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

by Johann Hari

The parents were terrified their son would die; the son felt he couldn’t stop. And one day, they were discussing his work as a smacked-out Santa, and they all began to laugh helplessly. Something about this pricked at Bruce. He had been taught to believe addicts were incapable of self-reflection—yet this young man could see the absurdity of his situation clearly. There was a humanity in this laughter that Bruce had not expected to hear. He continued to interview addicts in depth. Like Gabor, he could see that childhood trauma was a crucial factor. But he was also discovering facts that were deeply confusing to him and, at first glance, to everyone. There were big chunks of time in the 1970s in which the Canadian police managed to blockade the port of Vancouver so successfully that no heroin was getting into the city at all. We know this because the police tested the “heroin” being sold on the streets and found it actually contained zero percent of the drug: it was all filler and contaminants. So the war on drugs was, for some significant stretches, being won here.