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

by Johann Hari

Yet once Gabor learned that there was a connection between traumatic early childhoods and compulsive behaviors, he began to think about what the doctor told his mother all those years ago: “All my Jewish babies are crying.” The babies obviously couldn’t know that a genocide was taking place, but they did know, on some level, that their mothers were distraught and not able to meet their needs. His own mother, he says, “was stressed, depressed. She said the only reason she got out of bed was to look after me. So I saved her life. It’s a hell of a responsibility for a four-month-old, to save his mother’s life . . . She carried tremendous pain . . . tremendous grief, and as an infant, you absorb all that.” So he developed differently from a baby whose mother was able to offer calm and consistent love. Now, as an adult, he found himself unable to control himself at moments of stress. For him, the outlet was to buy music.

He saw a similar dynamic at the Portland, only the residents’ experiences were “not like my childhood. They’re much worse,” he tells me. “While the historical circumstances might be more horrifying in my case, the actual personal experience was far more traumatic in the case of my clients.” He says this is “because I wasn’t traumatized by my parents’ psychological dysfunctions . . . The trauma I sustained was the trauma they sustained . . . It came from the outside. But once my parents were united, we had a stable family life. I was not abused . . . It’s nothing like being sexually abused by your father or your mother. It’s nothing like being ignored by your addicted parents who are out carousing while you are left alone.”

Gabor’s trauma was mild, so his addiction was mild: he can bear to be present in the world most of the time. His patients’ trauma was extreme, so their addiction is extreme: they can bear to be present in the world very little of the time. But—crucially—in both cases, something had gone askew, he explains, “before the use of mind-altering substances begins.”

The people from stable families, who glance at addicts and shake their heads and say, “I would never do that to myself.” I feel an urge stop them and wave Gabor’s statistics in their face and say—Don’t you see? You wouldn’t do this to yourself because you don’t have to. You never had to learn to cope with more pain than you could bear. You might as well look at somebody who had their legs amputated in a car crash and declare: “Well, I would never have my legs cut off.” No. You haven’t been in a car crash. These addicts—they have been in car crashes of the soul. And then, just as I am rehearsing this self-righteous lecture in my mind, I notice that I, too, am hurrying past the street addicts, with a look on my face that seems a lot like—what? Fear? Disgust? Superiority? Recognition?

It plainly cannot be the case that all addicts were treated appallingly as kids. It is an important factor in addiction—but it is not enough.

Some people do not have traumatic childhoods, yet they still become addicts. What, he wanted to know, is going on with them?

He has shown that the core of addiction doesn’t lie in what you swallow or inject—it’s in the pain you feel in your head. Yet we have built a system that thinks we will stop addicts by increasing their pain. “If I had to design a system that was intended to keep people addicted, I’d design exactly the system that we have right now,” Gabor would tell me. “I’d attack people, and ostracize them.” He has seen that “the more you stress people, the more they’re going to use. The more you de-stress people, the less they’re going to use. So to create a system where you ostracize and marginalize and criminalize people, and force them to live in poverty with disease, you are basically guaranteeing they will stay at it.” “If negative consequences led people to transformation then I wouldn’t have a single patient left,” he says, “because they’ve experienced every negative consequence in the book. Being jailed. Being beaten up. Being traumatized. Being hurt. HIV. Hepatitis C. Poverty.” Gabor looks at me, his eyes sagging a little, as if picturing it all. “What haven’t they suffered yet?”

Gabor says that since child neglect and abuse is a major cause of addiction, if we were serious about reducing the number of addicts, we would start “at the first prenatal visit, because already the stresses on the pregnant woman will have an impact on the potentially addictive propensity of the child.” We would identify the mothers who are most stressed and least able to cope, and we would give them extensive care and support and coaching in how to properly bond with their child.

We would be highly vigilant for the parents who still can’t provide a safe home, or who become abusive, and find an alternative loving home for the child if we had to. These are approaches that would, over time, reduce addiction, instead of deepening it, as our current strategy does. Of course, services to help mothers and vulnerable kids already exist in all developed societies, but outside Scandinavia, they are usually threadbare and chronically underfunded.

