Over the weekend, a squad of drug cops raided the London flat of a woman named Natalie Rowe based on what they described as a “tip from a member of the public.” The drug cops found no drugs, no drug paraphernalia, no sign that drugs had ever been consumed in the apartment. Why is this such an interesting story? Because Rowe, formerly a prominent madam who procured women for paying male customers, is mere days from publishing an autobiography in which she details early 1990s sex and drug parties attended by various Tory politicians. She claims one of the politicians was current Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. He appears in the photo above with Rowe, along with what she says is a line of cocaine (in full, fat view between the yellow vase and the wine glass).

Think about it. Would a mere “tip from a member of the public” trigger an expensive full-scale drug raid, with no corroborating intelligence whatsoever, such as surveillance, reports from undercover police, or multiple complaints from neighbors? If so, any Brit with a personal enemynow knows how to ruin that person's day. A single tip will bring a phalanx of police crashing through their door. Does your neighbor's dog bark late at night? Call the drug cops. Did some total ass get a promotion you wanted? Call the drug cops. So, let’s dismiss with this “tip from a member of the public” nonsense. Clearly, a full-scale drug raid that takes place with no corroborating intelligence doesn’t occur because of some random tip. It occurs because someone with great influence wants it to happen.

As Cool and the Crazy opened, we thought the lesson was that cool was acceptable but crazy was what happened when you crossed the line. It quickly became clear that cool and crazy are synonymous, with both terms meaning that you’re beyond the pale, i.e. basically fucked. Lead actor Scott Marlowe plays Bennie Saul, and he’s both cool and crazy. The crazy part is clear, because he’s an M dealer (“M” being hepcat-speak for marijuana). He deals because he owes a big-time criminal lots of money, and the only way he can repay his debt is to get his buddies hooked on the M.

He decides to approach the task methodically. He starts with one member of his crew. This is where the cool comes in. He seduces the guy into trying it, then stands by and smirks as the poor fella tries to crawl between the grain on a wooden table. Later the same hapless chump dances with a bus stop sign as if it’s a woman, demonstrating his underlyingloneliness. Yes, Fred Astaire danced with a coat stand in Royal Wedding, and it was cute, but this bus stop sign dance is edgy stuff, highly disturbing. We hear that in the unrated version of the scene the character sexually assaults a merge sign because it was really asking for it.

Anyway, in the subplot, brooding delinquent-in-waiting Jackie Barzan meets a girl, which is only possible because he’s cool, but not yet crazy. Like Brando in The Wild One. The girl, Amy, is neither cool nor crazy. She’s warm and totally sane, with big, soulful eyes that drip redemption. Like Mary Murphy in The Wild One. While in Amy’s house one day, Jackie starts handling a ceramic bauble and Amy tells him to putit down, because it’s extremely valuable and irreplaceable. So, she’s sane, but stupid. She should know, via the Moviemaking 101 Handbook, that when an expensive bauble is handled, it will later be stolen or broken.

So, back we go to signdancer, who by now is so hooked on the M that he’s going to lose his mind if he doesn’t partake every day. The problem is he’s already spent his entire net worth. So, being a good friend but a terrible boyfriend, Jackie steals Amy’s priceless trinket to sell for more evil M, but he accidentally breaks it. Conveniently, this happens right in front of Amy, and rather than rat out his buddy, Jackie pretends to be hooked on the M himself. He whines, “You don’t know what it’s like when you’re hooked on the smoke, Amy! It’s the worst! Just the worst! When you’re hooked… you’re hooked!”

Later Jackie… actually, you know what? Let’s just yank the ripcord and end this agonizing freefall. You’ve got better things to do, right? We’ll summarize by saying that in mid-century drug movies all roads lead to either the nuthouse or a fiery wreck. That’s poor Bennie Saul in there, below, no longer cool. But he doesn’t charbroil in vain. His deathserves to reform Jackie, and perhaps even give him a shot to get back with Amy, who may be out one priceless tchotchke, but never runs dry of forgiveness.

