The modern drug war started with Arnold Rothstein | Hacker News Reader

The modern drug war started with Arnold Rothstein

salon.com

43 pointsVigier9 comments

>"Every copy of his wife’s memoir seemed to have disappeared. Even the copy at the New York Public Library had vanished sometime in the 1970s. I eventually tracked down what seems to be the only remaining copy, in the Library of Congress, ..."

Assuming it hasn't already been digitized, this seems like a minor historical emergency.

He married Caroline Greenwold https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FFT4-FVG .

https://books.google.com/books?id=qLXytSDc5YIC&pg=PA202&lpg=... says the memoir was published in 1934. ("Black Sox in the Courtroom: The Grand Jury, Criminal Trial and Civil Litigation" by Lamb.)

https://books.google.com/books?id=6nSAnkWiy_IC&pg=PA103&lpg=... has an excerpt from the memoir. ("Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series" by David Pietrusza)

https://books.google.com/books?id=b-uFZl4g8ZkC&pg=PT234&lpg=... says "As Mrs. Carolyn Rothstein Behar, she granted Fox Film a $2,500 option on the rights to a memoir she proposed to write on her life with the man Damon Runyon dubbed "The Brain."" ("Spencer Tracy", by James Curtis)

However, despite all that information, I am unable to find that memoir in the Library of Congress or Worldcat.

On the list of historical emergencies, this is very low.

I don't disagree, but it's definitely a minor one - if there's only one copy of a historically significant book in the world, I can't think of any better place for it to be held than the Library of Congress.

It's unlikely they've digitized it, though - I'm pretty sure the digitization effort there prioritizes the oldest books first, to make sure it gets done before they reach a condition that makes it impossible.

I'm in the process of reading this book, and am well past the excerpted part. I think this headline is very misleading.

Rothstein didn't start anything -- he responded to a situation created by Harry Anslinger. Anslinger created the situation out of a need to secure funding for his operation, and what appears, to my reading, to be a healthy dose of both racism and religious fervor.

Since you've read more of the material, can you please suggest an accurate and neutral title?

A shortened version of the title at Salon would be, to me, more accurate and neutral: "America's First Drug Dealer: Arnold Rothstein"

I don't particularly care for Salon's subtitle, though. It paints a picture of the drug war as being started by the drug dealers, as does the headline on HN. It was certainly not: It took the US Congress to outlaw narcotics in the first place, and Anslinger's involvement to scare the public to the point that a war was truly begun. The criminal element that moved into this newly created environment were clearly opportunists who seemingly didn't realize there was a war at all.

Truly, it's a tragic story. If addiction has touched your life in any way, this book is a worthwhile read.

> And I was going to see that, like Rothstein, Harry Anslinger is reincarnated in ever-tougher forms, too. Before this war is over, his successors were going to be deploying gunships along the coasts of America, imprisoning more people than any other society in human history, and spraying poisons from the air across foreign countries thousands of miles away from home to kill their drug crops. The key players in the war continue to be either Anslingers or Rothsteins—the prohibitionist and the gangster, locked together in a tango unto the far horizon. The policy of prohibition summoned these characters into existence, because it needs them. So long as it lives, they live.

I wonder why this message is so hard for policy-makers to understand

It's an interesting writeup by salon.com for sure... I enjoyed it so much that I read the entire Wikipedia article on Rothstein as well, which reads very differently than the article.

He wasn't randomly shot because of his gangsterism prowess, he lost $320,000 in a supposedly crooked poker game and refused to pay up.

His nickname "the brain" was one of his many, apparently.

I find the salon article to be outlandish in the many claims it makes, which based solely on one man's interpretation of Rothstein's wife's memoir.

Still a fun read, though.

Rothstein was a classic psychopath. All the tell-tale attributes are there. The article is confused, in wondering how he got "this" way - he was born that way.

"I learned that when he laughed the laughter was a surface demonstration, a combination of the movement of face muscles synchronized with a sound, counterfeiting, but not partaking of, hilarity"

"His father—who had witnessed his toddler son standing over his sleeping brother with a knife"

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