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

by Johann Hari

One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake one of my relatives from a drugged slump, and not being able to. Ever since, I have been oddly drawn to addicts and recovering addicts—they feel like my tribe, my group, my people.

It turns out that many of our most basic assumptions about this subject are wrong. Drugs are not what we think they are. Drug addiction is not what we have been told it is. The drug war is not what our politicians have sold it as for one hundred years and counting. And there is a very different story out there waiting for us when we are ready to hear it—one that should leave us thrumming with hope.

They recommended handing out clean needles as a matter of urgency. The Scottish city of Glasgow—which had a massive drug injection problem—became one of the first in the world to do this. As a result, fewer than 2 percent of their injectors became HIV positive. In New York City, they refused to do it. So by 1992, 50 percent of the city’s injectors were HIV positive—including Deborah. When the authorities finally relented, it brought down new infections by 75 percent.

The government fought a war on alcohol, and this led inexorably to gangs tooling up, creating a culture of terror, and slaughtering as they went. I spent weeks reading over the histories of alcohol prohibition, and there it was—this story, repeating right through history. When the government war on alcohol stopped, the gangster war for alcohol stopped. All that violence—the violence produced by prohibition—ended.

As I traveled from country to country, I started to realize that this story—of a street dealer—is only the story of the first layer of violence and criminality caused by transferring the drug trade into the illegal economy. Beyond Chino Hardin, there is another layer of gangsters controlling the neighborhood. Beyond them is a network of smugglers who transported the drugs from the U.S. border to New York. Beyond them is a mule who carried them across the border. Beyond them is a gang controlling the transit through Mexico, or Thailand, or Equatorial Guinea. Beyond them is a gang controlling the production in Colombia, or Afghanistan. Beyond them is a farmer growing the opium or coca. And at every level, there is a war on drugs, a war for drugs, and a culture of terror, all created by prohibition.

More than 50 percent of Americans have breached the drug laws. Where a law is that widely broken, you can’t possibly enforce it against every lawbreaker. The legal system would collapse under the weight of it. So you go after the people who are least able to resist, to argue back, to appeal—the poorest and most disliked groups.

But on I-95, Leigh began to see the act of pulling over a car to search it in a new way. Once, she saw this scene as a soldier in a just war approaching the enemy. Now she sees it as a meeting of people who are surrounded by ghosts. As he approaches the car, the police officer has ranged behind him the ghosts of all the cops he has known, “all the funerals he’s been to, all the people who’ve been killed in traffic stops—because it’s a lot,” she says. And then “there’s also this poor black kid” in the car. Sitting in the passenger seats behind him are his ghosts—all of his relatives and friends who have been killed in police raids or vanished into the American prison system. Neither can see the other side’s ghosts. They can only hate.

U.S. television documentary Nothing Personal—

What Ronald K. Siegel discovered seems strange at first. He explains in his book Intoxication: After sampling the numbing nectar of certain orchids, bees drop to the ground in a temporary stupor, then weave back for more. Birds gorge themselves on inebriating berries, then fly with reckless abandon. Cats eagerly sniff aromatic “pleasure” plants, then play with imaginary objects. Cows that browse special range weeds will twitch, shake, and stumble back to the plants for more. Elephants purposely get drunk off fermented fruits. Snacks of “magic mushrooms” cause monkeys to sit with their heads in their hands in a posture reminiscent of Rodin’s Thinker. The pursuit of intoxication by animals seems as purposeless as it is passionate. Many animals engage these plants, or their manufactured allies, despite the danger of toxic or poisonous effects.

Only 10 percent of drug users have a problem with their substance. Some 90 percent of people who use a drug—the overwhelming majority—are not harmed by it.

Some drug use causes horrible harm, as I know very well, but the overwhelming majority of people who use prohibited drugs do it because they get something good out of it—a fun night out dancing, the ability to meet a deadline, the chance of a good night’s sleep, or insights into parts of their brain they couldn’t get to on their own. For them, it’s a positive experience, one that makes their lives better. That’s why so many of them choose it. They are not suffering from false consciousness, or hubris. They don’t need to be stopped from harming themselves, because they are not harming themselves.

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.

Wouldn’t it be better to spend our money on rescuing kids before they become addicts than on jailing them after we have failed?

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.

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?

If we think like this, the question we need to answer with our drug policy shifts. It is no longer: How do we stop addiction through threats and force, and scare people away from drugs in the first place? It becomes: How do we start to rebuild a society where we don’t feel so alone and afraid, and where we can form healthier bonds? How do we build a society where we look for happiness in one another rather than in consumption?

Cut off from one another, isolated, we are all becoming addicts—and our biggest addiction, as a culture, is buying and consuming stuff we don’t need and don’t even really want. We all know deep down it doesn’t make us happy, to be endlessly working to buy shiny consumer objects we have seen in advertisements. But we keep doing it, day after day. It in fact occupies most of our time on earth.

“People overdose because [under prohibition] they don’t know if the heroin is 1 percent or 40 percent . . . Just imagine if every time you picked up a bottle of wine, you didn’t know whether it was 8 percent alcohol or 80 percent alcohol [or] if every time you took an aspirin, you didn’t know if it was 5 milligrams or 500 milligrams.”

Gandhi said one of the crucial roles for anyone who wants to change anything is to make the oppression visible—to give it a physical shape.

They voted to use their public money to fly in experts from Switzerland and the Netherlands to explain how those countries had massively reduced the death rate of addicts by abandoning the war on drugs.

As you enter, you are taken through the lobby, shown to your booth, and given clean needles. You inject yourself, while a friendly trained nurse waits unobtrusively in the background. The booths are small and neat and lit from above. Once you have injected yourself, you can walk through to get medical treatment or counseling or just to talk about your problems. Any time you are ready to stop, there is a detox center right upstairs, with a warm bed waiting for you.

Vancouver safe injection site description

In 2012, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that drug addicts have a right to life, and that safe injecting rooms are an inherent part of that right and can never be legally shut down.

“Whatever gave [you] the idea folk in authority operate according to reason? Your trouble is you’re being rational.”

If you give hard-core addicts the option of a safe legal prescription and allow them to control the dose, the vast majority will stabilize and then slowly reduce their drug consumption over time. Prescription isn’t an alternative to stopping your drug use. It is—for many people—a path to it.

In the United States alone, legalizing drugs would save $41 billion a year currently spent on arresting, trying, and jailing users and sellers, according to a detailed study by the Cato Institute. If the drugs were then taxed at a similar rate to alcohol and tobacco, they would raise an additional $46.7 billion a year, according to calculations by Professor Jeffrey Miron of the Department of Economics at Harvard University. That’s $87.8 billion next year, and every year.

The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection. It’s all I can offer. It’s all that will help him in the end. If you are alone, you cannot escape addiction. If you are loved, you have a chance.

It would have seemed like science fiction, but many of the men and women who took part in the Stonewall riots that night lived to see it happen. It happened in a single human lifetime, and it happened because they started somewhere, and they fought.

I wrote a book where I was taught, by extraordinary people like Bruce Alexander, that we should never underestimate the power of love and connection to break down barriers. What I didn’t foresee was that it would force me to acknowledge how my own political identity had, in fact, been a barrier to my ability to connect to some deeply admirable people.

Always remember: no hostile opinion is fixed in stone; it can be moved, if we do this right.