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

by Johann Hari

Sheriff Joe has built a jail that he refers to publicly as his “concentration camp,” and presidential candidates flock here during election campaigns, emerging full of praise. Anslinger said addicts were “lepers” who needed to be “quarantined,” and so Arpaio has built a leper colony for them in the desert.

If your environment is like Rat Park—a safe, happy community with lots of healthy bonds and pleasurable things to do—you will not be especially vulnerable to addiction. If your environment is like the rat cages—where you feel alone, powerless and purposeless—you will be.

The native peoples of North America were stripped of their land and their culture—and collapsed into mass alcoholism. The English poor were driven from the land into scary, scattered cities in the eighteenth century—and glugged their way into the Gin Craze. The American inner cities were stripped of their factory jobs and the communities surrounding them in the 1970s and 1980s—and a crack pipe was waiting at the end of the shut-down assembly line. The American rural heartlands saw their markets and subsidies wither in the 1980s and 1990s—and embarked on a meth binge.

If your problem is being chronically starved of social bonds, then part of the solution is to bond with the heroin itself and the relief it gives you. But a bigger part is to bond with the subculture that comes with taking heroin—the tribe of fellow users all embarked on the same mission and facing the same threats and risking death every day with you. It gives you an identity. It gives you a life of highs and lows, instead of relentless monotony. The world stops being indifferent to you, and starts being hostile—which is at least proof that you exist, that you aren’t dead already.

Just as when all legal routes to alcohol were cut off, beer disappeared and whisky won, when all legal routes to opiates are cut off, Oxy disappears, and heroin prevails. This isn’t a law of nature, and it isn’t caused by the drug—it is caused by the drug policy we have chosen. After the end of alcohol prohibition, White Lightning vanished—who’s even heard of it now?—and beer went back to being America’s favorite alcoholic drink. There are heroin addicts all across the United States today who would have stayed happily on Oxy if there had been a legal route to it.

If we legalize, there will be a barrier standing between our kids and drugs that does not exist today. This isn’t theoretical; the societies that have tried this have shown it to be the case. Some 21 percent of Dutch teenagers have tried marijuana; in the United States, it is 45 percent. I picture my nephews and my niece. If I decide to support legalization, it won’t be despite them—it will be because of them.

(at the time this was written, cannabis had been decriminalized since 2003 and the US had not)

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.

We still think—as I discussed earlier—of addiction as mainly caused by chemical hooks. There’s something in the drug that, after a while, your body starts to crave and need. That’s what we think addiction is. But chemical hooks are only a minor part of addiction. The other factors, like isolation and trauma, have been proven to be much bigger indicators. Yet the drug war increases the biggest drivers of addiction—isolation and trauma—in order to protect potential users from a more minor driver of addiction, the chemical hook. If we legalize, somewhat more people will be exposed to the chemical hook in drugs—but the even larger drivers of addiction, trauma and isolation, will be dramatically reduced.

Once the event was over, Sofia Garcia—one of the leading figures in the institute—had asked if I had noticed the armed men standing close to them throughout the event, with machine guns cocked. Those politicians don’t need armed guards all the time, she explained. They have armed guards when they make the case for legalizing drugs. The one thing the cartels fear—more than anything else—is a legal, regulated market.

“The opposite of addiction is connection.”

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. I also implored her to not communicate the notion that addiction makes you “evil” to the very vulnerable people coming to her for help.

If you want to understand why so many people are taking painkillers, you have to understand why so many people are in so much pain—and psychological pain is as real as physical pain. It is not a coincidence that opiate addiction is dramatically higher in West Virginia—where people have lost their communities, their economic security, and their sense of status—than among (say) the student body at Harvard, despite the fact that on average Harvard students have much better health insurance and so would find it easier to get hold of prescription opiates. The places with the biggest opioid crises are also the places with the highest suicide rates and the highest antidepressant prescriptions—which help us to see that what is really going on is an epidemic of deep disconnection.