Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction

by Johann Hari

They wanted easy answers to complex fears. It’s tempting to feel superior—to condescend to these people—but I suspect this impulse is there in all of us. The public wanted to be told that these deep, complex problems—race, inequality, geopolitics—came down to a few powders and pills, and if these powders and pills could be wiped from the world, these problems would disappear.

It is a natural human instinct to turn our fears into symbols, and destroy the symbols, in the hope that it will destroy the fear.

when a popular product is criminalized, it does not disappear. Instead, criminals start to control the supply and sale of the product. They have to get it into the country, transport it to where it’s wanted, and sell it on the street. At every stage, their product is vulnerable. If somebody comes along and steals it, they can’t go to the police or the courts to get it back. So they can only defend their property one way: by violence.

Arnold Rothstein is the start of a lineup of criminals that runs through the Crips and the Bloods and Pablo Escobar to Chapo Guzman—each more vicious because he was strong enough to kill the last. As Harry Anslinger wrote in 1961: “One group rose to power over the corpses of another.” It is Darwinian evolution armed with a machine gun and a baggie of crack.

We think the violence is the product of the drugs. But in fact, it turns out this is only a tiny sliver of the violence. The vast majority is like Chino’s violence—to establish, protect, and defend drug territory in an illegal market, and to build a name for being consistently terrifying so nobody tries to take your property or turf.

The unharmed 90 percent use in private, and we rarely hear about it or see it. The damaged 10 percent, by contrast, are the only people we ever see using drugs out on the streets. The result is that the harmed 10 percent make up 100 percent of the official picture.

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

The people from stable families, who glance at addicts and shake their heads and say, “I would never do that to myself.” I feel an urge stop them and wave Gabor’s statistics in their face and say—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 addicts—they have been in car crashes of the soul.

the core of addiction doesn’t lie in what you swallow or inject—it’s in the pain you feel in your head. Yet we have built a system that thinks we will stop addicts by increasing their pain.

The real pain of withdrawal is the return of all the psychological pain that you were trying to put to sleep with heroin in the first place.

addiction isn’t a disease. Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you—it’s the cage you live in.

The rats in solitary confinement and the soldiers in Vietnam weren’t being “hijacked” by the chemicals at hand. They were trying to cope with being dislocated from everything that gave their lives meaning and pleasure. The world around them had become an unbearable place to be—so when they couldn’t get out of it physically, they decided to get out of it mentally. Later, when they could get back to a meaningful life, they felt no more need for the drugs, and they left them behind with surprising ease.

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?

“People overdose because [under prohibition] they don’t know if the heroin is 1 percent or 40 percent . . . Just imagine if every time you picked up a bottle of wine, you didn’t know whether it was 8 percent alcohol or 80 percent alcohol

Nobody, she explained to me, swallows 80 mg of Oxycontin prescribed by their doctor and goes out to commit a crime, or dies of an overdose. No: it’s when the doctor realizes the patient is an addict and cuts them off that all the trouble begins.

But what does “legalization” mean when it comes to prescription drugs? Some people would argue that they should be openly sold, like alcohol—but I think Switzerland’s heroin experiment shows a better path forward: you could expand the criteria for prescription. If you can prescribe opiates for back pain, why can’t you prescribe them for psychological pain? Imagine if a woman addicted to Oxy in Oklahoma City wasn’t abruptly told to stop using, with directions to the nearest Narcotics Anonymous group and a brisk “Good luck.” Imagine if, instead, she was told exactly what the patients in Geneva are told: you will be given a safe, legal dose for as long as you need it, and while you receive it, we will give you support and care to help you to rebuild your life, get secure housing, and keep your job.

One of the best analysts of the drug war, the writer Mike Gray, explains it in his book Drug Crazy. When you are smuggling a substance into a country, and transporting it in secret, “you have to put the maximum bang in the smallest possible package,” he writes. Imagine secretly transporting a trunkload of beer across the United States. You will be able to get, say, a hundred people their drink for the night. But load the same trunk with whisky, and you will be able to get a thousand people their drink for the night. So you’re going to smuggle the whisky

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

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. After absorbing all this, I realize we have been told a story about the prescription drug crisis that doesn’t graft onto reality. It has been presented to us through the old drug war story—the chemical is to blame, and if only we could eradicate the chemical, we could eradicate the problem. It is a tempting story, because it is so simple—and allows us to avert our eyes from how much of this problem was created not by pills, but by people.

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 addicts should be transferred to educating kids and helping addicts to recover.

In the United States, 90 percent of the money spent on drug policy goes to policing and punishment, with 10 percent going to treatment and prevention. In Portugal, the ratio is the exact opposite.

“using drugs is only a symptom of some suffering, and we have to reach the reasons” that make addicts want to be out of their heads much of the time. “You can stop using drugs for a while, but if you don’t solve the problems you have in your mind, things will come back. We have to work [on] the trauma in your life, and only then can you change the way you deal with it.”

In the drug war, we guarantee addicts will find it almost impossible to work again, by marking them with the scarlet letter of a criminal record.

For many people of my generation growing up in the 1980s, drug education consisted mainly of being told that if you tried drugs, your life would be ruined, and that was that. As soon as you smoked your first spliff and survived, you dismissed your teachers as liars on the issue of drugs, and you stopped listening—even to the parts you needed to hear.

They don’t want a world where drug use becomes more exciting and revolutionary. They want a world where it becomes much more boring.

At the moment, we have a licensed and regulated way to sell the two deadliest recreational drugs on earth—alcohol and tobacco.

Legalization is the only way of introducing regulation to the drug market. If this were done, the people selling drugs wouldn’t be shooting each other, any more than your local neighborhood barkeeps send hit men to slaughter each other. The users would know what they were taking. And through taxation, we would have a huge new revenue stream to educate kids and invest in reducing the real causes of addiction.

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