Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari. 

4/5 rating. 298 pages.

Book  #53 of 2023. Read December 25, 2023.

This book completely changed how I look at addiction and gave me a fuller view of the War on Drugs.

The most important quote was: “The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection.”

Johann uses three of the original Americans in the drug war as metaphors for the actors within it. First, is Harry Anslinger. He is responsible for starting, and exporting worldwide, the war on drugs. He was a tyrant who would not bow to any facts from doctors, or anyone else, that went against his belief that drugs should be illegal and addicts should be locked up.

Person number two of import is Billie Holiday. One of the most famous and best jazz singers ever and a renowned abuser of drugs. She represents the drug user who cannot seem to escape the allure of drugs and is somewhat kept in it by the laws put in place (such as renters being banned from public housing, or drug convictions making jobs nearly impossible to find).

The last major character is Arnold Rothstein, one of the most successful and powerful gangsters and drugdealers of all time. He was responsible for US drug-dealing going industrial and manufacturing in bulk of illegal drugs. He set up gangs to distribute these new massive amounts of drugs, then bought off, killed, or intimidated cops, politicians, and most anyone else that was in his way.

Johann looks at what prohibition has done to the drug war. In short, it has been absolutely ineffective. It has bred a lot of addicts, allowed gangs to kill with impunity, has ruined countless people’s lives, and has cost all of us at least billions of dollars.

Johann shows that the leading cause of addiction is trauma and other impacts that lead to people needing an escape, not the drugs themselves.

I have so much more to say about the interesting aspects of this book. But I thought it did a great job of looking at the reasons for and against the drug war originally. After weighing these, it is nearly impossible to not view it as a detriment to all of society.

Quotes:

“[Anslinger] believed the two most-feared groups in the United States – Mexican immigrants and African Americans – were taking [marijuana] much more than white people, and he presented the House Committee on Appropriations with a nightmarish vision of where this could lead. He had been told, he said, of ‘colored students at the University of Minn[esota] partying with female students (white) and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result: pregnancy.’”

“Patients who had come in as unemployed physical wrecks were able, slowly and steadily, to go back to work, support their families, and look after themselves again, just as they had before drugs were criminalized. The order and calm that had existed before narcotics prohibition started to return to their neighborhoods.”

“Now, Harry warned sternly, every addict was not only a criminal and a thug. He was also a potential Communist traitor.”

“Whenever any representative of another country tried to explain to him why these policies weren’t right for them, Anslinger snapped: ‘I’ve made up my mind – don’t confuse me with the facts.’”

“His private files started to warn in frantic tones that addicts were ‘contagious,’ and that any one of us could be infected if they were not immediately ‘quarantined.’ And then, quite suddenly, Harry disappeared from the bureau for months. Although nobody was told at the time, Harry in fact had a mental breakdown and had to be hospitalized. When he returned, his paranoia only seemed to have grown. He saw enemies and plots and secret attempts to control the entire world around every corner.”

“There will always be some people who are violent and disturbed and sadistic – but human beings respond to incentives. In Chino’s neighborhood, the financial incentives for a kid like him were to step up the violence and the sadism – because if he did, he would have a piece of one of the biggest and most profitable industries in America, and if he didn’t, he would be shut out and left in poverty.”

Professor Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University has shown that the murder rate has dramatically increased twice in U.S. history – and both times were during periods when prohibition was dramatically stepped up. The first is from 1920 to 1933, when alcohol was criminalized. The second is from 1970 to 1990, when the prohibition of drugs was dramatically escalated. In both periods, people like Chino responded to the incentives to be terrifying and to kill, in order to control an illegal trade. By the mid-1980s, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and right-wing icon Milton Friedman calculated that it caused an additional ten thousand murders a year in the United States. That’s the equivalent of more than three 9/11s every single year. Professor Miron argues this is an underestimate. Take the drug trade away from criminals, he calculates, and it would reduce the homicide rate in the United States by between 25 and 75 percent.”

“The 1993 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse found that 19 percent of drug dealers were African American, but they made up 64 percent of the arrests for it. Largely as a result of this disparity, there was an outcome that was more startling still. In 1993, in the death throes of apartheid, South Africa imprisoned 853 black men per hundred thousand in the population. The United States imprisons 4,919 black men per hundred thousand (versus only 943 white men). So because of the drug war and the way it is enforced, a black man was far more likely to be jailed in the Land of the Free than in the most notorious white supremacist society in the world.”

“But perhaps most important, once you have been busted for a drug offense – at fifteen or seventeen or twenty – you are virtually unemployable for the rest of your life. You will never work again. You will be barred from receiving student loans. You will be evicted from public housing. You will be barred from even visiting public housing. ‘Say your mother lives in public housing, and you get arrested for possession, and you go visit her,’ Leigh says. ‘If the housing authority find out you’ve been there [they will say] you’ve violated the lease they’ll kick [the whole family] out.’”

“No human society has ever before imprisoned this high a proportion of its population.”

“But Mexico wouldn’t surrender its convictions for long: a few years later, it resumed providing narcotics legally to addicts who needed them, in order to smother the new rise of the cartels. Harry [Anslinger] responded by immediately cutting off the entire country’s supply of opiates for pain relief in its hospitals. Mexicans literally writhed in agony. Mexico now had no choice.”

“‘In every country, in almost every class of animal,’ Siegel explains, I found examples of not only the accidental but the intentional use of drugs.’”

“Only 10 percent of drug users have a problem with their substance. Some 90 percent of people who use a drug – the overwhelming majority – are not harmed by it. This figure comes not from a pro- legalization group, but from the United Nations Office on Drug Control, the global coordinator of the drug war.”

“The Canadian Journal of Medicine reviewed the best academic research into people who had received opiates from doctors following surgery. It found, Gabor writes, that ‘there was no significant risk of addiction, a finding common to all studies that examine the relationship between addiction and the use of narcotics for pain relief.’”

“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.”

“The [Vietnam] war ended. The [heroin] addicts came home. And something nobody expected took place. The study in the Archives of General Psychiatry – and the experiences people could see all across the country – show that 95 percent of them, within a year, simply stopped. The addicts who received drug treatment and rehab were no more likely to stop than those who received no treatment at all.”

“So Bruce [Alexander, a psychologist,] came to believe, as he put it, that ‘today’s flood of addiction 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.’”

“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 another rather than in consumption?”

“The first person to notice an effect [of providing addicts legal drugs] were the local police. Inspector Michael Lofts studied 142 heroin and cocaine addicts in the area, and he found that in the eighteen months before getting a prescription from Dr. Marks, they received, on average, 6.88 criminal convictions, mostly for theft and robbery. In the eighteen months, afterward, that figure fell to an average of 0.44 criminal convictions. In other words: there was a 93 percent drop in theft and burglary. ‘You could see them transform in front of your own eyes,’ Loft told a newspaper, amazed. ‘They came in in outrageous condition, stealing daily to pay for illegal drugs; and became, most of them, very amiable, reasonable law-abiding people.’”

“Drug use didn’t rise, and it didn’t hold steady. It actually fell – including among the people who weren’t being given a prescription. Research published in the Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh compared Widnes, which had a heroin clinic, to the very similar Liverpool borough of Bootle, which didn’t. In Bootle, there were 207.54 drug users per hundred thousand people; in Widnes it was just 15.83 – a twelvefold decrease.”

“Jean tells me the drug dealers he used to work for are ‘completely against this [prescription drug] program. They can control people in weak states and make money from them. If I was still in the criminal milieu, they could make me a killer, I would do anything….But now? No. I am lost for them.’”

“The [prescription drug] program costs thirty-five Swiss francs per patient per day, but it spares the taxpayer from having to spend forty-four francs a day arresting, trying, and convicting the drug user. So when people ask, ‘Why should I pay for this?’ the pragmatic Swiss answer is: This doesn’t cost you money. It saves you money.”

“Before the ban [of cocaine and heroin in 1914], almost all opiate users would buy a mild form of the drug at their corner store for a small price. A few did become addicts, and that meant their lives were depleted, in the same way that an alcoholic’s life is depleted today. Nobody should dismiss this effect: it is real human suffering. But virtually none of them committed crimes to get their drug, or became wildly out of control, or lost their jobs. Then the legal routes to the drug were cut off – and all the problems we associate with drug addiction began: criminality, prostitution, violence.”

“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.”

“Back on Chino’s block in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the state spends one million dollars for every five people it arrests and convicts of midlevel drug offenses: that’s what it took to get the Souls of Mischief off the streets for a while.”

“Prohibition is based on externally preventing people from using drugs through fear and force; the Portuguese alternative is based on the belief that drugs aren’t going away, so you need instead to give people the internal tools – the confidence, the knowledge, the support – to make the right decisions for themselves.”

“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. If the drugs were then taxed at a similar rate to alcohol and tobacco, they would raise an additional $46.7 billion 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 he told me this, I remembered that right at the start of the drug war, gangsters supported prohibition, even bribing Harry Anslinger’s agents to impose it more rapidly. Now, at the end of the drug war, they were violently intimidating people who wanted to end prohibition. What, I wondered to myself, does this reveal about who really benefits from this war?”

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

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