The War On the War On Drugs

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 45
Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

President Nixon first used the phrase “War On Drugs” in 1971, but Harry J. Anslinger, founding director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, used war metaphors in the 1930s. The Harrison Act, which banned formerly legal tinctures of coca and opium, passed in 1914, and under American pressure, other governments passed similar blanket drug bans. Yet somehow, drugs and their attendant problems persist. Drugs underwrite Mexico’s ongoing civil violence, and undergird American poverty. What gives?

Anglo-Swiss journalist Johann Hari, who has witnessed drug addiction in his family and admits struggling with amphetamine abuse himself, unpacks the global drug war, a quest that carries him from the Vancouver to Juárez to Liverpool, and from Great Depression to the Great Recession. The facts he uncovers challenge top-level sacred cows. Many common assumptions, from drugs themselves to addicts’ motivations, come under fire, daring readers, regardless of their politics, to evaluate their prior prejudices.

From its foundations, the drug war has reflected its generals’ values above science. Anslinger believed addicts so subhuman that any legal overreach was acceptable to squelch them. He made exceptions, though: Anslinger made destroying Billie Holiday his personal mission, but gave Judy Garland a free pass. Anslinger’s prohibitionist tendencies, and sense of moral mission, created entire new classes of criminals. He also empowered the Mafia by channeling control of world drug trafficking into organized crime.

But Hari doesn’t linger in the past. Scarcely has he laid out the drug war’s historical foundations, than he rockets into its present-day ramifications. Comparing Brooklyn turf competitions with Mexican cartel violence, Hari shows how American prohibition basically subsidizes both sides of the ongoing conflict. But some people have chosen to stand fast. From a cadre of Juárez schoolchildren, to a former street pusher turned scholar, Hari profiles activists who prove today’s circumstances aren’t inevitable.

Johann Hari

Why do drugs remain immune to police pressure? Interviewing law enforcement professionals, Hari shows that drugs don’t behave like other crimes. Where rounding up burglars reduces burglary stats, rounding up drug traffickers has little visible impact. Drugs have economic drivers most other major crimes lack, meaning when cops bust one pusher, somebody somewhere is hungry enough to fill the gap. Many police have become disillusioned, and begun pressuring for new approaches. (See also Howard Rahtz.)

This economic momentum also changes how we address addicts. Our current approach treats all drug users equally, squeezing them into marginal status. Anyone with a drug record is unilaterally excluded from government jobs, student loans, public assistance, and other hands up. This means convicted users, turned loose again, has few opportunities to earn a living, except to resume their former drug war roles. The drug war thus becomes a self-sealing argument, destined never to change.

And who, exactly, are these addicts? Anti-drug programs like DARE, and Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign, have been driven by Harry Anslinger’s moral impetus, but recent science calls common rhetoric into question. Researchers Hari interviews, like Gabor Maté and Bruce Alexander, have studied addicts as they actually are. They’ve made some remarkable discoveries, not least of which is: addicts have plenty in common before they ever discover drugs. Maybe if we treated underlying needs…?

Change is certainly possible. The city of Vancouver, British Columbia, saw an organized movement by local addicts that changed how the city treated its poorest citizens. Since then, Vancouver addicts’ life expectancies have expanded by ten years. The states of Colorado and Washington both famously legalized recreational marijuana, though for very different reasons outsiders probably missed. Entire countries, like Portugal and Switzerland, changed their addict treatment programs, and violence, disease, and overdose death all plunged.

For Hari, this isn’t merely academic. He bookends his journalism with personal narratives of loved ones who’ve descended into addiction, and how his researches have forced him to change how he treats them. Hari also briefly alludes to his own struggle with amphetamines as a binge-writing tool. He neglects to mention that his amphetamine abuse submarined his British journalism career. This book represents Hari’s efforts to confront the damage he’s done, and reclaim his integrity.

This book represents cause-oriented journalism, in the best way. Hari begins with a simple premise, that what we’re doing now doesn’t work, and another way must exist. He doesn’t start with simplistic alternatives in mind, and admits struggling with the conclusions his sources imply, because they contradict everything we think we know about drugs. But even if we cannot accept everything he discovers, Hari nevertheless gives us reason to hope today’s failed approaches can change.

Those Who Don't Learn From History

A march by right-wing German nationalist group PEGIDA. The banner reads:
"Nonviolent & United Against Faith Wars on German Soil!"
Notice the trash bin containing both an Islamic flag and a swastika.

