My review of Johann Hari’s book, Chasing the Scream
The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it is connection.
~Johann Hari~
I discovered the existence of this book several days after a certain president announced his opinion that drug traffickers should be executed. He would have felt an affinity with Harry Anslinger, the main architect and champion of the war on drugs that took hold in the 1930s. His view was that illegal drugs were bad and so were the people who sold them and they consumed. Both groups of people and the drugs themselves became the eradication targets for him.
Hari writes extensively about Anslinger and the army he led, as well as Billie Holliday, the renowned jazz singer who died of a heroin overdose, and Arnold Rothstein, an early drug addict. Throughout the course of the book, Hari also provides comprehensive coverage of drug users, drug dealers, the police, people who work with drug users, and investigators. He also documents the results of the investigation and the alternatives to a war on drugs.
Hari admits he found it hard to let go of traditional wisdom about the ills of drugs and those who use them. He also wrestled with the idea that drug eradication is the only effective way to address the problem. I have to admit that initially it was also hard for me as a reader to imagine looking at drugs in any other way than the traditional way.
The author documents the burdens placed on society by the war on drugs, making the problem for society much worse than it was when drugs were legal. He clearly points out how little we learned from alcohol prohibition. Crime increased significantly with the advent of prohibition and decreased with the end of prohibition. However, we found that the best way to deal with the problem of illegal drugs was to follow the same path we took with alcohol. Although the subtitle of Hari’s book is “The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs,” it doesn’t seem to me that the last days are in sight.
However, research and social experiments suggest that there are rational alternatives. Research with animals and then with people found that addiction is not primarily due to the nature of the substances ingested. A much larger contribution to addiction is a lack of a sense of worth, a lack of social connection, and a feeling of not being useful to society. As Gabor Maté says: “The core of addiction does not lie in what you swallow or inject, it is the pain you feel in your head.” Hari also mentions the effects of institutional racism that leads to increased drug use by people of color.
The author also details the success of programs in countries like Switzerland and Portugal and the efforts in the states of Colorado and Washington to achieve drug legalization in various ways. Such approaches often involve supervised drug use along with counseling to help users improve their sense of self, begin to feel human again, and find a way to contribute to society.
The book is presented in a narrative fashion, leaving you with a sense of meeting the people on all sides of this issue. It may be difficult for you to change the way you think about drugs, drug use and users after a long tradition of seeing this as a problem that must be eradicated. Addressing it in this way has led to a drain on society both socially and economically. I suggest you try this book. You can always go back to your old way of thinking if you want, but if you have any humanitarian bent, I have a feeling you will learn to think differently about this problem.