Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Chasing the Scream, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Drug Legalization and U.S. Policy
Addiction and Human Connection
Prohibition and the Cycle of Violence
Stories and Human Psychology
Summary
Analysis
As a child, Bruce Alexander read a comic that shows Batman watch a group of criminals beat up an addict. Alexander’s father told him that Batman didn’t intervene because junkies are “worthless human beings.” Years after learning about Alexander’s research in university, Hari gets the chance to meet him at the Downtown Eastside library in Vancouver. Alexander is clearly part of the community—an addicted woman even approaches him to thank him for his groundbreaking work.
Bruce Alexander’s Batman comic and his father’s comments capture modern Western societies’ standard attitude toward drug users, but Gabor Maté has already given a more empathetic alternative. Alexander’s popularity at the library suggests that he has also learned to embrace this alternative over the course of his career. It indicates that his research has meaningfully improved drug users’ lives, whether by providing them with resources or by helping others view them in a more positive light.
Themes
Alexander tells Hari about how, as a young professor, he was assigned to teach a class on social issues in psychology. To prepare, he visited Downtown Eastside and offered free family therapy to local drug addicts. His first patient was a 23-year-old addict who worked as a shopping mall Santa Claus in the winter. Alexander expected his patients to lack insight into their lives, but to his surprise, the young man fully understood the severity of his addiction.
Even after training as a professional psychologist, Alexander still believed in common misconceptions about addiction, which shows how powerful they can be. For instance, he still believed that drugs erode addicts’ minds, preventing them from understanding or controlling their drug use. This misconception is powerful and dangerous because it encourages people to treat addicts as irrational and give up on saving them. But the reality is that addicts often act rationally by taking drugs: in the moment, they rationally prefer the drug’s effects to feeling their intense psychological pain, and in the long term, they rationally know that continuing to use drugs is likely to harm them.
Themes
Later, Alexander learned more perplexing facts. First, there were periods in the 1970s when the Canadian police prevented any heroin from coming into Vancouver. This meant that there wasn’t actual heroin in the “heroin” that addicts were using—it was all filler. But, strangely, heroin users didn’t undergo withdrawal despite the fact that (unbeknownst to them) they weren’t taking heroin during this time. In fact, nothing changed: they noticed the “heroin” was weaker but stayed addicted and behaved exactly like they did before. Then, Alexander noticed that heroin withdrawal just resembled a bad flu—it wasn’t severe and life-threatening, like he had been taught. The pain of withdrawal, Hari writes, is mostly “the return of all the psychological pain that you were trying to put to sleep with heroin in the first place.” In fact, withdrawal almost never kills people.
Vancouver’s heroin-free periods and the surprisingly mild effects of withdrawal both reinforce Hari’s argument that the psychological, habitual side of drug use has a stronger effect than the physical dependence that addicts may form. These observations have important consequences. First, if the ritual of drug use matters more than drugs’ actual effects, then this suggests that treatment programs could help addicts quit drugs by giving them new habits and rituals to perform. Second, if withdrawal is mostly about psychological pain, then addicts can avoid the worst of it by developing other strategies for coping with their trauma.
Themes
A student challenged Alexander’s theory of addiction by citing famous studies that show that caged rats will self-administer cocaine until they kill themselves. But Alexander wondered if this may have been because the rats were isolated in an empty cage, with nothing to do but take drugs. To test his idea, he put one group of rats in empty cages and another group in “Rat Park,” a cage full of rats’ favorite things—like toys, food, and friends. He gave all the rats two bottles, one with morphine and one with water. The isolated rats consumed morphine at five times the rate of the rats in “Rat Park.” This suggests that addiction isn’t a disease—it’s an adaptation to one’s environment.
Most people interpreted the original rat study as proof that cocaine is so strong that it causes addiction on its own. However, Alexander’s experience with addicts led him toward a different explanation. His “Rat Park” experiment confirmed his suspicion, at least in rodents: drugs’ physical effects contribute less to addiction than environment does. If this is also true of humans, then overcoming addiction must require finding a more enriching, meaningful, Rat Park-like environment.
Themes
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Alexander modified the experiment to continue testing his hypothesis: he isolated the rats for two months and gave them huge amounts of morphine. Then, he put them in Rat Park. Surely enough, they all gave up the morphine. In fact, the Vietnam War provided a human version of this experiment: a fifth of U.S. soldiers developed heroin addictions during the war, but 95 percent of them recovered when they returned home.
