489 the War on Drugs
This song sent a shiver down my back ... Strange Fruit, by Billie Holiday.
Strange Fruit
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulgin' eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burnin' flesh
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop
The song is said to have been the first song about anti-racism ever ... and Billie Holiday paid for it dearly ...
“When it comes to (the mistreatment of …) African Americans, one of the best places to start is this story about Billie Holiday. Harry Anslinger was probably the most influential person that no one’s ever heard of. He took over the Department of Prohibition just as alcohol prohibition was ending, so he had this big government bureaucracy with very little to do. And he was driven by two intense hatreds: One was a hatred of addicts, and the other was a hatred of African Americans.
"He was regarded as an extreme racist by the racists of the 1930s. This is a guy who used the “N” word in official memos so often that his own senator said he should have to resign. He found out at about the same time that three famous Americans were addicts, and he treated them very differently. I think that tells you something.
"Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, and Joe McCarthy were all addicts. Judy Garland was told to take slightly longer vacations, and Anslinger reassured the studio she was going to be fine. Joe McCarthy was given a safe and legal prescription for opiates from a pharmacy in Washington, D.C. And Billie Holiday was stalked onto her deathbed, arrested, and completely destroyed.
"In 1939 Billie Holiday first sang “Strange Fruit,” the famous anti-lynching song. That night the Federal Bureau of Narcotics told her to stop singing the song, because according to Anslinger, it represented everything that was wrong with America.”
This is an extract from an interview by Sam Harris with Johann Hari, entitled A War Well Lost ... the story of the War Against Drugs. Oh boy, do I agree with them.
S. Harris: "Why did the drug war begin, and who started it?"
J. Hari: "It’s really fascinating ... to find the answers, I went on this long journey - across nine countries, 30,000 miles - and I learned that almost everything I thought at the start was basically wrong. Drugs aren’t what we think they are. The drug war isn’t what we think it is. Drug addiction isn’t what we think it is. And the alternatives aren’t what we think they are.
"If you had said to me, “Why were drugs banned?” I would have guessed that most people, if you stopped them in the street, would say, “We don’t want people to become addicted, we don’t want kids to use drugs,” that kind of thing.
(But ...) "the official statements (at the time, 100 years ago) are extraordinary. A typical one said, “The cocaine nigger sure is hard to kill.” Sheriffs across certain parts of the United States increased the caliber of their bullets because they believed African American men were taking cocaine and ravaging and attacking white people. The main way I tell about that in the book is through the story of how the founder of the war on drugs, Harry Anslinger, played a crucial role in stalking and killing Billie Holiday, the great jazz singer, which blew my mind when I first learned it ..."
"I think this story tells us so much about the origins of the drug war - the degree to which it was about race, then and now, and how they prefigure what we do to addicts today. People who are addicts are in terrible pain - Billie Holiday was raped and prostituted as a child - and we take these people and inflict more pain and suffering on them, and then we’re surprised they don’t stop taking drugs."
Read the article, this is a part of history that has great import today. Here's more wonderful music ...