When Hannah would fall into her furies and call herself a worthless junkie, Liz said to her: “You are an amazing human being . . . You show more resilience and tenacity and strength than any person I know . . . You’re strong. You’re beautiful. Can you tell yourself today you did an amazing job surviving?”

To the prohibitionists, Hannah is a failure, because she continued using drugs. To the Portland, she was a success, because she knew she was loved.

Bruce Alexander received his first lesson about addiction from Batman. As a small kid, he grew up on a series of military bases of the United States, where his father was a training officer. One day, he was reading a comic in which a group of crooks beat up a junkie while Batman hid behind a building, watching, impassive. “Dad,” Bruce asked, “why would Batman just stand there while they’re beating this junkie to a pulp? Isn’t it Batman’s job to stop criminals?” “Well, really, no one cares if they beat a junkie to a pulp,” his dad replied, “because they’re worthless human beings.”

In the early 1970s, Bruce was a young professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. He was told by the faculty to teach a course called Social Issues that nobody else wanted to bother with.

explain it to his students, and no more. The same parade of addicts that Gabor would see years later passed before him on the streets, and he thought of them just as Batman taught him to—as zombies whose minds have contracted to the single drooling dimension of their drug.

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.

But Bruce was seeing something really weird instead. There was no heroin in the city—but all the heroin addicts were carrying on almost exactly as before. They were still scrambling desperately to raise the money—robbing or prostituting—to buy this empty cocktail. They weren’t in agonizing withdrawal.

But the core of their addiction didn’t seem to be affected. Nothing had changed.

This is perplexing. You can get rid of the drug—yet the drug addiction continues in pretty much the same way. What could possibly be happening here? Bruce went back and taught his students that drug addiction must have much less to do with the actual chemicals than we commonly assume. They had—like all of us—been told that one of the worst aspects of heroin addiction is the fierce and unbearable sickness of physical withdrawal.

The real pain of withdrawal is the return of all the psychological pain that you were trying to put to sleep with heroin in the first place.

The medical researchers John Ball and Carl Chambers studied the medical literature between 1875 and 1968 and found that nobody had died of heroin withdrawal alone in that time. The only people who can be killed by withdrawal, it turns out, are people who are already very weak: withdrawal helped to kill Billie Holiday when she was terribly sick with liver disease, for example, in the same way that ordinary flu can kill a ninety-five-year-old.

“This is bullshit,” he said, “because we know why people take heroin. They take heroin because it captures their brain once they’ve taken it . . . and the proof is these rat studies which show that’s true.”

But when Bruce looked at these experiments, he noticed something. These rats had been put in an empty cage. They were all alone, with no toys, and no activities, and no friends. There was nothing for them to do but to take the drug.

What, he wondered, if the experiment was run differently? With a few of his colleagues, he built two sets of homes for laboratory rats. In the first home, they lived as they had in the original experiments, in solitary confinement, isolated except for their fix. But then he built a second home: a paradise for rats. Within its plywood walls, it contained everything a rat could want—there were wheels and colored balls and the best food, and other rats to hang out with and have sex with. He called it Rat Park. In these experiments, both sets of rats had access to a pair of drinking bottles. The first bottle contained only water.

So the old experiments were, it seemed, wrong. It isn’t the drug that causes the harmful behavior—it’s the environment. An isolated rat will almost always become a junkie. A rat with a good life almost never will, no matter how many drugs you make available to him. As Bruce put it: he was realizing that addiction isn’t a disease. Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you—it’s the cage you live in.

He took a set of rats and made them drink the morphine solution for fifty-seven days, in their cage, alone. If drugs can hijack your brain, that will definitely do it. Then he put these junkies into Rat Park. Would they carry on using compulsively, even when their environment improved? Had the drug taken them over? In Rat Park, the junkie rats seemed to have some twitches of withdrawal—but quite quickly, they stopped drinking the morphine. A happy social environment, it seemed, freed them of their addiction. In Rat Park, Bruce writes, “nothing that we tried instilled a strong appetite for morphine or produced anything that looked to us like addiction.”