The second version of Alexander’s experiment is significant because it shows that addiction is consistently reversible, which has important implications for drug treatment. Namely, it suggests that treatment programs should focus on helping addicts rebuild enriching lives and connections, rather than just forcing them to stop using drugs. Indeed, the example of the U.S. soldiers supports this approach: the soldiers managed to kick their heroin addictions when they returned home because were reunited with their loved ones and familiar environments, while all of the stressors that drove them to use heroin during the war were no longer present.
Themes
These examples show that people whose environments make them feel isolated and powerless are far more likely to become addicts than those who live in safe environments and have healthy relationships. In other words, social circumstances distinguish the 90 percent of drug users who don’t get addicted from the 10 percent who do. Alexander specifically focuses on dislocation—or losing a sense of meaning that is rooted in a specific group or place. (One example is indigenous Americans losing their land and culture through colonization.) Alexander concludes that modern society causes chronic isolation, which encourages addiction.
Just as drug use can be a reaction to serious childhood trauma, Alexander suggests that it can also be a reaction to a much less specific (but no less severe) sense of purposelessness. Maté views drugs as a response to trauma because they can help alleviate pain, while Alexander’s idea that drugs are a remedy for meaninglessness is based on the principle that drugs can give people a sense of calm and control that they might lack otherwise. Still, the connection between Maté and Alexander’s ideas is clear—after all, dislocation (like native people losing their land) is often a traumatic event in and of itself.
Themes
Bruce Alexander’s findings help illuminate Gabor Maté’s: children who experience serious trauma struggle to build healthy relationships as adults, and they end up feeling isolated. One of Alexander’s colleagues suggests talking about “bonding” instead of addiction: if people can’t bond to each other, they bond to compulsive behaviors instead.
Alexander and Maté are really describing two dimensions of the same problem: trauma and isolation tend to go together. Specifically, trauma leads people to isolate themselves, and people often experience isolation as traumatic. In turn, when cut off from others by trauma and isolation, people are likely to seek meaning and stability through behaviors they can control (like drug use).
Themes
Alexander also helps explain why addicts continued as usual even when there was no actual heroin in Vancouver. Besides their exciting life of getting high and committing crime with other addicts, Alexander notes, many addicts’ only real alternative is a lifetime of boring low-wage work. In other words, they don’t just bond with drugs themselves—they also bond with the subculture that surrounds drug use. This gives them a sense of identity. Thus, even when there was no real heroin, addicts still stuck with their subculture—at least it was better than nothing.
Alexander once again warns that it’s counterproductive to view addicts as irrational. Instead, he shows that becoming a drug addict—and even taking fake drugs—can actually be a perfectly rational decision for people with few other options in life. Just as addiction helps people deal with trauma by making their pain go away, it also helps people deal with dislocation by giving them some identity to latch onto. Thus, Alexander agrees that drug addiction isn’t addicts’ true, underlying problem—instead, it’s more often a solution to their true underlying problems.
Themes
Hari also wonders about the other side: the scientists who still think that chemicals cause addiction. He decides to meet Robert DuPont, the founder of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which funds 90 percent of global drug research. At an anti-drug conference, DuPont gives a passionate speech about how drugs “hijack your brain and cause chemical slavery,” then privately admits to Hari that these metaphors aren’t accurate, since people generally overcome addiction on their own. He also tells Hari that he never thinks about the environmental factors that may contribute to addiction because he doesn’t think they matter.
In contrast to Gabor Maté and Bruce Alexander, Robert DuPont simply repeats the conventional “drugs-hijack-brains” theory without citing any real evidence for it. While his role at the NIDA shows that he has an exceptional amount of power over global drug policy, his conversation with Hari shows that he’s more interested in pushing Anslinger’s conventional wisdom about drugs than seriously investigating the rigorous scientific evidence on them. Just like Anslinger, DuPont doesn’t listen to the facts because he has already made up his mind. Thus, the drug war continues simply because people in power don’t care enough to look at the real evidence.
Themes
Hari learns that that DuPont’s attitude is standard among scientists: they study the biochemistry of drugs to the exclusion of everything else. World-renowned drug researcher Carl Hart tells Hari that the scientific establishment’s ideas about addiction are based on “smoke and mirrors” because governments only fund research that advances the tenets of the drug war. Eric Sterling, a lawyer who helped write national drug policies, agrees. He tells Hari that the NIDA knows it would be shut down if any of its research opposed the “drugs-hijack-brains theory.”
