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

it came into focus. More than 50 percent of Americans have breached the drug laws. Where a law is that widely broken, you can’t possibly enforce it against every lawbreaker. The legal system would collapse under the weight of it. So you go after the people who are least able to resist, to argue back, to appeal—the poorest and most disliked groups. In the United States, they are black and Hispanic people, with a smattering of poor whites. You have pressure on you from above to get results. There has to be a certain number of busts, day after day, week after week. So you go after the weak. It’s not like you are framing them—they are, in fact, breaking the law. You keep targeting the weak. And you try not to see the wider picture.
    But then, for some people, it becomes inescapable.
    Leigh started to ask herself: How can you continue with this? But she felt an intense loyalty to her fellow officers, whom she knew to be good people. They were being increasingly sued by the American Civil Liberties Union—often personally—and her reflex was to defend them. These were the men she had faced gunfire with for years. How could she walk off the battlefield?
    We humans are good at suppressing our epiphanies, especially when our salaries and our friendships depend on it. She knew that a big chunk of her police department’s budget ran on the money they got from seizing drug suspects’ property. What would happen to all their jobs if that were taken away from the cops? She deliberately kept herself so busy that “I just didn’t have any time to think about it.”
    As she explained this to me, I realized that for Chino and for Leigh, all the incentives laid out by prohibition were to keep on fighting their wars and shooting their guns and ignoring their doubts.
    But on I-95, Leigh began to see the act of pulling over a car to search it in a new way. Once, she saw this scene as a soldier in a just war approaching the enemy. Now she sees it as a meeting of people who are surrounded by ghosts. As he approaches the car, the police officer has ranged behind him the ghosts of all the cops he has known, “all the funerals he’s been to, all the people who’ve been killed in traffic stops—because it’s a lot,” she says. And then “there’s also this poor black kid” in the car. Sitting in the passenger seats behind him are his ghosts—all of his relatives and friends who have been killed in police raids or vanished into the American prison system.
    Neither can see the other side’s ghosts. They can only hate.

    One day, Leigh discovered she was not alone. A friend told her about a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an organization of cops and judges and prison officers fighting to end the drug war so they can bankrupt the drug gangs. She was intrigued. She needed to find an answer to a question that was plaguing her: What had been the practical effect of all the policing she has done over the years?
    She decided to venture out into the drug war zones of Baltimore, not in uniform this time, but as a civilian. She looked at the kids in the city, and talked with them. She discovered “they are growing up in war zones. There’s no doubt about it.” There were prohibition-related killings almost every night, and “the kids see it. All the kids know this. It traumatizes you to a point you can’t begin to imagine.”
    But perhaps most important, once you have been busted 13 for a drug offense—at fifteen or seventeen or twenty—you are virtually unemployable for the rest of your life. You will never work again. You will be barred from receiving student loans. You will be evicted from public housing. You will be barred from even visiting public housing. “Say your mother lives in public housing, and you get arrested for possession, and you go visit her,” Leigh says. “If the housing authority find out you’ve been there [they will say] you’ve violated the lease and they’ll kick [the whole