Oddly enough, a large-scale human experiment along similar lines was being carried out shortly before. It was called the Vietnam War.

This wasn’t just journalistic hyperbole: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry later cited by many writers. This meant there were more heroin addicts serving in the U.S. Army than there were back home in the United States. The American military had cracked down hard on marijuana smoking among its troops, sending in pot-sniffing dogs and staging mass arrests, and so huge numbers of men—unable to face that level of pressure without a relaxant—had transferred to smack, which sniffer dogs can’t snuffle out.

Many people in the United States were understandably terrified. The war was going to end sooner or later, and at that point the streets of America were going to swell with an unprecedented number of junkies. They believed the pharmaceutical theory of addiction—so this was the only outcome that made any sense. Their brains and bodies were being hijacked by the drug, so, as Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa warned: “Within a matter of months in our large cities, the Capone era of the ’20s may look like a Sunday school picnic by comparison.”

And something nobody expected took place. The study in the Archives of General Psychiatry—and the experiences people could see all across the country—show that 95 percent of them, within a year, simply stopped. The addicts who received drug treatment and rehab were no more likely to stop than those who received no treatment at all. A tiny number of vets did carry on shooting up. They turned out either to have had unstable childhoods, or to have been addicts before they went.

If you believe the theory that drugs hijack your brain and turn you into a chemical slave—the theory on which the war on drugs has been based since Anslinger—then this makes no sense. But there is another explanation. As the writer Dan Baum puts it: “Take a man out of a pestilential jungle where people he can’t see are trying to kill him for reasons he doesn’t understand, and—surprise!—his need to shoot smack goes away.” After learning all this, Bruce was beginning to develop a theory—one that radically contradicted our earlier understanding of addiction but seemed to him the only way to explain all this evidence. If your environment is like Rat Park—a safe, happy community with lots of healthy bonds and pleasurable things to do—you will not be especially vulnerable to addiction. If your environment is like the rat cages—where you feel alone, powerless and purposeless—you will be. As Bruce explai...

The world around them had become an unbearable place to be—so when they couldn’t get out of it physically, they decided to get out of it mentally. Later, when they could get back to a meaningful life, they felt no more need for the drugs, and they left them behind with surprising ease.

He began to set out his ideas in an extraordinary book called The Globalization of Addiction.

you feel that you have been stripped of a tribe and its rituals you will become deeply unhappy: a human on the savannah who was alone against the world would almost certainly have died. Humans seem to have evolved with a deep need to bond, because it was absolutely essential to staying alive. Bruce began to look over the history of when addiction has suddenly soared among human beings—and he found it has, time and again, been when these bonds were taken away from people. The native peoples of North America were stripped of their land and their culture—and collapsed into mass alcoholism.

The American inner cities were stripped of their factory jobs and the communities surrounding them in the 1970s and 1980s—and a crack pipe was waiting at the end of the shut-down assembly line.

So Bruce came to believe, as he put it, that “today’s flood of addiction is occurring because our hyperindividualistic, frantic, crisis-ridden society makes most people feel social[ly] or culturally isolated. Chronic isolation causes people to look for relief. They find temporary relief in addiction . . . because [it] allows them to escape their feelings, to deaden their senses—and to experience an addictive lifestyle as a substitute for a full life.”

This isn’t an argument against Gabor’s discoveries. It’s a deepening of them. A kid who is neglected or beaten or raped—like Chino’s mother, or Billie Holiday—finds it hard to trust people and to form healthy bonds with them, so they often become isolated, like the rats in solitary confinement, and with the same effects.

Professor Peter Cohen, a friend of Bruce’s, writes that we should stop using the word “addiction” altogether and shift to a new word: “bonding.” 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. One recovering heroin and crack addict on the Downtown Eastside, Dean Wilson, put it to me simply. “Addiction,” he said, “is a disease of loneliness.”

