Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

by Johann Hari

The most popular way to consume coca was in teas and soft drinks. But within a few years of the introduction of prohibition, these milder forms of the drug had vanished. They were too bulky to smuggle: even though there was more demand for them, they weren’t worth the risk for dealers like Arnold Rothstein.

the overwhelming majority of adult drug users had no problem: they used for pleasure and did not become addicts.

João had seen from all his patients that the addicted person “is always divided between the . . . desire to use drugs, and the desire to stop.” Yet the prohibitionist system keeps kicking the recovering addict back to the ground, making it harder for the part of him that wants to walk away from drugs.

The program here, I am told, is built on João’s belief that “using drugs is only a symptom of some suffering, and we have to reach the reasons” that make addicts want to be out of their heads much of the time. “You can stop using drugs for a while, but if you don’t solve the problems you have in your mind, things will come back. We have to work [on] the trauma in your life, and only then can you change the way you deal with it.”

In the years since heroin was decriminalized in Portugal, its use has been halved there—while in the United States, where the drug war continues, it has doubled.

It has turned out, it seems, that strengthening people’s internal resistance to drugs works a lot better than trying to terrorize them away from drugs with force. The alternative works. And the best proof is that virtually nobody in Portugal is arguing for a return to the old ways.

It’s important to understand the limits of the Portuguese experiment. They have decriminalized the personal possession but not the sale of drugs. This is a strange hybrid: everyone knows that to possess drugs, you have to buy them—so under this system, you mostly still have to go to these criminals and their gangs.

Legalization is the only way of introducing regulation to the drug market.

At its heart, legalization is, Danny tells me, “a drama reduction program. Because all the excitement, the salaciousness, the sexiness of drugs is very much in their prohibition, not their regulation.

When you decriminalize, you stop punishing drug users and drug addicts—but you continue to ban the manufacture and selling of the drugs. They are still supplied by criminal drug dealers. When you legalize, you set up a network of stores or pharmacies or prescription where users and addicts can buy their drugs.

Because the people who sell alcohol in our culture have a really strong incentive not to sell to teenagers: if they do, they lose their license and their business.

When it comes to marijuana and the party drugs like ecstasy, up to and including cocaine, I think the harm caused by a small increase in use is plainly outweighed by all these gains. That’s why I would sell them in regulated stores, like alcohol.

with drugs like crack and meth? I am inclined to the middle option—allow safe regulated spaces where users can buy and take them, supervised by doctors.

Now look, he says, at marijuana. “There’s no significant evidence showing marijuana is problematic in that way. In fact the evidence suggests marijuana tends to reduce risk-taking behavior and makes people less likely to become violent. It’s less harmful to the body and it’s less harmful to society.

Compare this assessment regarding marijuana by Mason Tvert to Diadiun column in PD on 2/15/2019. The statements are contradictory and both cannot possibly be true.

The Washington campaign argued that drugs should be legalized not because they are safe, but because they are dangerous. It’s precisely because they are risky that we need to take them back from the gangsters and cartels, and hand them to regulated stores—and use the tax money we gain to pay for prevention and treatment.