Drug Addicts are Human Beings

"This is an eerily prophetic book that, as far as I can tell, has been completely forgotten since it was first published in the 1930s. The reason I discovered it is that there was a man called Harry Anslinger, who was the most influential person who no one’s ever heard of. He was the first person to use the phrase ‘war on drugs,’ it originates much earlier than most people think it does, many decades before Nixon used it. Anslinger was a government bureaucrat who took over the Department of Prohibition just as alcohol prohibition was ending. He inherited this big, corrupt, messy government department, and partly to give it something to do, came up with the war on drugs. One of the people I noticed in his files, that he really hated and was obsessed with, was a doctor in California. His name was Henry Smith Williams. He had treated drug addicts when drugs were legal, before the ban was introduced and enforced. He was not a man who was particularly sympathetic to drug addicts, certainly at the start. He was a social Darwinian, and had rather annihilatory views towards drug addicts. At one point he says — I’m paraphrasing — that the world would be a better place if they had never been born. He is no bleeding heart liberal. But he noticed several striking things. When drugs were legal — which was for most of human history, but particularly in this period in California prior to the beginning of Prohibition — most people would get them by buying them at the local pharmacy. The most popular way of consuming opiates was ‘Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup’. Coca tea was also very popular and Coca Cola really did contain the same extract as cocaine early on. Being an addict was certainly debilitating, like being an alcoholic, but addicts overwhelmingly had jobs and were no more likely to be poor than the rest of the population. Then, after Prohibition really kicks in, what Henry Smith Williams sees is two massive crime waves. Firstly, drugs are transferred from people like him to armed criminal gangs. These gangs are violent and jack up the price massively — I think the figure is 1000% — because you have to pay people a premium to take the risk of going to prison in order to sell it. Then, to pay these massively inflated prices, you get the second crime wave, which is people who previously bought their drugs at low prices from pharmacies suddenly stealing or prostituting themselves to pay for it. He also notices a huge increase in the death rate among addicts. So all sorts of changes happen, and, having previously been very unsympathetic to addicts, he starts thinking, ‘We’re really destroying these people.’ Another interesting thing he goes into in his book is that there was a loophole deliberately written into the 1914 law which first banned drugs. The loophole stated, quite clearly, that this new system should not apply to addicts. There was a ban on selling drugs to ordinary punters, but addicts were still meant to be able to go to the doctor to get them. And lots of doctors — including Henry Smith Williams and his brother, Edward, who was also a doctor — carried on prescribing drugs to addicts. They thought that it was better they get drugs from them than from a drug dealer who would sell them a contaminated, shitty product that was more likely to kill them. Then Anslinger arrives and starts a massive crackdown on doctors. This is a forgotten part of American history, but 17,000 doctors were arrested in the United States. The drug war was hugely contested when it was introduced. The mayor of Los Angeles stood outside the heroin-prescribing clinic where Edward Smith Williams worked and said words to the effect of ‘You will not shut down this clinic, it does a good job for the people of Los Angeles.’ There were lots of people who said it would be a disaster, and the person who said it would be a disaster more than anyone else was Henry Smith Williams. His book, Drug Addicts are Human Beings , sees the whole drug war coming. Amongst other things he says — and I’m paraphrasing again, the exact words are quoted in my book — ‘If we continue with this policy for the next 50 years, 50 years from now we’ll have a five billion dollar smuggling industry in the United States.’ He was right — almost to the exact year. The other fascinating thing about Drug Addicts are Human Beings is that he talks about why drugs were banned in California. The loophole of doctors being able to prescribe drugs to addicts is shut down state by state, and California was one of the last holdouts, partly because politicians there were quite brave. Henry Smith Williams reveals the story of why it was eventually shut down. I went and looked at the archives of the court case involved. It turns out the Chinese drug gangs in California were really pissed off, because in Nevada they had shut down medical prescription, and so drug addicts had to go to the drug gangs to get their drugs. In California they could still go to the doctor, so the drug gangs bribed the narcotics police to introduce the drug war in California. What this tells us is that, right at the start of the drug war, criminal gangs were paying for it to be introduced because they’re the only people who win from it. They’re the beneficiaries. For me, it was fascinating seeing the same dynamic at the end of the drug war, when I interviewed the people who led the Colorado marijuana legalisation campaign. They would make the case that we should legalize marijuana because it would bankrupt the cartels. But Steve Fox, one of the leaders of the campaign, explained to me that people in Colorado were really scared, they thought the cartels would threaten them or even kill them if they made that argument publicly. It’s fascinating to see, both at the beginning and end of the drug war: Who wants it? Who wins from it? Who benefits from it? It’s armed criminal gangs. For everyone else, it’s a disaster. Henry Smith Williams also thought the Mafia must have been bribing Anslinger to introduce the drug war, because he couldn’t understand why else anyone would be so foolish. That’s one big thing he was wrong about. But his book is still, I think, an absolutely crucial document. As far as I can tell, almost nobody. It had only one print run. It’s one of those tragic cries in the dark. To some degree, the debate was repressed by force in the United States. Some academics tried to sound warnings, and Anslinger literally had the police sent to warn their bosses that they were linked to organized crime. It’s extraordinary. He used the power of the state to intimidate people out of joining the debate. Henry Smith Williams’s brother Edward was one of the people arrested in the crackdown, and accused of being a drug dealer. He had his license suspended. I’m not a believer in the ‘Great Man’ theory of history. I’m not saying this is the work of one man, that would be wrong. Harry Anslinger can only be what he was within the range of social forces that existed within the United States at that time. You can be a great surfer, but if you don’t catch a great wave, you aren’t going to amount to much. Anslinger’s story is important, partly because he was an influential figure, but also because he’s a way into understanding these much wider social forces. One of the interesting things, to me, about the debate about drug prohibition, is that, unlike some of the other debates that I engage in, a lot of the impulses behind it are hugely admirable, and ones that I agree with. Most prohibitionists today are motivated by good and decent urges. Take, for example, Peter Hitchens, who’s probably the most prominent proponent of prohibition in Britain. He’s a conservative writer for the Mail on Sunday , and a very good writer. Peter Hitchens’s motivation in arguing for a much more extreme drug war in Britain is that he doesn’t want people to become addicted, he doesn’t want children to use drugs. Those are goals I entirely share with him, and I feel them very strongly. The only difference is that I think the evidence shows that the policies he supports actually make both those problems worse, while there are alternatives that are already in practice in various places in the world that could help. What I would say about Anslinger, though, is that if we look at the motivations for the introduction of the drug war in the United States and in Britain — and this is something that surprised me. I assumed, before I started work on this, that they would be pretty much the reasons that we give now, that we don’t want kids to use drugs etc. but when I looked at the archives, I found those arguments were barely discussed."