The drug war’s greatest tragedy is no doubt the deaths of innocent people who get accidentally caught up in violence, like six-year-old Tiffany Smith (who was killed in a drug-related gang shooting) and sixteen-year-old Rubi Fraire (who was murdered by her boyfriend, a drug cartel member). But in Chasing the Scream, Johann Hari also argues that many of the drug war’s seemingly less innocent victims—like addicts who die of overdoses and drug dealers who murder one another—would have survived and perhaps even lived ordinary, productive lives if it weren’t for drug prohibition. This is because prohibition causes far more violence than drugs themselves: it relegates formerly legal activities to the black market, where “the most insane and sadistic violence” gets rewarded with money, power, and status. Thus, Hari concludes that prohibition is the root cause of drug-related violence, which will inevitably become more destructive over time if drugs remain illegal.
The drug war has forced the drug trade into the black market, which naturally fosters violence because it’s outside the government’s reach. In the early 1900s, before drugs like heroin and cocaine were criminalized, Americans and Europeans could buy them legally in pharmacies. But when the government outlawed them, it pushed drugs into the illegal market, where gangsters like Arnold Rothstein ruled through violence. In fact, violence is the only way for buyers and sellers to control a black market. In a well-regulated market, the law enables people to fairly trade goods and services, and people can resolve any disputes through the courts. But in a black market, where buyers and sellers trade illegal goods, they can’t rely on the government to recognize their property rights or settle disputes. Thus, they turn to violence instead. For instance, if a thief steals drugs from a gang, the gang can’t sue the thief—it can only get retribution by violently retaliating against the thief. As a result, black markets replace legal regulation with illegal violence. Similarly, violence is also the only way to gain and hold market power in a black market. In the legal market, companies can grow through fair competition, like offering better products or lower prices. For instance, if a lemonade stand on one block wants to take customers from their competitor on the next block, it can simply start offering better lemonade. But if a drug dealer wants to do the same, they will likely have to eliminate their competition through violence. As a result, the black market strongly incentivizes gangs to expand through violence.
The illegal drug trade doesn’t just depend on violence: it also creates a cycle of escalating violence over time. First, black markets create cycles of violence because the most ruthless criminals outcompete everyone else. For instance, Arnold Rothstein was the most feared mobster in New York—until someone killed him and took over. This cycle repeats: someone killed the new boss, and then the new one, and so on, until the present day. Each new kingpin takes over specifically because they’re willing to use more violence than whomever came before. Similarly, violence actually increases when the police capture gang leaders, because other gang members fight to take over their vacant spot. Thus, while the drug trade remains illegal, groups who seek power in it become more and more violent over time. Extreme violence also gives gangs an edge by creating a “culture of terror,” which deters their rivals from challenging them. For instance, the ex-Zeta Cartel hitman Rosalio Reta tells Hari that the cartel deliberately uses extreme tactics, like murdering their rivals’ pregnant family members, in order to signal that nobody should cross them. Whichever gang uses the most extreme violence becomes the most feared and respected, so gangs try to outdo one another—which further contributes to the drug war’s escalating cycle of violence.
Finally, the illegal drug trade’s violence doesn’t stay in the black market: it also corrupts the government itself. First, dominance in the black market gives some criminals enough power to buy off the government and undermine the rule of law. For instance, in Ciudad Juárez, only two percent of murderers get convicted because the Zeta Cartel controls the state government through bribes and threats. Even when Zeta member Sergio Barraza admitted in court to murdering his girlfriend, Rubi Fraire, the judges acquitted him. This shows that when the drug trade is large enough, it can prevent the legal system from functioning effectively. Second, extreme drug violence sometimes justifies equally extreme responses from the government. For instance, Phoenix sheriff Joe Arpaio used the drug war’s extreme violence as an excuse for imprisoning drug addicts in inhumane conditions (like 140°F tents in the desert). Similarly, the U.S. now incarcerates more of its population than any other society in history—and the government uses the war on drugs as a justification. Thus, the drug war draws the government into its escalating cycle of violence, too.
The public often assumes that drugs cause violence, but Hari argues that they’re wrong: drug prohibition causes violence. Worse, some people even paint the deaths of drug users and dealers as evidence that the drug war is succeeding. But the truth is just the opposite: virtually all of these deaths are preventable, and they don’t signal that the forces of law and order are any closer to winning the war on drugs. Rather, the drug war is far more likely to achieve nothing at all—besides even greater levels of violence and suffering. On the drug war’s front lines, this effect is obvious. The U.S.’s greatest ever spikes in crime came during alcohol prohibition in the 1920s and the drug crackdown of the 1970s and 1980s, while in Ciudad Juárez, residents are so used to seeing dead bodies on the street that they scarcely even notice them anymore. Unfortunately, Hari concludes, the situation will only get worse until governments are willing to admit that the war on drugs has failed and replace the black market for drugs with a well-regulated, legal market.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Prohibition and the Cycle of Violence ThemeTracker
Prohibition and the Cycle of Violence Quotes in Chasing the Scream
Billie didn’t blame Anslinger’s agents as individuals; she blamed the drug war itself—because it forced the police to treat ill people like criminals. “Imagine if the government chased sick people 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.”
