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

by Johann Hari

Human beings need to bond. It is one of our most primal urges. So if we can’t bond with other people, we will find a behavior to bond with, whether it’s watching pornography or smoking crack or gambling. If the only bond you can find that gives you relief or meaning is with splayed women on a computer screen or bags of crystal or a roulette wheel, you will return to that bond obsessively.

Bruce says this dynamic is producing something even darker than the drug war. Cut off from one another, isolated, we are all becoming addicted—and our biggest addiction, as a culture, is buying and consuming stuff we don’t need and don’t even really want.