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Ruth Dreifuss
DuPont is a prominent psychiatrist and drug war advocate who was the founding director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which is by far the world’s major funder of addiction research. Despite his powerful position, DuPont continues to spread dangerous misinformation about drugs, like the idea that marijuana is more dangerous than other drugs and the notion that drugs “hijack your brain and cause chemical slavery.” When Hari challenged these metaphors and asked DuPont about the extensive evidence showing that the chemicals in drugs aren’t the most significant cause of addiction, DuPont admitted that the metaphors are incorrect and flatly stated that he doesn’t care about non-chemical factors that may contribute to addiction. In other words, he has already decided that chemical effects cause drugs, and he believes that any evidence that contradicts his perspective must be false. Hari views DuPont’s extreme perspective as evidence that the medical and scientific establishment prefers to align with the war on drugs (which provides their funding) rather than taking seriously their colleagues’ research into how addiction actually works.
Robert DuPont Quotes in Chasing the Scream
The Chasing the Scream quotes below are all either spoken by Robert DuPont or refer to Robert DuPont . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 13
Quotes
Almost all the funding for research into illegal drugs is provided by governments waging the drug war—and they only commission research that reinforces the ideas we already have about drugs. All these different theories, with their radical implications—why would governments want to fund those?
[…] [Eric Sterling] told me that if any government-funded scientist ever produced research suggesting anything beyond the conventional drugs-hijack-brains theory, […] the head of NIDA would be called before a congressional committee and asked if she had gone mad. She might be fired. She would certainly be stopped. All the people conducting the science for NIDA—and remember, that’s 90 percent of research on the globe into illegal drugs—know this.
So they steer away from all this evidence and look only at the chemical effects of the drugs themselves. That’s not fake—but it’s only a small part of the picture.
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Robert DuPont Quotes in Chasing the Scream
The Chasing the Scream quotes below are all either spoken by Robert DuPont or refer to Robert DuPont . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 13
Quotes
Almost all the funding for research into illegal drugs is provided by governments waging the drug war—and they only commission research that reinforces the ideas we already have about drugs. All these different theories, with their radical implications—why would governments want to fund those?
[…] [Eric Sterling] told me that if any government-funded scientist ever produced research suggesting anything beyond the conventional drugs-hijack-brains theory, […] the head of NIDA would be called before a congressional committee and asked if she had gone mad. She might be fired. She would certainly be stopped. All the people conducting the science for NIDA—and remember, that’s 90 percent of research on the globe into illegal drugs—know this.
So they steer away from all this evidence and look only at the chemical effects of the drugs themselves. That’s not fake—but it’s only a small part of the picture.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
