Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction

by Johann Hari

The key to understanding this hidden cause of addiction, Bruce came to believe, was found in one idea above all others—dislocation. Being cut off from meaning. He began to set out his ideas in an extraordinary book called The Globalization of Addiction. He began to piece together why this would be. Human beings evolved in small bands of hunter-gatherers on the savannahs of Africa. The tribe was your only way to survive. If you feel that you have been stripped of a tribe and its rituals you will become deeply unhappy: a human on the savannah who was alone against the world would almost certainly have died. Humans seem to have evolved with a deep need to bond, because it was absolutely essential to staying alive. Bruce began to look over the history of when addiction has suddenly soared among human beings—and he found it has, time and again, been when these bonds were taken away from people. 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. So Bruce came to bel...