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

by Johann Hari

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In Vietnam, the water buffalo have always shunned the local opium plants. They don’t like them. But when the American bombs started to fall all around them during the war, the buffalo left their normal grazing grounds, broke into the opium fields, and began to chew. They would then look a little dizzy and dulled. When they were traumatized, it seems, they wanted—like the mongoose, like us—to escape from their thoughts.

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.

Even William Bennett, the most aggressive drug czar in U.S. history, admits: “Non-addicted users still comprise the vast bulk of our drug-involved population.”

in 1995, the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted a massive scientific study of cocaine and its effects. They discovered that “experimental and occasional use are by far the most common types of use, and compulsive/dysfunctional [use] is far less common.” The U.S. government threatened to cut off funding to the WHO unless they suppressed the report. It has never been published; we know what it says only because it was leaked.

For anybody who suspects that we need to reform the drug laws, there is an easier argument to make, and a harder argument to make.

The easier argument is to say that we all agree drugs are bad—it’s just that drug prohibition is even worse.

The only difference is between prohibitionists who believe the tragedy of drug use can be dealt with by more jail cells in California and more military jeeps on the streets of Juárez, and the reformers who believe the tragedy of drug use can be dealt by moving those funds to educate kids and treat addicts.

Professor Siegel claims the desire to alter our consciousness is “the fourth drive” in all human minds, alongside the desire to eat, drink, and have sex—and it is “biologically inevitable.” It provides us with moments of release and relief.

Everyone who attended the Eleusinian mysteries was sworn to secrecy about what happened there, so our knowledge is based on scraps of information that were recorded in its final years, as it was being suppressed.

They believed the drugs brought them closer to the gods, or even made it possible for them to become gods themselves.

The classicist Dr. D.C.A. Hillman wrote that the “founding fathers” of the Western world were drug users, plain and simple: they grew the stuff, they sold the stuff, and more important, they used the stuff . . . The ancient world didn’t have a Nancy Reagan, it didn’t wage a billion-dollar drug war, it didn’t imprison people who used drugs, and it didn’t embrace sobriety as a virtue. It indulged . . . and from this world in which drugs were a universally accepted part of life sprang art, literature, science, and philosophy . . . The West would not have survived without these so-called junkies and drug dealers.

this annual festival ended only when the drug party crashed into Christianity.

The early Christians wanted there to be one route to ecstasy, and one route only—through prayer to their God. You shouldn’t feel anything that profound or pleasurable except in our ceremonies at our churches. The first tugs towards prohibition were about power, and purity of belief.

If the drive to get intoxicated is in all of us, and if 90 percent of people can use drugs without becoming addicted, what is happening with the 10 percent who can’t? What is different about them?

As a culture, we have a story about how addiction works, and it’s a good one. It says that some substances are so chemically powerful that if you use them enough, they will hijack your brain. They will change your neurochemistry. They will give you a brain disease. After that, you will need the drug physically.

This model of addiction had been proven through animal experiments. Put a rat alone in a cage and give it unlimited quantities of cocaine, and nine times out of ten, it will use so much and so compulsively that it will kill itself.

The fancy term for this is “the pharmaceutical theory of addiction.”

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, written by Gabor Maté.

Her nonprofit took over a hotel and turned it into a place for the people who could not be housed anywhere else—the most chronic addicts and most severely mentally ill people. Liz was put in charge, with a commitment to the residents that they would never be kicked out or lectured to.

Instead, they would be offered a room of their own, and—whenever they wanted it—staff who would sit with them, and listen to them, and try to love them. That was all.

“Our method is—be a human being with other human beings,” Liz tells me. “Be there for them. Don’t judge. Don’t tell them how to live their fricking life. Just be in their life. Be a nice, solid presence. Somebody who isn’t going to bow and bend . . . and walk away. Who’s not going to...

These are people, he soon discovered, who have spent their lives being chased away or chastised. Most of them have never sat down with a person who wanted to listen to their life story sympathetically.

The addicts had been made to feel disgusting and ashamed all their lives—and only the drug took this sense away. “The first time I did heroin,” one woman told him, “it felt like a warm, soft hug.”

After a while, Gabor started to see patterns in the psyches of the people at the Portland.

What did they all have in common? Horribly disturbed childhoods, marked by violence, sexual assault, or both. Gabor was finding that virtually all his patients fit this description.

Could it be that these hard-core addicts were all terribly damaged before they found their drugs?

All over the Western world, people are being given very powerful opiates every day, legally. If you have been badly injured in a car crash, or had a hip replacement, or had significant dental surgery, you have probably been given opiates, perhaps for quite a long time. These are pretty much the same opiates taken by Gabor’s patients

So if the pharmaceutical theory of addiction is right—if the drugs are so chemically powerful they hijack your brain—then it’s obvious what should happen. You should, at the end of your treatment, be an addict.

Early in this journey, I went to sit in—with the permission of everyone there—on a Gamblers Anonymous meeting at the Problem Gambling Center in Las Vegas. I found—just like you will—that they were indistinguishable from those of alcoholics or heroin addicts in their essentials.

Gabor came to suspect that it means, as he told me, “nothing is addictive in itself. It’s always a combination of a potentially addictive substance or behavior and a susceptible individual. So the question we need to keep asking is—What creates the susceptibility?”

Gabor began to read about a group of American scientists who had carried out something called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. It is the most detailed research ever conducted into the long-term effects of early childhood trauma.

These scientists discovered that for each traumatic event that happened to a child, they were two to four times more likely to grow up to be an addicted adult.

child abuse is as likely to cause drug addiction as obesity is to cause heart disease.

Another long-term study, published in American Psychologist, followed kids from the age of five until they were eighteen, to figure out how much the quality of your parenting while a child affects your drug use as you get older.

It turned out the kids whose parents had been either indifferent or cruel were dramatically more likely to heavily use drugs than the others. They had grown up, they found, less able to form loving relationships, and so they felt more angry and distressed and impulsive a lot of the time.

“Their relative maladjustment,” the study found, “precedes the initiation of drug use.” Indeed, “Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause, of personal and social maladjustment.”

This is one reason why Dr. Vincent Felitti—one of the key figures in the Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey—concluded, as Gabor writes, that “the basic cause of addiction is predominantly experience-dependent during childhood, and not substance-dependent. The current conception of addiction is ill-founded.”

The survivors of childhood trauma are often left with that sense of self-hatred all their lives, Liz saw now, and that is why so many of them turn to the strongest anesthetic they can find. It’s not a spasm of irrationality. It meets a need. It takes away the pain, for a while.

Long before, one of Billie Holiday’s friends, Memry Midgett, told an interviewer: “The reason for her being an addict was because she had a tremendously poor threshold of pain.” Another of her friends, Michelle Wallace, said: “People think sometimes people use drugs because they’re bad or evil. Sometimes . . . the softest people use drugs, because they can’t take the pain.”

[People] wonder—why do [addicts] keep doing it? Because it makes them feel good, and the rest of their life doesn’t make them feel good.”

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.

It’s nothing like being ignored by your addicted parents who are out carousing while you are left alone.”

I picture the look of judgment on the faces of people who stumble into this neighborhood by mistake. I can see them now. 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 a...