Recent news coverage of anti-Islamic protests in Europe have begun trickling into America, possibly despite America's’ best efforts. Generally, if it doesn’t involve Downton Abbey or timeshares in Ibiza, it’s hard to get Americans interested in European events beneath the national election level. Yet recent rallies by Germany’s PEGIDA nationalist movement, or France’s frankly creepy Front National party, have disturbingly familiar textures. And they reflect worrisome prospects in America’s domestic politics, unless we keep watch.

Steve Wick’s The Long Night, a biography of pioneering journalist William Shirer, describes Shirer’s time in Europe after World War I. Arriving in Hemingway’s Paris, he knocked around, enjoying the same nightlife that America’s legendary expatriates recorded, while attempting to find stringer work for American newspapers. But sometime around 1930, Europe’s economy imploded. Shirer, working for Edward R. Murrow and NBC, watched the Europe he loved descend into street violence, serial blaming, and early fascism.

Wick, quoting Shirer, does better describing Europe’s decline than I could. But watching news arising from today’s EU, and its eerie parallels in certain American political sectors, the historical patterns defy easy dismissal. Lavish lifestyles, subsidized by hefty consumer debt, came crashing like Jenga pieces when creditors could loan nothing further. Those who profited from ill-considered acquisitions found what they’d acquired suddenly worthless. Seeking to shift blame off themselves, they sought a designated scapegoat class.

Both PEGIDA and the Tea Party claim no racial motivation whatsoever, as Hitler and Mussolini did; yet they seek scapegoats easily recognizable by external characteristics. Jews, Gypsies, Arabs, Mexicans—regardless of particulars, the visible themes remain. The population that enjoys power perceives itself newly powerless, and seeks another population to blame. Problems always originate somewhere else. Importantly, they believe themselves oppressed by this otherwise powerless minority, whether it’s “Jewish bankers” or “illegals stealing our jobs.”

Tzvetan Todorov acknowledges that the last several years have seen a resurgence in European race-based bigotry. Yet he insists this doesn’t mean a return to Depression-era Fascism, but rather closing the book on that historical gulf. One wonders how that works. PEGIDA and the Front National are repeating behaviors familiar from world history textbooks, which doesn’t exactly suggest winding back the clock. Indeed, since familiar behaviors follow familiar precursors, it’s naive to expect different outcomes.

A Front National campaign poster from 2010. It reads:
"Enough Anti-French Racism, We're At Home!"

Lutz Bachmann, leader of PEGIDA, was recently shamed into hiding after a photo surfaced of him posing as Hitler. PEGIDA, to its credit, disavowed Bachmann altogether. Yet the underlying thinking was all too visible. Certainly, to joke about Hitler doesn’t make one secretly fascist; considering my occasional Hitler, Archie Bunker, and Old South wisecracks, I cannot cast aspersions. Yet Bachmann didn’t just make this joke; he preserved it. He was only ashamed at getting caught.

Britain elected David Cameron PM, and Germany retained Angela Merkel, despite their policies being massively unpopular. France voted out Nicolas Sarkozy, the first French President turfed out after one term since 1981, but that basically involved French voters holding their noses while name-checking the other guy. Marine Le Pen’s nationalist, anti-immigrant Front National, possibly Europe’s most overtly racist political force, came within ten points of final-round elections, reflecting French disaffection with the two mainstream parties.

On American shores, voters elected a wholly Republican Congress, while asking legislators to support policy platforms specifically opposite to the Republican agenda, apparently without irony. Louisiana Congressman Steve Scalise continues trying to walk back sometime racist affiliations. Sarah Palin gets agitated whenever somebody points out far-right policies have lopsided racial implications, claiming anybody who notices racism is secretly racist. “States’ Rights,” that pre-Civil War shibboleth of people nerving themselves to treason, has seen uncanny resurgence.

For history readers, the pattern is unmistakable. Europe descended into fascism in the 1930s, and the principle enjoyed remarkable American popularity; the unabashedly pro-Hitler folk hero, Charles Lindbergh, was a presidential front-runner until the outbreak of European violence derailed him. The conditions that precipitated transnational fascism in 1933 exist today, in both Europe and America. The fact that similar responses have cropped up in multiple countries should persuade doubters that we have cause to worry.

History readers have the reassurance, though, that history is written. We know what happened before, and why; we know how similar circumstances have arisen today, and we have the capacity to say we won’t repeat yesterday’s disasters. Elected leaders, media professionals, economic touchstones, and ordinary citizens have the opportunity, and the responsibility, to stand fast against creeping fanaticism. We have the power to repeat, or resist, history’s tides. Our next steps depend entirely upon us.

