.”8

  Leigh tried to get back to work, but this time she knew too much. It is hard to be Harry Anslinger with your eyes and your mind open.

  She had believed that by fighting the drug war, she was crushing the drug gangs that had killed her two closest friends. Now she began to see that her work in fact kept them in business and made them more deadly. The lesson of ending alcohol prohibition, she had come to believe, is that there is a way to actually stop this violence: legalize and regulate the drug trade.

  After he was told about the killing, Ed’s five-year-old son Daniel9 insisted on leaving the hallway light on at night, so “Daddy could find his way home.”

  While Leigh was studying for a law degree at night, another part of the drug war was slowly becoming clear to her. The shaft of light she had allowed in was illuminating more than she expected.

  She knew that drug use and drug selling are engaged in by all the racial groups in America—hell, she smoked marijuana herself as a teen. But that’s not who she was arresting and imprisoning. The 1993 National Household Survey10 on Drug Abuse found that 19 percent of drug dealers were African American, but they made up 64 percent of the arrests for it. Largely as a result of this disparity, there was an outcome that was more startling still. In 1993, in the death throes of apartheid, South Africa imprisoned 853 black men per hundred thousand in the population. The United States imprisons 4,919 black men per hundred thousand (versus only 943 white men). So because of the drug war and the way it is enforced, a black man was far more likely to be jailed in the Land of the Free than in the most notorious white supremacist society in the world.

  Indeed, at any given time,11 40 to 50 percent of black men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five are in jail, on probation, or have a warrant out for their arrest, overwhelmingly for drug offenses.

  It’s easy to assume that Harry Anslinger’s prejudices at the birth of the drug war were just a product of their time, long since discarded. Leigh was discovering they are not. The race panics that drove the early drug war have not burned out.

  But here, again, I was forced by Leigh—and by the facts—to see that this is not a simple story, with straightforward heroes and villains.

  I was inclined to assume that this hugely disproportionate rate of arrest of black men is due to naked racism on the part of cops. But Leigh is not a racist. We know this because she risked her life to expose violent racism. And most of her colleagues, she said with confidence, were not racist, and they would have been appalled if any of their colleagues made racist statements. Yet Leigh was—as she would see later—acting as part of a racist machine, against her own intentions.

  Around this time, other police officers across the United States were trying to figure out how this works, too. Matthew Fogg is one of the most decorated police officers in the United States, responsible for tracking down more than three hundred of the most-wanted felons in the country—from murderers to rapists to child molesters. But he was bewildered as to why his force only ever goes to black neighborhoods to bust people for drugs. He went to see his boss to suggest they start mounting similar raids in white neighborhoods.

  He explained in a speech that his superior officer told him: “Fogg, you know you’re right12 they are using drugs there [but] you know what? If we go out and we start targeting those individuals, they know judges, they know lawyers, they know politicians, they know all of the big folks in government. If we start targeting them, and their children, you know what’s going to happen? We’re going to get a phone call and they’re going to shut us down. You know that, Fogg? You know what’s going to happen? There goes your overtime. There’s the money that you’re making. So let’s just go after the weakest link. Let’s go after those who can’t afford the attorneys, those who we can lock up.”

  I kept trying to understand this dynamic, and the more cops I met—people who were not racist, but had produced a racist outcome—there more it came into focus. More than 50 percent of Americans have breached the drug laws. Where a law is that widely broken, you can’t possibly enforce it against every lawbreaker. The legal system would collapse under the weight of it. So you go after the people who are least able to resist, to argue back, to appeal—the poorest and most disliked groups. In the United States, they are black and Hispanic people, with a smattering of poor whites. You have pressure on you from above to get results. There has to be a certain number of busts, day after day, week after week. So you go after the weak. It’s not like you are framing them—they are, in fact, breaking the law. You keep targeting the weak. And you try not to see the wider picture.

  But then, for some people, it becomes inescapable.

  Leigh started to ask herself: How can you continue with this? But she felt an intense loyalty to her fellow officers, whom she knew to be good people. They were being increasingly sued by the American Civil Liberties Union—often personally—and her reflex was to defend them. These were the men she had faced gunfire with for years. How could she walk off the battlefield?

  We humans are good at suppressing our epiphanies, especially when our salaries and our friendships depend on it. She knew that a big chunk of her police department’s budget ran on the money they got from seizing drug suspects’ property. What would happen to all their jobs if that were taken away from the cops? She deliberately kept herself so busy that “I just didn’t have any time to think about it.”

  As she explained this to me, I realized that for Chino and for Leigh, all the incentives laid out by prohibition were to keep on fighting their wars and shooting their guns and ignoring their doubts.

