Whilst book reviews are a core and fundamental part of my website Johann Hari’s ‘Chasing the Scream’ may not immediately jump out to you as fitting in with the wider theme. The reason I read this book and wanted to share the key things I found out and learnt from the book is because we millennials will one day soon be the generation running the world, and we have the opportunity to learn the lessons of the failed ‘War of Drugs’ and implement a new strategy to better solve the problem of drug addiction. Plus, it’s a bloody good book! In his book Hari outlines an extremely persuasive argument, with empirical evidence to back it up: legalising drugs and having a far more compassionate view towards drug addicts will not only help those in need but will benefit society with increased tax returns, less criminality and less violence in our world.

Please see below the key notes and lessons I learnt from reading Johann Hari’s ‘Chasing the Scream’, these are only the things I found important and relevant to me, reading the book yourself I’m sure you’ll find your own. The majority of the below are direct quotes from the text.

History of ‘War on Drugs’

• Uses the lives of three people to tell the story of the ‘War on Drugs’: Billie Holiday, Harry Anslinger (Head of Federal Bureau of Narcotics) & Arnold Rothstein (drug dealer)
• Why was ‘War on Drugs’ started? The Blacks, Mexicans, and Chinese were using these chemicals, forgetting their place, and menacing white people.
• Harrison Act 1914 made selling cocaine and heroin illegal. Before that pharmacies had sold morphine for two or three cents a grain, the criminal gangs charged a dollar.
• While Harry Anslinger claimed to be fighting the Mafia, he was in fact transferring a massive and highly profitable industry into their exclusive control.
• By driving up the cost of drugs by more than 1000%, the new policies meant addicts were forced to commit crime to get their next fix.
• Drug prohibition put the entire narcotics industry into the Mafia’s hands. Once the clinics were closed, every single addict became a potential customer and cash cow.
• By conjuring a Communist conspiracy into existence in the 1950s, Anslinger found a way to turn his failure into a reason to escalate the war. Drug prohibition would work – but only if it was being done by everyone, all over the world.
• The public wanted to be told that these deep, complex problems – race, inequality, geopolitics- came down to a few powders & pills, and if these powders and pills could be wiped from the world, these problems would disappear.
• It was Rothstein (famous drug dealer) who paid 8 White Sox players to throw the 1919 World Series.
• Arnold tamed the police with an approach that, years later, would be distilled by his successors, the Mexican drug cartels, into a single elegant phrase: plato o plomo. Silver or lead. Take our bribe, or take a bullet.

Modern impact of ‘War on Drugs’

• When a popular product is criminalised, 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 & steals it, they can’t go to the police to get it back. So they can only defend their property one way: violence.
• Murders related to drugs….7.5% took place when someone high on drugs, 2% feeding habit by stealing going wrong, 75+% caused by establishing, protecting, or defending drug territory in an illegal market.
• When the government war on alcohol stopped, the gangster war for alcohol stopped.
• Murder rate has dramatically increased twice in U.S. history – and both times were during periods when prohibition was dramatically stepped up – Professor Jeffrey Miron. Take the drug trade away from criminals and it would reduce the homicide rates in the United States by between 25% & 75%.
• If you arrest a large number of rapists, the amount of rape goes down, but if you arrest a large number of drug dealers, drug dealing doesn’t go down. Why? Getting rid of the top dealer doesn’t impact demand for drugs, it just increases the price of the individual taking the top dog position, so higher police enforcement is associated with higher murder rates.

