Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by lucky » Thu Jan 15, 2015 5:13 am
by American Dream » Thu Jan 15, 2015 2:20 pm
American Dream » Thu Jan 08, 2015 11:38 am wrote:
Dope smuggling, LSD manufacture, organised crime
http://datacide.c8.com/dope-smuggling-l ... 0s-london/
by American Dream » Thu Jan 15, 2015 3:08 pm
by American Dream » Thu Jan 15, 2015 3:34 pm
Robert Dellar
Splitting In Two: Mad Pride & Punk Rock Oblivion
(Unkant Publishing)
Robert Dellar’s new book is part autobiography, part social history and in places morphs into fiction. It covers both Dellar’s own life via punk rock and the dehumanisation of those deemed clinically insane by the powers that be. While in academia the idea that madness might be the only sane response to capitalist society is often discussed in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Oedipal theories, Dellar has a more hands on and activist approach to ‘bad craziness’. At the turn of this millennium, Dellar helped found the Mad Pride movement to fight against the stigmatisation of those labelled as having mental health problems.
Most of Splitting In Two consists of straight-forward accounts of Dellar’s life and his thirty odd years of involvement in the fight for the rights of psychiatric survivors. When the book occasionally blooms into what is obviously fiction, I take this to be Dellar’s way of illustrating how easy it is for anyone to go off their rocker in the sick and insane capitalist society that blights all our lives. The writing is never academic and it is much closer to a punk rock fanzine in tone than the post-modern abstractions of ‘anti-psychiatrists’. There are also quite a few pictures to break up the text. The title of the book and every chapter title is more or less a punk rock song, and the acts thus cited but not named are Alternative TV, The Damned, Sham 69, Annie Anxiety, The Flamin’ Groovies, The Adverts, The Raincoats, Johnny Moped, The Sex Pistols, The Lurkers, The Flies, Zounds, Public Image and The Saints. The musicians Dellar actually writes about because he has a personal involvement with them are generally lesser known but include The Apostles, The Astronauts and Alternative TV (and I’ll stop there although I haven’t got beyond bands whose names begin with ‘a’).
I personally know quite a few of the people Dellar writes about (as well as Dellar himself), but there is plenty in the Splitting In Two that I either didn’t know or had forgotten. For example, this description of the opening event for Hackney Anarchy Week at Chat’s Palace in 1996: ‘Stewart Home was heckled as “sexist” by some of the audience as he deadpanned a sequence from his classic novel Defiant Pose, in which a skinhead recites Abeizer Cope’s A Fiery Flying Roll while he gets a blow job in a boat floating down the Thames, London simultaneously being destroyed by anarchist rioting…’ (page 86). I got heckled a lot in the 1990s and while I remember the event at Chat’s Palace, I have no memory of having abuse hurled at me there, although I’m sure Dellar is right about this and I’ve simply forgotten it. What Robert doesn’t add was that I agreed to do this event thinking it was the launch for a fiction anthology he’d edited that included me. I didn’t know when I said I’d do it that it also counted as a part of Hackney Anarchy Week!
Just as usefully Splitting In Two draws out the relationship between drugs, death and mental health – because despite the scare stories run by the tabloid press, those stigmatised as crazy are far more likely to hurt themselves than to attack someone else. So suicides are a feature of Dellar’s book, including that of Pete Shaughnessy, who was another key figure in getting Mad Pride off the ground. Dellar deals with such matters in a personal but understated way. To cite just one instance of this (dealing with drugs rather than suicide), he writes: ‘Cat Monstersmith introduced me to Hackney artist Gini Simpson, thinking we’d get on, and a relationship began which was hard work but never dull… Gini was still traumatised following the breakdown of a disastrous affair with a guy named Miles, and although I avoided hard drugs, substance abuse was a permanent feature of the time we spent together. Nevertheless, Gini was ablaze with wild energy, creativity and blinding intelligence, and after five months of feeling as if I was in a virtual stupor, I felt enlivened’ (page 148). The understatement of Dellar’s phrase ‘hard work’ becomes clear as Simpson’s behaviour, including an attempt to kill two guys by running them down in her car, is described.
Although Splitting In Two is not written as a theoretical treatise, there is plenty of material within it with which one can think through – everything from capitalist society to the relationship between madness and punk rock. That said, it also contains many well-told stories. Dellar writes of taking the Hackney Patients Council 5-a-side football squad to play at Broadmoor. There he met Robert Hunter who was incarcerated for killing seven cops when he used dynamite to blow up Greater Manchester Police Station. Dellar quotes Hunter as saying: ‘There were ten coppers in there… and three got out alive. Luckily though, I got the one I wanted, the chief superintendent who was my dad. He’d been knocking my old dear about for a while and of course, something had to be done…’ (page 76).
Dellar knows how to deliver a punchline even if it comes out of someone else’s mouth. This and his humorous approach to what might otherwise be some very depressing subject matter makes Splitting In Two a fast and furious – not to mention deeply informative – read.
Datacide Author: Stewart Home
by American Dream » Fri Jan 16, 2015 11:41 am
by Searcher08 » Fri Jan 16, 2015 12:33 pm
by American Dream » Mon Jan 19, 2015 3:56 am
Coca has been, ancestrally, a sacred leaf. We, the indigenous, have had a profound respect toward it... a respect that includes that we don't "pisar" it (the verb "pisar" means to treat the leaves with a chemical substance, one of the first steps in the production of cocaine). In general, we only use it to acullicar: We chew it during times of war, during ritual ceremonies to salute Mother Earth (the Pachamama) or Father Sun or other Aymara divinities, like the hills. Thus, as an indigenous nation, we have never prostituted Mama Coca or done anything artificial to it because it is a mother. It is the occidentals who have prostituted it. It is they who made it into a drug. This doesn't mean that we don't understand the issue. We know that this plague threatens all of humanity and, from that perspective, we believe that those who have prostituted the coca have to be punished.