A common Tea Party slogan. I shouldn't have to state the parallels.

Neurocapitalism

Valeh Nazemoff, The Four Intelligences of the Business Mind: How to Rewire Your Brain and Your Business for Success

First-time entrepreneurs stereotypically commence their careers with one of two approaches. Either they rely upon unique flashes of creative insight, which may show glimmerings of inspiration; or they front an analytical, data-driven technique that mainly repeats what others have accomplished previously. Valeh Nazemoff believes real success combines these two approaches. But having aggregated the left and right brains, she immediately identifies wholly new components.

Nazemoff, a business consultant whose résumé includes Walmart, Lockheed Martin, and several government agencies, lumps intellectual approaches into four angles: Financial, Customer, Data, and Mastermind Intelligence. Each serves specific roles within business structures, and each subdivides into further unique specialties. Her description runs short, punchy, free of ornamentation, and her discursive technique attracts a very self-selecting audience. Only you know if that includes you.

First, what this book isn’t. Nazemoff doesn’t use a narrative approach, like Malcolm Gladwell or Duncan J. Watts. She doesn’t tell stories to introduce concepts, and doesn’t consciously connect her important points to historical precedent. She assumes audiences already share her fundamental interest in “neuroeconomics,” and proceeds directly into difficult, sometimes jargon-laden explanations of complicated topics. Nazemoff demands an audience as dedicated to her topic as herself.

This produces a very slim book, under 120 pages including back matter. She doesn’t bother fleshing topics out once she’s introduced them; much of her text consists of bullet lists, schematics, and flow charts. Though occasionally she introduces narrative elements that connect hypothetical ideas to concrete examples—one extended interview with a Veterans’ Administration administrator comes to mind—she largely assumes you understand her thesis without clarification or object lessons.

Similarly, though Nazemoff names concepts, she doesn’t elucidate instructions. She frequently throws business terminology aggressively, like a thought grenade, and trusts audiences to comprehend what she’s said and why it matters. Very complicated principles like PR or social media marketing get named, but nothing further. Nazemoff’s principles rely upon readers’ prior familiarity with business technique; she basically assumes an audience already versed in MBA procedures.

Valeh Nazemoff

Therefore, Nazemoff’s target audience doesn’t encompass aspiring entrepreneurs or sole proprietors. Throughout the text, Nazemoff implicitly expects readers to have a functioning business plan, and a managerial team segregated into utilitarian departments. She often mentions the separate but overlapping responsibilities of marketing, HR, and legal departments. Thus her assistance will primarily profit organizations large enough to foster actual departmental structure.

Not that entrepreneurs need not apply. Garage innovators and store-front start-ups can adapt Nazemoff’s technique. She just doesn’t write with such an audience in mind.

Rather than coaching newbs in rudimentary entrepreneurial principles, Nazemoff instructs established businesses in applying sophisticated approaches to existing plans. Oh, and what approaches she describes! Nazemoff anchors her precepts in “neuroeconomics,” a burgeoning discipline that, like its cousin Behavioral Economics, studies the core neurological origins of human action. By understanding how economic forces stimulate the prefrontal cortex, Nazemoff says, we can predict human economic action.

This is especially important because Nazemoff, unlike standard neoliberal economic business pros, doesn’t demand economic behavior follow famous graphs. The supply/demand arc, the Laffer curve, and other famous mathematical representations don’t appear herein. Instead, Nazemoff admits, your business is subject to unpredictable forces like “the economy, legislative mandates and regulations, customer and partner needs, technology implementations, and of course your competition.”

In such fluctuating environments, Nazemoff writes, human judgement becomes the one utility we cannot standardize and commodify. You must assess and respond to changing circumstances, which requires awareness, not only of your own deeper mental processes, but those of your clients and competitors, too. When is cooperation more economically viable than competition? What means of governing near- and long-term payoff ensures durable client loyalty? What patterns make our lives comprehensible?

These questions, Nazemoff explains, have no single answer. Rather, by understanding how human brains work, and what networks of action produce which common outcomes, we can make informed predictions and respond accordingly. Nazemoff reminds me of Duncan J. Watts, who writes that outcomes are never inevitable; we must resist the impulse to believe, because some event transpired, that event was deterministically predictable. Instead, we learn to read complex, sometimes contradictory evidence.

Consultants write books like this to support their business structures. They send copies ahead to advertise their services, or leave copies behind to memorialize their precepts in clients’ practices. Sometimes they merit reading separate from the consultant herself; usually they don’t. Nazemoff’s writing, because she eschews the journalistic touches Gladwell and Watts employ, makes tough reading. But it’s detailed, innovative, and up-to-the-minute enough to justify professionals’ time.

