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

by Johann Hari

Hannah stammered that she had been beaten and raped. “And I remember just listening to her say to me, over and over again, ‘It’s my fault. I deserve this. It’s my fault. I’m a bad person.’ ” And on the little table beside Hannah, there was her alcohol, and her heroin, and a needle. And Liz—who has never wanted to use drugs—looked at them and looked at Hannah and thought: “Which of these things on your bedside table can I give you to take your pain away?” “And that was the moment I understood what addiction did for people,” she tells me. “It was like, in an instant, I made a connection to those black moments in my life where I felt that way . . . when I wanted to die, when I felt that I was a bad person.” The survivors of childhood trauma are often left with that sense of self-hatred all their lives, Liz saw now, and that is why so many of them turn to the strongest anesthetic they can find. It’s not a spasm of irrationality. It meets a need. It takes away the pain, for a while. As Liz told me this, I thought about how fiercely critical I had been of the people I love for their addictions over the years, and I realized I was crying.