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

by Johann Hari

Henry Smith Williams was never the same after these experiences. Before, he saw the majority of human beings as feeble dimwits who barely deserve life. But he started to argue that humans didn’t have to be engaged in a brutal Darwinian war of survival after all; instead, we can choose kindness in place of crushing the weak.

Pretty much every country has its own minority group, like African Americans, whom it wants to keep down.

At times, as I read through Harry’s ever-stranger arguments, I wondered: How could a man like this have persuaded so many people? But the answers were lying there, waiting for me, in the piles of letters he received from members of the public, from senators, and from presidents. They wanted to be persuaded. They wanted easy answers to complex fears. It’s tempting to feel superior—to condescend to these people—but I suspect this impulse is there in all of us. The public wanted to be told that these deep, complex problems—race, inequality, geopolitics—came down to a few powders and pills, and if these powders and pills could be wiped from the world, these problems would disappear.

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

So 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.”

“Human beings only become addicted when they cannot find anything better to live for and when they desperately need to fill the emptiness that threatens to destroy them,” Bruce explained in a lecture in London in 2011. “The need to fill an inner void is not limited to people who become drug addicts, but afflicts the vast majority of people of the late modern era, to a greater or lesser degree.”

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?

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. He argues we need to refocus our eyes, as if staring at a Magic Eye picture, to see that the problem isn’t in them, it’s in the culture. Stop thinking only about individual recovery, he argues, and start thinking about “social recovery.”

If we think like this, the question we need to answer with our drug policy shifts. 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?

So heroin under prohibition becomes, in effect, a pyramid selling scheme. “Insurance companies would love to have salesmen like drug addicts,” with that level of motivation, John remarked.

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. This explains why when you prescribe heroin, fewer people are recruited to use heroin, and why when you prescribe cocaine, fewer people are recruited to use cocaine.

It works exactly the same way when you ban other drugs. Before drugs were criminalized, the most popular way to consume opiates was through very mild opiate teas, syrups, and wines. The bestselling Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, for example, contained 0.16 grain of morphine. One wine laced with cocaine—Vin Mariani—was publicly recommended by Queen Victoria and Pope Leo XIII. The most popular way to consume coca was in teas and soft drinks. But within a few years of the introduction of prohibition, these milder forms of the drug had vanished. They were too bulky to smuggle: even though there was more demand for them, they weren’t worth the risk for dealers like Arnold Rothstein. That’s when coca tea was replaced by powder cocaine, and Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup was replaced by injectable heroin.

It’s a debate about how to achieve those values. In the United States alone, legalizing drugs would save $41 billion a year currently spent on arresting, trying, and jailing users and sellers, according to a detailed study by the Cato Institute.

As I try to understand this, I keep picturing the women back in Tent City on their chain gang. Imagine if, instead, you used that money Portugal-style to put them in a lovely clinic, teach them how to cope with pain, and help them get a job. Now imagine that kind of transformation spreading across a society, even one in which more people use drugs. Would addiction go up, or down?

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 happened after the end of alcohol prohibition.) Enormous amounts of police time will be freed up to investigate other crimes. Trust in the police will begin to come back to poor communities. (This happened in Portugal.) Teenagers will find it harder to get drugs. (This happened in the Netherlands.) Overdoses will significantly decline, and the rate of HIV transmission will fall dramatically. (Both happened in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Vancouver.) The drugs people use will, in the main, be milder than today. (Remember the iron law and the end of alcohol prohibition.) There will be a lot more money to spend on treating addicts and dealing with the underlying causes of addiction. Many addicts who currently get worse behind bars will get better in hospitals and then in new jobs. This means addiction will fall. (This happened in Portugal.) Millions of people who are currently imprisoned f...

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. For a hundred years we have been singing war songs about addicts. All along, we should have been singing love songs to them.