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

by Johann Hari

In Portugal, the dilemmas of teenage life aren’t playing out in a sealed-off cocoon of adolescence: they play out in conversation with parents and teachers and the guidance they can offer. After criminalization ends, a new, more candid conversation can begin.

So there are fewer addicts after decriminalization. At the same time, the British Journal of Criminology found that overdose has been “reduced significantly,” and the proportion of people contracting HIV who get it from drug use has fallen from 52 percent to 20 percent.27

In the years since heroin was decriminalized in Portugal, its use has been halved there—while in the United States, where the drug war continues, it has doubled.28

the vast majority of drug warriors, and the vast majority of legalizers—have a set of shared values. We all want to protect children from drugs. We all want to keep people from dying as a result of drug use. We all want to reduce addiction. And now the evidence strongly suggests that when we move beyond the drug war, we will be able to achieve those shared goals with much greater success.

Legalization slightly increases drug use—but it significantly reduces drug harms.

Some 21 percent of Dutch teenagers38 have tried marijuana; in the United States, it is 45 percent.

More people used drugs, yet addiction fell substantially. Why? Because punishment—shaming a person, caging them, making them unemployable—traps them in addiction. Taking that money and spending it instead on helping them to get jobs and homes and decent lives makes it possible for many of them to stop.

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.

He showed me that the evidence is that, of the people who have tried crack, just 3 percent have used40 it in the past month, and at most 20 percent were ever addicted at any point in their lives.

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.

people will never choose to bring drugs into the legal realm of regulation so long as they believe they are demonic substances that hijack most of their users and destroy them. When they discover that these drugs are in fact less dangerous than alcohol, and addiction is caused mainly by trauma and isolation rather than the drug itself, they will be more receptive to new approaches.

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. So when I threatened to cut him off—when I threatened to end one of the few connections that worked, for him and me—I was threatening to deepen his addiction.

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.

When we talk about ending the drug war, we are a little like the gay activists of 1969—the final end to the war is so distant we can’t see it yet, but we can see the first steps on the road, and they are real, and they can be reached.