January 25, 2023 • 36 mins
Our co-hosts Clayton English and Greg Glod, along with guest Johann Hari discuss the long-forgotten mastermind behind America’s War on Drugs: Harry Anslinger - the infamous head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics toward the end of Prohibition. Desperate to justify his agency, and secure funding from Congress, Anslinger, by all accounts a virulent racist, fabricated stories about the dangers of drugs by demonizing minority communities four decades before Richard Nixon's declaration of war on drugs.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to episode one of the War on Drugs Podcastah yeah,
kicking it off the right way. My name is Greg
Glode and I'm Clayton English. Clayton. I'm gonna start this
episode with a statement, what you get The War on
Drugs was never about drugs. This is Harry j Anslinger,
Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. So the Federal
(00:25):
Bureau of Narcotics was run by men called Harry Anslinger.
The Treasury Department intends to pursue a relentless warfare against
the despicable dope battling boxer who praised on the weakness
of his fellow man. He's the man who invented the
modern War on drugs. In fact, he's the first person
to use the friends, almost fifty years before Richard Nixon's
(00:46):
America's Public Enemy Number one is drug abuse. In order
to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to
wage a new all out offensis. It's very hard for
people to say, you know, what we're doing right now
just works fine, Let's just carry on with what we're doing,
right I think we're good here. Leading medical researchers are
(01:06):
coming to the conclusion that marijuana, pop grass, whatever you
want to call is probably the most dangerous drug in
the United States, and we haven't begun to find out
all of the ill effects. I went to places that
have built most of their approach to drugs around anger,
and evidence is clear when you respond primarily with anger,
(01:27):
you screwed. The problem gets massively worse. Yeah, but like raging,
anger is what we do best. Come on, how are
we gonna get We love getting off. Yeah, yeah, that's
our number one export. Hey, this is Clayton Engage. This
(01:47):
is Greg Gold and this is the War on Drugs.
All right, Welcome to the first inaugural episode of the
War on Drugs Podcasts. I'm Greg Glad Yes, and I'm
Clayton English. Clayton, why don't you tell the audience a
little bit about yourself, your background, why you're here. Oh yeah,
(02:09):
I'm Clayton English. I'm a stand up comedian, actor, writer,
been doing it for a while. I talk a lot
about being pulled over by the police and arrested by
the police, because that's just been my reality, you know,
just whether traveling from city to city. I've had a
lot of run ins with it, so that's always prevalent
(02:29):
in my comedy, and I kind of looked at those
great comedians before me who put you know, social commentary
and their stuff, and feel like their material had to
have a little bit of a social responsibility. So that's
why that's why I'm here, and I'm here also because
I feel like it's so much more I need to learn. Like,
I think I know a lot of things intuitively about
(02:51):
this thing we call the war on drugs, but I
don't know how deep it actually goes. And I think
that's why it's so great here working with you and
learning and talking to all these great people, because the
knowledge I've learned is just I mean, it could be
overwhelming it sometimes. Yeah. Yeah, So I definitely feel that
(03:11):
doing this job day in and day out. You're just like,
it's a lot of process, a lot of process, a
lot of process, but I think we put it in
a good way so people can understand it. Yeah. I
think you're good about that. Now, you know. I went,
now you got to tell the people something about you. Yeah, yeah,
so you know. I my name's Greg Glad. I'm the
senior fellow for an organization called a Marriage from Prosperity.
(03:34):
They're a part of the Stand Together philanthropic community, which
seeks to solve some of the nation's most pressing problems.
I work on improving the effectiveness of the criminal justice
system and protecting our communities. I work towards stopping the
system from incarcerating people who have not violated anyone's life, liberty,
or property rights. That includes the ten of thousands of
(03:55):
people that have been unnecessarily incarcerated due to the War
on drugs. You can't carse your way out of addiction,
and that's one of the many reasons why you know,
we wanted to start this podcast. In conversation with you all. Yeah,
you said that like you was in a hostage situation.
They should I blink twice. Yeah, yeah, blink let me
know you're good. But no, it actually say stand together,
(04:15):
film throughout a community four times on every podcast, so
you'll just float them in here. Yeah. I had to
say something because really it just sounded so much better
than my thing. Yeah, No, it's um. You know, I've
been working in this area for a while and I
learned so much going through this. You know, we're gonna
have our first guest, Johann Harri today, who wrote an
(04:36):
amazing book called Chasing the Scream. It's something that really
changed the way I thought about drug policy and addiction. Really,
Like Clint, I know, you know, you're you know, a
little bit older me. We kind of grew up in
the same time period at the very least. You know, Um,
it was all the DARE programs. It was all this
mentality that like, you could be the most straight laced
(04:57):
person that didn't touch anything, and then you had one
you know, aunt at the Devil's lettuce or smoke of
this and you're your tracks, You're crack it now, yeah exactly,
it's over. Yeah, and you learn that that's just completely wrong.
And we've just taken that at face value, and that's
been able to essentially vilify an entire subcategory of people,
which you know, we have just essentially said that that
(05:18):
is who those war is on. And because it's a vilification,
these people were able to do a lot of things
that generally citizens wouldn't be you know, yeah, they wouldn't
sposed to, they wouldn't tolerated. But now they're a drug person, um,
and that's a totally different subsect of our population. So
we can do things that you know, we wouldn't we
wouldn't put up with So yeah, so we're gonna get
into it with Johann Harri and really the origins of
(05:41):
the drug war. Where did the drug war as we
know it now? Where did it begin? And Johan's gonna
take us through that. Yeah, Clayton, you um work you
know on a Marvel show, on Hawkeye with superheroes. Ordinance
stories are very important and it is important for the
villain too, exactly. Yeah, and we're gonna bring some villains
in here. Yeah, and also the creators of these villains
(06:04):
that have regret from these villains. And it's it's a
it's a wild story and a journey. I think that
we're going to take you with these ten episodes. Um,
it is epic. It is an actual epic. So I'm
really really looking forward to you all listening this particularly
first episode of Johan Harry. He's an amazing, amazing um
novelists and speaker and advocate on you know, any of
the prohibition on drugs. So yeah, take a listen. We're
(06:27):
really excited and uh, here we go, Johan. It's it's
amazing to have you today. Welcome to the War on Drugs. Hey,
Greg we're living it for too long. Yeah, I'm welcoming
(06:48):
you. You You should be welcoming us, all right. Yeah, I'm
a little bit of a fanboy um on this. I've
read your book a couple of times now. I work
in drug policy, and it opened my mind up to
so much stuff. I felt like I was always just
like really focused on current policy, how do we make
things better? But I never took the time to understand
addiction and what it actually is. And I think you
(07:08):
really opened up a lot of my mind. Oh, cheers, Greg,
Thank you. It was subject. It was very close to
my heart. One of my earliest memories is of trying
to wake up one of my relatives and not being
able to And obviously I didn't understand why then, But
as I got older, I realized we had a lot
of addiction in my family. So it's been really moving
that it's helped some other people with addiction problems, and
it's tried to kind of open up a bit more
(07:28):
of the discussion about what addiction actually is. Where I
realized that I had really actually misunderstood what I'd seen
happening in front of me for so much of my life. Yeah. Yeah,
and so is that where a lot of your interests
drew to write this book was just kind of you know,
your own personal history within your family to write this,
or there other trigger points where like I need to
get this message out there. I think like a lot
of people who've got someone they loved with an addiction problem.
(07:50):
When I started working on Chasing the Screen ten years ago, now,
I was a real mixture of very intense emotions. So
that was part of me that really loved the people
I knew with addiction problems and wanted to help them
and felt incredibly compassionate for them. There was another part
of me that was really angry with them. If I'm honest,
I was like, why don't you just stop? Why are
(08:12):
you doing this? And I was really oscillating between these
feelings and nothing I was doing was helping. And that's
really why I started the research for the book. I
was like, Okay, what is actually happening here? What's going on?
