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
During his research, Hari frequently returns to London, but he doesn’t feel ready to see the addicts in his life: his relative and his ex-boyfriend. He constantly thinks about the drug war’s victims. For over a century, they have been dying unnecessarily. Among others, Hari remembers Billie Holiday, Deborah Hardin, and Marcia Powell. He thinks of Marisela Escobedo and her daughter Rubi, Bud Osborn’s friends in Vancouver, and all of Edward Williams and João Goulão’s patients who didn’t live to see decriminalization. He remembers the thousands more who have died anonymously.
Hari began Chasing the Scream by explaining his personal connections to drugs, which motivated him to learn about the history of the drug war and the reality of drug addiction. Now, in his conclusion, he brings the book full circle and returns to London. On the one hand, his extensive knowledge about drugs can make him a better friend, ally, and advocate for the addicts in his life. On the other, his research has also given him a keen sense of how unnecessary and pointless most addicts’ suffering is. Now, he sees the drug war as a futile century-long crusade that has merely piled tragedies on tragedies.
Themes
When Hari meets up with his relative and his ex, he learns that both quit drugs a year ago. His relative is now working at a phone help line for addicts, while his ex is going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings and finally coming to terms with his painful childhood. Hari is delighted.
Hari’s relative and ex seem to have overcome addiction on their own. But they have succeeded despite the drug war, not because of it: they quit drugs because they found ways to connect with others and heal their deep-seated pain, not because they faced harsh punishments from the government.
Themes
But then, Hari’s ex relapses. Most people would stage an intervention to try and whip their addicted loved one into shape. But this is drug war logic, and it doesn’t work. People connect with drugs when they can’t connect with other people, so cutting off relationships only makes the problem worse. Instead, Hari offers to deepen his connection with his ex. He invites his ex to talk or visit whenever he needs it.
At the beginning of his book, Hari noted that a version of the drug war constantly plays out in his head: he wonders whether to approach the addicts in his life with compassion or tough love. Now, having learned about the true causes of addiction from Gabor Maté and Bruce Alexander, he knows that compassion is the right answer. Addicts like his ex really need opportunities to reconnect with other people and find a sense of purpose in their lives.
Themes
As Hari writes this conclusion, his ex is next to him, passed out after a drug binge. “The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety,” Hari writes. “It’s connection.” Love is the best way to fight addiction, and nothing has interrupted it better than the war on drugs. By criminalizing and ostracizing addicts, modern societies only cut them off even further from the people around them.
Hari returns to the central insight from his research, which explains why the drug war has only worsened the problems it claims to solve. Because disconnection and trauma drive addiction, forcing an addict to stop using drugs without changing any of the other conditions in their life is likely to make them worse, not better. To really overcome addiction, they have to heal their deep emotional wounds. But others can help them. This principle can be applied at every scale: individuals can use love to help people in their lives overcome addiction (like Hari with his ex). Institutions and charity organizations can fight addiction by extending love and support to addict populations (like the Portland Hotel Society). And, finally, entire societies can end addiction and drug-related violence by building new drug policies that support drug users’ physical and mental health (like Portugal).
Themes
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Hari is also using this wisdom to cope with his own pill habit. Whenever he feels like taking drugs to suppress his feelings, he seeks out the people he loves instead. Soon, his desire to use drugs fades away. However, while Hari is no longer “fighting a drug war in [his] own head,” numerous people—mostly poor people and people of color—are still fighting a more literal drug war in their neighborhoods. This doesn’t have to continue; drug laws can and must be changed.
Hari’s story about his own addiction offers another example of how the work of scientists like Gabor Maté and Bruce Alexander can help people fight addiction. In fact, he’s actually talking about preventing addiction. Rather than bonding with drugs, he argues, people should deliberately bond with other people (who, unlike drugs, can actually love them back). Then, they can channel their individual victories into the broader political project of fighting addiction and the drug war through love and connection.