Carl Hart helps Hari understand the rational self-interest behind DuPont’s denialism: DuPont’s power and reputation depend on the “drugs-hijack-brains” theory that he has been pushing for several decades. Similarly, the U.S. government as a whole cares more about protecting its drug war policies than learning scientific truths about drugs. Thus, the stakes for scientists and doctors look much like they did in Anslinger’s time: disagreeing with the common myths about drugs means risking their careers. By studying drugs’ biochemical effects in a vacuum instead of actually studying addiction, they can do meaningful research while steering clear of this political conflict. However, as evidence about drugs’ effects continues to pile up, it becomes easier and easier to jump to the inaccurate conclusion that these effects must cause addiction.
Themes
This is exactly what happened to Bruce Alexander: after his first groundbreaking Rat Park experiment, his university cut off his funding. The administration worried that his work would invite public and political backlash. Alexander was astonished to see other scientists completely disregard his results and keep pushing proven falsehoods about addiction instead.
Once again, governments and universities act remarkably like drug cartels when their interests are threatened. The university’s backlash to Alexander shows how the powerful political consensus about drugs prevents solutions to the drug war from emerging. Notably, Alexander works in Canada, not the U.S., but the U.S. government’s drug war can still easily reach him. Again, the ongoing drug war shows how power can trump truth, while reform requires fighting to put truth above power.
Themes
Reflecting on his research, Hari realizes that he still hasn’t figured out why the drug war started in the early 1900s, why people so easily accept Anslinger’s message, and why societies keep stepping up the drug war even though it’s clearly making crime and addiction worse. Bruce Alexander offers answers. In modern society, Alexander argues, most people feel “the need to fill an inner void.” Since the beginning of the 20th century, people have become wealthier than ever before, but also more isolated and dislocated. People cope with this dislocation through addiction—whether to drugs, technology, consumerism, or even the drug war itself. Hari concludes that “the drug war began when it did because we were afraid of our own addictive impulses, rising all around us because we were so alone.”
Alexander’s nuanced point can be easy to miss: in addition to explaining why modern life fosters addiction, he’s also saying that the drug war itself is really a form of addiction. Just as addicts cope with pain and disconnection by using drugs, drug warriors cope with their “inner void[s]” by scapegoating drugs for their (and society’s) problems. In fact, Alexander and Hari are proposing that we ought to think of drug addiction as just one among many kinds of compulsive behaviors, which people use to cope with their sense of alienation and loneliness in the modern world. Thus, it’s possible to see Harry Anslinger’s vicious opposition to drugs, Robert DuPont’s insistence that only his science counts, Gabor Maté’s obsessive music-buying, and hardcore drug addiction as different versions of the same behavior.
Themes
Hari sits in a Vancouver park, contemplating Bruce Alexander’s idea that addiction should be seen as a collective problem, not an individual one. This means that drug policy should focus on creating a healthier, less dislocated society, where people find happiness through fulfilling relationships. This would reduce both drug addiction and our destructive modern addiction to consumption.
Alexander’s work on addiction, isolation, and connection helps Hari view drug addiction in its social and political context. Conceptualizing addiction as a shared social problem helps him transition to the last part of his book, which focuses on political alternatives to the drug war. Just as Gabor Maté and Bruce Alexander propose addressing individual cases of addiction by attacking its root causes—like trauma, dislocation, and isolation—Hari wants to address the broader social problem of addiction in the same way.
Themes
Hari now believes that most of addiction is environmental, but he still wants to know how much of it is chemical. He discovers Richard DeGrandpre’s pioneering experiment on nicotine patches. Nicotine, the active ingredient in cigarettes, is at least as chemically addictive as cocaine and more than 150 times deadlier. Yet, while patches completely satisfy the body’s chemical urge for nicotine, only 17.7 percent of patch users quit smoking. This speaks to the difference between dependence on a drug, which is physical, and addiction, which is primarily psychological. In reality, dependence is really just a small part of addiction.
DeGrandpre’s experiment shouldn’t be misinterpreted as offering a definitive, precise, perfectly quantifiable explanation for addiction. For instance, it would be wrong to say that DeGrandpre has proven that 82.3 percent of addiction is psychological. Instead, Hari cites DeGrandpre’s experiment because it succinctly captures the most important conclusion from all of the experiments that Hari has described in this chapter so far: the main driver of addiction is psychology, not chemical dependence.
Themes