Was a kind of wild ride to realize that so
many of the things that we think we know about
this are wrong. Drugs are not what we think they are.
(08:34):
Addiction is not what we think it is. The war
on drugs is not what we think it is. It's
a strange thing to have this subject we talk about
so much and to realize we're getting so much of
it wrong, and that when you understand what's really happening,
a whole different set of solutions begin to open up. Yeah,
something you said that I find interest in. You said
that you found yourself going between the emotions of anger
(08:56):
and feeling sympathy and compassion for the addicts. And I
think that's where most people who have to deal with
somebody going through addiction feel all the time, you know,
Like I know in my life, I'm like, wow, that's
I wish they could be all right. I wish they
could get off of it. I wish I could help them.
And then the other part is like they stole some
shit from me again, you know what I'm saying. So
(09:17):
it's like, yeah, is I think a lot of people
can relate to their feeling and the fact that it
set you out on this journey is hearing what you've
had to say is just enlightening about how we treat
people and where things should go from here. And I
think I think that's so moving the way you just
put that, Clayton, and I think we've got a level
with people that both those sets of feelings are legitimate, right,
(09:39):
the feelings of love and compassion, or legitimate the feelings
of anger and legitimate. But then we've got to figure out, Okay,
if we act on the compassion, what happens? And if
we act on the anger, what happens? And actually, obviously
I went to places that have built the most of
their approach to drugs and particularly addiction around anger, like
the United States, right, and evidence is clear when you're
(10:00):
spawn primarily with anger, when you've given, that's a natural
part of you. But if you let that dominate your response,
you screwed. The problem gets massively worse. But when you
build policies based around love and compassion in very practical ways,
and it's it's very clear what the outcome is. I've
been to the countries that did it. Countries that build
their policies based on love and compassion and restoring order
(10:21):
to this situation have huge diminishing addiction problems compared to
the countries that are based on rage and anger. Yeah,
but like rage and anger is what we do best.
We're Americans, Like, how are we going to get a rate?
We love getting missed? Half about. Yeah, yeah, that's our
number one export, John, What are we getting wrong about
addiction not only the United States but in so many
(10:44):
places around the world. We just saw statistics come out
last year one hundred and seven thousand people died of overdose.
If the whole point of the war on drugs is
to eradicate the harms of drugs, were failing miserably. And
so what are we missing about addiction that is so
critical and that's not carrying on in the policies that
we're carrying out any stages and abroad. Well, there's a
lot of things, but the one that most took me
(11:04):
aback is if you had asked me when I started
researching my book Chasing the Screen ten years ago, now, yo, Han,
what causes heroin addiction? I would have looked at you
like you're an idiot, and it would have said, well, Greg,
the clues in the name right, Obviously heroin causes heroin addiction.
We've been told this story for a hundred years. That's
become totally part of our common sense. It was certainly
(11:26):
part of mine. But what I learned is that story
is not totally wrong. Chemical hooks are definitely real, but Actually,
the evidence shows they are shockingly small part of the picture. Actually,
something much more important is going on, and I only
really began to understand it when I went to Vancouver
an interviewed incredible man named Professor Bruce Alexander, who did
(11:48):
an experiment in the nineteen seventies that's really begun to
transform how we think about addiction all over the world.
So Professor Alexander explained to me, this story we've all
got in our heads that addiction is caused primarily are
entirely by exposure to the chemical hooks comes from a
series of experiments that were done earlier in the twentieth century.
They're really simple experiments. Anyone listening. You can try these
(12:10):
experiments at home if you're feeling a little bit sadistic.
You take a rat, you put it in a cage,
and you give it two water bottles. One is just water,
the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine.
If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer
the drug water and almost always kill itself within a
couple of weeks. It'll die by overdosing. Right, So that's
(12:30):
our story. You try the drug, you want more and
more of it until eventually you overdose. But in the seventies,
Professor Alexander came along and he said, well, hang on
a minute. You put these rats alone in an empty
cage where they've got nothing to do except use these drugs.
What would happen if we did this differently? So he
built a cage that he called rat Park, which is
(12:52):
basically heaven for rats. They've got loads of friends, they've
got loads of cheese, they've got loads of colored balls,
they can have loads of sex. Anything a rat can
want in life is there in rat Park. And they've
got both the water bottles, the normal water and the
drug water, and of course they try both. They don't
know what's in them. This is the fascinating thing in
rat Park. They don't like the drug water. They hardly
(13:13):
ever use it. None of them use it compulsively, none
of them overdose. So you go from almost one hundred
percent compulsive use and overdose when they do not have
the things that make life worth living for them, to
no compulsive use and overdose when they do have the
things that make life worth living. The thing I really
learned from this is, oh, so the opposite of addiction
is not sobriety valuable, though that is to many people.
(13:36):
The opposite of addiction is connection. The core of addiction
is about not wanting to be present in your life
because your life is too painful a place to be.
Once you understand that, you can see why what we
do in the United States is such a disaster. The
war on drugs is based on the theory, well, what
causes addiction is the drug, it's physical exposure to the drug.
(13:58):
So a we spend most of them trying to physically
eradicate the drug and insane fantasy. We can't even keep
drugs out of our prisons, and we pay people to
walk around the whole damn perimeter the whole time. Right.
But also it's premised on well, with people with addiction problems,
you need to punish them in order to give them
an incentive to stop. But once you understand that pain
(14:18):
is the fuel, pain is the cause, pain is the
driver of addiction, you can see why that's so crazy, right.
It's throwing more fuel to the fire exactly. Sometimes we say, oh,
it doesn't work, Well, that's true, but that's way understating
how dumb what we're doing is. It's not that it
doesn't work, is that it makes the problem worse. Right,
and everyone listening knows you have natural physical needs. Obviously
(14:42):
you need food, you need water, you need shelter, you
need clean air. But there's equally strong evidence that all
human beings have natural psychological needs. You need to feel
you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning
and purpose. You need to feel that people see you
and value you. You need to you've got a future
that makes sense. And this culture we've built is good
at lots of things. I'm glad to be alive today,
(15:04):
but we have been getting less and less good at
meeting these deep, underlying psychological needs from people. With you
just saying there too, you kind of answer something you
said earlier. That's why there's drugs in jail, you know, like,
and they constantly take away programs that would help people
get readjusted to society. So yeah, of course the drugs
(15:25):
are going to play a part. How else are you
going to deal with those circumstances. I think you're totally right,
And I always think Clayton, you know, the one thing
you can say in defense of the American War on
drugs is we gave it a good shot. We did
it for a hundred years. We see a trillion dollars
college we went to grad school trying to get this.
(15:48):
United States has imprisoned more people as a proportion its
population then any human society ever, including Chairman Mouse, China
and Stalin's Russia. Number one, but number one if the
unsex has destroyed whole neighboring countries or nearby countries like
Colombia and El Salvador. And at the end of all that,
you can't even keep drugs out of your prisons, right,
(16:10):
So it's hard to imagine that, you know that any
country could try the war on drugs more than the
United States has tried it. And at the end of
a hundred years of doing it, where are we. We've
got the worst drug debts in the world. We've got
catastrophic organized crime related violence caused by the war on drugs.
(16:31):
You know, at least ten thousand additional murders a year,
almost certainly far more as a result of the violence
caused by prohibition. We can talk about that like no
good outcome and lots of bad outcomes, catastrophically bad outcomes.
