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
After learning about the benefits of drug legalization, Hari still wants to know how it can become politically possible—particularly in the U.S., which launched the war on drugs. In less than a decade, activists got marijuana legalized through public referendums in the states of Colorado and Washington. However, these activists ran totally different campaigns.
In the last chapter, Hari explained how drug legalization policies would function and predicted what their effects would be. In this chapter, he explores how drug activists can build a successful movement for legalization. As a journalist, he’s particularly interested in the messaging strategies that can win support for these movements. While not all of his readers will necessarily support legalization, many of the points he makes in this chapter apply to decriminalization and other reforms, too. Finally, the U.S. is a particularly important site for drug reform because it has long imposed the drug war on the rest of the world—so, changing domestic drug laws in in the U.S. is one of the best ways to put an end to prohibition around the world.
Themes
In Colorado, the activist Mason Tvert challenged the state governor, the millionaire brewery owner John Hickenlooper, to a tongue-in-cheek duel: Tvert would take a hit of marijuana every time Hickenlooper took a sip of beer until one of them died. Of course, Tvert’s point was that the scientific evidence shows marijuana to be much safer than alcohol. In college, when he was arrested for smoking marijuana, he realized that it was strange for the university to crack down on weed but openly accept underage alcohol drinking—which seemed to cause many more problems. After moving to Colorado, Tvert set up an activist group with one simple message: the science shows that marijuana is safer than alcohol. For years, he made little progress.
Tvert organized his campaign around the scientific evidence about marijuana, and Colorado’s peculiar political situation—including its brewer governor and reputation for marijuana use—may have made this a particularly appropriate choice. His point was that if society has decided to permit alcohol, it logically must permit marijuana, too. But in his campaign, Tvert paid little attention to the history or the harms of the drug war. Activists working in communities where these harms are more salient might prefer to emphasize them in their own campaigns for policy change.
Themes
Meanwhile, in Alaska, Tonia Winchester was going through a high-school antidrug campaign called DARE. She hated drugs, including marijuana, and never used them. As an adult, she became a local prosecutor in Wenatchee, Washington, where she realized she was mainly prosecuting young Black and Latino men for marijuana possession—even though most marijuana users are white. She realized that she was leading a racist system and ruining young people’s lives with convictions that locked them out of the labor market forever. When she learned that her office was prioritizing marijuana cases over domestic violence ones, she decided to push for change.
Where Tvert’s interest in marijuana stemmed from his personal drug use and his knowledge of drug research, Winchester’s came from a totally opposite place: her close-up knowledge of the drug war. She grew up believing the drug war’s myths about drugs and addiction, and it wasn’t until she challenged these myths as in adult that she saw that the drug war was unnecessarily and disproportionately harming young people. She could see that her office was essentially buying political power and reputation by ruining young people’s lives—just like the U.S. drug war has ever since it began under Harry Anslinger.
Themes
Mason Tvert and Tonia Winchester attacked Harry Anslinger’s war on drugs from completely opposite angles. Tvert defended marijuana as a healthier alternative to alcohol, and he constantly forced the government to defend its absurd prohibition laws. But to avoid alienating the public, he avoided pro-legalization arguments that could apply to other drugs besides marijuana.
Tvert and Winchester’s strategies demonstrate two possible approaches that drug reformers can take to fighting prohibition. While Tvert’s approach is grounded in science and logic, its focus is mostly limited to marijuana, because it still accepts the basic assumption that the legal status of particular drugs should depend on how safe or dangerous they are.
Themes
Get the entire Chasing the Scream LitChart as a printable PDF.
In Washington, Tonia Winchester avoided talking about marijuana itself and clarified that she wasn’t advocating actually smoking it. Instead, she focused on her experience as a prosecutor and explained how drug prohibition was ruining young people’s lives. She believed that Tvert’s focus on the safety of marijuana was “a stupid argument [that] doesn’t persuade people.” Instead, she emphasized the dangers of drugs and argued that legalization was a way to reduce them.
While Winchester’s strategy largely ignores the scientific evidence about drugs, it also has several important advantages. First, it fits neatly with the misconception that all drugs are inherently harmful. Since this myth can be so hard to disprove, it may be easier to just build on or ignore it. Second, it applies equally to all drugs. Third, it avoids alienating voters who aren’t very scientifically literate. And finally, it’s grounded in the active desire to save people from the harms of the drug war (whereas Tvert’s argument was based on the premise that marijuana simply isn’t harmful).
Themes
Ultimately, because of the differences between their campaigns, Colorado and Washington legalized marijuana in very different ways. Colorado focused on expanding the freedom to use marijuana, while Washington focused on reducing the harms associated with its use. When they got their initiative on the state ballot, Winchester and her campaign co-leader Alison Holcomb realized that the changes they were pioneering could eventually spread all over the world.
While Colorado and Washington’s legal marijuana policies both offer important precedents for the rest of the world, the differences between them show that the stories that activists choose to tell about legalization have significant consequences further down the line. Thus, Hari suggests that activists should consider what kind of system they want to create when choosing their messaging.
Themes
Hari notes that, a century after Harry Anslinger used racist arguments to ban marijuana for the first time, Winchester used anti-racist arguments about creating a more equal legal system in order to legalize it. Meanwhile, Colorado’s legalization campaign also saw echoes of Anslinger’s drug war. One local sheriff argued that marijuana users should be executed, while a Latinx radio host feared that legalization would invite cartel violence.