- former Bolivian guerrilla leader and presidential candidate Felipe Quispe, 2002
by lucky » Mon Jan 19, 2015 7:27 am
by American Dream » Mon Jan 19, 2015 9:31 am
by American Dream » Tue Jan 20, 2015 12:40 am
LONDON ART TRIPPING: A PSYCHOGEOGRAPICAL EXCURSION TAKING IN TWO GENERATIONS AND FIFTY YEARS.
The London art world is a labyrinth, and there are many different ways in which one might make one’s way through it. My own interests encompass the countercultural demimonde, rather than being contained by the gallery scene which is sometimes separated out from it by those art historians whose focus is objects rather than the human communities from which cultures emerge. This fifty year plus overview of London bohemia draws very much on my mother's life and experiences, as well as my own. In 1960 at the age of sixteen, my mother Julia Callan-Thompson (1944-1979) left Newport in south Wales for London. She immediately immersed herself in the Soho beatnik scene of the time. During the early to mid-sixties Julia worked as a hostess in Murray’s Cabaret Club alongside Profumo Affair scandal girl Christine Keeler, and also appeared as an extra in films such as "Accident", "Casino Royale", "Becket" and "Spy With A Cold Nose". She also did brief stints as a fashion model but drug dealing was a much more regular source of income for her. Julia came to know many different cultural figures, and some of them are more closely associated with the fifties than the sixties. I was conceived in the summer of 1961 while my mother was living in Islington, but before I was born she moved to 24 Bassett Road in Notting Hill. It was a fortuitous change of address because the area surrounding it was bohemian and once there Julia met many interesting people. Bassett Road runs west off Ladbroke Grove, and along with Oxford Gardens and Cambridge Gardens this was the sixties and seventies countercultural heart of Notting Hill. Among those already resident in the building my mother moved into was Russ Henderson, who had the first steel drum band on the streets of London and later played an important role in setting up the Notting Hill carnival. Also living at 24 Bassett Road was communist bookseller Ruth Forster, a Jewish refugee from Nazism and veteran of the anti-fascist resistance, who in the early sixties was still close to German writers such as Gustav Regler (the English translation of his autobiography "The Owl Of Minerva" is out of print but easy enough to find).
It wasn't at home in Bassett Road that Julia met the men she knew with links back to the 1950s London art scene, it was when she was out and about. So take the tube to Ladbroke Grove, turn left out of the station, wander down to Cambridge Gardens and turn left into this street. My mother died in the back basement flat of 104 Cambridge Gardens (probably from a heroin overdose) in December 1979. Try to imagine what Cambridge Gardens was like when the rents were cheap and most of the houses were broken up into bedsits. 104 is a residential building, so we can't go in, we'll just look at the exterior. Next we'll double back to St Marks Road and turn left, this will take us across Oxford Gardens and into Bassett Road. We'll turn right into Bassett Road, but look back on 58 to our left as we turn, where Julia lived at the end of the sixties in a pad she briefly shared with the reforgotten legend Terry Taylor. Wandering down Bassett Road let's check out 24 where my mother lived in a top floor flat from 1961 to 1966 (again this is a private house, we can only look at the exterior, we can't go inside). We'll carry on down Bassett Road until we get back to Ladbroke Grove where we turn right. We'll walk past the tube station until we see the Kensington Park Hotel on our right, at the junction with Lancaster Road. The KPH was one of my mother's locals, close to home and a place to meet people, so go inside and raise a glass to her memory. Suitably refreshed, we'll carry on up Ladbroke Grove and turn left into Elgin Crescent. My mother moved from Bassett Road to a flat at 55 Elgin Crescent in 1966 (again these are residential flats so we'll just look at the exterior). We'll walk along Elgin Crescent to Portobello Road and on our left we'll see The Duke of Wellington. In the old days this pub was called Finch's and those who know the area still refer to it by this name. In the mid-sixties Terry Taylor lived in a flat abutting this pub. My mother had met Taylor somewhere in Notting Hill by the mid-sixties, he can't recall where, and we'll return to him because he's an important link back to the fifties art scene in Soho. If after a drink in Finch's you want another, then there's also Henekey’s in Portobello Road which was another of my mother's hang-outs; but I'm not going to tell you exactly where it is, this is supposed to be an art tour not a pub crawl. Once we've finished drinking, we'll walk up Portobello Road - taking in the market as we go - to Notting Hill Gate. At the end of Portobello Road take a right onto Pembridge Road, and there on our left as we walk up towards the tube we'll find the Notting Hill Book Exchange. This emporium was established relatively recently but it has the feel of a lot of places that have disappeared from London. I ran into Ian Hunt (the new deputy editor of "Art Monthly") recently, and we were talking about how we used to spend a lot of time hanging out in London bookshops but don't anymore because most of the decent ones have closed. Although the Notting Hill Book Exchange doesn't go back that far, it has a good vibe and something of the atmosphere of the old boho London bookshops of the seventies and eighties. Next we need to turn left out of the book exchange and go down on the underground from Notting Hill to Oxford Circus. I'll return to our trip later, right now I need to digress back to Terry Taylor and then introduce a new character Bill Hopkins.
