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

by Johann Hari

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. But you don’t inject a deck of cards into your veins; you don’t snort a roulette wheel. How can we begin to make sense of this? After thinking about it deeply, 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?”