The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  Crack was the hottest combat reporting story… Robert Stutman qtd. in Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 52.

  They were allowed to confiscate the cash, cars, and homes of everyone arrested in drug busts… See Alexander’s The New Jim Crow for a more comprehensive account of the militarization of local police forces during the War on Drugs. Police departments got to keep the spoils from their drug busts, Alexander writes, not only by confiscating drugs but also by taking “the cash, cars, and homes of people suspected of drug use or sales.” The cultural narratives that legitimated these confiscations found their authority in a much deeper narrative about addiction and guilt: the belief that addicts were guilty, and deserved to have their possessions taken from them (79).

  equivalent to crack… Qtd. in Provine, Unequal Under Law, 112. As early as 1991, a report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission found that most judges found mandatory minimums “manifestly unjust.” See Eric E. Sterling, “Drug Laws and Snitching: A Primer,” Frontline, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/snitch/primer/.

  One San Francisco judge wept on the bench… See Provine, Unequal Under Law, 10.

  Between 1980 and 2014, the number of incarcerated drug offenders increased from just over 40,000to almost 490,000, and the majority of those incarcerated were people of color… The number of people in prisons and jails for drug offenses was 40,900 in 1980, and 488,400 in 2014. These statistics are taken from The Sentencing Project’s report “Trends in U.S. Corrections,” last updated December 2015, drawn from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Prisoners are classified according to the offense for which they are serving the longest sentence, so these prisoners are either serving only a sentence for drugs, or else for drugs and another crime—so long as the drug-related crime is the one for which they are serving the longest sentence. Many other people convicted of drug offenses are currently incarcerated, but are not listed as such as long as it’s another conviction for which they are serving the longest sentence.

  Whether the War on Drugs is the primary driver of American mass incarceration has been the subject of recent debates. Michelle Alexander laid out the argument bluntly in The New Jim Crow: “Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs” (60). It’s important to make some distinctions here: this doesn’t mean that the majority of incarcerated people in America are “nonviolent drug offenders”—a phrase that has become a comfortable compound subject in the mainstream liberal critique of mass incarceration in America, especially since Alexander’s book. But in his recent book Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration, and How to Achieve Real Reform (New York: Basic Books, 2017), David Pfaff argues that the narrative of the War on Drugs as the primary driver of mass incarceration in America misunderstands the problem—that it’s really the discretion of prosecutors (taking more cases to court) that has driven up incarceration rates—and that even if we freed all nonviolent drug offenders from prison, it would only make a dent in the problem of mass incarceration: America would still incarcerate more people, per capita, than any other country in the world. But it’s also true that while nonviolent drug offenders make up only a fifth of the incarcerated population, a large number of those offenders incarcerated for violent offenses owe their incarceration to the War on Drugs—which creates the conditions under which the drug trade has become and remains so violent. All that said, it’s important to recognize the War on Drugs and its racialized punitive project as one part of a much broader systemic injustice, rather than the entirety of the problem.

  For hard data on these questions, see annual reports from the U.S. Department of Justice, for example, “Prisoners in 2015,” https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p15.pdf. Additional resources include Jennifer Broxmeyer, “Prisoners of Their Own War: Can Policymakers Look Beyond the ‘War on Drugs’ to Drug Treatment Courts?” Yale Law Journal 118 (2008–9). For a fuller account of the War on Drugs and its legacy of incarceration, see also Marc Mauer and Ryan S. King, The Sentencing Project, a 25-Year Quagmire: The War on Drugs and Its Impact on American Society 2 (2007), available at http://www.sentencingproject.org/Admin%5CDocuments%5Cpublications%5Cdp _25yearquagmire.pdf. See also Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 6, 20. More than 31 million people have been arrested for drug offenses since the War on Drugs began.

  A 1993 study found that only 19 percent of drug dealers were African American, but they made up 64 percent of arrests… Hari, Chasing the Scream, 93.

  By waging a war on drug users and dealers, Reagan made good on his promise… Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 49.

