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

by Johann Hari

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

As Bruce explains this to me, I find myself picturing the Hole back in Tent City in the Arizona desert. In order to punish addicts, the drug warriors have in fact built the very conditions that will be most likely to produce and deepen addiction.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“We’re talking about learning to deal with the modern age,” Bruce believes. The modern world has many incredible benefits, but it also brings with it a source of deep stress that is unique: dislocation.

The drug war began when it did because we were afraid of our own addictive impulses, rising all around us because we were so alone. So, like an evangelical preacher who rages against gays because he is afraid of his own desire to have sex with men, are we raging against addicts because we are afraid of our own growing vulnerability to addiction?

Stop thinking only about individual recovery, he argues, and start thinking about “social recovery.”

How do we build a society where we look for happiness in one another rather than in consumption?

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.

between physical dependence, and addiction. Physical dependence occurs when your body has become hooked on a chemical, and you will experience some withdrawal symptoms if you stop—I am physically dependent on caffeine, and boy, can I feel it this morning. But addiction is different. Addiction is the psychological state of feeling you need the drug to give you the sensation of feeling calmer, or manic, or numbed, or whatever it does for you.

Bud volunteered for VISTA, one of the antipoverty programs set up by Lyndon Johnson as part of his War on Poverty, before it was replaced by Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs. He arrived at his posting in East Harlem a year after rioters had tried to burn it down, and the block he was assigned to—at the very top of Central Park—consisted of five stories of narrow apartments with long, snaking fire escapes, and stoops facing the street that were always thrumming with people. It was no different from the Harlem that Billie Holiday had arrived in forty years before. Bud was told to go and introduce himself to everyone on the block and ask what help they needed. He was taken aback by how many people were crammed into every apartment: when he told one little kid that he shared a house with just three people, the boy was incredulous. He shared an apartment with seventeen.

“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.”

So at the next few meetings, other addicts started to come up with suggestions themselves for how they could save each other. How do we get a safe injecting room? How do we protect the addicted sex workers? Soon the meetings had a hundred people at them, and they had to find a bigger room. The group decided to turn up at community centers and City Hall meetings where they were having discussions about the need to crack down on The Junkies.

The addicts started to insist on being at every meeting where drug policy was discussed. They took a slogan from the movements of psychiatric patients who were fighting to be treated decently: “Nothing about us, without us.” Their message was: We’re here. We’re human. We’re alive. Don’t talk about us as if we are nothing.

as if the loss of a thousand addicts deserved a pause. 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.

Since Henry Smith Williams was broken, anybody opposing the drug war had entered the debate in a defensive crouch. They had preemptively pleaded—no, no, we are not in favor of drug use, no, no, we are not bad people, no, no, we are not like those dirty junkies. VANDU was different. For the first time, they were putting prohibitionists on the defensive. They were saying: You are the people waging a war. Here are the people you are killing. What are they dying for? Tell us.

way. These people who had been lying and dying alone were now campaigning together, and often they seemed to have more dignity than the people screaming at them that they should just go away and kill themselves.

When you are confronted with historical forces that seem vastly bigger than you—like a war on your people that has lasted nearly a hundred years—you have two choices. You can accept it as your fate and try to adjust to being a pinball being whacked around a table by the powerful. Or you can band together with other people to become a historical force yourself—one that will eventually overwhelm the forces ranged against you.

Bud won the City of Vancouver Book Award for a collection of his poetry. Normally, the award is presented by the mayor, but Owen refused to do it. Bud was beginning to despair. He had fought so hard—but the mayor seemed to be an insurmountable barrier.

In 2012, the results of a decade of changed policies came in. The average life expectancy on the Downtown Eastside, according to the city’s medical health officials, had risen by ten years. One newspaper headline said simply: LIFE-EXPECTANCY JUMP ASTOUNDS. The Province newspaper explained: “Medical health officer Dr. John Carsley said it is rare to see such a shift in a population’s life expectancy.” Some of this improvement is due to the fact that the neighborhood is no longer seen as a disaster zone, so some wealthier, healthier people have started to move in; but the Globe and Mail newspaper reported, using figures from the British Columbia coroners’ office, that drug-related fatalities were down by 80 percent in this period. To find a rise in life expectancy this drastic, you’d have to look to the end of wars—which is what this is.

