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
To understand how the drug war looks today, Hari decides to ask a drug dealer. Through a friend, he meets the imposing, chain-smoking former crack dealer Chino Hardin. Hari interviews Hardin several times over three years, during which time Hardin is also transitioning his gender to live his life as a man. As a teenager, much like Arnold Rothstein, Hardin spent his days standing on a street corner. He was selling crack, and there were hundreds of other young people like him, all over the U.S. He felt like it was his best shot at upward mobility—and at staying safe in his dangerous neighborhood. He ran a crew of four other boys and worked for one of Brooklyn’s top dealers, making about $500 per week.
In the first part of the book, Hari sketched a general picture of the war on drugs: zealous agents like Harry Anslinger seek power by brutally repressing drug addicts like Billie Holiday, while prohibition hands control of the lucrative drug market over to violent gangsters like Arnold Rothstein. Meanwhile, doctors like the Williams brothers speak out about the science on drugs, but policymakers ignore them. In the following two sections (Chapters 5–10), Hari explains how this dynamic works today, when the stakes of the drug trade have never been higher. Chino Hardin’s story will show how the drug market functions today, and why it’s still based on a “culture of terror.”
Themes
Chino Hardin learned to defend his reputation, turf, and property with coldhearted violence. When a group of older dealers tried to claim their block, Hardin and his crew beat them until they left. When Hardin’s right-hand man Smokie picked a fight with a rival gang and then ran away like a coward, Hardin pulled a knife on the other gang to prove his mettle, then lashed Smokie with his belt as punishment. But instead of striking back at the other gang, Smokie attacked a random elderly man. He went back to prison. Hari concludes that “the war on drugs was not a metaphor” for Hardin—he was literally fighting a war to terrorize others and prove his worth.
Like Arnold Rothstein, Chino Hardin used terror to prevent his rivals from overpowering him or stealing his share of the market. His turf and place in his crew were never fully secure, so he had to constantly use violence in order to maintain them. Hari uses Hardin’s story to recalibrate his readers’ view of the drug war: people distant from its everyday violence are likely to think of it as a political metaphor, but it is really a literal war, an armed conflict being fought on streets around the world.
Themes
Hari notes that Chino Hardin’s story fits with the academic consensus: the vast majority of “drug-related violence” isn’t drug users attacking people while high, but rather drug dealers using violence to claim their slice of the market. The cause of this violence is the laws that criminalize drugs, not drugs themselves.
Competition for the drug market causes more violence than drug use itself, but the popular misconception that drug use fuels violence is convenient because it powerfully justifies the drug war. Yet again, public opinion is wedded to politicians’ rhetoric, not science, so it simply doesn’t match up with the reality of the drug war. Creating better drug policies will require the public to start believing scholars and journalists, not self-interested political actors.
Themes
When Chino Hardin was 13, he learned that he was conceived when an NYPD officer raped his mother, Deborah, who was addicted to crack. In fact, Deborah’s mother was also a drug addict, so she was raised by a relative named Lucille. Several men kidnapped and gang-raped Deborah when she was a teenager, and to numb her pain, she turned to heroin and crack. Then, to fund her habit, she started robbing houses, including Lucille’s. One day, when Lucille called the police on her, the officer raped her.
Hardin’s story vividly illustrates how the drug war’s cycle of violence engulfs entire communities and suffuses people’s entire lives. Hardin’s very existence is a product of the drug war’s terror, and his reality has always been defined by it. Moreover, his mother’s life story shows how this violence also cyclically fuels drug use: the drug war causes trauma and suffering, and people cope with this trauma and suffering by using drugs (which further fuels the drug war).
Themes
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Lucille raised Chino Hardin, too. Still, he occasionally saw Deborah. Once, she kidnapped him, and another time, she brought him to a crack house, where a woman attacked him. (In response, Deborah nearly beat the woman to death.) Eventually, Hardin and his mother started randomly attacking each other—she would punch him in the face, he would throw things at her out the window, and so on. Later, she contracted HIV from injecting drugs, then ended up in a psychiatric hospital. After she got out, the police beat her to death while arresting her for a robbery.
Hardin’s contentious relationship with his mother closely resembles the cycle of escalating conflict between drug gangs. Violence is the only source of authority and respect in their world, so it became the foundation of their relationships. Similarly, Deborah’s mother’s fight with the other addict shows that the drug war’s “culture of terror” applies to addicts as much as drug users: violence is their only way to protect themselves, so they preemptively attack others in order to avoid suffering violence later on. And her tragic death shows that law enforcement participates in the “culture of terror,” too, using senseless violence to maintain its power over the population.
Themes
Chino Hardin started selling crack shortly after Hardin’s mother’s death. At age 13, he went to juvenile detention. The staff treated him like an animal, and he learned to survive by acting cruel and heartless. When he was 16, he realized he was turning into his mother, and he couldn’t bear it. He attempted suicide three times but survived.
Hardin continued the cycle of violence that consumed his mother’s life and his neighborhood. Again, paradoxically, drugs and violence appear to be the only viable solutions to the suffering caused by drugs and violence. And instead of providing him alternatives to a life of crime, the legal system taught Hardin that he didn’t deserve a stable, ordinary life.
