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

by Johann Hari

He insisted it was not addictive,59 and stated “there is probably no more absurd fallacy” than the claim that it caused violent crime.

But almost overnight, he began to argue the opposite position. Why? He believed the two most-feared groups60 in the United States—Mexican immigrants and African Americans—were taking the drug much more than white people, and he presented the House Committee on Appropriations with a nightmarish vision of where this could lead.

[The lawmakers] must have known that their Edict, if enforced, was the clear equivalent of an order to create an illicit drug industry. They must have known that they were in effect ordering a company of drug smugglers into existence.”

The bureau was defying the clear ruling of the Supreme Court33 that the Harrison Act allowed doctors to prescribe to addicts, but “the Supreme Court has no army to enforce its decisions,”34 the press noted with a shrug.

Just as we are rescuing the sex drive from our subconscious and from shame, so we need to take the intoxication drive out into the open where it can breathe.36 Stuart Walton calls for a whole new field of human knowledge called “intoxicology.”37 He writes: “Intoxication plays,38 or has played, a part in the lives of virtually everybody who has ever lived . . . To seek to deny it is not only futile; it is a dereliction of an entirely constitutive part of who we are.”

All over the Western world, people are being given very powerful opiates every day, legally. If you have been badly injured in a car crash, or had a hip replacement, or had significant dental surgery, you have probably been given opiates, perhaps for quite a long time. These are pretty much the same opiates taken by Gabor’s patients (except yours didn’t have the contaminants added by drug dealers). So if the pharmaceutical theory of addiction is right—if the drugs are so chemically powerful they hijack your brain—then it’s obvious what should happen. You should, at the end of your treatment, be an addict. When you are discharged from the hospital, you should be looking to score on the streets, because now you need your fix. Yet you will have noticed something. You didn’t become addicted. You are not alone. The Canadian Journal of Medicine reviewed the best academic research into people who had received opiates from doctors following surgery. It found, Gabor writes, that “there was no significant risk15 of addiction, a finding common to all studies that examine the relationship between addiction and the use of narcotics for pain relief.” This happens in every city every day, and it passes mostly unnoticed.

“Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause,20 of personal and social maladjustment.”

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?

The alternative works. And the best proof is that virtually nobody in Portugal is arguing for a return to the old ways.

“All the Portuguese society accepts it completely. It is a system that is settled,” Figueira says.

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.

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.