There is one significant area in which we are worse: black men are ten times more likely to be imprisoned for drug offences than white men in Britain, a figure beating both the United States and apartheid South Africa.

Most addicts simply stopped of their own accord. They “mature out of addiction . . . possibly because the stresses and strains of life are becoming stabilized for them and because the major challenges of adulthood have passed.”

Here’s why drug use went into reverse in John Marks’s clinic. Prescription, it turns out, kills the pyramid selling scheme, by stripping out the profit motive. You don’t have to sell smack to get smack.

Harry Anslinger always said drug addiction was infectious. It isn’t, in normal circumstances—but the system of prohibition he built makes it so after all.

She found that sex workers, if you arm them with condoms and information, are actually “very good public health agents. But you have to trust them. You have to accept their job. So prevention begins with respect.”

These campaigns showed, in embryo, the case that, I believe, could end prohibition around the world. They did it to protect and defend not the addicts, but themselves. This is, it occurs to me, a crucial lesson for drug reformers.

“For many reasons. I mean, these people have to come regularly. We can’t send them I-don’t-know-where. When they have a job it’s important they can come during the lunch break or so. It’s practical.”

If I am an American who has developed an Oxycontin addiction, as soon as my doctor realizes I’m an addict, she has to cut me off. She is allowed to prescribe to treat only my physical pain—not my addiction.

Then the legal routes to the drug were cut off—and all the problems we associate with drug addiction began: criminality, prostitution, violence.

The American middle class had been painfully crumbling even before the Great Crash produced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Ordinary Americans are finding themselves flooded with stress and fear. That, Bruce’s theory suggests, is why they are leaning more and more heavily on Oxycontin and Vicodin to numb their pain.

faced. But if no mild intoxicants are available, plenty of people will use a more extreme intoxicant, because it’s better than nothing. Prohibition always narrows the market to the most potent possible substance. It’s the iron law.

out. On the streets, Oxy is three times more expensive than heroin—way beyond the price range of most addicts. So, he told me, they “switch to heroin, just because of the economics of it.”

The social disapproval of hard drugs didn’t die with the old drug laws. Indeed, it may be stronger now, since there’s no rebellion in drug use anymore. This approach brings teenage decisions into discussion with the adult world, instead of pretending they don’t exist.

And this change has caused another transformation—in how people see the police. “I don’t think [people in poor neighborhoods] see the police now as enemies. I think this is important. This is different.” I think of Leigh Maddox back in Baltimore, and how she told me this would happen after the end of the drug war. This in turn, Figueira says, makes investigating all forms of crime easier: “We spare lots of resources, human resources, paperwork, money” to go after real criminals. In the past, he spent his time “arresting consumers without any result.” Now, he says, “there are results.”

So some of these changes would have happened even without the transformation in the drug laws—but not, he is confident, all of it.

that we all—the vast majority of drug warriors, and the vast majority of legalizers—have a set of shared values. We all want to protect children from drugs. We all want to keep people from dying as a result of drug use. We all want to reduce addiction.

They have decriminalized the personal possession but not the sale of drugs. This is a strange hybrid: everyone knows that to possess drugs, you have to buy them—so under this system, you mostly still have to go to these criminals and their gangs.

But they still control the bulk of the trade. Decriminalization can’t take it away from them; only legalization can.

But in Portugal after the drug war, the state helped people to get better, and then those people helped more people to get better, and then they helped still more people to get better—and so the downward spiral of the drug war has been replaced by a healing ripple that spreads slowly out across the society.

Leary was the most credentialed salesman of legalization the American people had seen since Henry Smith Williams. Today, many people still believe that legalization would be an expression of his values—that drug use is a good thing and should be encouraged; that it would make drugs available to children; that legalization would lead to much more widespread drug use; and that it would end with the destruction of our culture as we know it.

“If I have too much luggage, too much property, too many material goods, that makes me worry I have to defend this stuff—then in that case I will not have time left to take care of the things I really love, and then I lose my freedom.”

Case called. Sentence entered, paperwork filled out. You go to the bailiff. Next case . . . The drama is afterward, when they go to get a job and they can’t because they have a conviction, when they can’t pay their fines and end up having to spend more time in jail . . . It’s a never-ending spiral of hopelessness.”

Busting weed was the priority for her bosses, and it carried a mandatory jail sentence—while domestic violence didn’t.