How Harry Anslinger Started The War on Drugs | Joe Rogan & Johann Hari

So where I open Chasing the Scream is with this story that I think a lot of people think why the fuck is a book about the war on drugs starting like this and I think it tells you so much. So in 1939 in a hotel in midtown Manhattan, Billie Holiday, the great jazz singer, walked on stage and she sang for the first time a song that I'm sure all your listeners and viewers have heard. It's a song called Strange Fruit, right? It's a song against lynching. It's the idea that in the south the bodies of African American men hang from the trees and they're like a kind of strange fruit in the south, right? So it's unbelievably challenging at that time. There are very few popular songs like that and to have an African American woman doing it was quite shocking. She wasn't even allowed to walk through the front door of that hotel. They made her go through the service elevator because she was African American. And that night Billie Holiday gets a warning from a man called Harry Anslinger, from the agents of a man called Harry Anslinger that basically says stop singing this song, right? And you think, wait, what's this got to do with the war on drugs? So Harry Anslinger is a man, he was a government bureaucrat. I think the most influential person no one's ever heard of, he's affected the lives of loads of people listening to your show. So Harry Anslinger is a government bureaucrat who takes over the Department of Prohibition just as alcohol prohibition is ending. See you've had this big war on alcohol, it's been a shit show, it's been a disaster and he takes it over and he wants to keep his government department going. And he invents the modern war on drugs, he's the first person to ever use the phrase war on drugs. And he really builds this war on drugs around two intense hatreds he has and Billie Holiday is the personification of both. One was a really intense hatred of African Americans. I mean, he was regarded as a crazy racist in the 1920s, which gives you a sense of how racist he was. He used the N word so often in official memos, his own senator said he should have to resign, that's how hardcore he was, right? And he also had an intense hatred of people with addiction problems. And Billie Holiday, she'd grown up on the streets of Baltimore, a part of Baltimore called Pigtown. When she was 10, she was horrific, she was raped. The man who raped her was sent to prison for a year and a half, she was sent reformatory for longer than he got, right? She was tormented by the nuns there, they said she was disobedient. She brought it on herself. They used to lock her in with dead bodies overnight to teach her a lesson. She eventually ran away, she tried to find her mother. Her mother had gone to Roosevelt Island now, it wasn't called that then, where she was working as a prostitute and Billie Holiday starts kind of working in inverted commas next to her mother in this brothel from when she's like 14. So she's being raped by men for money night after night after night. And when the police rescue, break into the brothel, they arrest her, right, and send her to prison. So Billie Holiday is trying to numb the grief and pain that comes from that, right? So she starts out using loads of alcohol and then she's using loads of other stuff as well, mostly heroin. And when she gets this warning from Harry Anslinger saying stop singing this song, Billie Holiday's attitude is fuck you, I'm an American citizen, I'll sing what I fucking please, right? And at that point, Harry Anslinger resolves to destroy her. The first man he sent to track her is a man called, follow her around, is a guy called Jimmy Fletcher. Harry Anslinger hated employing white people, sorry, hated employing African Americans, but you couldn't really send a white person into Harlem to follow Billie Holiday everywhere, it'd be kind of obvious. So he employed this African American guy called Jimmy Fletcher, whose job title was a bag man. So he was given the job, follow Billie Holiday everywhere she goes, befriend her, document her drug use, right? He dances with her in nightclubs, he gets to know her really well. Billie Holiday was so amazing that Jimmy Fletcher fell in love with her. And his whole life he felt really ashamed of what he did. He busts her, when they come in to search her, she makes him, she pisses in front of him and says, you can look in my pussy, you can see I don't have anything here. She's put on trial. The trial was called the United States versus Billie Holiday, and she said that's how it fucking felt. She sent to prison for 18 months. She doesn't sing a word in prison. So what happened to her next, I think, is the cruelest thing. She gets out of prison, and at that time to sing anywhere where they served alcohol, you needed what was called a cabaret performer's license. Anselinga makes sure she doesn't get it. So one of her friends, Yolanda Bavan, who's also a great jazz singer, said to me, what's the cruelest thing you can do to a person is to take away the thing they love, right? They take away singing from Billie Holiday. So what we do to people with addiction problems all over the United States, right? We give them criminal records that make it much harder to do the things that are meaningful to them by work, for example. So in that situation, obviously, Billie Holiday relapses, right? She starts using shit-town heroin again. One day in the early 50s, she collapses, not far from where she first sung Strange Fruit. The first hospital won't even take her because she's got an addiction problem. They