Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs Read Online Free PDF

is, who she wants to be. All the time. Her demons were way deeper than drugs. Way deeper than prison. I don’t know what they were. They were her demons. I’m pretty sure I carry some from her, and now they’re mine.”
    He decided to quit all drugs except weed in one single swoop. He went to stay with a friend who nursed him through the shakes, wiped up his vomit, and brought him glasses of water. Now “there is no more numbness to be had,” he said.
    And so—flooded with feeling, violent torrents of feeling—he started to learn and read and think. He began to ask: Had his life been shaped by a policy decision that didn’t have to be made, and didn’t have to continue?

    Chino was standing on a New York street corner 14 once again, pacing nervously, and sweating a little. In front of him, there was a crowd of over a thousand people, and standing next to him was a member of the House of Representatives. We were in Foley Square, in lower Manhattan, on a spring day in 2012. Chino gave the word and everybody, including me, marched behind him to One Police Plaza, the headquarters for the New York Police Department. He walked determinedly, alone, his eyes focused on the middle distance. When we arrived, words erupted from him, through a throat covered with a tattoo of the Egyptian wind-sun god rising.
    “We’re not demanding anything that’s alien,” he said. “We want justice . . . Not just on the Upper West Side, but in Brownsville, Brooklyn, too! Not just in City Hall, but in Jamaica, Queens! . . . Now statistically we know who smokes marijuana at higher rates. They don’t look like me. They don’t look like you. They look like [Michael] Bloomberg [then the mayor of New York]. But they don’t face the collateral consequences of being deported, of having your housing taken, your financial aid stripped.”
    The crowd started to chant with him.
    “No justice!” said Chino.
    “No peace!” they replied. And it echoed out across the police plaza, across to the Department of Justice: “No justice!” “No peace!”
    He called this protest “a Tale of Two Cities.” Everybody gathered here knew the raw fact that drug use is evenly distributed throughout New York City—in fact, the evidence suggests white people are slightly more likely 15 to use and sell drugs—but in his neighborhood there is crackdown, violence, and warfare, while in the richer, paler neighborhoods there is freedom and rehab for the few who fall through the cracks. Harry Anslinger’s priorities and prejudices are still in place.
    “Our communities are the one that are targeted,” he said to the crowd. “Our communities are the ones that are locked up and sent to bookings so that they”—he gestured toward police HQ—“can get overtime, because we know that it’s about money, because apparently if it don’t make dollars in New York City, it don’t make sense.” The demonstration ended with the protesters—white, black, and brown in equal measure—sitting down and peacefully blockading the police building.
    Chino left to lead a class he took every week for young teenagers who were trying to stay out of gang life in the South Bronx. We jumped into a yellow cab and sped through Manhattan, pulling up outside a sign that said “No Exit.” Behind it, in a library, there were teenagers waiting for him. They had been growing up on the same drug war battlefields as Chino.
    “I don’t like people,” a fifteen-year-old girl said. “I barely leave my house . . . I just stick to myself.” She saw a boy get shot in the chin a few years back, she mentioned, almost casually. Her body language was turned inward, as if she were trying to shut herself down. Chino sat with her, listening intently. Next to her, a teenage boy reacted differently: “I feel I could kill somebody if I had to,” he said, with a smile full of swagger, and sadness.

    Until he was twenty-one, Chino regarded the drug laws as a force of nature, as