As bad as Cool and the Crazy was, it’s an informative example of mid-century drug hysteria. All it needed was an ending voiceover: “And so Bennie Saul, rather than working hard and staying on the straight and narrow like a good American, took a shortcut that led to the graveyard. But while it’s too late for Bennie Saul, it isn’t for the rest of you out there. Play by the rules, obey the law, pay your taxes, and all your money will eventually be given away to a bunch of criminal bankers in something called a bailout.” Well, that last bit probably wouldn’t be in there. Maybe in the remake though. Cool and the Crazy opened in the U.S. this month in 1958. 

We’re back to the gossip magazine Uncensored today, with its info-packed cover telling us about gay Toronto, lesbian Hollywood, Sean Connery’s sex secrets and rumors about Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. But the standout item here (aside from the appearance of the non-word “rejuvination” and the misused term “capitol”) is the one on Cary Grant and his experimentation with LSD. Before the Beatles, Timothy Leary, and Carlos Castaneda, LSD was the drug of choice for a rarefied circle of glamorous elites who ingested it as part of their psychiatric therapy sessions. We’re talking about people as famous and diverse as aquatic actress Esther Williams, Time publisher Henry Luce, director Sidney Lumet, authors Aldous Huxley and Anais Nin, and composer André Previn.

Cary Grant never tried to keep his LSD use secret. In fact, he spoke glowingly about it in a 1959 interview with Look magazine, saying that it had brought him close to happiness for the first time in his life. He also said that LSD taught him immense compassion for other people, and had helped him conquer his own shyness and insecurity.

But by 1968 the U.S. government—which had experimented extensively with LSD in hopes of using it as a truth serum or a form of chemical warfare, and had dosed thousands of people both willingly and unwillingly—was moving toward declaring the drug illegal. Grant’s wife Dyan Cannon had famously cited LSD usage as a primary factor in seeking a 1967 divorce, and the counterculture embrace of the drug was beginning to frighten middle America and the White House. That’s the backdrop against which this August 1968 Uncensored appeared, and by October of the year LSD was illegal. But the fact that public opinion had shifted—or more accurately, had been pushed by a steady, government-initiated anti-LSD campaign—did not particularly harm Grant’s public standing.

When he died in 1986 he was still one of the most revered Hollywood actors ever. And about his LSD usage he had no regrets. Quite the opposite—he commented: “Yes, it takes a long time for happiness to break through either to the individual or nations. It will take just as long as people themselves continue to confound it. You’ll find that nowadays they put you away for singing and dancing in the street. ‘Here now, let’s have none of that happiness, my boy. You cut that out; waking up the neighbors!’ Those darn neighbors need waking up, I can tell you, constable!” 

During the summer of 1948 actor Robert Mitchum was busted for marijuana possession and sentenced to a brief stint in jail. He served part of his time doing hard labor making cinderblocks at Sheriff’s Honor Farm, north of Los Angeles in the town of Castaic, and in the above photo is being transferred to L.A. County Jail to finish his sentence in a cell. That was today in 1949.

Note: Wikipedia and other sources seemingly get Mitchum’s jail chronology backwards. They say Mitchum served his county time first, which means he would have been slaving under a hot sun in Castaic on this day. But he wasn’t—at least, not according to the photo’s label, which is contemporaneous with the shot. 

This True Detective from November 1939 features a cover painting of mobster Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, whose flight from authorities had taken him from the U.S. to Mexico, and then to Costa Rica, Puerto Rico and Cuba, and across the ocean to England, France and Germany. Buchalter had begun his career in organized crime by shaking down pushcart operators in Brooklyn, and had risen through the ranks of the criminal-controlled fur industry by doing every type of dirt imaginable, from issuing threatening phone calls to garment union activists to throwing acid in a competitor’s face. Eventually he was running a criminal empire that stretched to both coasts, and was acting as head of the infamous assassination squad Murder, Inc.

