Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Chasing the Scream, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Drug Legalization and U.S. Policy
Addiction and Human Connection
Prohibition and the Cycle of Violence
Stories and Human Psychology
Summary
Analysis
To understand the other side of the war between drug dealers and cops, Hari interviews 16 law enforcement agents. But the most interesting is the 50-something ex-police captain Leigh Maddox. She once spent her days patrolling the highway outside Baltimore, searching cars for drugs, arresting everyone she could, and seizing their property to fund the city’s highly militarized police department.
Chino Hardin’s story illustrated how vulnerable people join the drug trade (which appears to be their only shot at reaching a higher class status) and inadvertently end up acting out Arnold Rothstein’s legacy instead. Leigh Maddox’s story shows why well-meaning people join law enforcement in the hopes of doing good, but end up serving Harry Anslinger’s brutal agenda instead. By presenting both of these stories together, Hari suggests that there are no clear heroes and villains in the war on drugs—rather, most people join with good intentions but get caught up in a system that puts those intentions in the service of evil.
Themes
Maddox joined the police because, when she was a teenager, her best friend, Lisa Taylor, took a trip to visit her boyfriend—and disappeared. Lisa’s body was found several months later. Maddox had already applied to join the police. After graduating from the police academy, she read Lisa’s file and learned what really happened: a drug gang raped and murdered her.
Much like Harry Anslinger, Leigh Maddox’s traumatic personal experiences set her down a path to working in law enforcement. But unlike Anslinger, she was more interested in truly helping people than merely amassing power. Of course, these goals fit with the conventional wisdom about what the police do. But the reader will soon learn that in many cases, this conventional wisdom is just as far from reality as the common assumption that drugs turn people into violent criminals.
Themes
A few years after joining the police, Maddox infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan—when Klan members attacked local Black residents or carried illegal guns and drugs with them, she helped her police colleagues catch them. But soon, the Klan discovered her, and she barely escaped them alive.
Maddox’s undercover job infiltrating the KKK is a clear example of meaningful police work: it helped stop violence and save innocent lives. It also underlines how dangerous and stressful policework can be. While this stress doesn’t excuse police officers abusing their power, it certainly helps explain them.
Themes
Even more than the Klan, Leigh Maddox loved going after drug gangs. She thought that she was making a difference and saving lives by busting drivers on the highway. But she was wrong. For most offenses, Hari notes, arresting perpetrators reduces the amount of crime. But not for drug dealing. For instance, when the police officer Michael Levine arrested a hundred drug dealers on a notorious New York corner, a hundred new dealers showed up a few days later to replace them. Maddox found a similar effect: arresting gang members actually increases violent crime. This is because, when gang leaders go to jail, other gang members (and rival gangs) start fighting for control. Numerous studies confirm this pattern. For Leigh Maddox, this was a huge problem: it meant that she was actually making crime worse.
At first, Maddox saw an obvious similarity between her drug busts and her former position infiltrating the KKK: both involved stopping dangerous, violent lawbreakers. But then, she realized the crucial difference: drug dealers are essentially illicit businesspeople—they’re dangerous not because of their ideology, but because there’s demand for their product. Thus, while arresting KKK members can reduce the number of violent racist extremists out on the streets, arresting drug dealers won’t necessarily shrink the drug market. Instead, it only shrinks the supply of drugs, which makes joining the drug market an even more attractive option. (In turn, this makes prospective dealers more willing to risk violence in order to get into the market.) Thus, truly stopping the drug trade requires studying it as a market and intervening to reduce the demand for drugs.
Themes
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“The toughest gig” in policework is going undercover as a drug dealer. Leigh Maddox’s mentor, Ed Toatley, died while working undercover: a dealer shot him in the head during a drug bust. When she visited Toatley in the hospital, Maddox realized that the war on drugs was needlessly killing police officers—just like it needlessly killed her best friend, Lisa Taylor. She realized that her job wasn’t stopping drug violence: it was fueling it. The real solution to violence is to “legalize and regulate the drug trade.”
Just like antidrug advocates might find it counterintuitive to think of addicts like Deborah Hardin as innocent victims of the drug war, drug reformers might find it preposterous to view police casualties like Toatley the same way. But Hari insists that both of these types of casualties are victims: drug users largely fall into addiction because of pain and trauma, and Hari suggests that law enforcement officers usually join the drug war because they’ve been deceived about its true purpose. The officers who spearheaded the drug war (like Harry Anslinger) may have viewed it as part of a virtuous crusade for good, but those who fight it today don’t necessarily share this perspective. Instead, officers like Maddox clearly see that their orders are flawed and that their jobs are futile.
Themes
Maddox also learned that Black men are several times more likely to be arrested and imprisoned for drug crimes than white men. But she also knows that individual police officers aren’t racist—they just work for “a racist machine” without realizing it. Similarly, when a decorated officer asked his boss why they only do drug busts in Black neighborhoods, the boss replied that it’s too dangerous for the police to go after white people, who have powerful connections in the government. “Let’s just go after the weakest link,” the chief said: “those who can’t afford the attorneys, those who we can lock up.” Indeed, Hari notes, most Americans have broken drug laws. It’s impossible for the police to enforce these laws against everyone—but very easy for them to focus on targeting “the poorest and most disliked groups.”
Ironically, after infiltrating the KKK to try and protect Black communities from racist violence, Maddox ended up perpetrating the same kind of violence, arguably on an even broader scale. Her observation that law enforcement has become a “racist machine” shows that the modern drug war is still fulfilling Anslinger’s original goal: it allows law enforcement to repress Black and immigrant communities. The police chief’s comment explicitly confirms this: U.S. police officers’ function is to profit by inflicting suffering on powerless people. Yet his comments also show that he believes his hands are tied—and that government policy is responsible for tying them.
Themes
Leigh Maddox started wondering how she could address these problems. She knew that if the police stopped seizing drug suspects’ property, they’d lose much of their funding. Like Chino Hardin, she had every incentive to keep fighting the drug war. But she also started empathizing with the people she arrested. She joined Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) and started visiting poor Baltimore neighborhoods to learn how the war on drugs was affecting young people. She learned that after a drug arrest, young people can never again work, live in public housing, or even vote. But she never knew this when she was actually making those arrests.
Maddox pinpoints the specific policy mechanism that forces police to continue oppressing the communities they are supposed to protect and serve: money. Even if individual officers aren’t racist, their financial survival depends on continuing to enforce counterproductive, racist drug policies. In a way, the police force’s business model is based on extorting the poor—much like how Arnold Rothstein’s drug gang operated. Maddox only found her way out of the drug war by making the decision to value other people’s lives above her own paycheck.
Themes
Maddox decided to quit the police force, become a lawyer, and start defending drug offenders. But she doesn’t feel like she’s done enough to redeem her previous actions. She still meets too many people who will never get their lives back from the war on drugs.
Just like Chino Hardin, Maddox decided to channel her traumatic personal experience in the war on drugs into activism to help truly heal the drug war’s violence. However, despite doing all that she can as an individual, she continues to believe that broad policy change is the only way to truly change the system.
Themes
