From Salon.com:
The book that helped Johann Hari was one he stumbled upon in the stacks of the Senate library in Washington, D.C.
βI found a book that almost vanished as far as I could tell called Drug Addicts are Human Beings," said Hari.
He pulled this book out from oblivion on his quest to understand the War on Drugs, which is over 100 years old. The book was written by a doctor, Henry Smith Williams. Published in 1938, this was a book that told the future.
βDrug Addicts are Human Beings is an eerie book because you read it and you see that there was a man who saw everything that was coming down the line. He saw exactly what the drug war would mean. He saw it exactly, how many people it would kill. He saw that there was an alternative that would save their lives,β says Hari. βThese were insights that were widely known and that were systematically destroyed and dismantled.β
And they were systematically destroyed and dismantled primarily by one man: Harry Anslinger.
βI think if you want to understand why the drug war started, and why it continues today, it's really important to understand this man: Harry Anslinger," says Hari. "I think [he's] the most influential person who hardly anyone's ever heard of.β
In the 1930s, these two men β Dr. Henry Smith Williams and bureaucrat Harry Anslinger β were at odds with one another about how to deal with the problem of addiction.
βOne of things that was so shocking, looking at the early history of the drug war, was to realize, oh, this was massively contested,β says Hari. βThis did not just slide into history. There was a huge fight about whether this thing was ever going to happen, and it could have gone the other way.β
Henry Smith Williams (1863-1943) was a medical doctor, lawyer, and author of a number of books on medicine, history, and science.