  But on I-95, Leigh began to see the act of pulling over a car to search it in a new way. Once, she saw this scene as a soldier in a just war approaching the enemy. Now she sees it as a meeting of people who are surrounded by ghosts. As he approaches the car, the police officer has ranged behind him the ghosts of all the cops he has known, “all the funerals he’s been to, all the people who’ve been killed in traffic stops—because it’s a lot,” she says. And then “there’s also this poor black kid” in the car. Sitting in the passenger seats behind him are his ghosts—all of his relatives and friends who have been killed in police raids or vanished into the American prison system.

  Neither can see the other side’s ghosts. They can only hate.

  One day, Leigh discovered she was not alone. A friend told her about a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an organization of cops and judges and prison officers fighting to end the drug war so they can bankrupt the drug gangs. She was intrigued. She needed to find an answer to a question that was plaguing her: What had been the practical effect of all the policing she has done over the years?

  She decided to venture out into the drug war zones of Baltimore, not in uniform this time, but as a civilian. She looked at the kids in the city, and talked with them. She discovered “they are growing up in war zones. There’s no doubt about it.” There were prohibition-related killings almost every night, and “the kids see it. All the kids know this. It traumatizes you to a point you can’t begin to imagine.”

  But perhaps most important, once you have been busted13 for a drug offense—at fifteen or seventeen or twenty—you are virtually unemployable for the res
t of your life. You will never work again. You will be barred from receiving student loans. You will be evicted from public housing. You will be barred from even visiting public housing. “Say your mother lives in public housing, and you get arrested for possession, and you go visit her,” Leigh says. “If the housing authority find out you’ve been there [they will say] you’ve violated the lease and they’ll kick [the whole family] out.” I kept meeting people like this across the United States—second-class citizens, stripped even of the vote, because at some point in the past, they possessed drugs.

  Leigh was amazed to uncover all this. She explains: “When I was a police officer nobody ever trained me on the collateral consequences of marijuana arrests. I had no idea . . . It’s not something they’re made aware of. It’s—go out and get numbers. Do your job.”

  Just as Jimmy Fletcher—the agent sent by Harry Anslinger to break Billie Holiday—never forgave himself for what he ended up doing to her, Leigh Maddox never forgave herself for what she had done to all the kids she arrested over the years. It was not enough, Leigh decided, for her to say she’s sorry. You have to make amends. So she completed her retraining as a lawyer, quit her job as a cop, and started providing services in Baltimore to help the very people she had been busting and breaking before. She set up a low-cost legal clinic called Just Advice, where she and her students fight to have the arrest records of accused drug offenders expunged any way they can. She writes to universities imploring them to provide access to scholarships to students with drug convictions. She defends drug users in court. This is Leigh’s life now.

  It sounds like a neat ending to her story, but Leigh is more downbeat and humble than that. She can’t say, in all honesty, that she has found any redemption for herself, she tells me. No—because she keeps meeting “the people you can’t help [under prohibition]. The guy who comes in and he’s forty-five years old . . . and he has his criminal record with him and he wants to get it expunged and [all you can say is] ‘Sorry . . . you’re out of luck’ . . . To see that kind of distress in their eyes.” She is up against a legal system in which even a famously liberal judge like Justice Thurgood Marshall14 would openly brag: “If it’s a dope case, I won’t even read the petition. I ain’t giving no break to no drug dealer.”

  In 2011, Leigh drove to the city where Harry Anslinger launched this war long before—Washington, D.C. Not far from the old Federal Bureau of Narcotics building, she delivered a speech.

  “To those who urge the United States not to wave the white flag of surrender, I say—what white flag?” she asked. “Your white flag15 is now a red flag . . . A red flag, sullied and stinking from countless deaths of good guys and bad guys and simple people caught up in the crossfire.”

  Chapter 7

  Mushrooms

  Without really thinking about it, I guess I have always assumed that the people who die in the drug war are those who choose to enter it—dealers and users and cops. But I soon found out there is another category all together. In Baltimore, I learned, they call them “mushrooms.”

  Tiffany Smith was playing on the sidewalk1 as the light faded on a hot July night in West Baltimore in 1991. She was playing with her doll, Kelly, and her best friend, Quinyetta. They were outside Quinyetta’s house, where they were going to have a sleepover. Her parents were watching from the porch.

  The Baltimore Sun recorded the details in the days that followed. It had been a fun day.2 They had been singing and clapping at a block party, then they danced along to antidrug songs performed by the group Parents, Students Moving Against Drugs, and now this: sitting up in the heat with her doll and her friend. Tiffany’s hair was tied into pigtails. In a few weeks, she was going to be seven years old.

  Except she wasn’t. We don’t know if Tiffany saw the two young men at the corner. We don’t know if Tiffany knew what a “drug turf war” is. We don’t know if she heard the gunshot.

  Unlike Chino and Leigh and all the other people in this book, Tiffany didn’t get to formulate a position on the drug war. I got a message through to her parents. They didn’t want to talk.