To date Terry Taylor has been treated as a very minor figure within the history of youth culture despite the key role he played in London’s fifties art scene and sixties drug and occult underground. Described by Tony Gould in "Inside Outsider" as ‘unconventionally successful’, Taylor was for a time chiefly of interest to cultural historians like Gould because characters in the Colin MacInnes novels "Absolute Beginners" and "Mr. Love and Justice" had been based to a greater or lesser degree upon him. More recently fictionalised impressions of Taylor have appeared in both Esther Freud's "Hideous Kinky" and my novel "Tainted Love". In 1956 MacInnes got talking to Taylor in a drinking club in Berwick Street. At the time MacInnes was living above Gallery One in D'Arblay Street and Taylor was working as a passport photographer in Wardour Street (while in his leisure time pursuing an interest in modern jazz and getting stoned). Gallery One was owned by Victor Musgrave whose wife was Ida Kar, an important post-war photographer. At this time John Kasmin (a famous gallerist in his own right in the sixties) was Kar's assistant. Ida had an open marriage with Victor and after MacInnes introduced Taylor to her, Terry became her lover (despite an age gap of 25 years between them). Meanwhile Kasmin became Kar's business manager and Taylor took on the unpaid role of her photographic assistant. The atmosphere at Gallery One around this time is summed up for me by a series of pictures Kar took of Taylor getting stoned after a photographic session for the little known jazz singer Judy Johnson; these extraordinary images appear to have been hidden from public view until I included them in the show "Hallucination Generation" at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol earlier this year (2006); apparently their first public showing. For a time, Taylor took to living at Gallery One, but eventually he moved on to Notting Hill. After this relocation Victor Musgrave introduced Terry to Detta Whybrow when by chance both turned up in D'Arblay Street at the same time. In conversation Taylor and Whybrow discovered they both lived close to each other in Notting Hill. Shortly afterwards Terry called on Detta at her home and they became lovers. The relationship is said to have inspired MacInnes to write "Mr. Love and Justice", but Terry insists he was never a pimp like the Frankie Love character in that book (despite a conviction, he was in fact living with - not living off - the woman) and made his own money.
Terry Taylor's drug novel "Baron’s Court, All Change" was published in 1961 and from this date onwards he also spent a lot of time in Tangier. In his memoir "Journey Around an Extraordinary Planet", American beatnik poet Johnny Dolphin describes how he got heavily involved in a magic group formed by Terry Taylor and various Berbers which met in Tangier to materialise thought forms. The process combined smoking grass with magic and the practice was brought back to London. By the mid-sixties Terry, Detta and the circle around them (including my mother) were very interested in LSD. Partly because of her work as a high class prostitute, Detta knew people from all walks of life and persuaded a chemist she knew called Victor James Kapur to make LSD for her when it was still legal. The acid is said to have been very pure and an intense tripping scene developed, as well as much street dealing. Of course, it wasn't long before LSD became illegal and a series of police raids in November 1967 led to Detta and some of her friends appearing on the front page of "The Times" and at Bow Street Magistrate's Court over drug offences. Kapur received the heaviest sentence of nine years at the Central Criminal Court in May 1968, and was removed from the Pharmaceutical Register later that year. Thus Terry and Detta provide a perfect example of the overlaps between many different marginal worlds (art, prostitution, drugs, occultism, writing) in fifties and sixties London.
Gallery One had moved to D'Arblay Street in 1955; pior to that it had been in Litchfield Street on the other side of Charing Cross Road. At that address one of the tenants had been the writer Bill Hopkins, who like Taylor befriended my mother in the sixties. Hopkins recalls the old Gallery One building being filled with a mixture of the respectable, he was himself night editor for the "New York Times", and prostitutes. This seems to have been a fairly common feature of low budget central London housing of the time. Hopkins' only novel "The Divine & The Decay" was issued by MacCibbon & Kee in 1957; coincidently it was this publisher who also brought out the work of all three of Gallery One's resident writers (MacInnes and Taylor as well as Hopkins), and of course Ida Kar photographed all three of them too. Hopkins was closely associated with the angry young man movement, and in the late fifties lived in a house in Notting Hill's Chepstow Road with fellow 'upstart' writers Stuart Holroyd and Tom Greenwell; the spare room was shared by the better known scribblers Colin Wilson and John Braine, who lived out of London but rented this pad for use when they were in town. After a failed attempt to set up a new political party at the end of the fifties, Hopkins became an antiques dealer in Portobello Road and played a key role in the development of the modern market in that street. He remains to this day a passionate collector, particularly of outsider art, and I first met him in the late-eighties through our mutual connections to the Gimpel Fils Gallery.
Hopkins recalls the 'outsiders' of all classes meeting in Soho's fifties bohemaia - artists, writers, gangsters, prostitutes. He doesn't mention drug dealers and he appears monumentally uninterested in them, but he did inadvertently provide introductions via a third party between one of my mother's pot smuggling friends and a highly regarded artist of the sixties who was looking for a break into drug scamming. My mother's close friend shall remain nameless since he was never convicted for his illicit activities, but one of those he introduced to the drug scamming game, sculptor Francis Morland, was caught and jailed, so I can tell you about him. Morland was a London art world insider with a part time teaching job in the sculpture department at St Martin’s College. His mother, Dorothy Morland, had been director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. His work in bronze of the early sixties was well received. An anonymous "Times" critic covering the "Sculptors of Today" exhibition at the Bear Lane Gallery in Oxford praised him for ‘distinguished modelling coupled with imaginative insight’ (11 May 1962). The following year, alongside David Hockney, Joe Tilson, Peter Blake, Allen Jones and Derek Boshier, he appears in Gerald Laing’s photograph "London Artists in Paris"; this was taken during the "Biennale des Jeunes" at Musee de la Ville de Paris. 1963 was a key year for Morland, since he moved from working in bronze to using fibreglass finished in coats of cellulose paint. This was a complete break with his earlier work: the fibreglass pieces were large, pop and brightly coloured.