  The drug problem reflects bad decisions by individuals with free wills… George H. W. Bush, “National Drug Control Strategy,” 1992, qtd. in Jennifer Broxmeyer, “Prisoners of Their Own War: Can Policymakers Look Beyond the ‘War on Drugs’ to Drug Treatment Courts?” Yale Law Journal, June 30, 2008.

  Would you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me… Betty Watson Burston, Dionne Jones, and Pat Robertson-Saunders, “Drug Use and African Americans: Myth Versus Reality,” Journal of Alcohol and Drug Abuse 40 (Winter 1995): 19, qtd. in Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 106.

  I enjoy it much more, because I don’t go to bars… Berryman qtd. in Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 287.

  A fellow patient at the sanitarium… The memory of Jackson’s footprint in wine is from Bailey, Farther and Wilder.

  Jackson first stopped drinking at the age of thirty-three, using something called the Peabody Method… The Peabody Method was based on Richard Peabody’s The Common Sense of Drinking (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931). I have drawn my account of Jackson’s time using the Peabody Method from the longer account in Bailey, Farther and Wilder, 103–4.

  It was an approach grounded in pragmatism… See Peabody’s The Common Sense of Drinking.

  We regulate our lives in orderly and profitable fashion… Jackson to Bud Wister, December 19, 1936, Charles Jackson Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College.

  Why don’t you write me a letter about it?… Jackson, The Lost Weekend, 149–50. While Jackson himself was also an avid Fitzgerald fan, he didn’t have the same respect for other scribes of alcoholism. In an undated letter to Robert Nathan, in the Jackson archives at Dartmouth, Jackson wrote that he couldn’t find the “pathos of The Sun Also Rises…it’s bathetic, merely.” He thought alcoholism deserved to be represented as something more than tragic farce.

  the books begun and dropped… Jackson, The Lost Weekend, 17.

  It had long since ceased to matter Why… Ibid., 221–22.

  I am not saying that the critics could have cured Berryman of his disease… Lewis Hyde, “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking,” American Poetry Review, October 1975; repr. Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1986.

  It is my thesis here… that [a] war, between alcohol and Berryman’s creative powers… Ibid., 17.

  an alcoholic poet on his pity pot… Ibid., 14.

  We can hear the booze talking… Ibid., 17.

  It would not have been easy… Ibid., 18.

  he confesses that for two years he worked as an orderly… Ibid., 2.

  luminous self-destruction… Elizabeth Hardwick, “Billie Holiday,” New York Review of Books, March 4, 1976.

  very attractive customer… George White qtd. in Blackburn’s With Billie, 219.

  I got a habit and I know it’s no good… Holiday interview with Eugene Callender qtd. in Hari’s Chasing the Scream, 21.

  shyness so vast… John Chilton qtd. in Blackburn’s With Billie, 63. Blackburn’s book is a tremendous compilation of oral histories about Holiday’s life and career. The context of Blackburn’s book is an interestingly haunted one: Its oral histories were assembled from taped interviews left by Linda Kuehl, the biographer who committed suicide before she could finish her biography of Holiday.

  She was told nobody could sing the word “hunger” like she sang it… Ho
liday, Lady Sings the Blues, with William Dufty (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 195.

  She sang the clubs on West Fifty-second… These details from Blackburn, With Billie, 94.

  sheer enormity of her vices… For the grand destruction one must be worthy… Hardwick, “Billie Holiday.”

  Anslinger assigned several agents to Holiday’s case during the late 1940s, and they busted her on multiple occasions, including the 1947 conviction that sent her to Alderson Federal Prison Camp, in West Virginia, for almost a year… Johann Hari offers an excellent account of Anslinger’s fixation with Holiday in his 2015 Chasing the Scream, and Julia Blackburn gives the perspectives of the two agents assigned to her case, Jimmy Fletcher and George White, in With Billie. For my account of the legal dimensions of Holiday’s addiction, her persecution at the hands of the law, and the racial inflections of this persecution, I have drawn from Holiday’s own autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, as well as Hari’s history and Blackburn’s assembled testimonies. In Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday describes the media attention surrounding her drug busts, including one January 1949 headline that made her particularly indignant because it seemed to be gloating in her perpetual trouble with the law: “Billie Holiday Arrested on Narcotics Charges.”