  They call them mushrooms because they can pop up anywhere.

  They renamed the block3 where she died Tiffany Square. Today, it is a place where dealers openly sell drugs.

  Part III

  Angels

  Chapter 8

  State of Shame

  By the summer of 2012, I had been working on this book for a year, and I felt like I was trapped in a strange recurring dream in which I caught a glimpse of Harry Anslinger and Arnold Rothstein fleeing out the door every time I arrived at a drug war battlefield.

  I watched as Chino and Leigh tried to be Anslinger and Rothstein, and failed—but I kept hearing about people across the world who had in fact succeeded in becoming these founding fathers, and then went further than they ever dreamed. They had, I realized, taken the darkest impulses I found and feared within myself and our culture—to repress addictive urges with violence; to crush, in the belief you will conquer—and followed them literally. I needed, I knew, to go looking for those men. I wanted to understand them. They might hold the key.

  So I booked a ticket to Arizona, and within a few days, I was marching with a chain gang of meth addicts in the desert—all arranged by Harry Anslinger’s personal disciple. Then I booked a flight to Texas and found myself in a bare prison cell, talking through reinforced glass to a young man who has sawed off heads for the great-grandchildren of Arnold Rothstein. Then I headed into the deadliest city in the world, to track a dead woman’s dream.

  The female chain gang1 meets at five o’clock every weekday morning, just as the sun is starting to rise over the Arizona desert. The women emerge unfed from the tents, surrounded by barbed wire, as they are ordered to put on T-shirts that display to the world why they are here. I WAS A DRUG ADDICT2, it says in bold black letters you can read from a distance. I watch as they clamber into their striped uniforms, their limbs flailing with hunger and exhaustion. Then they put on leg-irons. Then the guards order them to begin their chant.

  Everywhere we go

  People want to know

  Who we are

  So we tell them

  We are the chain gang

  The only female chain gang.

  They have to stamp their boots and jangle their chains in rhythm to the song, as though they are the chorus line in some dystopian Broadway musical. And so their march out into the desert heat begins.

  Some days they are made to bury dead bodies. Today, they clamber into a bus. They are being taken, they are told, to a parched, trash-strewn traffic island in the 110-degree heat and ordered to collect trash, in front of signs urging people to vote for the politician who has pioneered this particular form of punishment.

  The women try to get out of the bus but keep tumbling into each other as the chains catch their feet. They always apologize, in small voices, as the other women hold them up. When they step out into the sun, the women are shoved a bottle of sunscreen. The expiration date on the bottle, I notice, is 2009—three years earlier. It comes out as a thick paste.

  One girl is free3 of the chains. It is her job to nail into place a sign that says CAUTION! SHERIFF’S CHAIN GANG AT WORK! and to fetch water for women when they are on the brink of collapse. Gabba is a pale, bony nineteen-year-old Italian American. As I follow her around, she tells me that she was thrown out by her parents as a teenager and started using heroin. “It was my escape,” she says, looking down.

  I can see Candice staggering around, looking fazed. She is a blond woman in her twenties with an inflamed red face that looks as if it is being slowly eaten by something. It is bleeding where she has scratched it too hard. The doctors have told her it is an allergic reaction to the bleach they use in the tents, she says, but there is no alternative for her. Her story comes out, like the other women’s, in a matter-of-fact monotone—it’s nothing special here. She ran away from her family when she was fourteen and joined the carnival, and she started using meth th
ere. “It was the best thing I ever had in my life—it made the bad feelings go away,” she told me, scratching. “I’m afraid to get released because I don’t know what I’m going to do. It numbs all the bad feelings. It makes me not feel anything.” Like everyone else, Candice is sweating constantly in this heat, and the salt in her sweat is making the rash burn.

  The other T-shirts the women are forced to wear say I AM BREAKING THE NEED FOR WEED, CLEAN(ING) AND SOBER, and METH USER. Michelle, an older former meth user, says to me as she collects rubbish awkwardly: “A lot of people didn’t have a lot of dignity to begin with, to come here, and what they did have is taken away. Everything . . . [is] about humiliating us until there’s nothing left.” A few hours after she tells me this, when she has been in the desert sun all this time covered only with out-of-date paste, Michelle starts vomiting4 and shaking, and has to be held up by the rest of the chain.

  The day before, when I mentioned Harry Anslinger’s name to the man who invented this chain gang—along with a slew of other ways to punish addicts—his face beamed big and wide.

  “Oh, wow! You’re amazing!” he exclaimed. “It’s amazing that you remember that man!” He had Harry’s signature on his wall, staring down at him as he worked. To him, Anslinger was a hero, a role model, the man who started it all. He kept repeating Anslinger’s name in our conversation as though stroking a purring cat: “When you go back to Anslinger—you got a good guy here!”5