Morland was unable to support himself from the sale of his work, and was extremely keen to find alternative sources of income. Once he’d been introduced to drug scamming by my mother's friend in 1966, he realised that one of the ways he might smuggle hash was to seal it inside his large fibreglass sculptures. Many years down the line this ploy was imitated by drug smuggling micro-celebrity Howard Marks, who substituted Morland’s modernist constructions with the speaker systems used by rock bands. To Morland smuggling was a means of subsidising his real passion, making art. In the late sixties Morland’s work appeared in group shows such as "New British Sculpture" organised by the Arnolfini Gallery at outdoor locations in Bristol and the "1st Burleighfield Sculpture Exhibition" at Burleighfield House, Loudwater, Bucks (both 1968). Morland’s one person show "Recent Sculpture" opened on 12 September 1969 at the Axiom Gallery, London W1.
Morland’s first bust occurred in October 1969, hot on the heels of his Axiom show. The art world reacted with horror, seeing taking drugs as one thing and smuggling them as quite another. Morland’s career as a professional sculptor came to an abrupt halt, and he was dropped by many of his professional friends. The charges against him took some time to wend their way to a conclusion in the courts but "The Times" dutifully covered this on 23 March 1971 under the heading ‘Diplomats In Drug Ring, Crown Says’. Morland failed to answer his bail so he wasn’t actually up before the beak. Others not present were a Mr Khaled and Fulton Dunbar, Third Secretary at the Liberian Embassy in Rome. Morland and Dunbar were said to have made statements admitting their guilt and that of others. It was claimed the gang smuggled £150,000 worth of cannabis into the UK, and had plans to ship a lot more around the world. In the dock was Robert Paul Palacios who'd used his catamaran to transport the drugs from Morocco to Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, from where he drove them to London in a Rolls-Royce car. Palacios who’d been hired to do the job by Morland was fined £4000. Morland began his first jail sentence for smuggling in America. After sailing his 47 foot ketch loaded with hash from Morocco to the US in July 1971 and being caught upon entry, he was jailed for eight years and fined $15,000. Morland suffered yet more major smuggling busts in the late eighties and late nineties. Still, he is a free man today and to my mind remains one of the most under-rated London artists of the sixties. I certainly felt very privileged when I was able to include three of his original sixties sculptures in the show "Hallucination Generation" in 2006, possibly the first time his sculpture had been publicly exhibited for 35 years.
by American Dream » Tue Jan 20, 2015 12:58 am
by American Dream » Tue Jan 20, 2015 7:15 pm
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 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.
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 toldby 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.
What Ronald K. Siegel discovered seems strange at first. He explains in his book Intoxication:After sampling the numbing nectar of certain orchids, bees drop to the ground in a temporary stupor, then weave back for more. Birds gorge themselves on inebriating berries, then fly with reckless abandon. Cats eagerly sniff aromatic “pleasure” plants, then play with imaginary objects. Cows that browse special range weeds will twitch, shake, and stumble back to the plants for more. Elephants purposely get drunk off fermented fruits. Snacks of “magic mushrooms” cause monkeys to sit with their heads in their hands in a posture reminiscent of Rodin’s Thinker. The pursuit of intoxication by animals seems as purposeless as it is passionate. Many animals engage these plants, or their manufactured allies, despite the danger of toxic or poisonous effects.
Noah’s Ark, he found, would have looked a lot like London on a Saturday night. “In every country, in almost every class of animal,” Siegel explains, “I found examples of not only the accidental but the intentional use of drugs.” In West Bengal, a group of 150 elephants smashed their way into a warehouse and drank a massive amount of moonshine. They got so drunk they went on a rampage and killed five people, as well as demolishing seven concrete buildings. If you give hash to male mice, they become horny and seek out females — but then they find “they can barely crawl over the females, let alone mount them,” so after a little while they yawn and start licking their own penises.
In Vietnam, the water buffalo have always shunned the local opium plants. They don’t like them. But when the American bombs started to fall all around them during the war, the buffalo left their normal grazing grounds, broke into the opium fields, and began to chew. They would then look a little dizzy and dulled. When they were traumatized, it seems, they wanted — like the mongoose, like us — to escape from their thoughts.
Thousands of people were streaming in to a ten-day festival in September where they were planning — after a long burst of hard work — to find some chemical release, relaxation, and revelry. They found drugs passed around the crowd freely, to anybody who wanted them. Everyone who took them soon felt an incredible surge of ecstasy. Then came the vivid, startling hallucinations. You suddenly felt, as one user put it, something that was “new, astonishing, irrational to rational cognition.”
Some people came back every year because they loved this experience so much. As the crowd thronged and yelled and sang, it became clear it was an extraordinary mix of human beings. There were farmers who had just finished their harvest, and some of the biggest celebrities around. Their names—over the years—included Sophocles, Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero.
The annual ritual in the Temple at Eleusis, eighteen kilometers northwest of Athens, was a drug party on a vast scale. It happened every year for two thousand years, and anybody who spoke the Greek language was free to come. Harry Anslinger said that drug use represents “nothing less than an assault on the foundations of Western civilization,” but here, at the actual foundations of Western civilization, drug use was ritualized and celebrated.
I first discovered this fact by reading the work of the British critic Stuart Walton in a brilliant book called Out of It, and then I followed up with some of his sources, which include the work of Professor R. Gordon Wasson, Professor Carl Ruck, and other writers.