  At Alderson, Holiday got Christmas cards… These details from Holiday’s time at Alderson are from Lady Sings the Blues.

  When you form some sort of friendship with anybody… Jimmy Fletcher, qtd. in Blackburn, With Billie, 215.

  in July 1986, ABC News introduced the American public to Jane… Information about ABC report (July 11, 1986) and NBC report (October 24 and 25, 1988) from Drew Humphries’s Crack Mothers: Pregnancy, Drugs, and the Media, 29–30.

  As criminologist Drew Humphries argues, the media effectively created the “crack mother”… In her urgent and revelatory survey of the “crack mother” phenomenon, Crack Mothers, criminologist Drew Humphries surveys news programs that covered women and cocaine between 1983 and 1994—84 in total, largely drawn from ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news—with a swell during the peak of the crack panic in 1989 (19–20).

  although the majority of pregnant addicts were white… Ibid., 128.

  the public outrage around crack mothers effectively redirected public notions of addiction away from disease and back to vice… One of the central ironies of America’s brief and passionate obsession with the figure of the “crack mother”—an obsession driven by pity for her misconstrued child and contempt for her misconstrued villainy—was that it somehow turned an essentially vulnerable group of women into a powerful public scapegoat. As Humphries puts it: “How… did an unusually powerless group of women emerge as a threatening symbol of disorder? The unenviable enemy in the domestic war on drugs?” (15).

  Dr. Ira Chasnoff, whose early reports on the effects of cocaine in utero had fueled the press frenzy… In a 1992 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Chasnoff presented a follow-up study that disproved media conclusions based on his prior work. He publicly chastised the “rush to judgment” on the part of the press, based on his preliminary research, and said he had “never seen a ‘crack kid’” and doubted he ever would. See Humphries, Crack Mothers, 62; and Ira Chasnoff, “Missing Pieces of the Puzzle,” Neurotoxicology and Teratology 15 (1993): 287–88, qtd. in Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine, Crack in the Rear-View Mirror: Deconstructing Drug War Mythology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Based on sensational extrapolations of early scientific findings, the media had predicted that the surging population of “crack babies” would become a doomed underclass: a vast fleet of struggling preemies and little “possessed” Arthurs. The July 30, 1989, column in the Washington Post by the singularly horrific Charles Krauthammer offered an infamous version of the doomsday prophecy: “The inner-city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror: a bio-underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth.” Krauthammer pronounced their futures “closed to them from day one. Theirs will be a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority. At best, a menial life of severe deprivation.” He wondered if “the dead babies may be the lucky ones.” It’s now medical consensus that “crack babies” weren’t doomed at all, and that the whole notion of a “crack baby” was impossible to isolate anyway. These babies had been influenced by such an array of intertwined variables—not only other drugs but also environmental factors like poverty, violence, short-term foster placements, and homelessness—that it was impossible to identify what damage crack itself had done (Humphries, Crack Mothers, 62.)

  If you give drugs to your child because you can’t help it… Qtd. in ibid., 2.

  Instead of showing shame, Tracy was defiant… Ibid., 52.

  when white pregnant drug addicts were covered in the media… Ibid.

  Now they weren’t just part of the “undeserving” poor, welfare junkies who were corroding the civic body… It was stereotypes like the crack mother that fueled the New Right’s campaign to diminish social services in the late 1980s. See Jimmie L. Reeves and Richard Campbell, Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994).

  Unlike most addicts, they entered the criminal justice system through the hospital… Humphries, Crack Mothers, 6.

  Prosecutors twisted familiar laws in new ways… See full description of Melanie Green and Jennifer Johnson’s cases in ibid., 72–73 and 75–79. Jennifer Johnson’s conviction was eventually overturned.

