Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction

by Johann Hari

Prohibition, Bourgois explains in his writing, creates a system in which the most insane and sadistic violence has a sane and functional logic. It is required. It is rewarded.

“They might be working for the president by day, and by night they’re working for the cartels.”

“It is impossible to break up the traffic in drugs because of the corruption of the police and also because of the wealth and political influence of some of the traffickers.” Unless, that is, you resist the whole idea of the drug war. Keep drugs legal, he said. Have their sale controlled and supplied by the state, so it can regulate their use, purity, and price. This would prevent criminals from controlling the trade and so end drug trafficking and the violence and chaos it causes.

Leopoldo Salazar

Only 10 percent of drug users have a problem with their substance. Some 90 percent of people who use a drug—the overwhelming majority—are not harmed by it.

For example, in 1995, the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted a massive scientific study of cocaine and its effects. They discovered that “experimental and occasional use are by far the most common types of use, and compulsive/dysfunctional [use] is far less common.” The U.S. government threatened to cut off funding to the WHO unless they suppressed the report. It has never been published; we know what it says only because it was leaked.

They don’t need to be stopped from harming themselves, because they are not harming themselves.

Nearly two-thirds of injection drug use, they found, is the product of childhood trauma. This is a correlation so strong the scientists said it is “of an order of magnitude rarely seen in epidemiology or public health.” It means that child abuse is as likely to cause drug addiction as obesity is to cause heart disease.

Don’t you see? You wouldn’t do this to yourself because you don’t have to. You never had to learn to cope with more pain than you could bear. You might as well look at somebody who had their legs amputated in a car crash and declare: “Well, I would never have my legs cut off.” No. You haven’t been in a car crash. These addicted people—they have been in car crashes of the soul.

“If I had to design a system that was intended to keep people addicted, I’d design exactly the system that we have right now,” Gabor would tell me. “I’d attack people, and ostracize them.”

Wouldn’t it be better to spend our money on rescuing kids before they become addicted than on jailing them after we have failed?

You can get rid of the drug—yet the drug addiction continues in pretty much the same way. What could possibly be happening here?

As Bruce put it: he was realizing that addiction isn’t a disease. Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you—it’s the cage you live in.

In order to punish addicts, the drug warriors have in fact built the very conditions that will be most likely to produce and deepen addiction.

“Addiction,” he said, “is a disease of loneliness.

We are increasingly alone, so we are increasingly addicted.

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?

As a culture, for one hundred years, we have convinced ourselves that a real but fairly small aspect of addiction—physical dependence—is the whole show.

“Nothing about us, without us.” Their message was: We’re here. We’re human. We’re alive. Don’t talk about us as if we are nothing.

This process—the fancy names for it are “maturing out” or “natural recovery”—is not the exception: it’s what happens to almost all of the addicted people around you. This finding is so striking I had to read about it in slews of studies before I really took it on board: Most addicts will simply stop, whether they are given treatment or not, provided prohibition doesn’t kill them first. They usually do so after around ten years of use.

the choice that I’m being offered, and society is being offered, is drugs from the clinic or drugs from the Mafia.”

So heroin under prohibition becomes, in effect, a pyramid selling scheme.

If you give people with hard-core addictions the option of a safe legal prescription and allow them to control the dose, the vast majority will stabilize and then slowly reduce their drug consumption over time.

Meghan says, the prescription drug crisis doesn’t discredit legalization— it shows the need for it.

Prohibition always narrows the market to the most potent possible substance. It’s the iron law.

The harder you crack down, the stronger the drugs become.

The war on drugs makes it almost impossible for drug users to get milder forms of their drug—and it pushes them inexorably toward harder drugs.

Instead of “striv[ing] toward an unachievable perfection such as zero drug use,” they would decriminalize all drugs. Choosing to put a chemical into your body should not be a crime, and being addicted should not be a crime. Instead, all the money spent on arresting, trying, and punishing addicted people should be transferred to educating kids and helping them to recover.

After criminalization ends, a new, more candid conversation can begin.

“The things we were afraid of,” he says, “didn’t happen.” Two highly respected and impartial bodies have studied the outcomes: the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), and the British Journal of Criminology. They have no horse in this race. Their role is solely to figure out what actually happened. They discovered there has been a slight increase in overall drug use, from 3.4 to 3.7 percent of the population.

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.

It occurred to me as I walked up and down those Lisbon streets that we all—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 is the only way of introducing regulation to the drug market.

And through taxation, we would have a huge new revenue stream to educate kids and invest in reducing the real causes of addiction.

Somebody once said to me—what you really need to do is get a movie made of what legalization would look like. And I said—Jesus, that would be the most boring film in the world. Because it would be. It’s going to be watching somebody walk into a shop and say, ‘Please can I have some MDMA?’ and they will say, ‘Yes, here’s some. That’ll be £4.50 please.’

What seems to happen when you legalize marijuana is that a significant number of people looking to chill out transfer from getting drunk to getting stoned.

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

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.

Seen in the long sweep of human history, Danny says, it’s not this new wave of legalization of drugs that is radical. “The radical move,” he tells me, “was prohibition”—the experiment that lasted a century and was based on the idea that it could eradicate entire plant species from the face of the earth and stop humans from getting high.

For me it was just realizing that my ideas of what I thought people were like who used drugs were totally incorrect— and allowing those beliefs to be shattered when facts presented themselves.”

The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection.

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

whoever you are, if you are a human being with a voice, you can start to persuade people, and if your arguments are good enough and you never stop, you will make converts, and they will join you, and you will win. And even when you appear to be losing, you might be starting a process that will win further down the line.

“Courage calls to courage everywhere.”

“Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong,”

Gambling addicts (along with sex addicts and videogame addicts) show us you can have all of the addiction with none of the chemical hooks. This tells us that we have overstated the role of chemical hooks in addiction, and understated other factors.