Something that you talked about a little bit like the
War on drugs has not been about drugs, because if
it was about drugs and stopping drugs, we would already
(16:52):
have better results or start what we're doing. But I
want to get to a little bit of the history
behind this because I think a lot of us, particularly
in America, we think about the War on drugs starting
with Richard Nixon and kind of you know, he declared
the War on drugs, that was the initial decoration. But
Harry Anslinger, I mean, he is, he's on the mount
Rushmore of drug policy, and where does he fit into
all this? Why is he on like your mount Rushmore
(17:15):
of you know? The drug war? Interesting at the start,
before I had done the research for the book, if
you'd asked me why did the War on drugs begin?
I would have guessed it was for the reasons that
if you stop someone in the street today and said
why is there a war on drugs? Most people would go, well,
you don't want kids to use drugs, you don't want
people to be condicted. That barely comes up, right. Yeah.
(17:35):
The reason drugs are banned is because there was a fear,
a hysterical racist fear that black people and Chinese Americans
and Mexican Americans were using drugs and in invert commas
forgetting their place and attacking white people. I mean, it
really is stated that explicitly in the Senate, one person
(17:56):
says the cocaine N word sure is hard to kill.
That's the level of the debate at the time that
drugs are being banned. So the Federal Bureau of Narcotics
was run by men called Harry Anslinger. Harry Anslinger is
probably the most influential person who no one's ever heard of, right,
hardly anyone's ever heard of. He's the man who invented
the modern war on drugs. So Harry Anslinger is a
(18:17):
government bureaucrat who takes over the Department of Prohibition just
as alcohol prohibition is ending. So the United States had
a war on alcohol and alcohol one right says, department's
about to be shut down, and he effectively invents the
modern drug war to give his department a renewed rationale.
Now he sincerely believed what he was saying. It wasn't
(18:38):
a kind of false invention. So this occurs, and Harry's
looking for a way to kind of gin up support,
funding strength for this organization that doesn't have a lot
of purpose at this point after prohibition ends. But marijuana
was this foreign drug that was kind of attached to
different races like Black Americans, Mexican Americans, and he was
kind of like, all right, there swear I'm going for
(19:01):
and if you can talk about that, and how that
was used to show that like marijuana was the next
bad thing and we need to be expanded and forced.
This was zero tolerance and cracked out. So cannabis was legal,
right and right after ansling a text, how Federer narcotics,
you know, he wants his department to be a big
department and there's not much you can you know, heroine
and cocaine were very very minor tastes in the United
(19:22):
States at that time. Very few people use them. Of course,
cannabis was more popular. It was still much smaller than
it was you know, before the war drugs begins, but
it was, but it was it was, you know, they
were more popular. And really with the help of Hearst newspapers,
which was kind of like the Fox News of the day,
he promotes a series of very extreme scare stories about cannabis.
(19:46):
So in Florida and Tampa, a twenty one year old
boy named Victor le Carta hacked his family to death
with an axe. All of his family and Anslinger's latches
onto the idea are, this is what cannabis does to people.
If you smoke cannabis, you'll hack people to death with
an axe. It sounds like I'm comically exaggerating. This is
(20:07):
literally what they said. So this becomes this huge story.
Years later, someone goes back and studies the psychiatric notes.
Bit taller. Carter didn't even smoke cannabis, right, His family
had been worn that he was very seriously mentally ill
for a long time. Obviously, we know almost everyone listening
will have smoke cannabis at some point, and it's very
unlikely any of them had their family to death with
an ax. Yeah, they might have gotten a little fair exactly.
(20:29):
That's about it. Yeah, say, there can be some harmful
effects associated with cannabis. To be sure, I'm gonna tell you,
froze hand. It's hard to swing at X if you smoke.
I don't care what you're chapping. Yeah, very good point,
Very good point. So, yeah, Antley, it feeds and creates
this kind of hysterical literally, a hysteria about drugs, and
(20:50):
it's not a coincidence he chose the Latino young man,
and it's not a coincidence. What's it to be referred
to as marijuana a Spanish word, not cannabis, So it
actively promotes that. So with every drug he tried to
associate it with a different ethnic group. So he said
that heroin had been brought in by the Chinese by
the fifties. He says, it's actively been put in by
the communist Chinese government to weaken the United States for
(21:13):
an invasion. This is how fucking crazy this guy was.
With cocaine, he said it was saying that that African
Americans were smuggling in and with cannabis, said it was
something that's being brought in by Mexicans. So it's all
part of this kind of racist asia. And whenever there
was evident and of course this is all bullshit, white
people use drugs just as much as anyone else, and whatever,
(21:35):
and whenever and whenever that was well, whenever that was revealed,
he would always present it as, oh, yes, they've been
given it by these other racial groups to prepare them
for what he described as the ultimate nightmare, which was
race mixing and particularly mixed race children, which he described
as the ultimate tragedy. So you can see how I mean,
(21:56):
it's hard to understate how racist Harry Anstie was. He
was so racist that his own senator in the nineteen
twenties said he should have to resign for being too racist.
That's quite hard, right, Like that was it was not
a progressive time, right, So he was really a very
extreme racist. And we've lost the racists, you know, you've
(22:17):
really gone too far right, Yeah, in the twenties. Yeah,
I think what you just said makes so much sense,
especially for me being a black person here in America.
Like you've just proven what I've always known without knowing
that the whole war on drugs comes from racism. It
(22:38):
comes from the mind of a racist, and that's how
it's set upon communities. Like I think about people always
talk about how black people always blame the man, the
man's keeping you down. Like this is the man, like
we actually had, Like we found him. We never knew
who it was. It's him, It's Harry. We'll be right
(23:01):
back with the war on drugs. Hi. I'm Jason Flom,
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into contact with the War on Drugs when she saw
(24:06):
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She witnessed how kids were affected and her mothers wanted
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(24:29):
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Stand Together has many more stories like this one, as
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(24:58):
I always thinking about Harry's story with this very different moment.
In nineteen thirty nine, in a hotel in Midtown Manhattan,
Billy Holliday, the great jazz singer, walked onto a stage
and she sang the song Strange Fruit, which was an
incredibly radical song. It remains a radical song. What was
incredibly radical then. I'm sure most people listening know it,
(25:19):
but people who don't know. It's a song about the
idea that in the South there's a strange fruit that
hangs from the trees, and as the song goes on,
you realize these are the bodies of black men who've
been murdered by white mobs. And not long after that,
Billy received or warning from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics
(25:42):
the FBM, and they effectively told her stop singing this song.
And to Harry Annslinger, Billy Holliday is everything he hates. Right,
She's a black woman standing up to white supremacy in
a very brave and bold way. And Billy they had
a heroin addiction. So when Billy Holiday gets this warning,
(26:03):
it's telling her you stop singing this song. In effect,
she says, basically, fuck you. I'm an American citizen. I'll
sing what I Dann will please. And that's the point
of which Harry Anslinger resolves to destroy her. So he
hated employing black agents. But you couldn't really send a
white guy into Harlem to follow Billy Holliday everywhere. It
kind of obvious. So they had this agent called Jimmy Fletcher,
(26:25):
who was told followed Billy Holiday everywhere gather information about
her drug use. If that gather information about all the
jazz musicians drug use, we're going to bust them all.
So Jimmy Fletcher spent eighteen months following Billy everywhere, getting
to know her undercover, so they busted her. She was
put in prison for eighteen months. She didn't sing a
(26:46):
word in prison, but when she got out, that was
when they did the cruelest thing. At that time. To
perform in most places in the country where alcohol was served,
you needed something called a cabaret performers license. Anslinger. Make
sure Billy Holiday is not given a beret performer's license.
Her friend Yolanda Bavan said to me, what is the
cruelest thing you can do, is to take away the
(27:06):
thing someone loves. Imagine taking away singing from Billy Holiday
despite the way, is what we do all over the
country today. Right people have an addiction problem, we don't
help them reconnect. We put barriers between the exactly makes
sometimes but you can't touch your kid or yeah, exactly,
we limit your connections exactly as possible. That the most
(27:28):
counterproductive thing we could do in that situation. Entirely predictably,
Billy Holiday relapsed and one day in Midtown, only a
few blocks from I should first sun strange fruit, she
collapsed and she was taken to a hospital and the
first hospital wouldn't take a cashed addiction problem. The second
(27:49):
hospital took her and on the way in Billy said
to her best friend MALEI dufty, they're going to kill
me in there. Don't let them. They're going to kill me.
