Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (6 page)

The only other way she could soothe herself was by returning to childhood habits of her own. She would lie in bed all day reading Superman comics and chuckling. One day, she went out with a teenage friend to Central Park.
¹⁷⁸
They fed LSD to the horses and then took a ride. The cabbie was puzzled: Why wouldn’t the horses follow their normal route? Billie cackled with laughter from her carriage.

But when she was forced to interact with people, she was becoming more and more paranoid. If Jimmy Fletcher had been one of Them, who else was? She believed—correctly, it turns out—that some of the people around her were informing on her to Anslinger’s army. “You didn’t know who to trust,” her friend Yolande Bavan told me. “So-called friends—were they friends? What were they?” Everywhere she went, there were agents asking about her,
¹⁷⁹
demanding details.

She began to push away even her few remaining friends,
¹⁸⁰
because she was terrified the police would plant drugs on them, too—and that was the last thing she wanted for the people she loved.

One day, Harry Anslinger was told that there were also white women, just as famous as Billie, who had drug problems—but he responded to them rather differently. He called Judy Garland, another heroin addict, in to see him. They had a friendly chat,
¹⁸¹
in which he advised her to take longer vacations between pictures, and he wrote to her studio,
¹⁸²
assuring them she didn’t have a drug problem at all. When he discovered that a Washington society hostess he knew
¹⁸³
—“a beautiful, gracious lady,” he noted—had an illegal drug addiction, he explained he couldn’t possibly arrest her because “it would destroy . . . the unblemished reputation of one of the nation’s most honored families.” He helped her to wean herself off her addiction slowly, without the law becoming involved.

As I sat in his archives, reading over the piles of fading papers that survive from the launch of the drug war, there was one thing I found hardest to grasp at first.

The arguments we hear today for the drug war are that we must protect teenagers from drugs, and prevent addiction in general. We assume, looking back, that these were the reasons this war was launched in the first place. But they were not. They crop up only occasionally, as asides. The main reason given for banning drugs
¹⁸⁴
—the reason obsessing the men who launched this war—was that the blacks, Mexicans, and Chinese were using these chemicals, forgetting their place, and menacing white people.

It took me a while to see that the contrast between the racism directed at Billie and the compassion offered to addicted white stars like Judy Garland was not some weird misfiring of the drug war—it was part of the point.
¹⁸⁵

Harry told the public that “the increase [in drug addiction] is practically 100 percent among Negro people,”
¹⁸⁶
which he stressed was terrifying because already “the Negro population . . . accounts for 10 percent of the total population, but 60 percent of the addicts.”
¹⁸⁷
He could wage the drug war—he could do what he did—only because he was responding to a fear in the American people. You can be a great surfer, but you still need a great wave. Harry’s wave came in the form of a race panic.

In the run-up to the passing of the Harrison Act, the
New York Times
ran a story typical of the time. The headline was:
NEGRO
COCAINE
“
FIENDS
”
NEW SOUTHERN MENACE
¹⁸⁸
. It described a North Carolina police chief who “was informed that a hitherto inoffensive negro, with whom he was well-acquainted, was ‘running amuck’ in a cocaine frenzy [and] had attempted to stab a storekeeper . . . Knowing he must kill this man or be killed himself, the Chief drew his revolver, placed the muzzle over the negro’s heart, and fired—‘intending to kill him right quick,’ as the officer tells it, but the shot did not even stagger the man.” Cocaine was, it was widely claimed in the press at this time, turning blacks into superhuman hulks who could take bullets to the heart without flinching. It was the official reason why the police across the South increased the caliber of their guns.
¹⁸⁹

One medical expert put it bluntly: “The cocaine nigger,”
¹⁹⁰
he warned, “sure is hard to kill.”

Many white Americans did not want to accept that black Americans might be rebelling because they had lives like Billie Holiday’s—locked into Pigtowns and banned from developing their talents. It was more comforting to believe that a white powder was the cause of black anger, and that getting rid of the white powder would render black Americans docile and on their knees once again. (The history of this would be traced years later in Michelle Alexander’s remarkable book
The New Jim Crow
.)

But there was another racial group
¹⁹¹
that also had to be kept down, Harry believed. In the mid-nineteenth century,
¹⁹²
Chinese immigrants had begun to flow into the United States, and they were now competing with white people for jobs and opportunities.

Worse still, Harry believed they were competing for white women. He warned that with their “own special Oriental ruthlessness,”
¹⁹³
the Chinese had developed “a liking for the charms of Caucasian girls . . . from good families.” They lured these white girls into their “opium dens”—a tradition they had brought from their home country—got the girls hooked, and then forced them into acts of “unspeakable sexual depravity” for the rest of their lives. Anslinger described their brothels in great detail: how the white girls removed their clothes slowly, the “panties” they revealed,
¹⁹⁴
how slowly they kissed the Chinese, and what came next . . .