  I had concerns about an unborn helpless child to be… Judge Peter Wolf, qtd. in ibid., 35. Now that it’s medical consensus that “crack babies” weren’t doomed at all, or if they were doomed, they were doomed by the social conditions that their government wasn’t doing enough to address, it seems apparent that this “concern” for unborn children should have been translating into expanded social services rather than the vilification of crack mothers themselves.

  If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills… Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 212–13.

  Holiday’s coauthor, journalist William Dufty, thought addiction would be a good “gimmick”… I’ve drawn this from John Szwed’s account of the publication history of Lady Sings the Blues in his biography Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth (New York: Viking, 2015), 20. Even though Lady Sings the Blues warned against the dangers of addiction, its sales also ended up financially supporting Holiday’s habit. The idea to publish an autobiography was certainly driven by financial necessity: Holiday owed money to the IRS and couldn’t play most nightclubs in New York because her felony conviction meant she’d lost her cabaret license. She was looking for positive publicity that might help her get it back. But the same drug record that had taken away Holiday’s cabaret card also made it possible for her to earn money by selling her “sensational” story to glossy magazines, in articles called “How I Blew a Million Dollars,” “Can a Dope Addict Come Back,” and (trumpeting the tinny optimism she would ultimately disavow) a piece called “I’m Cured for Good.” One issue of Tan magazine featured a cover photo of Holiday in an emerald gown with white gardenias on her breast and her two white Chihuahuas in her arms. Account of the financial imperatives behind the autobiography’s publication is from Szwed, Billie Holiday, 12. “How I Blew a Million Dollars” ran in Our World, March 1953; “Can a Dope Addict Come Back” ran in Tan, February 1953; and “I’m Cured for Good” ran in Ebony, in July 1949.

  I’ve been on and I’ve been off… Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 218.

  No Guts Holiday… Hari, Chasing the Scream, 23.

  A habit is no damn private hell… Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 218.

  Dope never helped anybody sing better… Ibid., 214.

  Carl… don’t you ever use this shit!… Carl Drinkard qtd. in Blackburn, With Billie, 230.

  I want you to know you stand convicted as a wrongdoer… Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 151.

  Would he treat a diabet
ic like a criminal?… Ibid., 153.

  She was born just a month after the Harrison Act came into effect… The Harrison Act was passed in December 1914 and became effective in March 1915. Holiday was born in April 1915.

  for the sake of young kids whose whole life will be ruined…Lady Sings the Blues, 212.

  William Burroughs’s Junkie, subtitled Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict, was published in 1953… same year as Anslinger’s Traffic in Narcotics, and three years before the Narcotic Control Act. Part of a “Two Books in One” package from Ace Books, Junkie was sold for thirty-five cents and bound with Narcotic Agent, a memoir by a former undercover agent named Maurice Helbrant. In a picaresque of stings and busts and deceptions, Helbrant tells his story as an opposite narrative: the pursuit of the unredeemed junkie. But it emerges as a parallel tale instead, another account of addiction—a parade of vignettes in which a maniacal crusader is camped out with whiskey bottles in seedy motel rooms. Helbrant is obsessed with heroin: how to use it, how to fake using it, how to spot someone who is using it. His fixation on punishing the obsession of the addict became an obsession all its own. The moral indignation becomes another kind of drug, the crusade another kind of bender.

  Given cooperation… William Burroughs, Junkie, 99.

  an addict with “no pleading need to quit”… Hardwick, “Billie Holiday.”

  With cold anger… Ibid.

  Why do they keep putting her on stage? Surely they know she has a problem… Both newscasters qtd. in Amy (dir. Asif Kapadia, 2015).

  IV. LACK

  the surplus of mystical properties… Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Epidemics of the Will,” Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 132.

  Ever to confess you’re bored… John Berryman, “Dream Song 14,” The Dream Songs.

  narrowing of repertoire… Meg Chisolm interview with the author, August 11, 2016.

  through the turnstile… Adam Kaplin interview with the author, October 13, 2016.