Name: Chasing the Scream
ISBN: 9781526608369

Johann Hari

The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

Chasing the Scream

nhu ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

The man Anslinger sent to track and bust Billie Holiday had, it seems, fallen in love with her. Confronted with a real addict, up close, the hatred fell away.

 “Imagine if the government chased sick people 248 with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn’t treat them,” she wrote in her memoir, “then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs.”

Henry Smith Williams urged the public to ask: Why would gangsters pay the cops to enforce the drug laws harder? The answer, he said, was right in front of our eyes. Drug prohibition put the entire narcotics industry into their hands. Once the clinics were closed, every single addict became a potential customer and cash cow.

They explain that 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.

When we hear about “drug-related violence,” we picture somebody getting high and killing people. 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 1993 National Household Survey 10 on Drug Abuse found that 19 percent of drug dealers were African American, but they made up 64 percent of the arrests for it.

Under prohibition, he explains, if you are the first to abandon a moral restraint, you gain a competitive advantage over your rivals.

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.

 “Of course the control of the drugs, the routes, is what gives them the money to pay off cops, military, federal police—everyone,” Juan told me. “If you legalize drugs they are going to lose a lot of money.” When they legalized alcohol in the United States, lots of gangsters were bankrupted. Would it be similar in Mexico, I ask him, if drugs were legalized? “Of course. There’s going to be less sources of money.”

In Vietnam, the water buffalo have always shunned the local opium plants. They don't like them. But when the American bombs started to fall all around them during the war, the buffalo left their normal grazing grounds, broke into the opium fields, and began to chew. They would then look a little dizzy and dulled. When they were traumatized, it seems, they wanted-like the mongoose, like us— to escape from their thoughts.

In 1995, the World Health Organization 12 (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.

 What they discovered was startling. It turned out that the rats in isolated cages used up to 25 milligrams of morphine a day, as in the earlier experiments. But the rats in the happy cages used hardly any morphine at all —less than 5 milligrams. “These guys [in Rat Park] have a complete total twenty-four-hour supply” of morphine, Bruce said, “and they don’t use it.” They don’t kill themselves. They choose to spend their lives doing other things.

So Bruce came to believe, as he put it, that “today’s flood of addiction 27 is occurring because our hyperindividualistic, frantic, crisis-ridden society makes most people feel social[ly] or culturally isolated. Chronic isolation causes people to look for relief. They find temporary relief in addiction . . . because [it] allows them to escape their feelings, to deaden their senses— and to experience an addictive lifestyle as a substitute for a full life.”

The modern world has many incredible benefits, but it also brings with it a source of deep stress that is unique: dislocation. “Being atomized and fragmented and all on [your] own—that’s no part of human evolution and it’s no part of the evolution of any society,” he told me.

“People overdose because 8 [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 [or] if every time you took an aspirin, you didn’t know if it was 5 milligrams or 500 milligrams.”

Allan Parry, who worked for the local health authority, saw that patients who didn’t have a prescription were injecting smack with “brick dust in it, coffee, crushed bleach crystals, anything.” 

In the United States alone, legalizing drugs would save $41 billion a year currently spent on arresting, trying, and jailing users and sellers, according to a detailed study by the Cato Institute. 31 If the drugs were then taxed at a similar rate to alcohol and tobacco, they would raise an additional $46.7 billion 32 a year, according to calculations by Professor Jeffrey Miron of the Department of Economics at Harvard University. That’s $87.8 billion next year, and every year. For that money, you could provide the Portuguese style of treatment and social reconnection for every drug addict in America.

As a result of this policy where tobacco is legal but increasingly socially disapproved of, cigarette smoking has fallen dramatically. In 1960 in the United States, according to the General Household Survey, 24 59 percent of men and 43 percent of women were smokers. Today, it’s 26 percent of men and 23 percent of women—a halving. There have been similar trends across the developed world. Just because something harmful is legal doesn’t mean people rush to use it: more and more are turning away from it.

