Chasing the Scream: The Persecution and Assassination of Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday has been dead for over fifty years now.  If you’re over thirty, you’ve probably heard of her, although I imagine that fewer and fewer people listen to her music.  For the record, she was a jazz singer – one of the best.  She was also one of the first victims of the war on drugs.  Not just a victim of drugs, but of the war on drugs.  Johann Hari tells that story in the first part of his fascinating new book, Chasing the Scream:  The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. 

It’s clear to anyone paying attention that American drug policy is a dysfunctional blend of Puritanism, racism, and hypocrisy.  But what I learned from Chasing the Scream is that this state of affairs has been the same for nearly a century, and that the war on drugs was corrupt and cynical from its inception.  It was President Richard Nixon who coined the phrase “War on Drugs” in 1971, but the war actually began in the 1930s, when two men who were on opposite sides of the law discovered that they both had vested interests in making sure that that drug addiction was viewed as a criminal problem rather than a health problem.

Harry Anslinger was an ambitious government agent who harassed rum runners during the Prohibition Era.  In 1930, he left the Bureau of Prohibition to head up the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics.  Then as now, government attempts to prevent the use of illegal intoxicants were both ineffective and rife with corruption, and when the Prohibition Amendment was repealed in 1933, public support for the work of Anslinger’s agency was ebbing.

But Anslinger wanted to keep his job, and he had an ace up his sleeve.  He played the race card.  He proclaimed that marijuana made black people crazy, and led them to rape white women.  As clearly insane and racist as that argument seems now, in the 1930s it resonated with many politicians and their constituencies.  It’s been obvious for a long time that the war on drugs has been waged disproportionately against people of color.  Now we know why.  It was designed to work that way from the very beginning.

But every cloud has a silver lining for someone, and the bureaucrats at Federal Bureau of Narcotics weren’t the only ones to breathe a sigh of relief when drugs were criminalized.  Organized crime had lost an important revenue stream when Prohibition was repealed in 1933.  Enter Arnold Rothstein, the first mob kingpin to understand that there was big money to be made in selling drugs – but only if those drugs were illegal.  At the beginning of the 20th century, doctors could prescribe heroin, and cocaine was famously an ingredient in Coca Cola.  All that changed in the ‘30s.  Thanks to Harry Anslinger’s efforts, narcotics replaced bootleg whiskey as the mob’s cash cow.

Anslinger held onto power until 1962, spreading misinformation about drugs, attempting to wreck the careers of physicians and scientists who dared to disagree with him, and waging merciless war on addicts and low level suppliers, who were much easier targets than powerful mobsters like Arnold Rothstein and his successors. 

Arizonans have a particularly clear window into Anslinger’s operating methods because we’re living in the shadow of one of his protégés – Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.  Anslinger hired Arpaio as a special agent in 1957, and one of the chapters in Chasing the Scream covers Arpaio’s brutal treatment of addicts (who are mostly people of color) in the Phoenix area.  Like his mentor, Sheriff Joe isn’t interested in rehabilitating addicts.  He’s interested in making them suffer.

And that brings us back to Billie Holiday, who was one of Anslinger’s early targets.  Holiday had a hard life.  Her mother was a prostitute, and Holiday was dragged into that life when she was 13.  But she loved jazz, and she had a unique sound.  She was “discovered” (by John Hammond, the same guy who signed Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and Bruce Springsteen to their first recording contracts) and became one of the most influential singers of the 20th century.  The Post Office even put her face on a postage stamp in 1994 – a few decades after the government hounded her to her death.

Holiday’s childhood traumas scarred her, and life as a musician on the road in the 1930s wasn’t exactly easy for a black woman.  She began drinking, and by the 1940s, she had begun to use heroin.  But the thing that attracted Harry Anslinger’s attention was her 1939 recording of “Strange Fruit,” an anti-lynching song. 

Anslinger didn’t like black people, and he didn’t like jazz.  He thought it “sounded like the jungle in the dead of night,” and that jazz musicians “reeked of filth.”  He became obsessed with Holiday, and assigned a black agent named Jimmy Fletcher to follow her.  It wasn’t hard for Fletcher to set up a bust.  And then another.  At her second trial, she asked to be sent to a rehabilitation facility.  Instead she spent a year doing hard time in a West Virginia prison. 

When she got out, Holiday was a convicted felon, and couldn’t work in places where alcohol was sold – which was pretty much every night club in the country.  But Anslinger wasn’t through with her yet.

