Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (28 page)

Marisela’s eldest son, Juan, made it to the United States. I met him in a city there that he has asked me not to name, for his own safety.

“I just want for you to understand,” he said, “who the real victims are in this war. It’s not the cartels, it’s not the police, but the people coming between [them in] this war.” When you picture the seventy thousand dead, don’t picture a drug dealer, or a drug user—picture Marisela. She is more representative. And it is all, he says, for nothing. “Since the war started, the cartels have got stronger. The drugs, they won’t stop—if you walk the streets of Mexico and the United States, drugs are still selling on the streets, drugs are still in the schools. They haven’t stopped anything at all.”

“Of course the control of the drugs, the routes, is what gives them the money to pay off cops, military, federal police—everyone,” Juan told me. “If you legalize drugs they are going to lose a lot of money.” When they legalized alcohol in the United States, lots of gangsters were bankrupted. Would it be similar in Mexico, I ask him, if drugs were legalized? “Of course. There’s going to be less sources of money.” But he feared that now, the cartels’ control
⁸
is so deep they would simply transfer to other forms of crime.

As he spoke, I found myself thinking back to the start of this war. Harry Anslinger himself wrote
⁹
in the 1960s: “Prohibition, conceived as a moral attempt to improve the American way of life, would ultimately cast the nation into a turmoil. One cannot help but think in retrospect that Prohibition, by depriving Americans of their ‘vices,’ only created the avenues through which organized crime gained its firm foothold.”

Marisela’s other son, Paul, is severely autistic, so he can’t fully understand what happened. But when we met, he wanted to show me something. It is Google Maps, on a laptop. He looks obsessively at the house where he lived with Marisela. He says, staring at the screen: “It’s dangerous. I can’t go back. But my house is fine. Nothing’s going to happen. I hope they don’t burn it. I hope they don’t burn my house. Everything’s going to be fine over there.” And he smiles, awkwardly, looking away from me.

Difficult questions continued to be asked about the case, and what it revealed about the drug war and corruption in Mexico. In November 2012, the Mexican police surrounded a house in the state of Zacatecas. Four men were shot dead. One of them was Sergio.

It is not what the family
¹⁰
wanted. Now there will be no trial, and there will be no opportunity to ask any uncomfortable questions.

Before all this happened, back when she was a nurse, Marisela had something she loved to do. She would take a break from looking after her kids and working hard for them, and she would climb onto her motorbike and ride far out into the desert, with the sand and the breeze in her hair.

As I traveled across Mexico, I kept asking myself—If it is condemning sixty thousand of their countrymen to violent murder and has butchered the rule of law, why is this country fighting the drug war at all?

The most articulate analyst of the drug war I could find is Sandra Rodriguez, a journalist in her early forties. She has remained at her post as chief crime reporter for the Juárez newspaper
El Diario
even as her colleagues are murdered all around her. Over a glass of wine in a friend’s apartment in Juárez, I asked her why this was happening to her city, and she said straight off: “Mexico is not deciding this policy . . . This war, this criminalization strategy, is imposed by the U.S. government.”

I only really understood what she meant later, when I started researching the history of how this happened.

In the 1930s, Mexico watched its neighbor to the north launch drug prohibition, and they saw that it wouldn’t work—so they decided to choose a very different path. In Mexico City, the country’s leading expert on drugs
¹¹
was a sober-minded doctor named Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, who ran a hospital treating drug addicts, so he was considered to be a good person to put in charge of the country’s drug policy. The president appointed him chief
¹²
of the Alcohol and Narcotic Service.

This Mexican started to make the same discoveries
¹³
as the silenced California doctor Henry Smith Williams, at precisely the same time. He published a fourteen-year study demonstrating that cannabis does not cause psychosis,
¹⁴
and talking about the “myth of marijuana,”
¹⁵
and when it came to other drugs, he explained: “It is impossible
¹⁶
to break up the traffic in drugs because of the corruption of the police and also because of the wealth and political influence of some of the traffickers.” Unless, that is, you resist the whole idea of the drug war. Keep drugs legal, he said. Have their sale controlled and supplied by the state, so it can regulate their use, purity, and price. This would prevent criminals
¹⁷
from controlling the trade and so end drug trafficking and the violence and chaos it causes.