Everyone who attended the Eleusinian mysteries was sworn to secrecy about what happened there, so our knowledge is based on scraps of information that were recorded in its final years, as it was being suppressed. We do know that a special cup containing a mysterious chemical brew of hallucinogens would be passed around the crowd, and a scientific study years later seemed to prove it contained a molecular relative of LSD taken from a fungus that infested cereal crops and caused hallucinations. The chemical contents of this cup were carefully guarded for the rest of the year. The drugs were legal – indeed, this drug use was arranged by public officials – and regulated. You could use them, but only in the designated temple for those ten days. One day in 415 b.c., a partygoing general named Alcibiades smuggled some of the mystery drug out and took it home for his friends to use at their parties. Walton writes: “Caught in possession with intent to supply, he was the first drug criminal.”
But while it was a crime away from the Temple and other confined spaces, it was a glory within it. According to these accounts, it was Studio 54 spliced with St. Peter’s Basilica – revelry with religious reverence.
They believed the drugs brought them closer to the gods, or even made it possible for them to become gods themselves. The classicist Dr. D.C.A.Hillman wrote thatthe “founding fathers” of the Western world were drug users, plain and simple: they grew the stuff, they sold the stuff, and more important, they used the stuff . . . The ancient world didn’t have a Nancy Reagan, it didn’t wage a billion-dollar drug war, it didn’t imprison people who used drugs, and it didn’t embrace sobriety as a virtue. It indulged . . . and from this world in which drugs were a universally accepted part of life sprang art, literature, science, and philosophy . . . The West would not have survived without these so-called junkies and drug dealers.
There was some political grumbling for years that women were behaving too freely during their trances, but this annual festival ended only when the drug party crashed into Christianity. The early Christians wanted there to be one route to ecstasy, and one route only – through prayer to their God. You shouldn’t feel anything that profound or pleasurable except in our ceremonies at our churches. The first tugs towards prohibition were about power, and purity of belief. If you are going to have one God and one Church, you need to stop experiences that make people feel that they can approach God on their own. It is no coincidence that when new drugs come along, humans often use religious words to describe them, like ecstasy. They are often competing for the same brain space – our sense of awe and joy.
So when the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and brought the Empire with him, the rituals at the Temple at Eleusis were doomed. They were branded a cult and shut down by force. The new Christianity would promote wine only in tiny sips. Intoxication had to be sparing. This “forcible repression by Christianity,” Walton explains, “represents the beginning of systematic repression of the intoxication impulse in the lives of Western citizens.”
Yet in every generation after, some humans would try to rebuild their own Temple at Eleusis—in their own minds, and wherever they could clear a space free of local Anslingers.
Harry Anslinger, it turns out, represented a trend running right back to the ancient world.
When Sigmund Freud first suggested that everybody has elaborate sexual fantasies, that it is as natural as breathing, he was dismissed as a pervert and lunatic. People wanted to believe that sexual fantasy was something that happened in other people – filthy people, dirty people. They took the parts of their subconscious that generated these wet dreams and daydreams and projected them onto somebody else, the depraved people Over There, who had to be stopped. Stuart Walton and the philosopher Terence McKenna both write that we are at this stage with our equally universal desire to seek out altered mental states. McKenna explains: “We are discovering that human beings are creatures of chemical habit with the same horrified disbelief as when the Victorians discovered that humans are creatures of sexual fantasy and obsession.”
Just as we are rescuing the sex drive from our subconscious and from shame, so we need to take the intoxication drive out into the open where it can breathe. Stuart Walton calls for a whole new field of human knowledge called “intoxicology.” He writes: “Intoxication plays, or has played, a part in the lives of virtually everybody who has ever lived . . . To seek to deny it is not only futile; it is a dereliction of an entirely constitutive part of who we are.”
by Searcher08 » Wed Jan 21, 2015 11:10 am
by American Dream » Fri Jan 23, 2015 11:35 am
The Hunting of Billie Holiday
How Lady Day found herself in the middle of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ early fight for survival.
By JOHANN HARI
January 17, 2015
From his first day in office in 1930, Harry Anslinger had a problem, and everybody knew it. He had just been appointed head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics—a tiny agency, buried in the gray bowels of the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C.—and it seemed to be on the brink of being abolished. This was the old Department of Prohibition, but prohibition had been abolished and his men needed a new role, fast. As he looked over his new staff—just a few years before his pursuit of Billie Holiday began—he saw a sunken army who had spent fourteen years waging war on alcohol only to see alcohol win, and win big. These men were notoriously corrupt and crooked—but now Harry was supposed to whip them into a force capable of wiping drugs from the United States forever.
Harry believed he could. He believed that the response to being dealt a weak hand should always be to dramatically raise the stakes. He pledged to eradicate all drugs, everywhere—and within thirty years, he succeeded in turning this crumbling department with these disheartened men into the headquarters for a global war that would continue for decades. He could do it because he was a bureaucratic genius—but, even more crucially, because there was a deep strain in American culture that was waiting for a man like him, with a sure and certain answer to their questions about chemicals.
***
Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger believed in. It is improvised, relaxed, free-form. It follows its own rhythm. Worst of all, it is a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean and African echoes, all mating on American shores. To Anslinger, this was musical anarchy and evidence of a recurrence of the primitive impulses that lurk in black people, waiting to emerge. “It sounded,” his internal memos said, “like the jungles in the dead of night.” Another memo warned that “unbelievably ancient indecent rites of the East Indies are resurrected” in this black man’s music. The lives of the jazzmen, he said, “reek of filth.”
His agents reported back to him that “many among the jazzmen think they are playing magnificently when under the influence of marihuana but they are actually becoming hopelessly confused and playing horribly.”
The Bureau believed that marijuana slowed down your perception of time dramatically, and this was why jazz music sounded so freakish—the musicians were literally living at a different, inhuman rhythm. “Music hath charms,” their memos say, “but not this music.” Indeed, Anslinger took jazz as yet more proof that marijuana drives people insane. For example, the song “That Funny Reefer Man” contains the line “Any time he gets a notion, he can walk across the ocean.” Anslinger’s agents warned that’s exactly what drug users were like: “He does think that.”
