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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Johann Hari
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February 18 - February 27, 2021
They don’t want a world where drug use becomes more exciting and revolutionary. They want a world where it becomes much more boring. They are a pair of English policy wonks called Danny Kushlick and Steve Rolles.
Together, Danny and Steve formed a group called the Transform Drugs Policy Institute, to answer a question nobody else in the world was answering in any detail: In practice, on your street, what does legalization mean? If we end the drug war, how will drugs be distributed? Who will be allowed to use them? What would change?
Just because something harmful is legal doesn’t mean people rush to use it: more and more are turning away from it.
expand the web of regulation covering booze and cigarettes to cover them.
Across every country in the developed world, there is a network of doctors and pharmacists who prescribe powerful chemicals, on the basis of your doctor’s assessment of whether you need them. As you read this, they are handing out opiates and amphetamines and everything in between, for medical purposes. This, too, can be expanded—just as they’ve done in Switzerland. Under this model, addicts would be prescribed their drug by their doctor, while being offered all sorts of programs to help them stop using.
Expanding these two tiers of regulation that already exist would, they argue, end most of the problems caused by the drug war today.
It would mean people who go right now to armed gangsters on street corners will go either to licensed stores, or to doctor...
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This isn’t a vision in which we lose control of drugs, Danny and Steve argue—it’s a vision in whi...
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The users would know what they were taking. And through taxation, we would have a huge new revenue stream to educate kids and invest in reducing the real causes of addiction.
This finding suggests that there is no significant increase in drug use if a country decriminalizes possession, but some increase when they legalize sale.
It’s important to be candid about this rise, but also important not to exaggerate its scale. Cannabis use rose a little, but it is still low in the Netherlands. Some 5 percent of Dutch citizens reported smoking cannabis in the previous month, which is lower than the United States at 6.3 percent and the EU average of 7 percent.
Cannabis consumption didn’t spiral out of control, and it remains low compared to other countries.
if you do count alcohol as drug use, then there is some evidence suggesting overall drug use will not go up after legalization. Why? What seems to happen when you legalize marijuana is that a significant number of people looking to chill out transfer from getting drunk to getting stoned.
talk about a rise in “drug use” is the wrong way of thinking about it. The more interesting question, he says, is how patterns of drug use will change.
The evidence suggests there will probably be a modest but real increase in use.
Nobody in my nephews’ schools, it occurred to me as Fred talked, is selling Budweiser or Jack Daniel’s. But there are plenty of people selling weed and pills. Why? Because the people who sell alcohol in our culture have a really strong incentive not to sell to teenagers: if they do, they lose their license and their business.
The people who sell other, prohibited drugs in our culture have a really strong incentive to sell to teenagers: they are customers like everybody else.
Some 21 percent of Dutch teenagers have tried marijuana; in the United States, it is 45 percent.
But what about overdose?
In a regulated store, by contrast, you know what you are getting.
When you ban a drug, it’s very risky to transport it—so dealers will always choose the drug that packs the strongest possible kick into the smallest possible space.
After drug prohibition ends, it’s reasonable to expect that the milder forms of drugs that were popular before prohibition will come back, just as beer did. So the rise in drug use will most likely consist not of an army of crack addicts, but of an increase in people drinking stronger tea and smoking weaker spliffs. Nobody has ever overdosed on coca tea.
In the column next to it, arguing for legalization, I found myself writing out the following arguments: Across the world, armed criminal gangs selling drugs will be financially crippled, from the Crips to the Zetas. The survivors will be pushed into much less profitable markets, where they will be able to do much less harm. As a result, the culture of terror that currently dominates whole neighborhoods and countries—from Brownsville, Brooklyn, to Ciudad Juárez—will gradually abate. (This happened after the end of alcohol prohibition.) The murder rate will significantly fall. (This also
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Millions of people who are currently imprisoned for nonviolent offenses, at great expense to the taxpayers and to their communities, will walk free. Huge numbers of African American and Latino men who are currently locked out of the workforce, student loans, and public housing will be allowed back in. Shaming addicts will be replaced by caring for addicts.
Mujica “would be different if he weren’t kept prisoner,” Lucia tells me, “because he had so much time to think, it became clear to him what was important in life.” He learned “to live with light baggage in jail. He learned that happiness doesn’t come from what you have, but from what you are.”
