Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari Page A

the drug gangs that had killed her two closest friends. Now she began to see that her work in fact kept them in business and made them more deadly. The lesson of ending alcohol prohibition, she had come to believe, is that there is a way to actually stop this violence: legalize and regulate the drug trade.
    After he was told about the killing, Ed’s five-year-old son Daniel 9 insisted on leaving the hallway light on at night, so “Daddy could find his way home.”
    While Leigh was studying for a law degree at night, another part of the drug war was slowly becoming clear to her. The shaft of light she had allowed in was illuminating more than she expected.
    She knew that drug use and drug selling are engaged in by all the racial groups in America—hell, she smoked marijuana herself as a teen. But that’s not who she was arresting and imprisoning. The 1993 National Household Survey 10 on Drug Abuse found that 19 percent of drug dealers were African American, but they made up 64 percent of the arrests for it. Largely as a result of this disparity, there was an outcome that was more startling still. In 1993, in the death throes of apartheid, South Africa imprisoned 853 black men per hundred thousand in the population. The United States imprisons 4,919 black men per hundred thousand (versus only 943 white men). So because of the drug war and the way it is enforced, a black man was far more likely to be jailed in the Land of the Free than in the most notorious white supremacist society in the world.
    Indeed, at any given time, 11 40 to 50 percent of black men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five are in jail, on probation, or have a warrant out for their arrest, overwhelmingly for drug offenses.
    It’s easy to assume that Harry Anslinger’s prejudices at the birth of the drug war were just a product of their time, long since discarded. Leigh was discovering they are not. The race panics that drove the early drug war have not burned out.
    But here, again, I was forced by Leigh—and by the facts—to see that this is not a simple story, with straightforward heroes and villains.
    I was inclined to assume that this hugely disproportionate rate of arrest of black men is due to naked racism on the part of cops. But Leigh is not a racist. We know this because she risked her life to expose violent racism. And most of her colleagues, she said with confidence, were not racist, and they would have been appalled if any of their colleagues made racist statements. Yet Leigh was—as she would see later—acting as part of a racist machine, against her own intentions.
    Around this time, other police officers across the United States were trying to figure out how this works, too. Matthew Fogg is one of the most decorated police officers in the United States, responsible for tracking down more than three hundred of the most-wanted felons in the country—from murderers to rapists to child molesters. But he was bewildered as to why his force only ever goes to black neighborhoods to bust people for drugs. He went to see his boss to suggest they start mounting similar raids in white neighborhoods.
    He explained in a speech that his superior officer told him: “Fogg, you know you’re right 12 they are using drugs there [but] you know what? If we go out and we start targeting those individuals, they know judges, they know lawyers, they know politicians, they know all of the big folks in government. If we start targeting them, and their children, you know what’s going to happen? We’re going to get a phone call and they’re going to shut us down. You know that, Fogg? You know what’s going to happen? There goes your overtime. There’s the money that you’re making. So let’s just go after the weakest link. Let’s go after those who can’t afford the attorneys, those who we can lock up.”
    I kept trying to understand this dynamic, and the more cops I met—people who were not racist, but had produced a racist outcome—there more