Jimmy Fletcher had begun to feel sorry for Holiday, so Anslinger turned to George White, an agent with fewer scruples.  White caught up with Holiday in San Francisco, and sure enough, it wasn’t long before police found opium in her apartment.   Holiday claimed to have been drug-free for over a year, and checked herself into a clinic, where she showed no symptoms of withdrawal.   A jury found her not guilty, but by this time, she was broke and broken.  Her drinking got worse, and she began using heroin again.

When she returned to New York, Anslinger’s men had her hospitalized and placed guards around her room to keep her friends away.  When a doctor tried methadone and it seemed to be helping, Anslinger saw to it her methadone was cut off.  She died in 1959, at the age of 44.  Harry Anslinger’s reaction? “No more ‘Good Morning Heartache.’”

Maybe Holiday’s demons would have overtaken her without Anslinger’s assistance.  The details of her death interest me because I’m a fan of her music, but otherwise she’s just one of a million victims of the war on drugs.  Fifty years later, the war drags on, and casualties are everywhere, from Joe Arpaio’s inhumane tent cities in Maricopa County to Ciudad Juarez across the border, where the brutal Zeta drug cartel leaves corpses hanging from bridges to terrify people on general principles. 

So far, so depressing.  But Chasing the Scream comes bearing good news too.  The war on marijuana is almost over.  (Spoiler alert:  marijuana is winning.)  And it turns out that even fearsome drugs like heroin and cocaine aren’t quite as powerful as anti-drug propaganda would have us believe.  Both animal and human studies confirm that addiction derives much of its power from the psychological state of the user.

Animals like elephants and water buffalo have access to psychoactive plants in their native environment.  They avoid them under normal circumstances, but when disaster strikes – habitat destruction or the loss of a mate – they often get high to distract themselves from grief.  A lab rat isolated in a cage will keep going back to whatever drug he’s being offered.  When that same rat is reintroduced into rat society, he’ll stop using the drug, even when it continues to be available.

People, it turns out, aren’t much different than rats when it comes to addiction.  Maybe you’re old enough to remember the epidemic of heroin use among American soldiers in Vietnam.  Pundits issued dire warnings that these soldiers would bring their habits back to the States with them, and all hell would break loose.  Instead, when those heroin users returned to the safety and comfort of home, the vast majority of them stopped using and just got on with their lives.    

Humans are social creatures, and outbreaks of addictive behavior occur predictably when there’s a rupture in the social fabric.  Native Americans turned to alcohol when they were herded onto reservations.  The Industrial Revolution drove the English poor from the countryside into cities, and into the gin mill slums.  When manufacturing jobs began to disappear in America’s urban centers at the end of the 20th century, crack was waiting to ease the pain.  Not long after that, as unemployment spread to rural areas, the meth epidemic exploded. 

Johann Hari says that 90% of drug users get high recreationally and responsibly.  They enjoy their buzz and then go back to living their lives.  Drug users only turn into drug abusers when their everyday lives are filled with trauma.  “The core of addiction,” he says, “doesn’t lie in what you swallow or inject – it’s in the pain that you feel in your head.  And yet we have built a system that thinks we will stop addicts by increasing their pain.”

Sadly, there’s a lot of trauma going around these days.  Cynical politicians and their media enablers work hard to convince us that we’re in a permanent crisis – and that there’s a sinister “other” to blame for it.  They keep people misinformed and frightened, and encourage them to blame their neighbors for the terrible state of affairs.  They market mindless consumerism as an antidote.  Shop ‘til you drop, and when you wake up again, there’ll be even newer stuff to buy. 

Ignorance, fear, and distraction.  There’s no better formula for dissolving the glue that holds society together and tempting people to find temporary relief in drugs or alcohol.

So what’s to be done?  The experts Johan Hari interviews say it all boils down to simple human connection, nothing more and nothing less.  The more connected you feel to your family, neighborhood, and society, the less likely you are to become dependent on drugs.

Before I read Chasing the Scream, I felt like I was doing my part simply by not being a drug user myself.  Now, though, it seems like that’s not enough.  For me, Chasing the Scream brings me back to the Parable of the Good Samaritan, which I wrote about in this space a few days ago. 

I need to get better at connecting with people.  Not drug users, particularly, but people who are in need of human connection for whatever reason.  My first job is to pay attention to them.  The 8th century Buddhist philosopher Shantideva said to start small when you’re doing good works, so the first steps should be easy – perhaps as simple as taking a little extra time to acknowledge people I usually ignore – clerks in the grocery store, neighbors on the street, people like that. 

Then I have to try to love them, and finally try to love them as I love myself.  It’s a simple enough formula – and it will be the hardest thing I’ll ever do.  If I ever do it.