In 1936 Buchalter went into hiding after he became aware that criminal charges were being prepared against him. Not long after he dropped out of sight, he was indicted for smuggling an estimated $10 million in heroin into the U.S. from Hong Kong. The FBI printed a million posters and displayed them in every post office, police station, and federal building in America. All this attention was a problem for U.S. mob bosses, and so with characteristic unsentimentality, they decided Buchalter had to surrender. Convincing him was not difficult. While he undoubtedly had the flair and intelligence to dodge the feds indefinitely, living in another country away from the old neighborhood and away from the hundreds of underlings who respected him was not his style. Buchalter was a mobster through-and-through. To him, an anonymous existence, even in a tropical paradise or cosmopolitan foreign capitol, was little different from being in prison.

Buchalter’s associates got word to him that if he came back to the U.S. he would be able to surrender personally to J. Edgar Hoover. Surrendering to the Feds meant he would not face a more serious group of charges brought by Manhattan D.A. Thomas Dewey. But it was wishful thinking. The federal charges were rapidly followed by Dewey’s charges and Buchalter earned a fourteen-year jolt in the pen. His legal team hoped tohave the sentence reduced via appeals and procedural maneuvers, but when a snitch fingered Buchalter for ordering the murder of a candy store owner named Joe Rosen, he was tried for the killing, convicted, and sentenced to execution. By some estimates Buchalter had been responsible for a thousand murders as head of Murder, Inc., but all it took was one to seal his fate. Louis "Lepke" Buchalter was electrocuted in Sing Sing prison's famous "Old Sparky" electric chair on March 4, 1944, perhaps while realizing life on a beach in Costa Rica hadn’t been so bad after all.

Cover of the New York Daily News from today in 1962, the day after Marilyn Monroe was pronounced dead from a drug overdose. 

Hush-Hush magazine goes for broke in this issue from August 1963, offering up a slate of tales narrated in their usual breathless style. First, they tell us how Roddy McDowall took nude photographs of Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra and tried to sell them, but was thwarted when she “erupted like Mount Vesuvius”. They then demonstrate the limits of their imaginations by telling us that Italian singer Silvana Blasi reacted like “an uncontrollable Mount Vesuvius” when an African-American dancer was hired at the Folies Bergère. Two volcano similes in one issue is bad enough, but the same mountain?

For investigative journalism, Hush-Hush shows us photographs of a dead Carole Landis and an unconscious Susan Hayward, and concludes that sleeping pills are bad. And finally, the magazine stokes the fires of paranoia with two stories: in the first, they explain how Fidel Castro plans to conquer America with heroin, which he’s growing with the help of two-thousand Chinese advisors; in the second, they reveal that the second wife of Dr. Sam Sheppard is a Nazi who plans to revive the Third Reich, and that she’s being helped by—you guessed it—Fidel Castro, who is somehow a communist and a Nazi. Neat trick that.

As we’ve mentioned before, though these stories are laughable, people actually believed them, and believed them by the millions, as evidenced by Hush-Hush’s sales figures. The lesson is clear: the choice between popularity and truth is really no choice at all.

New York Daily News from today, 1969, announcing the death of Judy Garland, one of the most famous and successful child stars ever. Like many child stars that came after her, Garland had problems with her weight, her self-image, along with drugs and alcohol throughout her life. She died of a Seconal overdose at age 47, but a doctor privy to her autopsy results commented that her liver was in such an advanced state of cirrhosis that she was already living on borrowed time. 

Last week in Mexico, critics of President Felipe Calderón’s administration ratcheted up claims that Calderón is playing favorites in his high-profile war on drugs. Arrest records going back to 2003 show that the Sinaloa Cartel, which is responsible for 45% of drug trafficking in Mexico, has suffered only a handful of arrests—none involving high-ranking members. Even as a group of investigative reporters pointed out last week that this indicated possible collusion between Calderón and the Sinaloa Cartel, two more Sinaloa members were arrested, but again they were little more than errand boys—sacrificial lambs, according to skeptics.