Anslinger looked out over a scene filled with rebels like Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk, and—as the journalist Larry Sloman recorded—he longed to see them all behind bars. He wrote to all the agents he had sent to follow them and instructed: “Please prepare all cases in your jurisdiction involving musicians in violation of the marijuana laws. We will have a great national round-up arrest of all such persons on a single day. I will let you know what day.” His advice on drug raids to his men was always simple: “Shoot first.”
He reassured congressmen that his crackdown would affect not “the good musicians, but the jazz type.” But when Harry came for them, the jazz world would have one weapon that saved them: its absolute solidarity. Anslinger’s men could find almost no one among them who was willing to snitch, and whenever one of them was busted, they all chipped in to bail him out.
In the end, the Treasury Department told Anslinger he was wasting his time taking on a community that couldn’t be fractured, so he scaled down his focus until it settled like a laser on a single target—perhaps the greatest female jazz vocalist there ever was.
He wanted to bring the full thump of the federal government down upon that scourge of modern society, his Public Enemy #1: Billie Holiday.
***
One night, in 1939, Billie Holiday stood on stage in New York City and sang a song that was unlike anything anyone had heard before. ‘Strange Fruit’ was a musical lament against lynching. It imagined black bodies hanging from trees as a dark fruit native to the South. Here was a black woman, before a mixed audience, grieving for the racist murders in the United States. Immediately after, Billie Holiday received her first threat from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
Harry had heard whispers that she was using heroin, and—after she flatly refused to be silent about racism—he assigned an agent named Jimmy Fletcher to track her every move. Harry hated to hire black agents, but if he sent white guys into Harlem and Baltimore, they stood out straight away. Jimmy Fletcher was the answer. His job was to bust his own people, but Anslinger was insistent that no black man in his Bureau could ever become a white man’s boss. Jimmy was allowed through the door at the Bureau, but never up the stairs. He was and would remain an “archive man”—a street agent whose job was to figure out who was selling, who was supplying and who should be busted. He would carry large amounts of drugs with him, and he was allowed to deal drugs himself so he could gain the confidence of the people he was secretly plotting to arrest.
Many agents in this position would shoot heroin with their clients, to “prove” they weren’t cops. We don’t know whether Jimmy joined in, but we do know he had no pity for addicts: “I never knew a victim,” he said. “You victimize yourself by becoming a junkie.”
He first saw Billie in her brother-in-law’s apartment, where she was drinking enough booze to stun a horse and hoovering up vast quantities of cocaine. The next time he saw her, it was in a brothel in Harlem, doing exactly the same. Billie’s greatest talent, after singing, was swearing—if she called you a “motherfucker,” it was a great compliment. We don’t know the first time Billie called Jimmy a motherfucker, but she soon spotted this man who was hanging around, watching her, and she grew to like him.
When Jimmy was sent to raid her, he knocked at the door pretending he had a telegram to deliver. Her biographers Julia Blackburn and Donald Clark studied the only remaining interview with Jimmy Fletcher—now lost by the archives handling it—and they wrote about what he remembered in detail.
"Stick it under the door!" she yelled. "It's too big to go under the door!" he snapped back. She let him in. She was alone. Jimmy felt uncomfortable. "Billie, why don't you make a short case of this and, if you've got anything, why don't you turn it over to us?" he asked. "Then we won't be searching around, pulling out your clothes and everything. So why don't you do that?" But Jimmy's partner arrived and sent for a policewoman to conduct a body search.
"You don't have to do that. I'll strip," Billie said. "All I want to say is- will you search me and let me go? All that policewoman is going to do is look up my pussy."
She stripped and stood there, and then she pissed in front of them, defying them to watch.
The morning he first raided her, Jimmy took Billie to one side and promised to talk to Anslinger personally for her. "I don't want you to lose your job," he said.
Not long after, he ran into her in a bar and they talked for hours, with her pet Chihuahua, Moochy, by her side. Then, one night, at Club Ebony, they ended up dancing together-Billie Holiday and Anslinger's agent, swaying together to the music.
"And I had so many close conversations with her, about so many things," he would remember years later. "She was the type who would make anyone sympathetic because she was the loving type." The man Anslinger sent to track and bust Billie Holiday had, it seems, fallen in love with her.
But Anslinger was going to be given a break on Billie, one he got nowhere else in the jazz world. Billie had got used to turning up at gigs so badly beaten by her husband, manager and sometimes pimp, Louis McKay, they had to tape up her ribs before pushing her onstage. She was too afraid to go to the police-but finally she was brave enough to cut him off.
"How come I got to take this from this bitch here? This low-class bitch?" McKay raged, according to an interviewer who spoke with him years after Billie's death. "If I got a whore, I got some money from her or I don't have nothing to do with the bitch." He had heard that Harry Anslinger wanted information on her, and he was intrigued. "She's been getting away with too much shit," MacKay said, adding he wanted "Holiday's ass in the gutter in the East River." That, it seems, was the clincher. "I got enough to finish her off," he had pledged. "I'm going to do her up so goddam bad she going to remember as long as she live." He travelled to D.C. to see Harry, and he agreed to set her up.
When Billie was busted again, she was put on trial. She stood before the court looking pale and stunned. "It was called `The United States of America versus Billie Holiday,'" she wrote in her memoir, "and that's just the way it felt." She refused to weep on the stand. She told the judge she didn't want any sympathy. She just wanted to be sent to a hospital so she could kick the drugs and get well. Please, she said to the judge, "I want the cure."
