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

by Johann Hari

Mason wanted to focus on undoing Harry’s claims about the effects marijuana has on its users. Tonia wanted to focus on undoing Harry’s claims about the benefits of prohibition.

The Washington campaign argued that drugs should be legalized not because they are safe, but because they are dangerous. It’s precisely because they are risky that we need to take them back from the gangsters and cartels, and hand them to regulated stores—and use the tax money we gain to pay for prevention and treatment.

Their case for legalizing marijuana was not that it is safe, but that the drug laws do more harm than the drug itself—and this, they believe, is an argument that can and will be expanded to many other chemicals.

If you are brave, if you refuse to be defeated, there will be a ripple effect from your actions that you may never see—but it will be there, transforming lives.

The journey I went on to talk about this book and spread its message ended up being as long and as epic as the journey to write the book itself—from Norway to Colombia, from Los Angeles to Sydney, from Paris to Mexico City. It slowly became clear to me that, all over the world, people are particularly hungry for three things. The first is a message of love and compassion toward people with addictions. The second is a desperate need to end the violence caused by the ongoing decision to criminalize drugs. And the third is evidence about how the alternatives actually work in practice.

fighting for women to be granted their right to vote—Millicent Fawcett—said once: “Courage calls to courage everywhere.”

In many cases, she said, these babies shouldn’t be with her. They should be with their mothers. Somebody should have helped them long before it got to the point where they lost their children. She saw the fierce love of these mothers for their babies, and their desperation to be with them, and their joy when their children were returned to them—and realized somebody needed to be helping much earlier in the process, before it came to all this.

I learned that you never know where your allies will be; that love and compassion exist on every part of the political spectrum; and the drug war is so harmful that it can unite people from a very broad range of perspectives.

I discovered there is scientific evidence that there are nine different kinds of disconnection that are making us deeply distressed—and that are, in turn, leading many of us to seek out very powerful anesthetics.

Across the U.S., there has been a series of collapses—in social connections; in access to the natural world; in the sense that we have a secure future—and many more.

Cacioppo says we need to think in terms of “social neuroscience”—your brain is reshaped by social forces.

And many of our scientists imagine the root cause of addiction can be found on a brain scan, in a society that is falling apart, where many people have no friends, where they are taught life is all about buying things and showing them off on Instagram, where they are experiencing more and more humiliation as each day passes.