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 the pharmacies, morphine had cost two or three cents a grain; the criminal gangs charged a dollar. 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.
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 alternative for Americans to turn to.
There would be many more bullets, but I was going to learn on my journey that Arnold Rothstein has not yet died. Every time he is killed, a harder and more vicious version of him emerges to fill the space provided by prohibition for a global criminal industry. Arnold Rothstein is the start of a lineup of criminals that runs through the Crips and the Bloods and Pablo Escobar to Chapo Guzman—each more vicious because he was strong enough to kill the last.
[…]
And I was going to see that, like Rothstein, Harry Anslinger is reincarnated in ever-tougher forms, too. Before this war is over, his successors were going to be deploying gunships along the coasts of America, imprisoning more people than any other society in human history, and spraying poisons from the air across foreign countries thousands of miles away from home to kill their drug crops.
For Chino, the war on drugs was not a metaphor. It was a battlefield onto which he woke and on which he slept.
“That one act of human compassion…I went into her cell and started talking to her. And all my shit stopped.”
There will always be some people who are violent and disturbed and sadistic—but human beings respond to incentives. In Chino’s neighborhood, the financial incentives for a kid like him were to step up the violence and the sadism—because if he did, he would have a piece of one of the biggest and most profitable industries in America, and if he didn’t, he would be shut out and left in poverty.
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.
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.
At first, when the murders began, people would run in panic from the death scenes. Then it changed. They started to stop and stare. Then it changed again. They would just walk on by. As if it was normal. As if it was nothing. Because in Juárez, it was. People were training themselves not to see, to dismember the part of them that sees the dismembering.
But Juan and his teenage friends refused to live in a city where murder was ignored.
If you are the first to kill your rivals’ relatives, including their pregnant women, you get a brief competitive advantage: people are more scared of your cartel and they will cede more of the drug market to you. Then every cartel does it: it becomes part of standard practice. If you are the first to behead people, you get a brief competitive advantage. Then every cartel does it. If you are the first to behead people on camera and post it on YouTube, you get a brief competitive advantage. Then every cartel does it. If you are the first to mount people’s heads on pikes and display them in public, you gain a brief competitive advantage. Then every cartel does it. If you are the first to behead a person, cut off his face, and sew it onto a soccer ball, you get a brief competitive advantage. And on it goes.
That is when Marisela heard rumors that started to make it possible to make sense of this whole story. Sergio, she was told, is a Zeta. That is why the police would not touch him. That is why he kept escaping. When Marisela got her final lead on where Sergio was, the police were finally honest with her. “If he’s with the Zetas, we’re not going to be able to do anything, because they run the state,” they told her. “If we do a bust, it’s because they allow us to do it. We don’t bust people just like that.” They were apologetic, but they explained that the Zetas give them money if they serve them and death if they don’t.
Just as when all legal routes to alcohol were cut off, beer disappeared and whisky won, when all legal routes to opiates are cut off, Oxy disappears, and heroin prevails. This isn’t a law of nature, and it isn’t caused by the drug—it is caused by the drug policy we have chosen. After the end of alcohol prohibition, White Lightning vanished—who’s even heard of it now?—and beer went back to being America’s favorite alcoholic drink. There are heroin addicts all across the United States today who would have stayed happily on Oxy if there had been a legal route to it.
This is worth repeating, because it is so striking, and we hear it so rarely, despite all the evidence. The war on drugs makes it almost impossible for drug users to get milder forms of their drug—and it pushes them inexorably toward harder drugs.
In his office, Goulão told me there were two dimensions to Portugal’s drug revolution. The panel didn’t simply lift the legal penalties and leave people to it. They took the big, lumbering machinery of the drug war and turned it into an equally big, active machine to establish a drug peace. “The big effect of decriminalization,” he said, “was to make it possible to develop all the other policies.” In the United States, 90 percent of the money spent on drug policy goes to policing and punishment, with 10 percent going to treatment and prevention. In Portugal, the ratio is the exact opposite.
We all—the vast majority of drug warriors, and the vast majority of legalizers—have a set of shared values. We all want to protect children from drugs. We all want to keep people from dying as a result of drug use. We all want to reduce addiction. […] When we move beyond the drug war, we will be able to achieve those shared goals with much greater success.
At the start of my journey, I set out to find an answer to a contradiction within myself, and within our culture—between the impulse to be compassionate to addicts, and the impulse to crush and destroy our addictive impulses. Now, at last, I see—and really feel—that it is not a contradiction at all. A compassionate approach leads to less addiction. […] This isn’t a debate about values. It’s a debate about how to achieve those values.
With legalization, the fevered poetry of the drug war has turned into the flat prose of the drug peace. Drugs have been turned into a topic as banal as selling fish, or tires, or lightbulbs.
As Barbara speaks, all the killing—from Arnold Rothstein to Chino’s gang to the Zetas—is being replaced by contracts. All the guns are being replaced by subordinate clauses. All the grief is being replaced by regulators and taxes and bureaucrats with clipboards.
[…]
I am bored at last, and I realize a tear of relief is running down my cheek.
