Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (7 page)

The prosecution of Billie went ahead. “The hounding and the pressure
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drove me,” she wrote, “to think of trying the final solution, death.” Her best friend said it caused Billie “enough anxieties to kill a horse.”
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At the trial, a jury of twelve ordinary citizens heard all the evidence. They sided with Billie against Anslinger and White, and found her not guilty.
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Nonetheless, “she had slipped from the peak of her fame,” Harry Anslinger wrote. “Her voice was cracking.”
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In the years after Billie’s trial, many other singers were too afraid of being harassed by the authorities to perform “Strange Fruit.” But Billie Holiday refused to stop. No matter what they did to her, she sang her song.

“She was,” her friend Annie Ross told me, “as strong as she could be.” To the end, Billie Holiday kept the promise she had made to herself back in Baltimore when she was a little girl. She didn’t bow her head to anyone.

When Billie was forty-four years old, a young musician named Frankie Freedom was serving her a bowl of oatmeal and custard in his apartment when she suddenly collapsed.
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She was taken to the Knickerbocker Hospital in Manhattan and made to wait for an hour and a half on a stretcher, and they said she was a drug addict and turned her away.
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One of the ambulance drivers recognized her,
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so she ended up in a public ward of New York City’s Metropolitan Hospital. As soon as they took her off oxygen,
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she lit a cigarette.

“Some damnbody is always trying to embalm me,”
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she said, but the doctors came back and explained she had an array of very serious illnesses: she was emaciated because she had not been eating; she had cirrhosis of the liver because of chronic drinking; she had cardiac and respiratory problems due to chronic smoking; and she had several leg ulcers
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caused by starting to inject street heroin once again. They said she was unlikely to survive for long
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—but Harry wasn’t done with her yet. “You watch, baby,”
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Billie warned from her tiny gray hospital room. “They are going to arrest me in this damn bed.”

Narcotics agents were sent to her hospital bed and said they had found less than one-eighth of an ounce of heroin
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in a tinfoil envelope. They claimed it was hanging on a nail on the wall,
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six feet from the bottom of her bed—a spot Billie was incapable of reaching. They summoned a grand jury
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to indict her, telling her that unless she disclosed her dealer,
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they would take her straight to prison. They confiscated
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her comic books, radio, record player, flowers, chocolates, and magazines, handcuffed her to the bed,
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and stationed two policemen at the door. They had orders to forbid any visitors
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from coming in without a written permit, and her friends were told there was no way to see her.
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Her friend Maely Dufty screamed at them
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that it was against the law to arrest somebody who was on the critical list. They explained that the problem had been solved: they had taken her off the critical list.

So now, on top of the cirrhosis of the liver, Billie went into heroin withdrawal, alone. A doctor was brought into the hospital at the insistence of her friends to prescribe methadone. She was given it for ten days and began to recover: she put on weight and looked better. But then the methadone was suddenly stopped,
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and she began to sicken again. When finally a friend was allowed in to see her, Billie told her in a panic: “They’re going to kill me. They’re going to kill me in there. Don’t let them.” The police threw the friend out. “I had very high hopes that she would be able to come out of it alive,”
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another friend, Alice Vrbsky, told the BBC, until all this happened. “It was the last straw.”

One day, her pimp-husband Louis MacKay turned up at the hospital—after informing on her—and ostentatiously read the Twenty-Third Psalm over her bed. It turned out he wanted her to sign over the rights to her autobiography to him, the last thing she still controlled. She pretended to be unconscious. As soon as he was gone, she opened her eyes. “I’ve always been a religious bitch,”
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she said, “but if that dirty motherfucker believes in God, I’m thinking it over.”