She was sentenced instead to a year in a West Virginia prison, where she was forced to go cold turkey and work during the days in a pigsty, among other places. In all her time behind bars, she did not sing a note. Years later, when her autobiography was published, Billie tracked Jimmy Fletcher down and sent him a signed copy. She had written inside it: "Most federal agents are nice people. They've got a dirty job to do and they have to do it. Some of the nicer ones have feelings enough to hate themselves sometime for what they have to do . . . Maybe they would have been kinder to me if they'd been nasty; then I wouldn't have trusted them enough to believe what they told me." She was right: Jimmy told the writer Linda Kuehl that he never stopped feeling guilty for what he'd done to Lady Day. "Billie `paid her debt' to society," one of her friends wrote, "but society never paid its debt to her."
Now, as a former convict, she was stripped of her cabaret performer's license, on the grounds that listening to her might harm the morals of the public. This meant she wasn't allowed to sing anywhere that alcohol was served-which included all the jazz clubs in the United States.
***
One day, Harry Anslinger was told that there were also white women, just as famous as Billie, who had drug problems-but he responded to them rather differently. He called Judy Garland, another heroin addict, in to see him. They had a friendly chat, in which he advised her to take longer vacations between pictures, and he wrote to her studio, assuring them she didn't have a drug problem at all. When he discovered that a Washington society hostess he knew-"a beautiful, gracious lady," he noted-had an illegal drug addiction, he explained he couldn't possibly arrest her because "it would destroy... the unblemished reputation of one of the nation's most honored families." He helped her to wean herself off her addiction slowly, without the law becoming involved.
Harry told the public that "the increase [in drug addiction] is practically 100 percent among Negro people," which he stressed was terrifying because already "the Negro population . . . accounts for 10 percent of the total population, but 60 percent of the addicts." He could wage the drug war-he could do what he did-only because he was responding to a fear in the American people. You can be a great surfer, but you still need a great wave. Harry's wave came in the form of a race panic.
In the run-up to the passing of the Harrison Act in 1914-the law that first criminalized drugs in the United States-the New York Times ran a story typical of the time. The headline was: "Negro cocaine `fiends' new southern menace." It described a North Carolina police chief who "was informed that a hitherto inoffensive negro, with whom he was well-acquainted, was `running amuck' in a cocaine frenzy [and] had attempted to stab a storekeeper . . . Knowing he must kill this man or be killed himself, the Chief drew his revolver, placed the muzzle over the negro's heart, and fired-`intending to kill him right quick,' as the officer tells it, but the shot did not even stagger the man." Cocaine was, it was widely claimed in the press at this time, turning blacks into superhuman hulks who could take bullets to the heart without flinching. It was the official reason why some police in the South increased the caliber of their guns. One medical expert put it bluntly: "The cocaine nigger," he warned, "sure is hard to kill."
Harry Anslinger did not create these underlying trends. His genius wasn't for invention: it was for presenting his agents as the hand that would steady all these cultural tremblings. He knew that to secure his bureau's future, he needed a high-profile victory, over intoxication and over black people, and so he turned back to Billie Holiday.
To finish her off, he called for his toughest agent-a man who was at no risk of falling in love with her, or anyone else.
***
The Japanese man couldn't breathe. Colonel George White-a vastly obese white slab of a man-had his hands tightened around his throat, and he was not letting go. It was the last thing the Japanese man ever saw. Once it was all over, White told the authorities he strangled this "Jap" because he believed he was a spy. But privately, he told his friends he didn't really know if his victim was a spy at all, and he didn't care. "I have a lot of friends who are murderers," he bragged years later, and "I had very good times in their company." He boasted to his friends that he kept a photo of the man he had throttled hanging on the wall of his apartment, always watching him. So as he got to work on Billie, Colonel White was watched by his last victim, and this made him happy.
White was Harry Anslinger's favorite agent, and when he looked over Holiday's files, he declared her to be "a very attractive customer," because the Bureau was "at a loose end" and could do with the opportunity "to kick her over."
White had been a journalist in San Francisco in the 1930s until he applied to join the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The personality test given to all applicants on Anslinger's orders found that he was a sadist. He quickly rose through the bureau's ranks. He became a sensation as the first and only white man ever to infiltrate a Chinese drug gang, and he even learned to speak in Mandarin so he could chant their oaths with them. In his downtime, he would go swimming in the filthy waters of New York City's Hudson River, as if daring it to poison him.
He was especially angered that this black woman didn't know her place. "She flaunted her way of living, with her fancy coats and fancy automobiles and her jewelry and her gowns," he complained. "She was the big lady wherever she went."
When he came for her on a rainy day at the Mark Twain Hotel in San Francisco without a search warrant, Billie was sitting in white silk pajamas in her room. This was one of the few places she could still perform, and she badly needed the money. She insisted to the police that she had been clean for over a year. White's men declared they had found opium stashed in a wastepaper basket next to a side room and the kit for shooting heroin in the room, and they charged her with possession. But when the details were looked at later, there seemed to be something odd: a wastepaper basket seems an improbable place to keep a stash, and the kit for shooting heroin was never entered into evidence by the cops-they said they left it at the scene. When journalists asked White about this, he blustered; his reply, they noted, "appeared a little defensive."
That night, White came to Billie's show at the Café Society Uptown, and he requested his favorite songs. She never lost faith in her music's ability to capture and persuade. "They'll remember me," she told a friend, "when all this is gone, and they've finished badgering me." George White did not agree. "I did not think much of Ms. Holiday's performance," he told her manager sternly.
Billie insisted the junk had been planted in her room by White, and she immediately offered to go into a clinic to be monitored: she would experience no withdrawal symptoms, she said, and that would prove she was clean and being framed. She checked herself in at a cost of one thousand dollars, and according to Ken Vail's book Lady Day's Diary, she didn't so much as shiver.