She believed that Anslinger's men weren't finished with her, and
she wasn't wrong. So in hospital she was diagnosed with
a vans liver cancer. Anslinger's men came and they arrested
her on her hospital bed. Knowing her diagnosis, they handcuffed
(28:12):
her to the bed. In hospital obviously didn't give her
any heroine, and she went into withdrawal, which can be
quite dangerous if you're as sick as she was with cancer.
So Maylie, her friend, managed to insist the doctors gave
her METHODONEA and then she began to recover a bit.
And ten days later she was cut off and the
methodone and the next day she died and Harry Anslinger gloated.
(28:32):
When she died, he wrote, there'll be no more good
morning heartache for her. And I think a lot about
this story because the fight between Harry Anslinger and Billy
Holiday isn't over right. All over the world, every day
people listen to Billy Holiday and it makes them stronger,
(28:53):
and it makes them better, and every day all over
the world we listened to Harryett with a few exceptions,
we listened to Harry Ansling at and we follow the
war on drugs that he created, and it makes people
weaker and it breaks people more, and at some point
we have to side with Billy. But the other thing
that that story really helped me to think about, it
goes right back to where we started. It helps me
(29:15):
to think about people I love. You've got addiction problems.
You know, in our culture, we tell one heroic story
about people with addiction problems, which is sometimes they recover
from their addiction, and that is indeed a heroic story,
and everyone listening is in that position should be really
proud of themselves. But Billy Holliday never stopped having an
addiction problem. She was addicted till the day she died.
(29:35):
She was still a hero, right, staggering courage and bravery.
But you just think about how many people like Billy
Holliday have there been since then? You know, we're talking
about happened in the nineteen fifties, right, how many people
since then have died needlessly because of this catastrophic war,
and how many people have just had shit lives when
they could have been helped and turned their lives around. Right,
(29:58):
At some point we have to st following Harry Anslinger, Yeah, absolutely,
I'm optimistic that if we fight, we can tear this
thing down and we can replace it with policies that
actually work. And in some ways goes right back to
the very first thing you said, Greg, one hundred thousand
people died of overdoses. That is an unbearable tragedy and
(30:19):
we'll never get those people who have unique lives back.
But the one good thing that can come from that
is all the fire alarms are going off. Right, It's
very hard for people to say, you know, what we're
doing right now just works. Fine, Let's just carry on
with what we're doing. Right. I think we're good here. Right.
No one's saying that. They're not saying that in the
(30:40):
most conservative parts of the country. They're not saying that
in the most liberal parts of the country. No one
says that. Right. People can see what we've done hasn't worked.
They're ready to be persuaded of the alternatives, and it
is a job to persuade them, and we've got to
do it through stories and evidence and love. But I
absolutely believe we can win this one. Johan, this was incredible.
(31:02):
I urge everyone to rechasing the Scream. I think it's
gonna open your eyes. There's so many little tidbits and
notes in there, and like these aha moments all throughout
it where you're just like I'd never thought about it
that way, or it was completely shocking, or you know,
it's just amazing. It'll change your whole perspective on this.
So thank you so much, um, you know, for your
time and you know, hopefully we get to talk to
you again soon. Yeah, thank you, Thank you both. I
(31:25):
really enjoyed coming on the show. Thanks Clayton. Thanks right.
We got a couple of bills to pay, but we'll
be right back. Money money, money, wow. Um. Thanks again
(31:48):
to Johan for for coming on and giving us so
much of his time. That was you know they say
don't meet your heroes, um, but no, it was. It
was amazing. No, he did not. He's like the most
likable guy in the World's got that British accent rolling yeah, man,
like a more likable James Cord. Yeah. Yeah, he's one
(32:10):
of those guys where like anything you say that has
even like a bit of here like he's just dying laughing.
You're like, no, maybe, hey, can you get this whole
stand up there and trying to get out there? Let
me know it was just Johan and then just a
bunch of other people I get to pay. Yeah, maybe
we can get a good show going here. But yeah,
I mean you can kind of see why we picked
that as the first interview, first episode. It needed to be,
(32:32):
and it just confirmed everything that I ever thought. It
is racist and most of this stuff is not based
on any type of facts. Yeah, our producer Michael pulled
a bunch of these articles, some things that we catched
on that we're coming out then and a slingers fingers
are all over it. And then you know William randolp
Hurst who in a bunch of newspapers and was able
(32:52):
to just kind of pump this out. And so when
you control the media, you know, you kind of controlled everything.
This is from Reader's Digest back in nineteen thirty eight
Marijuana Assassin of Youth by Harry Hann Slinger and Courtney
Riley Cooper. And some of these quotes is just crazy,
just like anecdotes of things that were going on that
we know that could not be true Chicago to marijuana
(33:12):
smoking boys, murder policeman use it as justification exactly why yeah, yeah,
And then there's this different from to day, Yeah exactly.
I mean it was always drugs and it was just
used to who is the enemy right now? How can
we pin drugs on them? And how are they going
to damage the white community? And it happened over and
over again. It was marijuan, it was heroin, it's cocaine,
(33:33):
it's it's everything else. Just looking at these you could
just see that criminalizing race, you know, ethnicity, and then
you know poverty goes hand in hand with that. Yeah,
it's just drugs worthy mechanism by which you were able
to keep people down as second class citizens. Whoever was
the enemy of the day. You see it over and
over again. Nixon during you know, he didn't like he
(33:57):
didn't like the black panthers, he didn't like hippies. And
now they're a bunch of LSD heroin toating folks that
are gonna, you know, take over the country. And you
know they're not pushing back because I think drugs are
bad and this is what's going to help. It allows
for control. If you legalize marijuana, now you can't use
like I smell marijuana. Now I get to search to
the bar that goes away, right, Yeah you know that.
I mean, yeah, that's that's the main go to how
(34:19):
did you smell marijuana? I was going the opposite direction
with both windows up right, But okay, cool? Yeah. I
love the police officers that are their own drug dog.
You sniffed it out yourself, like they didn't even give
you a dog. You just okay mcgruth, good job man. Yeah,
but yeah, you know, I'm I'm hoping you know that
this is the jump off of more episodes to come,
(34:41):
and we, like we said, we want to show that
this does affect you even if you don't go through
the criminal justice them, even you don't use drugs. Yeah,
you break your ankle, you or a loved one gets cancer,
are you able to get it opiate prescription? You know,
We're going to get into a lot of that, and
so it's going to touch on every thing, and we
really just want to show that historical aspe picked up
at where it comes from and how this has been utilized.
(35:02):
It's not about drugs, it's about power control. And so
thanks for listening to first one and we'll hopefully be
along for the right for the next few Yeah, yeah, yeah,
come back. Make sure you follow the War on Drugs
podcast so you don't miss any new episodes or any
of our Quick Fix bonus content, and we'll be back
next week with another episode of War on Drugs. Until then,
(35:25):
thank you for listening. Executive producers for War on Drugs
are Jason Flam and Kevin Wordis. Senior producer is Michael Epston.
Editing by Nick Massetti and Michael Epstein. Associate producer and
mix and mastering by Nick Massetti. Additional production by Jeff
Kleburn and Anna mcintee. Be sure to follow the show
on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook at Lava for Good. You
(35:46):
can follow Greg on Twitter at Greg Glaude and Clayton
on Instagram at Clayton English. The War on Drugs is
a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with
Signal Company Number One. I'm your host, Clayton English, and
I'm Greg Gloude and thanks for listening to the War
on Drugs podcast.