On the street outside the hospital, protesters gathered, led by a Harlem pastor named the Reverend Eugene Callender. They held up signs reading “Let Lady Live.” Callender had built a clinic for heroin addicts in his church,
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and he pleaded for Billie to be allowed to go there to be nursed back to health. His reasoning was simple, he told me in 2013: addicts, he said, “are human beings, just like you and me.” Punishment makes them sicker; compassion can make them well. Harry and his men refused. They fingerprinted Billie on her hospital bed. They took a mug shot of her on her hospital bed.
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They grilled her on her hospital bed
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without letting her talk to a lawyer.

Billie didn’t blame Anslinger’s agents as individuals; she blamed the drug war itself
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—because it forced the police to treat ill people like criminals. “Imagine if the government chased sick people
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with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn’t treat them,” she wrote in her memoir, “then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs.”

Still, some part of Billie Holiday believed she had done something evil, with her drug use, and with her life. She told people she would rather die than go back to prison, but she was terrified that she would burn in hell
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—just as her mother had said she would all those years before, when she was a little girl lying on the brothel floor, listening to Louis Armstrong’s music and letting it carry her out of Baltimore. “She was exhausted,” one of her friends told me. “She didn’t want to go through it no more.”

And so, when she died on this bed, with police officers at the door to protect the public from her, she looked—as another of her friends told the BBC—“as if she had been torn from life violently.”
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She had fifteen fifty-dollar bills strapped to her leg. It was all she had left. She was intending to give it to the nurses
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who had looked after her, to thank them.

Her best friend, Maely Dufty, insisted to anyone who would listen that Billie had been effectively murdered by a conspiracy to break her, orchestrated by the narcotics police—but what could she do? At Billie’s funeral, there were swarms of police cars,
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because they feared their actions against her would trigger a riot. In his eulogy for her, the Reverend Eugene Callender told me he had said: “We should not be here. This young lady was gifted by her creator with tremendous talent . . . She should have lived to be at least eighty years old.”

The Federal Bureau of Narcotics saw it differently. “For her,” Harry wrote with satisfaction, “there would be no more ‘Good Morning Heartache.’ ”
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It is easy to judge Harry Anslinger. But if we are honest, I suspect that everybody who has ever loved an addict—everybody who has ever been an addict—has this impulse in them somewhere. Destroy the addiction. Kill the addiction. Throttle it with violence. Harry Anslinger is our own darkest impulses, given a government department and a license to kill.

As I researched this book, I traveled a long way from the farm fields of Pennsylvania—but at every step, I began to feel I was chasing the scream that terrified little Harry Anslinger all those years ago, as it echoed out across the world.

In his private files, Harry kept a poem that had been sent in by an admiring member of the public, addressed directly to him. It defined for Harry his mission in life. Until the day that “the Great Judge proclaims: / ‘The last addict’s died,’
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 ” the poem said, “Then—not till then—may you be retired.”

Chapter 2

Sunshine and Weaklings

In Harry Anslinger’s files I began to notice a few names that he raged against repeatedly, as monsters who were trying to sabotage his work and spread drugs throughout America. This intrigued me. Who were these people? Who, for example, were Edward Williams and Henry Smith Williams?

I began to follow a paper trail through file folders, old court records,  and yellowing books, and I uncovered a story that, as far I can tell, has been almost entirely forgotten
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for more than sixty years now—yet it has the power to transform how we see this whole war.

The drug war was born in the United States—but so was the resistance to it. Right at the start, there were people who saw that the drug war was not what we were being told. It was something else entirely.

Harry Anslinger wanted to make sure we would never put these pieces together.

In the sunshine of Los Angeles, there was a doctor in the early 1930s named Henry Smith Williams, with a long, unsmiling face. He wore small wire-framed glasses
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through which he peered down on the world and at almost everyone in it. This doctor shared all of Harry Anslinger’s hatreds. He said that addicts were “weaklings”
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who should never have been brought into the world and wrote that “the idea that every human life has genuine value . . .
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and therefore is something to be treasured, is an absurd banality. The world would be far better off if forty percent of its inhabitants had never been born.” In his view, drugs led only to destruction,
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and nobody should take them, ever.