"January, 2015 will mark a century of the war on drugs in the United States: one hundred years since the first arrests under the Harrison Act. Facing down this anniversary, Johann Hari was witnessing a close relative and an ex-boyfriend bottoming out on cocaine and heroin. But what was the big picture in the war on drugs? Why does it continue, when most people now think it has failed? The reporter set out on a two-year, 20,000-mile journey through the theater of this war--to find out how it began, how it has affected people around the world, and how we can move beyond it. Chasing the Scream is fueled by dramatic personal stories of the people he meets along the way: A transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who wanted to know who killed her mother, and a mother in Mexico who spent years tracking her daughter's murderer across the desert. A child smuggled out of the Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust who helped unlock the scientific secrets of addiction. A doctor who pushed the decriminalization in Portugal of all drugs - from cannabis to crack. The title itself comes from a formative story of Harry Anslinger, first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, sent as a boy to the pharmacy for a neighbor screaming in withdrawal -- an experience which led him to fear drugs without regard to context. Always we come back to the front lines in the U.S., where we instigated the war and exported it around the globe, but where change is also coming. Powerful, propulsive, and persuasive, Chasing the Scream is the page-turning story of a century-long mistake, which shows us the way to a more humane future"--

Kathy Jedrzejczyk

I liked this book because I already kind of believed most of what he is selling, but I never quite had the evidence to back it up. It was interesting to learn about the history of prohibition. It was enlightening to read about the various places where drugs have been decriminalized or legalized and how well it has worked. 

The author does not just paint a pretty picture of what it could be like. He is realistic that there will always be people who will be addicted and people who can't help themselves. However, he shows worlds where the situation has improved greatly because of the law changes and the attitude changes of the citizens.

Basically it comes down to the fact that drug users need help, not to be criminalized. Drug addicts are people, too, and we should treat them as such. The violence and other atrocious things that come with drugs will resolve themselves if we help the people in need.

Compelling and informative. Really makes you think how the world is working and how much power is too much power, especially when it falls into the wrong hands. 

Daksh

Nadine 

An interesting combination of things I’ve read elsewhere on the war on drugs. My main critique is that is overly long and repetitive and labours a few points. 
Having read a little on his plagiarism puts his credibility as an ethical person in question. 
While he makes some sensible recommendations one can clearly see there is way too much money and power at stake for this to become a reality. Until perhaps in some dystopian future it suits the powers that be to have their subjects in a permanently drugged compliant state.

Melody Izard

The war on drugs is not a civil war. Americans say they want drugs and drug addiction squashed, but they also want to be able to get high when they want to. Keep the drugs out of the unsavory hands, but let me have fun, safe drugs when I want them. Lock up those stinking addicts and build more prison's to keep them locked up. 

This book calls for the end to the war. Johann Hari does not claim to have all the answers, just that our current approach is corrupt and not working. Interesting ideas.

James Montague

Paula Plaza Ponte 

The New York Times Bestseller What if everything you think you know about addiction is wrong? Johann Hari's journey into the heart of the war on drugs led him to ask this question--and to write the book that gave rise to his viral TED talk, viewed more than 62 million times, and inspired the feature film The United States vs. Billie Holiday and the documentary series The Fix. One of Johann Hari's earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of his relatives and not being able to. As he grew older, he realized he had addiction in his family. Confused, not knowing what to do, he set out and traveled over 30,000 miles over three years to discover what really causes addiction--and what really solves it. He uncovered a range of remarkable human stories--of how the war on drugs began with Billie Holiday, the great jazz singer, being stalked and killed by a racist policeman; of the scientist who discovered the surprising key to addiction; and of the countries that ended their own war on drugs--with extraordinary results. Chasing the Scream is the story of a life-changing journey that transformed the addiction debate internationally--and showed the world that the opposite of addiction is connection.

The Inspiration for the Feature Film "The United States vs. Billie Holiday"

Kendall

NOW WITH A NEW AFTERWORD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND THE SOURCE OF THE VIRAL TED TALK 'Screamingly addictive' STEPHEN FRY 'Superb ... Thrilling story-telling' NAOMI KLEIN 'A powerful contribution to an urgent debate' GUARDIAN What if everything we've been told about addiction is wrong? One of Johann Hari's earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of his relatives and not being able to. As he grew older, he realised there was addiction in his family. Confused, he set out on a three-year, thirty-thousand mile journey to discover what really causes addiction – and how to solve it. Told through a series of gripping human stories, this book was the basis of a TED talk and animation that have been viewed more than twenty million times. It has transformed the global debate about addiction.

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