Professor Roger Roffman, an expert on addictive disorders, was one of the leading figures in the campaign, and he had been campaigning for marijuana legalization since 1967, ever since he returned from Vietnam. But when he heard people during the campaign saying the drug is “safe,” he felt obliged to explain: “This is perhaps what you’d like to believe, but the science doesn’t support it. Dependence is a risk. Driving accidents are a risk. Teenagers using marijuana early and regularly and becoming derailed . . . is a risk, and to say marijuana is harmless is misinformed, and it’s misinforming
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In Colorado, it seemed to me they primarily argued that it would make people healthier by getting them to transfer from alcohol to marijuana.
In Washington, they argued it would make people healthier by making it possible to raise taxes to undo some of the harm caused by their marijuana use.
Professor David Nutt, the former chief scientific adviser to the British government on drugs, published a study in The Lancet—Britain’s leading medical journal—going through every recreational drug, and calculating how likely it was to harm you, and to cause you to harm other people. He found that one drug was quite far ahead of all the others. It had a harm score of 72. The next most harmful drug was heroin—and it had a harm score of 55, just ahead of crack at 54 and methamphetamine at 32. It wasn’t even close. The most harmful drug was alcohol.
alcohol is considerably more dangerous than we realize.
He coped with his childhood by cutting himself off. He obsessively connected with his chemicals because he couldn’t connect with another human being for long.
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.
You don’t need a chemical; you need a connection.
McCarthy—the red-faced red-baiter—was a junkie, and Anslinger was his dealer. Nobody ever believes the drug war should be waged against somebody they love. Even Harry Anslinger turned into Henry Smith Williams when confronted with an addict he cared about.
Years later, after Harry retired, he developed angina, and he began to use the very drug he had been railing against: he took daily doses of morphine. Anslinger died with his veins laced with the chemicals he had fought to deny to 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.
Millicent Fawcett—said once: “Courage calls to courage everywhere.”
Courage, I realized, is contagious.
Compassion, too, is c...
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“There is no one to care, if you do not care. Bud Osborn, 1947–2014.”
They talked about their own struggles, or about relatives who were still addicted. I saw that some of them were tempted to cut off the addicts in their lives, to cauterize the pain. Several of them were being urged to do this by people in their lives, to show “tough love.” Instead, they were taking a risk—the risk of connection. It seemed as if they were looking to me for permission to act on their kindest instincts.
As we debated the issues, this woman kept intervening on the side of Iain Duncan Smith, in favor of harsh and stigmatizing policies: indeed, she praised him. At one point, she told me that I didn’t understand: she had, she said, been “evil” when she was a heroin user.
I told her later that it broke my heart to hear her talk about herself in this way. You may have done bad things when you were addicted, I said—we have all done bad things, by the way, whether we had an addiction or not—but that was because you were in terrible pain, and you deserved love then, and you deserve love now.
There’s lots of good people in the drug treatment world, but I quickly saw there’s also a lot of cruel and unscientific ideas that are rampant too.
There’s a conflict within the treatment world on these questions—some
some routinely screen a TED talk I gave, which is entitled “Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong,” to people when they first arrive and are hungry for a deeper and more compassionate analysis.
Others are run by people like the man I met in L.A. who too often seem to be playing out their own traumas and internal stigma on peo...
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In 2017, a transcript of a conversation between Trump and the recently elected president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, was leaked. Duterte had said in a press conference: “Hitler massacred three million Jews . . . There’s three million drug addicts [in the Philippines]. There are. I’d be happy to slaughter them.” He added: “If Germany had Hitler, the Philippines would have . . .” and pointed at himself. This was not a joke. He had dispatched death squads across the country to kill people who use, are addicted to, or sell drugs, and this campaign has extrajudicially murdered more than
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In a curious parallel with Harry Anslinger, Duterte is himself—by his own admission—using an extraordinarily powerful drug, the opiate fentanyl, which he says makes him feel like he is “on cloud nine, as if everything is okay with the world, nothing to worry about.” Challenged about this by a BBC interviewer, he snapped, “I am not an addict. Only when it is prescribed.” He began to use fentanyl three years earlier after an injury to his spine.