Welcome to episode one of the War on Drugs Podcastah yeah,
kicking it off the right way. My name is Greg
Glode and I'm Clayton English. Clayton. I'm gonna start this
episode with a statement, what you get The War on
Drugs was never about drugs. This is Harry j Anslinger,
Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. So the Federal
(00:25):
Bureau of Narcotics was run by men called Harry Anslinger.
The Treasury Department intends to pursue a relentless warfare against
the despicable dope battling boxer who praised on the weakness
of his fellow man. He's the man who invented the
modern War on drugs. In fact, he's the first person
to use the friends, almost fifty years before Richard Nixon's
(00:46):
America's Public Enemy Number one is drug abuse. In order
to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to
wage a new all out offensis. It's very hard for
people to say, you know, what we're doing right now
just works fine, Let's just carry on with what we're doing,
right I think we're good here. Leading medical researchers are
(01:06):
coming to the conclusion that marijuana, pop grass, whatever you
want to call is probably the most dangerous drug in
the United States, and we haven't begun to find out
all of the ill effects. I went to places that
have built most of their approach to drugs around anger,
and evidence is clear when you respond primarily with anger,
(01:27):
you screwed. The problem gets massively worse. Yeah, but like raging,
anger is what we do best. Come on, how are
we gonna get We love getting off. Yeah, yeah, that's
our number one export. Hey, this is Clayton Engage. This
(01:47):
is Greg Gold and this is the War on Drugs.
All right, Welcome to the first inaugural episode of the
War on Drugs Podcasts. I'm Greg Glad Yes, and I'm
Clayton English. Clayton, why don't you tell the audience a
little bit about yourself, your background, why you're here. Oh yeah,
(02:09):
I'm Clayton English. I'm a stand up comedian, actor, writer,
been doing it for a while. I talk a lot
about being pulled over by the police and arrested by
the police, because that's just been my reality, you know,
just whether traveling from city to city. I've had a
lot of run ins with it, so that's always prevalent
(02:29):
in my comedy, and I kind of looked at those
great comedians before me who put you know, social commentary
and their stuff, and feel like their material had to
have a little bit of a social responsibility. So that's
why that's why I'm here, and I'm here also because
I feel like it's so much more I need to learn. Like,
I think I know a lot of things intuitively about
(02:51):
this thing we call the war on drugs, but I
don't know how deep it actually goes. And I think
that's why it's so great here working with you and
learning and talking to all these great people, because the
knowledge I've learned is just I mean, it could be
overwhelming it sometimes. Yeah. Yeah, So I definitely feel that
(03:11):
doing this job day in and day out. You're just like,
it's a lot of process, a lot of process, a
lot of process, but I think we put it in
a good way so people can understand it. Yeah. I
think you're good about that. Now, you know. I went,
now you got to tell the people something about you. Yeah, yeah,
so you know. I my name's Greg Glad. I'm the
senior fellow for an organization called a Marriage from Prosperity.
(03:34):
They're a part of the Stand Together philanthropic community, which
seeks to solve some of the nation's most pressing problems.
I work on improving the effectiveness of the criminal justice
system and protecting our communities. I work towards stopping the
system from incarcerating people who have not violated anyone's life, liberty,
or property rights. That includes the ten of thousands of
(03:55):
people that have been unnecessarily incarcerated due to the War
on drugs. You can't carse your way out of addiction,
and that's one of the many reasons why you know,
we wanted to start this podcast. In conversation with you all. Yeah,
you said that like you was in a hostage situation.
They should I blink twice. Yeah, yeah, blink let me
know you're good. But no, it actually say stand together,
(04:15):
film throughout a community four times on every podcast, so
you'll just float them in here. Yeah. I had to
say something because really it just sounded so much better
than my thing. Yeah, No, it's um. You know, I've
been working in this area for a while and I
learned so much going through this. You know, we're gonna
have our first guest, Johann Harri today, who wrote an
(04:36):
amazing book called Chasing the Scream. It's something that really
changed the way I thought about drug policy and addiction. Really,
Like Clint, I know, you know, you're you know, a
little bit older me. We kind of grew up in
the same time period at the very least. You know, Um,
it was all the DARE programs. It was all this
mentality that like, you could be the most straight laced
(04:57):
person that didn't touch anything, and then you had one
you know, aunt at the Devil's lettuce or smoke of
this and you're your tracks, You're crack it now, yeah exactly,
it's over. Yeah, and you learn that that's just completely wrong.
And we've just taken that at face value, and that's
been able to essentially vilify an entire subcategory of people,
which you know, we have just essentially said that that
(05:18):
is who those war is on. And because it's a vilification,
these people were able to do a lot of things
that generally citizens wouldn't be you know, yeah, they wouldn't
sposed to, they wouldn't tolerated. But now they're a drug person, um,
and that's a totally different subsect of our population. So
we can do things that you know, we wouldn't we
wouldn't put up with So yeah, so we're gonna get
into it with Johann Harri and really the origins of
(05:41):
the drug war. Where did the drug war as we
know it now? Where did it begin? And Johan's gonna
take us through that. Yeah, Clayton, you um work you
know on a Marvel show, on Hawkeye with superheroes. Ordinance
stories are very important and it is important for the
villain too, exactly. Yeah, and we're gonna bring some villains
in here. Yeah, and also the creators of these villains
(06:04):
that have regret from these villains. And it's it's a
it's a wild story and a journey. I think that
we're going to take you with these ten episodes. Um,
it is epic. It is an actual epic. So I'm
really really looking forward to you all listening this particularly
first episode of Johan Harry. He's an amazing, amazing um
novelists and speaker and advocate on you know, any of
the prohibition on drugs. So yeah, take a listen. We're
(06:27):
really excited and uh, here we go, Johan. It's it's
amazing to have you today. Welcome to the War on Drugs. Hey,
Greg we're living it for too long. Yeah, I'm welcoming
(06:48):
you. You You should be welcoming us, all right. Yeah, I'm
a little bit of a fanboy um on this. I've
read your book a couple of times now. I work
in drug policy, and it opened my mind up to
so much stuff. I felt like I was always just
like really focused on current policy, how do we make
things better? But I never took the time to understand
addiction and what it actually is. And I think you
(07:08):
really opened up a lot of my mind. Oh, cheers, Greg,
Thank you. It was subject. It was very close to
my heart. One of my earliest memories is of trying
to wake up one of my relatives and not being
able to And obviously I didn't understand why then, But
as I got older, I realized we had a lot
of addiction in my family. So it's been really moving
that it's helped some other people with addiction problems, and
it's tried to kind of open up a bit more
(07:28):
of the discussion about what addiction actually is. Where I
realized that I had really actually misunderstood what I'd seen
happening in front of me for so much of my life. Yeah. Yeah,
and so is that where a lot of your interests
drew to write this book was just kind of you know,
your own personal history within your family to write this,
or there other trigger points where like I need to
get this message out there. I think like a lot
of people who've got someone they loved with an addiction problem.
(07:50):
When I started working on Chasing the Screen ten years ago, now,
I was a real mixture of very intense emotions. So
that was part of me that really loved the people
I knew with addiction problems and wanted to help them
and felt incredibly compassionate for them. There was another part
of me that was really angry with them. If I'm honest,
I was like, why don't you just stop? Why are
(08:12):
you doing this? And I was really oscillating between these
feelings and nothing I was doing was helping. And that's
really why I started the research for the book. I
was like, Okay, what is actually happening here? What's going on?
Was a kind of wild ride to realize that so
many of the things that we think we know about
this are wrong. Drugs are not what we think they are.