Winchester and Tvert’s campaigns show that the drug war is still deeply tied up with the Americans’ attitudes about race—just like it was in Anslinger’s time. On the one hand, many Americans are eager for solutions to racial inequality; on the other, many Americans have also lived their whole lives steeped in the drug war’s common wisdom, and it is difficult to imagine them ever abandoning it.
Themes
Hari asks which approach is better: the Colorado campaign’s or the Washington campaign’s. While Hari’s instincts lie with Washington, he also knows that Americans are more willing to accept legalization today because they no longer believe in hysterical myths about the drug (like Anslinger’s warning that marijuana turns people into psychotic killers). And Tonia Winchester agrees: she tells Hari how meeting marijuana users helped her overcome her prejudices about the drug. Still, Hari is apprehensive about some of Tvert’s arguments, like the idea that it’s better for teenagers to smoke marijuana than drink beer. Yet both Tvert and Winchester’s campaigns won by 10-percent margins. And after legalization, the margin of support in Colorado became nearly two-to-one.
Hari shows that the Colorado and Washington campaigns both succeeded in different but complementary ways. This is because each captured half of the whole truth: Tvert explained the science that the drug war has denied, while Winchester explained the drug war’s real political consequences. Regardless of whether any campaign could truly combine these two ideas without losing a focused message, it’s clear that both of these ideas can succeed in the right context. Hari clearly hopes that, given this level of political support, it’s only a matter of time before voters across the U.S. agree to end the drug war—which will let other countries do the same.
Themes
When choosing between Tvert and Winchester’s approaches, there’s one more key question: which can be applied to other drugs besides marijuana? Tvert readily admits that his approach can’t, because other drugs are far more dangerous than alcohol. While he still believes in legalization, he doesn’t think that other drugs should be regulated like marijuana is now in Colorado. In contrast, the Washington argument—that drug prohibition is more harmful than drugs themselves—does apply to other substances besides marijuana. But both campaigns agree that marijuana legalization is the first step to broader policy change.
While Tvert essentially ran a single-issue campaign for marijuana, Winchester’s approach set the foundation for a long-term fight to entirely end the drug war. Of course, Hari’s goals align with Winchester’s more than Tvert’s, so he encourages his readers to follow her approach in their activism. They can certainly repeat Tvert’s arguments about marijuana’s safety, too, but Hari suggests that they ought to remain focused on the longer-term goal of fighting the drug war as a whole.
Themes
Mason Tvert is right to say that marijuana is safer than alcohol, but Hari wonders whether the same is true of other drugs. When a prominent British scientist measured the harm from different drugs, he found that alcohol is actually the most dangerous of all. Alcohol’s “harm score” was 72; the next-highest were heroin (55), crack (54), and meth (32). Hari admits that this may be hard to believe, but it’s scientifically proven. Columbia neuroscientist Carl Hart argues that accepting this is the first step to demystifying other drugs, like meth and crack, which are as vilified today as marijuana was in the early 1900s.
The available scientific evidence actually contradicts Mason Tvert’s claim that other drugs besides marijuana are generally more dangerous than alcohol. This may be difficult for the public to stomach, as alcohol is generally accepted across modern societies, while meth and crack are highly stigmatized and viewed as extremely dangerous. While Hart believes that activists have to change social attitudes toward other drugs in the long term, he points out that this doesn’t necessarily have to be part of the same struggle as the fight against the war on drugs. After all, Winchester’s campaign shows that it’s possible to fight the drug war without condoning drug use.
Themes
Hari knows that Dr. Hart is right about the importance of educating people about drugs. But he also worries that telling the truth will alienate people who know how badly these drugs harm the people who become addicted to them. Alcohol might cause “horrible damage,” but drugs like crack and meth still cause “only-slightly-less-horrible harm.” In the future, Hari concludes, citizens and activists will determine whether Tvert or Winchester’s approach is more successful.
Hari struggles to find a reasonable middle ground between Hart’s long-term goal of teaching people to accurately assess the dangers of drugs and activists’ short-term goal of ending the drug war through any means necessary—including by emphasizing how harmful drugs and addiction are under prohibition. For instance, even though alcohol might actually be more harmful than crack, focusing on this evidence could undermine efforts to stop the drug war because most people will struggle to believe it. Under prohibition, after all, crack addiction carries many dangers that alcohol addiction does not. It’s generally easier for alcoholics to remain socially accepted and find effective treatment because the drug they take is legal, and they don’t have to worry about overdosing on drinks of an unknown alcohol content.
Themes
In Colorado, Governor Hickenlooper eventually supported the legalization law. Then, the government set up a network of licensed stores and resolved regulatory issues like what kind of edible products to allow. As he discusses these issues with a state official, Hari realizes that they’re totally boring. This is what it means for the drug war to end: replacing violence and death with boring government regulation. Hari cries “a tear of relief.”
The drug war has caused little besides unnecessary suffering, so Hari argues that the best thing that can happen to it is for it to fade away into insignificance. Today, drug policy deeply shapes millions of lives, but under legalization, it would become just another mundane issue for leaders and experts to hash out. This is why Hari lets out “a tear of relief” while learning about Colorado’s utterly boring debates over regulation: this is what the end of the drug war looks like.
Themes