Once the Chinese dealers got you hooked on opiates, they would laugh in your face and reveal the real reason they sell junk: it was their way of making sure that “the yellow race would rule the world.”
¹⁹⁵
“They were too wise, they urged, to attempt to win in battle, but they would win by wits; would strike at the white race through ‘dope’ and when the time was ripe would command the world,”
¹⁹⁶
explained a senior judge.

At first, ordinary citizens had taken matters into their own hands against this Yellow Peril. In Los Angeles, twenty-one Chinese people were shot,
¹⁹⁷
hanged, or burned alive by white mobs, while in San Francisco, officials tried to forcibly move everyone in Chinatown into an area reserved for pig farms and other businesses that were designated as dirty and disease-ridden, until the courts ruled the policy was unconstitutional.
¹⁹⁸
So the authorities did the next best thing: they launched mass raids on Chinese homes and businesses, saying it was time to stop their opium use. The agents built a bonfire of opium-smoking equipment with flames “shooting 30 feet into the air,” as one observer put it: “The choking smoke spread its heavy mantle
¹⁹⁹
over Chinatown like a pall upon the dead.” The Harrison Act followed soon after.

Harry Anslinger did not create these underlying trends. His genius wasn’t for invention: it was for presenting his agents as the hand that would steady all these cultural tremblings. He knew that to secure his bureau’s future, he needed a high-profile victory, over intoxication and over the blacks, and so he turned back to Billie Holiday.

To finish her off, he called for his toughest agent—a man who was at no risk of falling in love with her, or anyone else.

The Japanese man couldn’t breathe. Colonel George White—a vastly obese white slab of a man
²⁰⁰
—had his hands tightened around his throat, and he was not letting go. It was the last the Japanese man ever saw. Once it was all over, White told the authorities he strangled this “Jap” because he believed he was a spy. But privately, he told his friends he didn’t really know if his victim was a spy at all, and he didn’t care. “I have a lot of friends who are murderers,”
²⁰¹
he bragged years later, and “I had very good times in their company.” He boasted to his friends that he kept a photo of the man he had throttled
²⁰²
hanging on the wall of his apartment, always watching him. So as he got to work on Billie, Colonel White was watched by his last victim, and this made him happy.

He was Harry Anslinger’s favorite agent, and when he looked over Holiday’s files, he declared her to be “a very attractive customer,”
²⁰³
because the Bureau was “at a loose end” and could do with the opportunity “to kick her over.”
²⁰⁴

White had been a journalist in San Francisco in the 1930s until he applied to join the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The personality test given to all applicants on Anslinger’s orders found that he was a sadist.
²⁰⁵
He quickly rose through the bureau’s ranks. He became a sensation as the first and only white man ever to infiltrate a Chinese drug gang, and he even learned to speak in Mandarin so he could chant their oaths with them. In his downtime, he would go swimming in the filthy waters
²⁰⁶
of New York City’s Hudson River, as if daring it to poison him.

He was especially angered that this black woman didn’t know her place. “She flaunted her way of living, with her fancy coats and fancy automobiles and her jewelry and her gowns,” he complained. “She was the big lady wherever she went.”
²⁰⁷

When he came for her on a rainy day at the Mark Twain Hotel in San Francisco without a search warrant, Billie was sitting in white silk pajamas
²⁰⁸
in her room. This was one of the few places she could still perform, and she badly needed the money. She insisted to the police that she had been clean for over a year. White’s men declared they had found opium stashed in a wastepaper basket next to a side room and the kit for shooting heroin in the room, and they charged her with possession.
²⁰⁹
But when the details were looked at later, there seemed to be something odd: a wastepaper basket seems an improbable place to keep a stash, and the kit for shooting heroin was never entered into evidence by the cops—they said they left it at the scene. When journalists asked White about this, he blustered; his reply, they noted, “appeared a little defensive.”
²¹⁰

That night, White came to Billie’s show at the Café Society Uptown, and he requested his favorite songs. She never lost faith in her music’s ability to capture and persuade. “They’ll remember me,”
²¹¹
she said, “when all this is gone, and they’ve finished badgering me.” George White did not agree. “I did not think much of Ms Holiday’s performance,”
²¹²
he told her manager sternly.

Billie insisted the junk had been planted in her room by White, and she immediately offered to go into a clinic to be monitored: she would experience no withdrawal symptoms,
²¹³
she said, and that would prove she was clean and being framed. She checked herself in at a cost of one thousand dollars,
²¹⁴
and she didn’t so much as shiver.

George White, it turns out, had a long history of planting drugs on women. He was fond of pretending to be an artist
²¹⁵
and luring women to an apartment in Greenwich Village where he would spike their drinks with LSD
²¹⁶
to see what would happen. One of his victims was a young actress
²¹⁷
who happened to live in his building, while another was a pretty blond waitress in a bar. After she failed to show any sexual interest in him, he drugged her
²¹⁸
to see if that would change. “I toiled whole-heartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun,” White boasted. “Where else [but in the Bureau of Narcotics] could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage
²¹⁹
with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?” He may well have been high when he busted Billie for getting high.