(08:34):
Addiction is not what we think it is. The war
on drugs is not what we think it is. It's
a strange thing to have this subject we talk about
so much and to realize we're getting so much of
it wrong, and that when you understand what's really happening,
a whole different set of solutions begin to open up. Yeah,
something you said that I find interest in. You said
that you found yourself going between the emotions of anger
(08:56):
and feeling sympathy and compassion for the addicts. And I
think that's where most people who have to deal with
somebody going through addiction feel all the time, you know,
Like I know in my life, I'm like, wow, that's
I wish they could be all right. I wish they
could get off of it. I wish I could help them.
And then the other part is like they stole some
shit from me again, you know what I'm saying. So
(09:17):
it's like, yeah, is I think a lot of people
can relate to their feeling and the fact that it
set you out on this journey is hearing what you've
had to say is just enlightening about how we treat
people and where things should go from here. And I
think I think that's so moving the way you just
put that, Clayton, and I think we've got a level
with people that both those sets of feelings are legitimate, right,
(09:39):
the feelings of love and compassion, or legitimate the feelings
of anger and legitimate. But then we've got to figure out, Okay,
if we act on the compassion, what happens? And if
we act on the anger, what happens? And actually, obviously
I went to places that have built the most of
their approach to drugs and particularly addiction around anger, like
the United States, right, and evidence is clear when you're
(10:00):
spawn primarily with anger, when you've given, that's a natural
part of you. But if you let that dominate your response,
you screwed. The problem gets massively worse. But when you
build policies based around love and compassion in very practical ways,
and it's it's very clear what the outcome is. I've
been to the countries that did it. Countries that build
their policies based on love and compassion and restoring order
(10:21):
to this situation have huge diminishing addiction problems compared to
the countries that are based on rage and anger. Yeah,
but like rage and anger is what we do best.
We're Americans, Like, how are we going to get a rate?
We love getting missed? Half about. Yeah, yeah, that's our
number one export, John, What are we getting wrong about
addiction not only the United States but in so many
(10:44):
places around the world. We just saw statistics come out
last year one hundred and seven thousand people died of overdose.
If the whole point of the war on drugs is
to eradicate the harms of drugs, were failing miserably. And
so what are we missing about addiction that is so
critical and that's not carrying on in the policies that
we're carrying out any stages and abroad. Well, there's a
lot of things, but the one that most took me
(11:04):
aback is if you had asked me when I started
researching my book Chasing the Screen ten years ago, now, yo, Han,
what causes heroin addiction? I would have looked at you
like you're an idiot, and it would have said, well, Greg,
the clues in the name right, Obviously heroin causes heroin addiction.
We've been told this story for a hundred years. That's
become totally part of our common sense. It was certainly
(11:26):
part of mine. But what I learned is that story
is not totally wrong. Chemical hooks are definitely real, but Actually,
the evidence shows they are shockingly small part of the picture. Actually,
something much more important is going on, and I only
really began to understand it when I went to Vancouver
an interviewed incredible man named Professor Bruce Alexander, who did
(11:48):
an experiment in the nineteen seventies that's really begun to
transform how we think about addiction all over the world.
So Professor Alexander explained to me, this story we've all
got in our heads that addiction is caused primarily are
entirely by exposure to the chemical hooks comes from a
series of experiments that were done earlier in the twentieth century.
They're really simple experiments. Anyone listening. You can try these
(12:10):
experiments at home if you're feeling a little bit sadistic.
You take a rat, you put it in a cage,
and you give it two water bottles. One is just water,
the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine.
If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer
the drug water and almost always kill itself within a
couple of weeks. It'll die by overdosing. Right, So that's
(12:30):
our story. You try the drug, you want more and
more of it until eventually you overdose. But in the seventies,
Professor Alexander came along and he said, well, hang on
a minute. You put these rats alone in an empty
cage where they've got nothing to do except use these drugs.
What would happen if we did this differently? So he
built a cage that he called rat Park, which is
(12:52):
basically heaven for rats. They've got loads of friends, they've
got loads of cheese, they've got loads of colored balls,
they can have loads of sex. Anything a rat can
want in life is there in rat Park. And they've
got both the water bottles, the normal water and the
drug water, and of course they try both. They don't
know what's in them. This is the fascinating thing in
rat Park. They don't like the drug water. They hardly
(13:13):
ever use it. None of them use it compulsively, none
of them overdose. So you go from almost one hundred
percent compulsive use and overdose when they do not have
the things that make life worth living for them, to
no compulsive use and overdose when they do have the
things that make life worth living. The thing I really
learned from this is, oh, so the opposite of addiction
is not sobriety valuable, though that is to many people.
(13:36):
The opposite of addiction is connection. The core of addiction
is about not wanting to be present in your life
because your life is too painful a place to be.
Once you understand that, you can see why what we
do in the United States is such a disaster. The
war on drugs is based on the theory, well, what
causes addiction is the drug, it's physical exposure to the drug.
(13:58):
So a we spend most of them trying to physically
eradicate the drug and insane fantasy. We can't even keep
drugs out of our prisons, and we pay people to
walk around the whole damn perimeter the whole time. Right.
But also it's premised on well, with people with addiction problems,
you need to punish them in order to give them
an incentive to stop. But once you understand that pain
(14:18):
is the fuel, pain is the cause, pain is the
driver of addiction, you can see why that's so crazy, right.
It's throwing more fuel to the fire exactly. Sometimes we say, oh,
it doesn't work, Well, that's true, but that's way understating
how dumb what we're doing is. It's not that it
doesn't work, is that it makes the problem worse. Right,
and everyone listening knows you have natural physical needs. Obviously
(14:42):
you need food, you need water, you need shelter, you
need clean air. But there's equally strong evidence that all
human beings have natural psychological needs. You need to feel
you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning
and purpose. You need to feel that people see you
and value you. You need to you've got a future
that makes sense. And this culture we've built is good
at lots of things. I'm glad to be alive today,
(15:04):
but we have been getting less and less good at
meeting these deep, underlying psychological needs from people. With you
just saying there too, you kind of answer something you
said earlier. That's why there's drugs in jail, you know, like,
and they constantly take away programs that would help people
get readjusted to society. So yeah, of course the drugs
(15:25):
are going to play a part. How else are you
going to deal with those circumstances. I think you're totally right,
And I always think Clayton, you know, the one thing
you can say in defense of the American War on
drugs is we gave it a good shot. We did
it for a hundred years. We see a trillion dollars
college we went to grad school trying to get this.
(15:48):
United States has imprisoned more people as a proportion its
population then any human society ever, including Chairman Mouse, China
and Stalin's Russia. Number one, but number one if the
unsex has destroyed whole neighboring countries or nearby countries like
Colombia and El Salvador. And at the end of all that,
you can't even keep drugs out of your prisons, right,
(16:10):
So it's hard to imagine that, you know that any
country could try the war on drugs more than the
United States has tried it. And at the end of
a hundred years of doing it, where are we. We've
got the worst drug debts in the world. We've got
catastrophic organized crime related violence caused by the war on drugs.
(16:31):
You know, at least ten thousand additional murders a year,
almost certainly far more as a result of the violence
caused by prohibition. We can talk about that like no
good outcome and lots of bad outcomes, catastrophically bad outcomes.
Something that you talked about a little bit like the
War on drugs has not been about drugs, because if
it was about drugs and stopping drugs, we would already
(16:52):
have better results or start what we're doing. But I
want to get to a little bit of the history
behind this because I think a lot of us, particularly
in America, we think about the War on drugs starting
with Richard Nixon and kind of you know, he declared
the War on drugs, that was the initial decoration. But
Harry Anslinger, I mean, he is, he's on the mount
Rushmore of drug policy, and where does he fit into
all this? Why is he on like your mount Rushmore
(17:15):
of you know? The drug war? Interesting at the start,
before I had done the research for the book, if
you'd asked me why did the War on drugs begin?