Just as Henry Smith Williams had to be crushed by Anslinger for showing there was a better alternative to prohibition, so did Leopoldo Salazar. Harry started demanding that he be fired. He instructed Mexico’s representative at the League of Nations that addicts “were criminals first
¹⁸
and addicts afterwards”—and before long, on American orders, he was forced from office.
¹⁹

But Mexico wouldn’t surrender its convictions for long: a few years later, it resumed providing narcotics legally to addicts who needed them, in order to smother the new rise of the cartels. Harry responded by immediately cutting off the entire country’s supply of opiates for pain relief in its hospitals. Mexicans literally writhed in agony.
²⁰
Mexico now had no choice. Its government started to fight the drug war obediently, and the U.S. Treasury’s officials declared: “This is a notable victory for Harry
²¹
Anslinger.” The first step of Marisela’s long march was taken on that day.

The U.S. government has approached Mexico with the same threat as the cartels—
plato o plomo
. Silver or lead. We can give you economic “aid” to fight this war, or we can wreck your economy if you don’t. Your choice.

What is never an option is to pursue a rational drug policy.

In 2012, not longer after Marisela was killed, Michele Leonhart, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said that the level of violence and death in Mexico is in fact “a sign of success
²²
in the fight against drugs.”

On one of my final days in Juárez, I was driven out to the sand dunes that lie just beyond the city’s sprawl, and I looked back over the flat, semiabandoned city where Rubi met Sergio, and Marisela found her in the pile of pig bones.

I ran my fingers through the prickly-hot white sand and tried to picture these three teenagers I have learned so much about sitting together at a party in a Mexico that had been allowed to choose drug peace instead of drug war. Lady Gaga is playing in the background. Rubi is texting her mother, laughing. Juan, stripped of his angel wings, is chatting with Rosalio about World of Warcraft. They might, I like to think, have been friends.

Part IV

The Temple

Chapter 11

The Grieving Mongoose

Sometimes, after journeying to the front lines of the drug war in Brownsville or in Juárez or in Tent City, I would go back to an anonymous hotel room and ask myself one question. Why? Why are these people being shot or beheaded or cooked? What is the purpose of this war?

I looked again at the official reasons. The United Nations says the war’s rationale is to build “a drug-free world
¹
—we can do it!” U.S. government officials agree, stressing that “there is no such thing
²
as recreational drug use.” So this isn’t a war to stop addiction, like that in my family, or teenage drug use. It is a war to stop drug use among all humans, everywhere. All these prohibited chemicals need to be rounded up and removed from the earth. That is what we are fighting for.

I began to see this goal differently after I learned the story of the drunk elephants, the stoned water buffalo, and the grieving mongoose. They were all taught to me by a remarkable scientist in Los Angeles named Professor Ronald K. Siegel.

The tropical storm in Hawaii had reduced the mongoose’s home to a mess of mud, and lying there, amid the dirt and the water, was the mongoose’s mate—dead. Professor Siegel, a silver-haired official adviser to two U.S. presidents
³
and to the World Health Organization, was watching this scene. The mongoose found the corpse, and it made a decision: it wanted to get out of its mind.
⁴

Two months before, the professor had planted a powerful hallucinogen called silver morning glory in the pen. The mongooses had all tried it, but they didn’t seem to like it: they stumbled around disoriented for a few hours and had stayed away from it ever since. But not now. Stricken with grief, the mongoose began to chew. Before long, it had tuned in and dropped out.

It turns out this wasn’t a freak occurrence in the animal kingdom. It is routine. As a young scientific researcher, Siegel had been confidently told by his supervisor that humans were the only species that seek out drugs to use for their own pleasure. But Siegel had seen cats lunging at catnip—which, he knew, contains chemicals that mimic the pheromones in a male tomcat’s pee—so, he wondered, could his supervisor really be right? Given the number of species in the world, aren’t there others who want to get high, or stoned, or drunk?

This question set him on a path that would take twenty-five years of his life, studying the drug-taking habits of animals from the mongooses of Hawaii to the elephants of South Africa to the grasshoppers of Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia. It was such an implausible mission that in one marijuana field in Hawaii, he was taken hostage by the local drug dealers, because when he told them he was there to see what happened when mongooses ate marijuana, they thought it was the worst police cover story they had ever heard.