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

by Johann Hari

But why, then, do these ideas persist? Why haven’t the scientists with the better and more accurate ideas eclipsed these old theories? Hart tells me bluntly: Almost all the funding for research into illegal drugs is provided by governments waging the drug war—and they only commission research that reinforces the ideas we already have about drugs. All these different theories, with their radical implications—why would governments want to fund those? Eric Sterling is the lawyer who wrote the drug laws for the United States between 1979 and 1989. When every major drug law was being drafted, he was at the table shaping it into words. When I met him in his Maryland office, he told me that if any government-funded scientist ever produced research suggesting anything beyond the conventional drugs-hijack-brains theory, he knows exactly what would happen. The head of NIDA would be called before a congressional committee and asked if she had gone mad. She might be fired. She would certainly be stopped. All the people conducting the science for NIDA—and remember, that’s 90 percent of research on the globe into illegal drugs—know this.