Before they became junkies, these young people were sitting in a room alone, cut off from meaning. Most of them could hope at best for a McJob with a shrinking minimum wage—a lifelong burger-flip punctuated by watching TV and scrimping for minor consumer objects. “My job was basically to say—why don’t you stop taking drugs?” Bruce says. “And one guy explained to me very beautifully. He said, ‘Well, think about that for a minute. What would I do if I stopped taking drugs? Maybe I could get myself a job as a janitor or something like that.’ ” Compare that, he said, to “what I’m doing right now, which is really exciting. Because I’ve got friends down here and we do exciting things like rob stores and hang around with hookers.” Suddenly you are part of a world where, together with other addicts, you are embarked on a crusade—a constant frenetic crusade to steal enough to buy the drugs, dodge the police, keep out of jail, and stay alive.

If your problem is being chronically starved of social bonds, then part of the solution is to bond with the heroin itself and the relief it gives you. But a bigger part is to bond with the subculture that comes with taking heroin—the tribe of fellow users all embarked on the same mission and facing the same threats and risking death every day with you. It gives you an identity. It gives you a life of highs and lows,

The heroin helps users deal with the pain of being unable to form normal bonds with other humans. The heroin subculture gives them bonds with other human beings.

The horrifying fact is that, as Bruce puts it, “it’s a lot better to be a junkie than to be nothing at all, and that’s the alternative these guys face—

When you have been told you are a piece of shit all your life, embracing the identity of being a piece of shit, embracing the other pieces of shit, living openly as a piece of shit—it seems better than being alone. As one addict told Bruce: “This is a life. It’s better than no life.”

DuPont is a tall, thin, genial man from Ohio, and he delivered the knockout speech of the conference—an eloquent rallying call for the drug war, summing up a conference that warned that chemicals can hijack your brain and cause chemical slavery. He agreed to let me put to him some of the possible holes in the theory, and as we spoke, he listened intently. I started by asking how many of the negative effects of drugs he believed are driven by their pharmacological component. He looked at me blankly. “As opposed to . . . ?” And there was a silence.

I mentioned childhood trauma, and isolation. He continued to look blank. “I think the environment is really important,” he said—and then named only one environmental factor: whether drugs are legal or not. Drug use must be kept as a crime, or it will explode. I tried to press him on other factors, but this was the only one he would acknowledge.

felt a little baffled. These are the central metaphors on which the standard theory of addiction is built, and this was the most distinguished expert on the matter, speaking at a conference with these ideas at its very heart. But when I asked him the most basic questions about how this relates to the wider environment, he said—in a friendly way—that he’s never really thought about them. This is the man who set up the main center for drug research in the world, and it was plain he hadn’t actually heard of these alternative theories. He didn’t seem to know who Gabor or Bruce were, or what people like them have shown in their studies.

To be fair, later, when I read through the scientific literature, I realized this is not a failing of DuPont’s. It seems to be standard for scientists in this field, even the very best. They overwhelmingly focus on biochemistry and the brain. The questions Bruce and Gabor look at—how people use drugs out here on the streets—are ignored. Nobody, I kept being told, wants to fund studies into that.

tells me that when you explain these facts to the scientists who have built their careers on the simplistic old ideas about drugs, they effectively say to you: “Look, man—this is my position. Leave me alone.” This is what they know. This is what they have built their careers on. If you offer ideas that threaten to eclipse theirs—they just ignore you.

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.

And that, it turns out, is what happened to Bruce. Once the nature of their findings became clear, the money for the Rat Park experiment provided by his university was abruptly cut off, before the team had a chance to investigate many of the questions it raised.

To a sober-minded military brat raised in a conservative family, the experience of Rat Park and the heroin famines was startling, and it changed how Bruce saw the world. “It’s amazing to discover that something which is so centrally believed is false. It’s just false,” he said to me.