Themes
As a young adult, Hardin noticed that “the paperwork seemed to vanish” every time he was arrested. He realized that his father, the police officer, had been hiding the evidence. (They only met once—Hardin’s father was a “half crazy” paraplegic.) But Hardin’s crew did go to prison, and they learned about all sorts of new crimes there.
Hardin’s “half crazy” father helped improve his chances of leaving the drug trade and finding ordinary work by keeping felonies off his record. However, this episode only underlines how deeply corrupt and arbitrary U.S. law enforcement has become: an officer’s decision to file (or lose) a few papers can make or break a young person’s life.
Themes
Meanwhile, Hardin kept trying to win respect by acting tough, getting a girlfriend, and so on. Eventually, he tried crack—and soon, he was spending entire weeks partying and smoking nonstop. Hari notes that Arnold Rothstein was psychopath, so he gladly committed senseless violence. But Hardin’s conscience tortured him, so he “drugged himself into psychosis” instead.
Hardin’s descent into crack use shows how the war on drugs actually makes addiction worse: it traumatizes people, which gives them a reason to use drugs. In Hardin’s case, he had to be vicious and coldblooded to participate in his neighborhood’s “culture of terror,” and he couldn’t stand to do so without drugs.
Themes
When Hardin finally went to prison, he joined the Bloods gang, which gave him a community and sense of safety on the inside. He also fell in love with another inmate named Nicole, but since he only knew how to express his feelings through “aggression and loathing,” he threatened her. Then, after Hardin’s girlfriend got raped in Brooklyn, Nicole visited to comfort him. While Nicole eventually left prison, Hardin says that this “one act of human compassion” changed his life. Still, he had to deal with “the toughest gang of all” in prison: the guards. For instance, when Hardin fell in love with a beautiful young inmate named Dee, one of the corrections officers raped her in front of him. Later, Hardin insulted the officer, who then locked him in solitary confinement.
Hardin’s connection with Nicole was a turning point, because it showed him that he could relate to other people on the basis of something besides violence. Yet everyone else in Hardin’s environment—particularly the state-appointed corrections officers who were charged with fighting the war on drugs—continued pushing him to abandon compassion and embrace violence and cruelty instead.
Themes
After leaving prison, Chino Hardin started using more crack. It shut off his emotions, preventing him from feeling pain. But a few years later, he again decided that he couldn’t turn into Deborah. He went sober, cold turkey, and then started confronting his feelings. He asked why his life turned out the way it did, and what government policy had to do with it.
Hardin eventually found his way out of the war on drugs by tapping into his emotions and seriously interrogating his identity. This shows that, to overcome violence and addiction, people need to come to terms with their deep-seated pain—not suffer even more of it, as the drug war’s leaders continue to suggest.
Themes
In 2012, Chino Hardin led a protest march through Lower Manhattan. In his speech, he noted that while white people smoke marijuana at the highest rates, law enforcement primarily targets communities of color, which face nearly all the legal consequences. He also taught a class to at-risk teenagers in the Bronx.
Chino’s transformation into an activist shows how people involved in the drug war can channel their pain and suffering into truly making a difference. But this requires learning about the connections between their personal experiences and the policy decisions that have set up the war on drugs. Of course, Hari hopes that his book can help make this kind of analysis possible.
Themes
In his twenties, Chino Hardin started to realize that there was something wrong with drug laws. He landed an internship at an anti-prison group and learned about the history of U.S. drug laws. Hardin’s research led him to the same conclusion as Hari’s: if the drug trade were part of the legal economy, the “extreme culture of violence” that surrounds it would vanish. Indeed, a Harvard study shows that Prohibition and the criminalization of drugs coincided with the U.S.’s greatest ever spikes in violence. Similarly, Hardin noted that his crew gave up on violence when they agreed to stop selling drugs.
To become an activist, Hardin first had to extract himself from the drug trade’s “extreme culture of violence” and, crucially, find an alternative source of income. After doing so, he could learn how powerful people like Harry Anslinger deliberately set up the system that plagued the first two decades of his life with constant, needless violence. The Harvard study further suggests that this violence is the inevitable consequence of prohibiting substances that remain in demand. This means that the only way to win the war on drugs is to abandon it.
Themes
Hardin still wonders if, with different drug laws, Hardin’s mother might still be alive today—or would never have been raped in the first place. He’s still angry about her terrible behavior, but he tries to forgive and empathize with her. He even tries to empathize with his father, too. He now helps run the No More Youth Jails Coalition, organizing protests and successfully lobbying the government to close facilities like the one where he was first imprisoned. But he knows that there is much more work to do. Indeed, Hari points out that street dealing is only “the first layer” of the far-reaching violence caused by the drug war.
Hardin’s feelings about his mother depend on his realization that none of her suffering was necessary, nor was it fully her fault. Different drug policies would have prevented nearly all of it. Thus, Hardin manages to empathize with his parents because he understands how policy, pain, and terror drove their poor decisions. Of course, Hari has shown that the people who made these harmful policies, like Harry Anslinger, were driven by their own pain and fear, too. Hardin’s experience suggests that empathy and understanding are crucial to resolving the drug war.
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