said we're not having her. Second hospital takes her, but she says to her friend, Maylee Duffy, on the way in that Anselinga's men weren't done with her. They were going to come for her. She said, they're going to kill me in there. Don't let them. They're going to kill me. She wasn't wrong. So in the hospital, she's diagnosed with advanced liver cancer, probably related to severe alcoholism. And in the hospital, she goes into heroin withdrawal. So Maylee, her friend, manages to insist that she's given methadone and she starts to recover a bit because heroin withdrawal is quite dangerous when you're weak, right? Like when you're old or you've... The first thing is men come, they arrest her on her hospital bed. They handcuff her to the hospital bed. I interviewed the last person who was still alive, who'd been in that room, a man called Reverend Eugene Callender, who'd been a religious minister. They handcuff her to a hospital bed. They don't let her friends in to see her. They don't let her even have candies. Outside Reverend Callender led protests with signs saying, let Lady Day live. They were big protests. They knew they were killing her, right? And after 10 days, they cut off the methadone and she died the next day. Her friend, one of her friends told the BBC that she looked like she had been violently wrenched from life, right? There's loads of things about this story, which has been made into a movie. Lee Daniels is directing it. There's so many things about this story that tell us what this war on drugs is about, right? Firstly, it's about... Its effect, it's about shaming addicts and its effect is it makes addicts worse, right? See that with Billy Holiday, see that everywhere. Secondly, it's been insanely racist from the start, right? At the same time that Harry Anseling, I found out Billy Holiday had a heroin addiction, he found out Judy Garland, Dora Thief and the Wizard of Oz had a heroin addiction. It changes how you watch the Wizard of Oz when you know that. And he went to the studio and he said to Judy Garland and to the studio, she should take longer vacations, right? Spot the difference. With a white woman, Judy Garland, longer vacations with Billy Holiday, fucking destroy her, right? In fact, one of the agents he sent to destroy her, a man called George White, who this guy tracked her in the last days of her life, we now know, I mean, he's literally a psychopath. He was a hugely obese guy, he was a strange guy. He infiltrated a Chinese drug gang when he wasn't Chinese, the only person to ever do that. But he boasted in his diary about murdering people, about spiking women and raping them. I mean, these were really deranged people that founded the drug war. But the reason I say in relation to what we were just talking about is because in this culture we tell only one heroic story about people with addiction problems and that's that they sometimes recover from their addiction. That is indeed a heroic story. Everyone watching this who's managed to do that is a hero and I massively love and congratulate them. But that is not the only heroic story we should tell about people with addiction problems. Billy Holiday never stopped using drugs. She was still a fucking hero. She never let these people stop her singing that song. She would go to the places where you didn't have a license, she would go to the worst parts of the Deep South. She sang Strange Fruit. People threw bottles at her, they stubbed out cigarettes on her. She never stopped singing that song, right? And I think about Billy Holiday a lot and I think about, you know, all over the world every day people listen to Billy Holiday and they feel stronger and all over the world every day we are still following the policies of Harry Anslinger and it makes us weaker. And this conflict that begins right at the start of the drug and I think if I'm honest I think this isn't an easy thing to say but I think one of the reasons why the debate about the drug war is so charged is because it runs through the hearts of all of us, right? Anyone who's got someone they love who's got an addiction problem as I do, there's a Harry Anslinger in your head, right? There's a bit of you that looks at them and thinks someone should just fucking stop you. Why are you doing this? Someone should stop you doing this. And then for most people there's another part that's like, okay, that anger isn't useful in most cases. Actually you're doing this for a reason, we need to understand those reasons, we need to help you to change your life, right? But that conflict is very deep in us and Harry Anslinger, the war he invented and we can talk about what he did with cannabis and loads of other things but because he invented the ban on cannabis, that war is still playing out. Does that make sense? I know that was a long answer but sorry. No, it does make sense and it's a horrific story about Billie Holiday and I had no idea that Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz was also addicted. And the Munchkins, a lot of them as well. Now Harry, why was Harry Anslinger's hate towards her so extreme? So when he was a kid, the book is called Chasing the Screen because when he was a kid, he grew up in a place called Altoona in Pennsylvania and he lives in a farmhouse. His dad was actually a refugee, well, refugee in a bit of commas, immigrant from Switzerland and they grew up in this farmhouse and in the next farmhouse down there was a farmer's wife who had a heroin addiction or a meth, sorry, morphine addiction, it wouldn't have been heroin then. And Harry Anslinger had this really haunting