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InvisibleJokeshopbeard
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Registered: 11/30/11
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A War Well Lost * 2
    #21550920 - 04/15/15 12:35 PM (8 years, 11 months ago)

Source

Quote:

Johann Hari is a British journalist who has written for many of the world’s leading newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The Nation, Slate, El Mundo, and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was an op-ed columnist for The Independent for nine years. He graduated from King’s College, Cambridge with a double first in social and political sciences in 2001.
Hari was twice named “National Newspaper Journalist of the Year” by Amnesty International. He was named “Environmental Commentator of the Year” at the Editorial Intelligence Awards, and “Gay Journalist of the Year” at the Stonewall Awards. He has also won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for political writing.
Hari’s latest book is the New York Times best seller Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. You can follow him on Twitter @johannhari101.
*  *  *

S. Harris: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me, Johann. You’ve written a wonderful book about the war on drugs—about its history and injustice—and I hope everyone will read it. The practice of making certain psychoactive compounds illegal raises some deep and difficult questions about how to create societies worth living in. I strongly suspect that you and I will agree about the ethics here: The drug war has been a travesty and a tragedy. But you’re much more knowledgeable about the history of this war, so I’d like to ask you a few questions before we begin staking out common ground.

The drug war started almost exactly 100 years ago. That means our great-grandparents could wander into any pharmacy and buy cocaine or heroin. Why did the drug war begin, and who started it?

J. Hari: It’s really fascinating, because when I realized we were coming up to this centenary, I thought of myself as someone who knew a good deal about the drug war. I’d written about it quite a lot, as you know, and I had drug addiction in my family. One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to.

And yet I just realized there were many basic questions I didn’t know the answer to, including exactly the one you’re asking: Why were drugs banned 100 years ago? Why do we continue banning them? What are the actual alternatives in practice? And what really causes drug use and drug addiction?

To find the answers, I went on this long journey—across nine countries, 30,000 miles—and I learned that almost everything I thought at the start was basically wrong. Drugs aren’t what we think they are. The drug war isn’t what we think it is. Drug addiction isn’t what we think it is. And the alternatives aren’t what we think they are.

If you had said to me, “Why were drugs banned?” I would have guessed that most people, if you stopped them in the street, would say, “We don’t want people to become addicted, we don’t want kids to use drugs,” that kind of thing.

What is fascinating when you go back and read the archives from the time is that that stuff barely comes up. Drugs were banned in the United States a century ago for a very different reason. They were banned in the middle of a huge race panic. After the Civil War, Reconstruction failed, and what you had were African Americans and Chinese Americans who—rightly—were pissed off. At various points they showed their anger—in fact, given how extreme their oppression was, it’s surprising they didn’t show a lot more anger. Many white Americans explained this growing rebelliousness at the start of the 20th century by saying that African Americans and Chinese Americans were forgetting their place, using drugs, and attacking white people. If this sounds bizarre, that’s because it was.

The official statements are extraordinary. A typical one said, “The cocaine nigger sure is hard to kill.” Sheriffs across certain parts of the United States increased the caliber of their bullets because they believed African American men were taking cocaine and ravaging and attacking white people. The main way I tell about that in the book is through the story of how the founder of the war on drugs, Harry Anslinger, played a crucial role in stalking and killing Billie Holiday, the great jazz singer, which blew my mind when I first learned it.

S. Harris: I’d like to underscore this background fact. Many people are aware that the war on drugs has caused disproportionate harm to the black community. But I think people don’t generally know that racism had anything to do with its origins. Can you say a bit more about what the link was?

J. Hari: I think a good illustration is that in California there was a really deep bigotry against Chinese Americans. There were actually mass lynchings of them in Los Angeles, for example. In San Francisco they tried to forcibly relocate Chinatown out of the city and into an area reserved for pig farming. Chinese Americans challenged it all the way to the California Supreme Court, which ruled that they couldn’t be forcibly evicted.

Very soon afterward, the white authorities shifted and said, in effect, “Oh, okay, well, these Chinese Americans brought opium dens with them. We’ll attack them for their opium dens.” They went in and burned large parts of Chinatown. The drug war provided a legal excuse to do what they wanted to do already—unleash real force against ethnic minorities.

One of the best places to start, when it comes to African Americans, is that story about Billie Holiday. Harry Anslinger was probably the most influential person that no one’s ever heard of. He took over the Department of Prohibition just as alcohol prohibition was ending, so he had this big government bureaucracy with very little to do. And he was driven by two intense hatreds: One was a hatred of addicts, and the other was a hatred of African Americans.

He was regarded as an extreme racist by the racists of the 1930s. This is a guy who used the “N” word in official memos so often that his own senator said he should have to resign. He found out at about the same time that three famous Americans were addicts, and he treated them very differently. I think that tells you something.
Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, and Joe McCarthy were all addicts. Judy Garland was told to take slightly longer vacations, and Anslinger reassured the studio she was going to be fine. Joe McCarthy was given a safe and legal prescription for opiates from a pharmacy in Washington, D.C. And Billie Holiday was stalked onto her deathbed, arrested, and completely destroyed.

In 1939 Billie Holiday first sang “Strange Fruit,” the famous anti-lynching song. That night the Federal Bureau of Narcotics told her to stop singing the song, because according to Anslinger, it represented everything that was wrong with America.




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Offlinerubberlizard
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Re: A War Well Lost [Re: Jokeshopbeard]
    #21553852 - 04/16/15 02:39 AM (8 years, 11 months ago)

Interesting read - though long,

just marking for later use


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InvisibleDisoRDeR
motional
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Registered: 08/29/02
Posts: 1,158
Loc: nonsensistan
Re: A War Well Lost [Re: Jokeshopbeard]
    #21575936 - 04/21/15 11:06 AM (8 years, 11 months ago)

That was a good read. I found this particularly noteworthy for those advocating for legalization:

Quote:

I think one of the really important things, particularly in winning the debate in America, is to look at what arguments won in these places and what arguments didn’t. We found that in the places that successfully decriminalized or legalized, liberty-based arguments for ending the drug war were very unpopular. I’m philosophically sympathetic to the argument that it’s your body and you’ve got a right to do what you want with it. But it turns out that’s a politically toxic argument—people really don’t like it, and it only works with people who already agree.


The arguments that work well in persuading the people we still want to reach are order-based arguments. I think the Swiss heroin referenda are good models for that. Basically, what they said was drug war means chaos. It means unknown criminals selling unknown chemicals to unknown users, all in the dark, in our public places, filled with disease and chaos. Legalization is a way of imposing regulation and order on this anarchy. It’s about taking it away from criminal gangs and giving it to doctors and pharmacists, and making sure it happens in nice clean clinics, and we get our nice parks back, and we reduce crime. That’s the argument that will win. And it’s not like it’s a rhetorical trick—it’s true. That is what happens.



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