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

by Johann Hari

But—as Gabor is the first to point out—even with these discoveries, our picture is still incomplete. 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.

about childhood trauma, but he was trying to answer this further question. 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.

But what if we replaced this war on addicts with a war on the causes of addiction?

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.

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. 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.

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.

Rat Park. In these experiments, both sets of rats had access to a pair of drinking bottles. The first bottle contained only water. The other bottle contained morphine—an opiate that rats process in a similar way to humans and that behaves just like heroin when it enters their brains. At the end of each day, Bruce or a member of his team would weigh the bottles to see how much the rats had chosen to take opiates, and how much they had chosen to stay sober.

What they discovered was startling. It turned out that the rats in isolated cages used up to 25 milligrams of morphine a day, as in the earlier experiments. But the rats in the happy cages used hardly any morphine at all—less than 5 milligrams. “These guys [in Rat Park] have a complete total twenty-four-hour supply” of morphine, Bruce said, “and they don’t use it.” They don’t kill themselves. They choose to spend their lives doing other things.

It isn’t the drug that causes the harmful behavior—it’...

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.”

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.”

The key to understanding this hidden cause of addiction, Bruce came to believe, was found in one idea above all others—dislocation. Being cut off from meaning.

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.

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.”

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.

“Addiction,” he said, “is a disease of loneliness.”

It gives you an identity. It gives you a life of highs and lows, instead of relentless monotony.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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. So they steer away from all this evidence and look only at the chemical effects of the drugs themselves.

That’s not fake—but it’s only a small part of the picture. There is a powerful political brake on e...

There were three questions I had never understood. Why did the drug war begin when it did, in the early twentieth century? Why were people so receptive to Harry Anslinger’s message? And once it was clear that it was having the opposite effect to the one that was intended—that it was increasing addiction and supercharging crime—why was it intensified, rather than abandoned?

the average number of close friends a person has has been steadily falling. We are increasingly alone, so we are increasingly addicted.

At the same time that our bonds with one another have been withering, we are told—incessantly, all day, every day, by a vast advertising-shopping machine—to invest our hopes and dreams in a very different direction: buying and consuming objects.

Bruce says that at the moment, when we think about recovery from addiction, we see it through only one lens—the individual. We believe the problem is in the addict and she has to sort it out for herself, or in a circle of her fellow addicts.

But this is, he believes, like looking at the rats in the isolated cages and seeing them as morally flawed: it misses the point.

the problem isn’t in them, it’s in the culture. Stop thinking only about individual recovery, he argues, and start ...

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?

We haven’t been able to reduce addiction, it occurs to me, because we have been asking the wrong questions.

Bruce says this dynamic is producing something even darker than the drug war. 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.

Smoking tobacco kills 650 out of every hundred thousand people who use it, while using cocaine kills four.

The pharmacology of nicotine patches works just fine—you really are giving smokers the drug they are addicted to. The level of nicotine in your bloodstream doesn’t drop if you use them, so that chemical craving is gone.

There is just one problem: even with a nicotine patch on, you still want to smoke. The Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of nicotine patch wearers were able to stop smoking.

How can this be? There’s only one explanation: something is going on that is more significant than the...

distinction that really helped me—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—

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.

“I vowed I would never again be vulnerable to another human being.”

He learned to live in the stationary world by falling into almost hypnotic trances: he would be sitting with people, but he would go somewhere in his head where he couldn’t see or hear them, and he was alone, and he was numb. “I was able to shut it out. Disassociation,” he says. “You remove your consciousness from what’s going on around you.”