I would have guessed it was for the reasons that
if you stop someone in the street today and said
why is there a war on drugs? Most people would go, well,
you don't want kids to use drugs, you don't want
people to be condicted. That barely comes up, right. Yeah.
(17:35):
The reason drugs are banned is because there was a fear,
a hysterical racist fear that black people and Chinese Americans
and Mexican Americans were using drugs and in invert commas
forgetting their place and attacking white people. I mean, it
really is stated that explicitly in the Senate, one person
(17:56):
says the cocaine N word sure is hard to kill.
That's the level of the debate at the time that
drugs are being banned. So the Federal Bureau of Narcotics
was run by men called Harry Anslinger. Harry Anslinger is
probably the most influential person who no one's ever heard of, right,
hardly anyone's ever heard of. He's the man who invented
the modern war on drugs. So Harry Anslinger is a
(18:17):
government bureaucrat who takes over the Department of Prohibition just
as alcohol prohibition is ending. So the United States had
a war on alcohol and alcohol one right says, department's
about to be shut down, and he effectively invents the
modern drug war to give his department a renewed rationale.
Now he sincerely believed what he was saying. It wasn't
(18:38):
a kind of false invention. So this occurs, and Harry's
looking for a way to kind of gin up support,
funding strength for this organization that doesn't have a lot
of purpose at this point after prohibition ends. But marijuana
was this foreign drug that was kind of attached to
different races like Black Americans, Mexican Americans, and he was
kind of like, all right, there swear I'm going for
(19:01):
and if you can talk about that, and how that
was used to show that like marijuana was the next
bad thing and we need to be expanded and forced.
This was zero tolerance and cracked out. So cannabis was legal,
right and right after ansling a text, how Federer narcotics,
you know, he wants his department to be a big
department and there's not much you can you know, heroine
and cocaine were very very minor tastes in the United
(19:22):
States at that time. Very few people use them. Of course,
cannabis was more popular. It was still much smaller than
it was you know, before the war drugs begins, but
it was, but it was it was, you know, they
were more popular. And really with the help of Hearst newspapers,
which was kind of like the Fox News of the day,
he promotes a series of very extreme scare stories about cannabis.
(19:46):
So in Florida and Tampa, a twenty one year old
boy named Victor le Carta hacked his family to death
with an axe. All of his family and Anslinger's latches
onto the idea are, this is what cannabis does to people.
If you smoke cannabis, you'll hack people to death with
an axe. It sounds like I'm comically exaggerating. This is
(20:07):
literally what they said. So this becomes this huge story.
Years later, someone goes back and studies the psychiatric notes.
Bit taller. Carter didn't even smoke cannabis, right, His family
had been worn that he was very seriously mentally ill
for a long time. Obviously, we know almost everyone listening
will have smoke cannabis at some point, and it's very
unlikely any of them had their family to death with
an ax. Yeah, they might have gotten a little fair exactly.
(20:29):
That's about it. Yeah, say, there can be some harmful
effects associated with cannabis. To be sure, I'm gonna tell you,
froze hand. It's hard to swing at X if you smoke.
I don't care what you're chapping. Yeah, very good point,
Very good point. So, yeah, Antley, it feeds and creates
this kind of hysterical literally, a hysteria about drugs, and
(20:50):
it's not a coincidence he chose the Latino young man,
and it's not a coincidence. What's it to be referred
to as marijuana a Spanish word, not cannabis, So it
actively promotes that. So with every drug he tried to
associate it with a different ethnic group. So he said
that heroin had been brought in by the Chinese by
the fifties. He says, it's actively been put in by
the communist Chinese government to weaken the United States for
(21:13):
an invasion. This is how fucking crazy this guy was.
With cocaine, he said it was saying that that African
Americans were smuggling in and with cannabis, said it was
something that's being brought in by Mexicans. So it's all
part of this kind of racist asia. And whenever there
was evident and of course this is all bullshit, white
people use drugs just as much as anyone else, and whatever,
(21:35):
and whenever and whenever that was well, whenever that was revealed,
he would always present it as, oh, yes, they've been
given it by these other racial groups to prepare them
for what he described as the ultimate nightmare, which was
race mixing and particularly mixed race children, which he described
as the ultimate tragedy. So you can see how I mean,
(21:56):
it's hard to understate how racist Harry Anstie was. He
was so racist that his own senator in the nineteen
twenties said he should have to resign for being too racist.
That's quite hard, right, Like that was it was not
a progressive time, right, So he was really a very
extreme racist. And we've lost the racists, you know, you've
(22:17):
really gone too far right, Yeah, in the twenties. Yeah,
I think what you just said makes so much sense,
especially for me being a black person here in America.
Like you've just proven what I've always known without knowing
that the whole war on drugs comes from racism. It
(22:38):
comes from the mind of a racist, and that's how
it's set upon communities. Like I think about people always
talk about how black people always blame the man, the
man's keeping you down. Like this is the man, like
we actually had, Like we found him. We never knew
who it was. It's him, It's Harry. We'll be right
(23:01):
back with the war on drugs. Hi. I'm Jason Flom,
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(23:45):
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on drugs, the root cause of so many problems and
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into contact with the War on Drugs when she saw
(24:06):
how it was ripping apart the family she worked with.
She witnessed how kids were affected and her mothers wanted
something better for their families but didn't have the tools
to get there themselves. Christina Dent started a nonprofit called
Ended for good because she knew there was a better
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state to help families struggling with substance abuse problems find
(24:29):
a different path forward than the one they've been given.
Stand Together has many more stories like this one, as
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(24:58):
I always thinking about Harry's story with this very different moment.
In nineteen thirty nine, in a hotel in Midtown Manhattan,
Billy Holliday, the great jazz singer, walked onto a stage
and she sang the song Strange Fruit, which was an
incredibly radical song. It remains a radical song. What was
incredibly radical then. I'm sure most people listening know it,
(25:19):
but people who don't know. It's a song about the
idea that in the South there's a strange fruit that
hangs from the trees, and as the song goes on,
you realize these are the bodies of black men who've
been murdered by white mobs. And not long after that,
Billy received or warning from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics
(25:42):
the FBM, and they effectively told her stop singing this song.
And to Harry Annslinger, Billy Holliday is everything he hates. Right,
She's a black woman standing up to white supremacy in
a very brave and bold way. And Billy they had
a heroin addiction. So when Billy Holiday gets this warning,
(26:03):
it's telling her you stop singing this song. In effect,
she says, basically, fuck you. I'm an American citizen. I'll
sing what I Dann will please. And that's the point
of which Harry Anslinger resolves to destroy her. So he
hated employing black agents. But you couldn't really send a
white guy into Harlem to follow Billy Holliday everywhere. It
kind of obvious. So they had this agent called Jimmy Fletcher,
(26:25):
who was told followed Billy Holiday everywhere gather information about
her drug use. If that gather information about all the
jazz musicians drug use, we're going to bust them all.
So Jimmy Fletcher spent eighteen months following Billy everywhere, getting
to know her undercover, so they busted her. She was
put in prison for eighteen months. She didn't sing a
(26:46):
word in prison, but when she got out, that was
when they did the cruelest thing. At that time. To
perform in most places in the country where alcohol was served,
you needed something called a cabaret performers license. Anslinger. Make
sure Billy Holiday is not given a beret performer's license.
Her friend Yolanda Bavan said to me, what is the
cruelest thing you can do, is to take away the
(27:06):
thing someone loves. Imagine taking away singing from Billy Holiday
despite the way, is what we do all over the
country today. Right people have an addiction problem, we don't
help them reconnect. We put barriers between the exactly makes
sometimes but you can't touch your kid or yeah, exactly,
we limit your connections exactly as possible. That the most
(27:28):
counterproductive thing we could do in that situation. Entirely predictably,
Billy Holiday relapsed and one day in Midtown, only a
few blocks from I should first sun strange fruit, she
collapsed and she was taken to a hospital and the
first hospital wouldn't take a cashed addiction problem. The second
(27:49):
hospital took her and on the way in Billy said
to her best friend MALEI dufty, they're going to kill
me in there. Don't let them. They're going to kill me.