The case of legalisation & regulation

• The lesson of ending alcohol prohibition is that there is a way to actually stop this violence: legalise and regulate the drug trade.
• In 1993, 19% of drug dealers were black but they made up 64% of arrests for drug dealing.
• The United States now imprisons more people for drug offences than Western European nations imprison for all crimes combined
• Prohibition creates a system in which the most insane and sadistic violence has a sane and functional logic. If you’re the first to abandon a moral restraint you gain a competitive advantage over your rivals, and you get more control of the drug market – Philippe Bourgois.
• Humans aren’t the only ones who search out ways to get drunk or high to escape their thoughts. Elephants, mongoose & water buffalo all have.
• Only 10% of drugs users have a problem with their substance. 90% are not harmed. This 10% makes up 100% of the public picture.
• The desire to alter our consciousness is the ‘fourth drive’ in all human minds, alongside the desire to eat, drink and have sex, it is biologically inevitable – Professor Siegel.
• The prescription drug crisis doesn’t discredit legalisation – it shows the need for it.
• Prohibition always narrows the market to the most potent possible substance. It’s the iron law and explains why people move from prescriptive drugs to hero on when prescription drugs are taken away.
• Before drugs were criminalised, the most popular way to consume opiates was through very mild opiate teas, syrups, and wines, but within a few years of the introduction of prohibition, these milder forms of the drug had vanished. They were too bulky to smuggle: even though there was more demand for them, they weren’t worth the risk for dealers.
• Just as when all legal routes to alcohol were cut off, beer disappeared and whisky won, when all legal routes to opiates are cut off, mild versions disappear, and heroin prevails.
• In the years since heroin was decriminalised in Portugal, its use has been halved while in the United States it has doubled. It is important to note, it is decriminalised not legalised in Portugal.
• In the United States alone, legalising drugs would save $41billion a year currently spent arresting, trying, and jailing users/sellers. If drugs were taxed at similar rate to alcohol & tobacco they could raise an additional $46.7 billion a year.
• The legalisation of drugs would not lead to people to rush to use it, and with tobacco more and more are turning away from it.
• Marijuana should be treated like tobacco. Hard-core drugs (e.g. Heroin) should be prescribed by an addict’s doctor, alongside offering programs to help them stop using.
• Legalisation is the only way of introducing regulation to the drug market. The users would know what they were taking. And through taxation, we would have a huge new revenue stream to educate kids & invest in reducing the real causes of addition.
• Looking at the Netherlands, evidence suggests that there is no significant increase in drug use if a country decriminalises possession, but some increase when they legalise the sale, due to ease of access.
• People who sell alcohol in our culture have a really strong incentive not to sell to teenagers: if they do, they lose their license and their business. People who sell prohibited drugs have a really strong incentive to sell to teenagers: they are customers and it isn’t more illegal to deal to child than an adult.
• What about meth and crack? These would need tighter regulation, with only ‘supervised’ injecting in safe injection rooms. It is important to note that addiction rates for meth and crack are still only 20%, not the very high figure we tend to believe.
• Alcohol harm score: 72, heroin: 55, crack: 54, meth: 32 – Professor David Nutt.
• With legalisation in Colorado, the fevered poetry of the drug war has turned into the flat prose of drug peace. Drugs have been turned into a topic as banal as selling fish, or tires.

Importance of compassion

• Nothing is addictive in and of itself, in fact nearly two-thirds of injection drug use is the product of child trauma. Survivors of childhood trauma are often left with that sense of self-hatred all their lives and that is why so many of them turn to the strongest anesthetiser they can find.
• 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.
• An isolated rat will almost always become a junkie. A rat with a good life will almost never.
• Heroin helps users deal with the pain of being unable to form normal bonds and other humans, often the result of child trauma. The heroin subculture gives them bonds with other human beings.
• Most addicts will eventually stop whether they are given treatment or not, providing prohibition and consequences of it don’t kill them first. They usually do so after ten years of use. This is called ‘maturing out’, possibly because the stresses & strains of life are becoming more bearable and major challenges of adulthood have passed.
• If you give hard-core addicts the option of a safe legal prescription and allow them to control the dose, the vast majority will stabilise and then slowly reduce their drug consumption over time. Prescription isn’t an alternative to stopping your drug use, it is – for many people – a path to it.
• A compassionate approach leads to less addiction.

Conclusion

The strongest and most prevalent argument I read in ‘Chasing the Scream’ and a view point I agree with is this: ‘when people discover that drugs are in fact less dangerous then alcohol, and addiction is caused mainly by trauma & isolation rather than the drug itself, they will be more receptive to new approaches’. Drugs can be dangerous and must be tightly regulated but it’s education and pivoting to a compassionate approach to drug addiction that is really the important thing we should be focusing on and pushing for in the political agenda.