memory of going to that house and hearing this woman scream and scream and him being sent to take the horse and cart, I think he was 11 or something, being sent to take the horse and cart into town to go to the pharmacy to get her the morphine and then bringing it back and her scream stopping. The lesson he took from that is these drugs are evil and we need to destroy them, especially later on. He was in Europe during the First World War and he had this very keen, he was a diplomat, this very keen sense that civilisation was incredibly fragile, it could collapse at any moment, that you only need a little bit of contamination and it would all go to shit. And so he, yeah, I call it chasing the screen because I think in a way what Harry Anslinger is doing is chasing this scream all over the world and I felt like what I was doing going to all these different places from the killing fields in Mexico to Portugal and Switzerland was following this scream as it ricocheted around and actually how he thinks he's stopping these screams, he's actually creating far more screams in their place. Yeah, but I still don't understand why he had this intense... With Billie Holiday. Yeah. So, well, she's an African American woman standing up to white supremacy who has an addiction problem. But the truth is what he did to Billie Holiday is not... This is what he did to African Americans and to people with addiction problems. Billie Holiday just happens to be famous, so I'm telling her story, but this is what he did to huge numbers of people, right? He wanted to destroy the whole jazz scene. One of the amazing things, spending time in his archives in Penn State was seeing all these memos from his agents. So he said to them, go to your local jazz club, document the evil things that are happening there. And the things they wrote back are kind of hilarious, right? There's one agent who, I forget where it was, but he wrote back and it's like, there was a popular jazz song at the time called That Ocean Man and had a lyric that said, when he gets the notion, he thinks he can walk across the ocean. And he's like, there is going to be an epidemic of drowning across the United States as people use cannabis because they're going to believe they can walk on water. So he would... He was like, I mean, literally hilarious. He really thinks he said, he believed that when you smoke cannabis, time slows down, so a minute seems to last a thousand years. These extraordinarily heightened, crazy things that he would say. And he actually latched... At that time when he first takes over what becomes the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, you know, Kycen and heroin just aren't very popular, right? There's just not much of a war to fight. I mean, they exist, but they're not that popular. They're confined to small urban scenes. Cannabis was more popular, not as popular as it is now, but... And he had previously said cannabis isn't harmful, not bothered about it. Suddenly when he cottons on that this is the way to build up his department, he announces that cannabis is... The phrase he used was the most evil drug in the world. He said when Frankenstein's monster bumps into a spliff on the staircase, Frankenstein's monster dies of fright. Like these extraordinarily heightened claims. And he's just trying to get support for a ban on cannabis. And he latches onto one case in particular. It's important because I think we're hearing these things again now. So a kid in Tampa, Florida called Victor Lycata, he was not so much a kid, 21, killed his entire family with an axe, butchered them all. And with the help of the Fox News of its time, Hearst newspapers, Anslinger announces, this is what will happen if you use cannabis. Literally you will kill your family with an axe, right? And this becomes a very famous story across the United States and cannabis is banned in its wake. Years later, someone goes and checks the psychiatric files for Victor Lycata. It wasn't even evidence he'd ever used cannabis, right? He had terrible problems with psychosis. His family had been advised more than a year before that he should be institutionalized and they refused, they kept him at home. And this tragedy ensued. We're hearing these, these scarce stories again about, about cannabis. There's something that Anslinger said that I think could be like the motto for the entire drug war in the wake of the sec. So Anslinger introduces this ban in the US. He promises drugs will disappear, right? You will have noticed drugs did not disappear. He starts to say, well, that's just cause evil foreign countries like Mexico are flooding our country with drugs. And that's, that's come back as well. So what we need to do is force all these other countries to ban them as well. And then they'll disappear. So the US in the wake of the second world war really has the power to do that world is in ruins. And there's one point when he goes to the new United nations and he's insisting this happens and they're basically threatening people. They're saying, we'll cut off your foreign aid or you won't be allowed to sell goods to the US market if you don't do this. The ambassador from Thailand is like, well, you know, it doesn't seem to have worked very well in your country. You've actually got a long pattern of established drug use in Thailand. We don't really have many problems. We don't want to do this. And Anslinger said to her, I said to him, I've made up my mind. Don't try to confuse me with the facts. And I always feel like that's the drug war, right? I made up my mind. Don't try to confuse me with the facts.