We do know that George White had a long history of planting drugs on women. He was fond of pretending to be an artist and luring women to an apartment in Greenwich Village where he would spike their drinks with LSD to see what would happen. One of his victims was a young actress who happened to live in his building, while another was a pretty blond waitress in a bar. After she failed to show any sexual interest in him, he drugged her to see if that would change. "I toiled whole-heartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun," White boasted after he had retired from the Bureau. "Where else [but in the Bureau of Narcotics] could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?" He may well have been high when he busted Billie for getting high.
The prosecution of Billie went ahead. "The hounding and the pressure drove me," she wrote, "to think of trying the final solution, death." Her best friend said it caused Billie "enough anxieties to kill a horse." At the trial, a jury of twelve ordinary citizens heard all the evidence. They sided with Billie against Anslinger and White, and found her not guilty. Nonetheless, "she had slipped from the peak of her fame," Harry Anslinger wrote. "Her voice was cracking."
In the years after Billie's trial, many other singers were too afraid of being harassed by the authorities to perform "Strange Fruit." But Billie Holiday refused to stop. No matter what they did to her, she sang her song.
"She was," her friend Annie Ross told me, "as strong as she could be."
***
When Billie was forty-four years old, a young musician named Frankie Freedom was serving her a bowl of oatmeal and custard in his apartment when she suddenly collapsed. She was taken to the Knickerbocker Hospital in Manhattan and made to wait for an hour and a half on a stretcher, and they said she was a drug addict and turned her away. One of the ambulance drivers recognized her, so she ended up in a public ward of New York City's Metropolitan Hospital. As soon as they took her off oxygen, she lit a cigarette.
"Some damnbody is always trying to embalm me," she said, but the doctors came back and explained she had an array of very serious illnesses: she was emaciated because she had not been eating; she had cirrhosis of the liver because of chronic drinking; she had cardiac and respiratory problems due to chronic smoking; and she had several leg ulcers caused by starting to inject street heroin once again. They said she was unlikely to survive for long-but Harry wasn't done with her yet. "You watch, baby," Billie warned from her tiny gray hospital room. "They are going to arrest me in this damn bed."
Narcotics agents were sent to her hospital bed and said they had found less than one-eighth of an ounce of heroin in a tinfoil envelope. They claimed it was hanging on a nail on the wall, six feet from the bottom of her bed-a spot Billie was incapable of reaching. They summoned a grand jury to indict her, telling her that unless she disclosed her dealer, they would take her straight to prison. They confiscated her comic books, radio, record player, flowers, chocolates and magazines, handcuffed her to the bed and stationed two policemen at the door. They had orders to forbid any visitors from coming in without a written permit, and her friends were told there was no way to see her. Her friend Maely Dufty screamed at them that it was against the law to arrest somebody who was on the critical list. They explained that the problem had been solved: they had taken her off the critical list.
So now, on top of the cirrhosis of the liver, Billie went into heroin withdrawal, alone. A doctor was brought into the hospital at the insistence of her friends to prescribe methadone. She was given it for ten days and began to recover: she put on weight and looked better. But then the methadone was suddenly stopped, and she began to sicken again. When finally a friend was allowed in to see her, Billie told her in a panic: "They're going to kill me. They're going to kill me in there. Don't let them." The police threw the friend out. "I had very high hopes that she would be able to come out of it alive," another friend, Alice Vrbsky, told the BBC, until all this happened. "It was the last straw."
On the street outside the hospital, protesters gathered, led by a Harlem pastor named the Reverend Eugene Callender. They held up signs reading "Let Lady Live." Callender had built a clinic for heroin addicts in his church, and he pleaded for Billie to be allowed to go there to be nursed back to health. His reasoning was simple, he told me in 2013: addicts, he said, "are human beings, just like you and me." Punishment makes them sicker; compassion can make them well. Harry and his men refused. They fingerprinted Billie on her hospital bed. They took a mug shot of her on her hospital bed. They grilled her on her hospital bed without letting her talk to a lawyer.
Billie didn't blame Anslinger's agents as individuals; she blamed the drug war itself-because it forced the police to treat ill people like criminals. "Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn't treat them," she wrote in her memoir, "then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs."
Still, some part of Billie Holiday believed she had done something evil, with her drug use, and with her life. She told people she would rather die than go back to prison, but she was terrified that she would burn in hell- just as her mother had said she would all those years before, when she was a little girl lying on the brothel floor, listening to Louis Armstrong's music and letting it carry her out of Baltimore. "She was exhausted," one of her friends told me. "She didn't want to go through it no more."
And so, when she died on this bed, with police officers at the door to protect the public from her, she looked-as another of her friends told the BBC-"as if she had been torn from life violently." She had fifteen fifty-dollar bills strapped to her leg. It was all she had left. She was intending to give it to the nurses who had looked after her, to thank them.
Her best friend, Maely Dufty, insisted to anyone who would listen that Billie had been effectively murdered by a conspiracy to break her, orchestrated by the narcotics police-but what could she do? At Billie's funeral, there were swarms of police cars, because they feared their actions against her would trigger a riot. In his eulogy for her, the Reverend Eugene Callender told me he had said: "We should not be here. This young lady was gifted by her creator with tremendous talent . . . She should have lived to be at least eighty years old."
The Federal Bureau of Narcotics saw it differently. "For her," Harry wrote with satisfaction, "there would be no more `Good Morning Heartache.'"
This article is an adapted excerpt from Johann Hari's book Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, published by Bloomsbury. @johannhari101
Return to Data & Research Compilations
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest
