Chasing the Scream Study Guide

The son of a Swiss bus driver and a Scottish nurse, Johann Hari was born in Glasgow and raised in London, where he still lives today. After attending a series of prestigious private schools, Hari went on to study Social and Political Science at Cambridge University, where he also won national awards for his writings in a student newspaper. After graduation, he began working for the magazine New Statesman and writing a column for the newspaper The Independent, where he stayed for more than a decade. During this time, he also published work in a variety of leading global newspapers, and he won significant awards including the 2008 Orwell Prize for political writing and the 2010 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. However, in 2011, bloggers discovered that Hari had plagiarized parts of many interviews: he inserted real quotes from his subjects’ other writing or media appearances into his articles, in order to falsely imply that these quotes came from interviews that he conducted. The public also learned that Hari had assumed a false identity in order to make biased edits to his own and many of his rival journalists’ Wikipedia pages. Hari publicly apologized for his behavior, returned his Orwell Award, and lost his position at The Independent. For the next three years, he fell out of the public spotlight while traveling around the world and interviewing people to write Chasing the Scream, which he published in 2015. Then, he repeated this research process to study depression and anxiety for his 2018 book Lost Connections and focus and attention for his 2022 book Stolen Focus. While Hari’s journalistic comeback has been controversial, he now meticulously cites all the sources and quotes in his work, including by publishing audio recordings of his interviews online. Today, Hari is probably best known for his extremely popular TED Talks about addiction and depression.

Chasing the Scream covers a century of history in the war on drugs, which began with the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which outlawed the sale of cocaine and opiates (the family of drugs that includes heroin) except in a very narrow range of medical circumstances. This shifted the market for these drugs into the hands of criminal gangs, like the one run by Arnold Rothstein. During his long tenure at the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, from 1930 to 1962, Harry Anslinger dramatically ramped up the war on drugs. He began igniting public fears about drugs by linking them to Black and immigrant communities, then targeted these communities (and the activists who led them) with often-fabricated drug charges. Eventually, he convinced the U.S. congress to effectively ban cannabis through the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, and his bureau aggressively enforced the new law, even though his efforts didn’t significantly reduce drug use. Later, during the Cold War, he redirected his antidrug crusade against communists. All the while, he helped addicted white celebrities and politicians, like the actress Judy Garland and the anti-communist congressman Joe McCarthy, safely access heroin. After Anslinger’s retirement, the Nixon and Regan administrations ramped up the drug war around the world, particularly in major drug-growing regions of South America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Over time, the drug war has contributed to widespread violence and poverty in these regions, without significantly reducing drug production, trafficking, or addiction. In fact, these efforts have often made drug use more dangerous, because they have given traffickers a strong incentive to sell stronger drugs. (For instance, the deadly opiate fentanyl is far more concentrated than heroin, so traffickers can make more money from transporting the same weight in drugs.) The drug war continues today—particularly in Central America and along the U.S.-Mexico border, where the conflict has escalated dramatically since 2006. Now, the border is the among the most dangerous regions in the entire world.

Besides Chasing the Scream, Johann Hari’s other books are God Save the Queen?: Monarchy and the Truth about the Windsors (2002), Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression—and the Unexpected Solutions (2018), and Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again (2022). Throughout Chasing the Scream, he cites the work of numerous doctors, drug researchers, and scholars who have proposed alternatives to the drug war and the “drugs-hijack-brains” theory of addiction. These date all the way back to 1938, when the doctor Henry Smith Williams published Drug Addicts are Human Beings (1938). Recent books by the researchers Hari interviews in Chasing the Scream include Bruce Alexander’s The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in the Poverty of the Spirit (2008), Carl Hart’s Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear (2021), and David Nutt’s Drugs Without the Hot Air: Minimizing the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs (2012). Some of the books that inspired Hari during his research include the doctor Gabor Maté’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Close Encounters with Addiction (2010), the literary scholar Stuart Walton’s Out of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication (2001), and the drug researcher Ronald K. Siegel’s Intoxication: Life in Pursuit of Artificial Paradise (1989). Hari also cites the memoirs of many people involved in the drug war, including Harry Anslinger’s accounts of the drug war’s origins, The Murderers: The Shocking Story of the Narcotics Gang (1962) and The Protectors: Our Battle Against the Crime Gangs (1966), and Billie Holiday’s autobiography Lady Sings the Blues (1956). However, the best sources on early figures in the drug war include John McWilliams’s The Protectors: Harry J. Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1930-62 (1991), Leo Katcher’s The Big Bankroll: The Life and Times of Arnold Rothstein (1994), and Rothstein’s wife Carolyn Rothstein’s Now I’ll Tell (1934). Specific histories of crucial times, places, and events in the drug war include Larry Sloman’s Reefer Madness: A History of Marijuana (1998), David Bewley-Taylor’s academic study The United States and International Drug Control, 1909-1997 (1999), and Charles Bowden’s Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields (2010).