Themes
Almost a century ago, even Harry Anslinger concluded that alcohol Prohibition was a mistake. Today, Billie Holiday’s godson—who works with heroin addicts at a San Francisco homeless clinic—clearly sees that the drug war is a mistake, too. And yet ending it often seems politically impossible. But Hari remembers how the gay rights movement changed the course of human history in just a few decades, even though most of its earliest leaders died without knowing it would succeed. Drug activists today are much like gay activists in the 1960s: even if they can’t see the end of the war on drugs, they can take the first steps.
Ironically, Anslinger clearly saw the terrible downsides of alcohol prohibition, but he never extended this insight to his own war on drugs. For Hari, Anslinger’s blindness to the war on drugs is also a metaphor for modern societies’ attitudes toward drugs in general. Namely, they have already tried prohibition and seen it fail, but they keep repeating it anyway, because they are afraid to acknowledge their mistakes. Hari concludes that building a mass movement against drug prohibition is the best way to shake political leaders out of this paralysis.
Themes
Chino Hardin and Bud Osborn have shown Hari that anyone—even reviled drug users—can make a difference if they start to speak up and persuade people. Edward Williams and Billie Holiday have demonstrated that even people who fail during their lifetimes can set the stage for others to succeed decades later. The first step to overcoming the drug war is the same as the first step to overcoming addiction: make a connection with someone else.
Through these stories, Hari encourages his readers to take action, even if they don’t fully believe that they can make a difference. Even if the drug war began with just one man, ending it will be a massive political struggle that requires collective action. As Hari pointed out in his chapters on Bud Osborn and Portugal, politics is one of many ways that addicts can develop the connections they need to heal. Thus, organizing isn’t just the political solution to the drug war: it’s also the personal solution to addiction.
Themes
In conclusion, Hari notes two last important details about Harry Anslinger: he started using and dealing drugs. First, in the 1950s, Anslinger learned that the powerful Senator Joe McCarthy was addicted to heroin. To avoid a public scandal, he sold the congressman safe, clean heroin on the government’s dime. When a journalist discovered this story, Anslinger threatened him into silence.
Senator McCarthy was famous for publicly persecuting hundreds of his political opponents by accusing them of communism. In this way, his zealotry and extreme paranoia about communism resembled Anslinger’s attitudes about drugs. Anslinger’s deal with McCarthy shows his corruption and double standards: he didn’t take issue with drug use when his allies were the ones doing it. Yet Hari is also making another, deeper point about the hypocrisy of power: just like addiction is often really a reaction to trauma, Anslinger’s obsessive focus on drugs (and McCarthy’s on communism) was really a reaction to his own anxieties and fears. In reality, Hari concludes, the drug war’s endless cycle of violence began with the scream from Anslinger’s childhood.
Themes
At the end of his life, Anslinger started taking morphine for his chest pain. He died pumped full of opiates, the same chemicals he spent his life trying to suppress. Hari wonders what Anslinger thought when he received his first dose. Perhaps he remembered the scream he heard all those years before, as a young boy in Pennsylvania, and “all of the people he had made scream since” through his war on drugs. Or perhaps he finally felt the scream fade away.
Hari ends with a final image of Anslinger’s hypocrisy, but his goal isn’t merely to condemn Anslinger as evil. Instead, Hari is actually trying to empathize with Anslinger, who dedicated his whole life to an obsessive crusade against something he was too afraid to understand. The more he punished addicts, the more they yearned for drugs, and the more he fought the drug trade, the further it slipped into the black market. Thus, Anslinger’s drug war wasn’t just a devastating failure for the societies that fought it: it was also a personal failure for Anslinger himself, because the more he chased the scream to try and silence it, the more screams he created. And his final days on morphine represent how he inevitably lost his war on drugs. When Hari asks if Anslinger remembered the screams or let them fade away, this isn’t just a metaphor for heroin’s effects: it’s also a way of asking whether Anslinger finally accepted the truth that the drug war was futile and that drugs aren’t nearly as dangerous as Anslinger thought. Of course, Hari is also asking whether global society will finally learn the same lesson, accept the scientific evidence about drugs, and overcome its addiction to the drug war once and for all.
Themes
