The Murderers: The Shocking Story of the Narcotic Gangs

"That actually leads neatly to my second book, The Murderers by Harry Anslinger. I spent a lot of time in his archives. If you look at the reason why drugs are banned in the United States, and then in Britain, the real reason was a race panic. There’s a deep belief that African Americans and Chinese Americans are using drugs to attack white people, and therefore drugs have to be banned in order to put these ethnic minorities back in their place. A good example is in California. There was a Chinatown in San Francisco, and they wanted to forcibly relocate it and get the Chinese out. The Chinese Americans go to the California state-level Supreme Court, which rules they cannot be forcibly relocated. Immediately afterwards many Chinese Americans are arrested for running opium dens. Some of the racist quotes are really shocking, official statements like: ‘the cocaine nigger sure is hard to kill.’ There’s this belief that African Americans use cocaine and become superhuman. You do have to understand this in the context of the failure of reconstruction after the Civil War. Michelle Alexander writes about it really well in her book, The New Jim Crow . There’s this promise to African Americans that they’ll become equal citizens. That doesn’t happen, they’re forcibly repressed, Jim Crow — the American system of apartheid — is introduced, and African Americans and Chinese Americans are understandably angry. Now, you can understand why white Americans didn’t want to see why they were angry, and would rather believe, “Oh, if we just got rid of these white powders and these potions, they’ll just go back to ‘their place.’’ You really see that with Anslinger. Anslinger’s books are fascinating. He co-wrote them with a guy called Will Oursler, who’s a brilliant writer. Anslinger loved the ‘true crime’ genre, and these books are written as sexy, thrilling, captivating stories of their time. Anslinger is right about one big thing, ahead of everyone else. It’s very hard to remember, but from the 1920s, right up to the early 1960s and the Bobby Kennedy hearings, the belief that the Mafia existed was regarded as a crazy conspiracy theory. Anslinger was one of the first government officials to believe in the existence of the Mafia. It was a real and significant achievement. The tragedy is he thought he was undermining the Mafia when, in fact, he was transferring one of the biggest industries in the world into their control. In his book, there are his stories of tracking the Mafia. The story I tell in my book, Chasing the Scream , is how he was involved in the stalking and killing of Billie Holliday, the great jazz singer. It tells you a lot about what motivated Anslinger. In 1939, Billie Holiday stood on stage in New York City and sang ‘Strange Fruit,’ which, as many people know, is a song against lynching. Her goddaughter, Lorraine Feather, explained to me how unbelievably shocking it was at the time to have an African American woman standing in front of a white audience, in a hotel where she wasn’t even allowed to walk through the front door (she had to go through the service elevator), and sing a song against white supremacy. Someone referred to it later as the musical starting gun for the civil rights movement. That night, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics told Billie Holiday to stop singing that song. When Harry Anslinger found out Judy Garland was a heroin addict he told her to take longer vacations and reassured the studio she was going to be fine. With Billie Holliday, he stalked her right up to her deathbed. The drug gangs. Of the two kind of sexy books Anslinger wrote, one is called The Murderers and the other The Protectors . They’re both fascinating. Firstly, they’re great reads, extremely well-written, good, pulpy, pleasurable, and extremely insightful. As far as I can tell, they’ve been out of print since they first came out, but they can be got hold of. Anslinger was obsessed with a guy called Lucky Luciano, who was an iconic gangster. There are some very revealing moments, for example when Anslinger talks about alcohol prohibition, and how he came to realise that it was a disaster, and caused more problems than alcohol itself. And you think, ‘Gee, Harry, can you think of anywhere else that applies?’ He also talks about the dynamic of prohibition — which is something I really saw in northern Mexico. One group of gangsters rises over the bodies of another group, and you get a Darwinian process where you get more and more extreme gangsters. Al Capone wouldn’t last five minutes in Juarez today. For as long as prohibition lasts, we’ll continue to have these horrendous mutations, it’s like the battle between antibiotics and bacteria. Of course, if we end prohibition, this dynamic ends."