The Life Of Woman In 1001 Books

Samantha Ellis, How to Be a Heroine: Or, What I've Learned from Reading too Much

Upon a literary pilgrimage to the Brontë sisters’ isolated Yorkshire home, British playwright Samantha Ellis asked herself several important questions. Who’s a better female role model, Catherine Earnshaw or Jane Eyre? Why did Jo March and Anne Shirley apparently quit writing? In a life modeled on classic authors from Jane Austen to Margaret Mitchell, how much is truly her own? Seeking answers, Ellis returns to her beloved library, and rediscovers the controversies of literary womanhood.

Ellis combines literary criticism and intimate memoir to tell her own story, which, unpacked from its context, proves not her own. For Ellis, books aren’t artistic creations or cultural artifacts. Where too many academic critics treat literature scientifically, like some distant tribe they research dispassionately, Ellis has cozy relationships with her books. She allows literature to transform her, and she in turn transforms her literature; Laura Ingalls and Lady Lazarus become inextricably part of her.

Growing up amid London’s close-knit, often insular immigrant Jewish community, books form Ellis’s connection to larger society. Starting with literature’s established canon, mostly British with generous samplings of American and Commonwealth, she incrementally molds herself on fictional templates: rebellious wives, headstrong daughters, tempestuous women, unconventional girls. Where her community imposes standards of religious and cultural conformity upon her, she seeks adventure, glamour, satisfaction. She chases what, in books, appears to come easily to her heroines.

Her relationships with books resemble relationships with people. She embraces them, struggles with them, learns from them, and—to her constant chagrin—eventually she outgrows them. Just as with friends, our relationships with books change us, revealing our options to us, teaching us to view other people more completely, guiding us to understand ourselves better. Thus, though her books have the same words, in the same order, as yours, each one is unique to her.

“I’m beginning to think all readings are provisional, and that maybe we read heroines for what we need from them at the time,” Ellis writes, explaining her supposed misreading of EM Forster’s A Room With a View. But this line echoes forward and back throughout this book. Giddy childhood friendships with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, or LM Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, soured when both heroines, to please overbearing patriarchal husbands, flatly quit writing.

Samantha Ellis

Sadly, each stage of growing up brings new disillusionments. The heroines of childhood, created by broadly Victorian authors like Frances Hodgson Burnett and LM Montgomery, don’t survive Ellis’s teenage transition to social consciousness. An astonishing range of literary sexual temptations, from Judy Blume to Jilly Cooper, challenge her parents’ chaste authority. Fellow Cambridge alum Sylvia Plath carries Ellis through college, but becomes an albatross afterward. Each life stage’s charming mythology falls away with each evolution.

But Ellis also rediscovers why these heroines matter as adults—just because she’s written these ideas down doesn’t mean they’ve become fixed. Only as an adult does Ellis finish reading Alcott’s novels, and learn that Jo March vetoed her husband and resumed writing. Rereading Plath after adult-onset seizure disorder colored her life, she realizes Esther Greenwood isn’t heroic because she suffers; she’s heroic because she perseveres. Reading, like love, is a constant process of reinvention.

Diverse readers may find Ellis’ experience very particular. Despite her aggressively international reading selections, her story is intensely British, intensely Jewish, intensely female. As a literary critic, she doesn't indulge illusions of thematic transcendence or proclaim erudite judgements as “death of the author” or “chain of signifiers.” Ellis isn’t an academic; she writes about writers to make them clearer, to herself if nobody else. I contend her particularity, her personal approach, makes her truly universal.

Not that she’s averse to scholarly criticism. Alongside her love affair with novels, Ellis describes consciousness-raising encounters with Germaine Greer, Susie Orbach, and other feminist revisionists who influence her outlook. Once she discovers the tools to read favorite novels more critically, she discovers unexamined implications that frequently run so horrifying, I remember twice reeling back from Ellis’s text, moaning “holy shit.” Ellis also learns that literature sometimes counters critics; it’s okay to argue with scholars.

Books, like Swann’s famous macaroon, have powerful psychic abilities. Cracking the spine on some childhood favorite instantly transports you back to that moment, that period of your development, your ideas and hopes and loves. Ellis relives her life, sometimes nostalgically, sometimes ruefully, through the novels which once enlivened her. The result is sometimes shocking, but always honest. And, in examining her journey through a lifetime’s greedy reading, she encourages us to revisit our journey, too.