She believed that Anslinger's men weren't finished with her, and
she wasn't wrong. So in hospital she was diagnosed with
a vans liver cancer. Anslinger's men came and they arrested
her on her hospital bed. Knowing her diagnosis, they handcuffed
(28:12):
her to the bed. In hospital obviously didn't give her
any heroine, and she went into withdrawal, which can be
quite dangerous if you're as sick as she was with cancer.
So Maylie, her friend, managed to insist the doctors gave
her METHODONEA and then she began to recover a bit.
And ten days later she was cut off and the
methodone and the next day she died and Harry Anslinger gloated.
(28:32):
When she died, he wrote, there'll be no more good
morning heartache for her. And I think a lot about
this story because the fight between Harry Anslinger and Billy
Holiday isn't over right. All over the world, every day
people listen to Billy Holiday and it makes them stronger,
(28:53):
and it makes them better, and every day all over
the world we listened to Harryett with a few exceptions,
we listened to Harry Ansling at and we follow the
war on drugs that he created, and it makes people
weaker and it breaks people more, and at some point
we have to side with Billy. But the other thing
that that story really helped me to think about, it
goes right back to where we started. It helps me
(29:15):
to think about people I love. You've got addiction problems.
You know, in our culture, we tell one heroic story
about people with addiction problems, which is sometimes they recover
from their addiction, and that is indeed a heroic story,
and everyone listening is in that position should be really
proud of themselves. But Billy Holliday never stopped having an
addiction problem. She was addicted till the day she died.
(29:35):
She was still a hero, right, staggering courage and bravery.
But you just think about how many people like Billy
Holliday have there been since then? You know, we're talking
about happened in the nineteen fifties, right, how many people
since then have died needlessly because of this catastrophic war,
and how many people have just had shit lives when
they could have been helped and turned their lives around. Right,
(29:58):
At some point we have to st following Harry Anslinger, Yeah, absolutely,
I'm optimistic that if we fight, we can tear this
thing down and we can replace it with policies that
actually work. And in some ways goes right back to
the very first thing you said, Greg, one hundred thousand
people died of overdoses. That is an unbearable tragedy and
(30:19):
we'll never get those people who have unique lives back.
But the one good thing that can come from that
is all the fire alarms are going off. Right, It's
very hard for people to say, you know, what we're
doing right now just works. Fine, Let's just carry on
with what we're doing. Right. I think we're good here. Right.
No one's saying that. They're not saying that in the
(30:40):
most conservative parts of the country. They're not saying that
in the most liberal parts of the country. No one
says that. Right. People can see what we've done hasn't worked.
They're ready to be persuaded of the alternatives, and it
is a job to persuade them, and we've got to
do it through stories and evidence and love. But I
absolutely believe we can win this one. Johan, this was incredible.
(31:02):
I urge everyone to rechasing the Scream. I think it's
gonna open your eyes. There's so many little tidbits and
notes in there, and like these aha moments all throughout
it where you're just like I'd never thought about it
that way, or it was completely shocking, or you know,
it's just amazing. It'll change your whole perspective on this.
So thank you so much, um, you know, for your
time and you know, hopefully we get to talk to
you again soon. Yeah, thank you, Thank you both. I
(31:25):
really enjoyed coming on the show. Thanks Clayton. Thanks right.
We got a couple of bills to pay, but we'll
be right back. Money money, money, wow. Um. Thanks again
(31:48):
to Johan for for coming on and giving us so
much of his time. That was you know they say
don't meet your heroes, um, but no, it was. It
was amazing. No, he did not. He's like the most
likable guy in the World's got that British accent rolling yeah, man,
like a more likable James Cord. Yeah. Yeah, he's one
(32:10):
of those guys where like anything you say that has
even like a bit of here like he's just dying laughing.
You're like, no, maybe, hey, can you get this whole
stand up there and trying to get out there? Let
me know it was just Johan and then just a
bunch of other people I get to pay. Yeah, maybe
we can get a good show going here. But yeah,
I mean you can kind of see why we picked
that as the first interview, first episode. It needed to be,
(32:32):
and it just confirmed everything that I ever thought. It
is racist and most of this stuff is not based
on any type of facts. Yeah, our producer Michael pulled
a bunch of these articles, some things that we catched
on that we're coming out then and a slingers fingers
are all over it. And then you know William randolp
Hurst who in a bunch of newspapers and was able
(32:52):
to just kind of pump this out. And so when
you control the media, you know, you kind of controlled everything.
This is from Reader's Digest back in nineteen thirty eight
Marijuana Assassin of Youth by Harry Hann Slinger and Courtney
Riley Cooper. And some of these quotes is just crazy,
just like anecdotes of things that were going on that
we know that could not be true Chicago to marijuana
(33:12):
smoking boys, murder policeman use it as justification exactly why yeah, yeah,
And then there's this different from to day, Yeah exactly.
I mean it was always drugs and it was just
used to who is the enemy right now? How can
we pin drugs on them? And how are they going
to damage the white community? And it happened over and
over again. It was marijuan, it was heroin, it's cocaine,
(33:33):
it's it's everything else. Just looking at these you could
just see that criminalizing race, you know, ethnicity, and then
you know poverty goes hand in hand with that. Yeah,
it's just drugs worthy mechanism by which you were able
to keep people down as second class citizens. Whoever was
the enemy of the day. You see it over and
over again. Nixon during you know, he didn't like he
(33:57):
didn't like the black panthers, he didn't like hippies. And
now they're a bunch of LSD heroin toating folks that
are gonna, you know, take over the country. And you
know they're not pushing back because I think drugs are
bad and this is what's going to help. It allows
for control. If you legalize marijuana, now you can't use
like I smell marijuana. Now I get to search to
the bar that goes away, right, Yeah you know that.
I mean, yeah, that's that's the main go to how
(34:19):
did you smell marijuana? I was going the opposite direction
with both windows up right, But okay, cool? Yeah. I
love the police officers that are their own drug dog.
You sniffed it out yourself, like they didn't even give
you a dog. You just okay mcgruth, good job man. Yeah,
but yeah, you know, I'm I'm hoping you know that
this is the jump off of more episodes to come,
(34:41):
and we, like we said, we want to show that
this does affect you even if you don't go through
the criminal justice them, even you don't use drugs. Yeah,
you break your ankle, you or a loved one gets cancer,
are you able to get it opiate prescription? You know,
We're going to get into a lot of that, and
so it's going to touch on every thing, and we
really just want to show that historical aspe picked up
at where it comes from and how this has been utilized.
(35:02):
It's not about drugs, it's about power control. And so
thanks for listening to first one and we'll hopefully be
along for the right for the next few Yeah, yeah, yeah,
come back. Make sure you follow the War on Drugs
podcast so you don't miss any new episodes or any
of our Quick Fix bonus content, and we'll be back
next week with another episode of War on Drugs. Until then,
(35:25):
thank you for listening. Executive producers for War on Drugs
are Jason Flam and Kevin Wordis. Senior producer is Michael Epston.
Editing by Nick Massetti and Michael Epstein. Associate producer and
mix and mastering by Nick Massetti. Additional production by Jeff
Kleburn and Anna mcintee. Be sure to follow the show
on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook at Lava for Good. You
(35:46):
can follow Greg on Twitter at Greg Glaude and Clayton
on Instagram at Clayton English. The War on Drugs is
a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with
Signal Company Number One. I'm your host, Clayton English, and
I'm Greg Gloude and thanks for listening to the War
on Drugs podcast.
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