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

by Johann Hari

Gabor tells me: “The whole economy is based around appealing to and heightening every false need and desire, for the purpose of selling products. So people are always trying to find satisfaction and fulfillment in products.” This is a key reason why, he says, “we live in a highly addicted society.” We have separated from one another and turned instead to things for happiness—but things can only ever offer us the thinnest of satisfactions. This is where the drug war comes in. These processes began in the early twentieth century—and the drug war followed soon after. The drug war wasn’t just driven, then, by a race panic. It was driven by an addiction panic—and it had a real cause. But the cause wasn’t a growth in drugs. It was a growth in dislocation. The drug war began when it did because we were afraid of our own addictive impulses, rising all around us because we were so alone. So, like an evangelical preacher who rages against gays because he is afraid of his own desire to have sex with men, are we raging against addicts because we are afraid of our own growing vulnerability to addiction?