The Cancer of Liberty

Tzvetan Todorov, The Inner Enemies of Democracy

Newshounds my age recall the 20th Century, when democratic ideology stood up to, and ultimately outlasted, a string of autocratic political ideas: imperialism during WWI, fascism during WWII, Communism during the Cold War. But since 1991, when the USSR collapsed, Western democracy has wheeled through multiple enemies, latterly settling on international terrorism, though struggling to identify what “terrorism” means. Though radicalists still stage salutary challenges, we lack serious threats, which evidently bothers some powerful people.

Franco-Bulgarian critic Tzvetan Todorov, who grew up under Communism, knows something about institutional enemies. From Warsaw-pact governments that maintained order by squelching dissent, to rah-rah democracy that catered to citizens’ appetites, he’s experienced a range of modern social orders. While he agrees that democracy trumps its autocratic challengers, he contends the last generation or so has seen a radical shift in Western democracy’s self-figuration. In a world without global enemies, democracies simply invent their own.

American readers will primarily recognize Todorov from his literary criticism. But he’s actually written more social criticism, including revisionist takes on the American frontier myth, and the role of conflicting humanisms in European thought. His work has a strange duality: though packed with dense implications, in that French école normale style, yet written in unaffected language committed laypeople can understand. His writing isn’t easy by any stretch. Yet he unfolds splendidly for curious, resourceful readers.

Todorov perceives the arc of Western thought in terms I’d never previously considered: the conflict between Augustine and Pelagius. Where Augustine believed humans fundamentally aren’t free, and rely on divine grace for redemption, Pelagius rejected such determinism, insisting humans are free to strive after salvation. Ecumenical leaders supported Augustine, and excommunicated Pelagius, temporarily settling that debate; but Renaissance humanism resurrected the controversy. Western philosophy, especially politics and social science, now continues re-fighting that centuries-old battle.

Tzvetan Todorov

Todorov’s own religious inclinations remain unclear in this text; he keeps spiritual themes cagily impersonal. But despite citing religious analogies, he presents a wholly humanist examination of human social structure. He asserts, like Durkheim, that in a secular age, government assumes roles once belonging to God. And as Augustinian determinism or Pelagian liberty condition believers’ relationship to divine authority, today’s modern philosophic debates center on whether ordinary citizens must challenge or submit to human power.

This takes multiple forms. Todorov dedicates his longest discourse for what he terms “political messianism.” If the state is God, and democracies outlast other ideologies (for Todorov, “democracy” and “capitalism” are interchangeable), it follows that democracy offers the proven route to secular salvation. Todorov deplores when the powerful use “free speech” to excuse beating down already-oppressed populations. He also notes the correlation between populism and xenophobia; French paranoia about headscarves looms large in Todorov’s examinations.

Unsurprisingly, in an originally Francophonic book, Todorov addresses French democracy, and EU governance more broadly, in ways Americans aren’t accustomed to hearing from our media. (First published in French in 2012, it debuted in English in 2014. I commend translator Andrew Brown for negotiating concepts with no one-to-one equivalents.) Though he addresses America’s War on Terror, this Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkey saves his greatest disdain for that corporatist toad-eater, Nicolas Sarkozy. His language is frankly bracing.

Readers may recognize one theme Todorov repeatedly addresses without directly naming it: the Western will to martyrdom. When he quotes a Danish editor comparing himself to medieval reformists for mocking Muslims, a systematically marginalized minority, I had an insight. American conservative evangelicals tout their supposed oppression, despite Christianity’s outright majority. Powerful majorities yearn for oppressed status; Todorov writes, “It has to be said that, these days, the figure of the victim exerts an irresistible attraction.”

Reading this directly after the Charlie Hebdo massacre gave Todorov’s message an urgency he couldn’t have anticipated. French law protects certain minorities; shortly after the Charlie Hebdo killings, French authorities arrested a comedian for an anti-Semitic Facebook post. Charlie mocked a powerless, ostracized minority, then cried foul when that minority, defenseless in either government or media, hit back. The subsequent crocodile tears weren’t about free speech; they basically manufactured, or recycled, a new global enemy.

This book carries the shock of recognition. Todorov repeatedly hits informed readers with insights we’ve not suspected, but have lingered unspoken behind public discourse in our time. Spokespeople for democracy’s competing visions offer powerful, but incompatible, narratives of various enemies whose overwhelming, malignant might altogether jeopardizes modern freedom, because fear of totalitarian foes energizes free citizens. But in a world where global enemies offer only symbolic challenges, democracy’s real enemies dwell within our own borders.