In Chasing the Scream, journalist Johann Hari spends three years trying to understand the war on drugs by interviewing hundreds of people who have fought on its front lines. Some, like the cartel hitman Rosalio Reta and the sadistic sheriff Joe Arpaio, are partially responsible for its violence. Others, like the addiction doctor Gabor Maté and the former president of Switzerland, Ruth Dreifuss, have dedicated their lives to healing its victims. And many, like the ex-crack dealer Chino Hardin and the former police officer Leigh Maddox, have switched sides from the drug warriors to the activists.
In each chapter, Hari focuses on one or two people who represent a particular group’s role in the war on drugs. By the end of his journey, he concludes that the drug war has been a misguided, fruitless mistake. While its leaders claim to be reducing addiction and creating a “drug-free world,” in reality, the drug war has only made drugs more dangerous, worsened addiction, and produced an unfathomable amount of unnecessary violence and death. The criminalization of drugs is far more dangerous than drugs themselves, Hari concludes. By exploring places that have moved beyond the drug war—like Portugal, Switzerland, and Uruguay—Hari concludes that the best way to reduce addiction and drug-related violence is by legalizing illegal drugs and regulating them through the same system that already exists for alcohol, tobacco, and prescriptions.
Hari begins by explaining his personal connections to the war on drugs. His family and social circle are full of drug addicts (including a close relative and an ex-boyfriend), and after developing a serious pill addiction of his own, he starts to wonder why modern societies criminalize addiction and whether this approach has succeeded. In the first part of his book, Hari throws away his pills, flies to New York, and starts interviewing experts, who tell him about three people who set the stage for the drug war all the way back in the 1930s: Harry Anslinger, Billie Holiday, and Arnold Rothstein.
During Harry Anslinger’s childhood, an encounter with a screaming, drug-addicted neighbor convinced him that drugs ruin anyone who touches them. He went on to spend most of his career running the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics and “chasing the scream”—or scaring politicians and the public into criminalizing drugs in the U.S. and around the world. But in reality, Anslinger mainly wanted more funding for his department and an excuse to crack down on immigrants and Black anti-segregation activists. His principal target was the jazz singer Billie Holiday. Like most addicts, Holiday started taking drugs—in her case, heroin—to cope with childhood trauma.
Meanwhile, Anslinger’s policies turned substances like heroin, cocaine, and cannabis from ordinary medicines that anyone could buy in small doses at their local pharmacy to vilified, illegal drugs that were only available in the black market. Predictably, in the 1930s, the drug market fell into the hands of organized criminals, like the ruthless gangster Arnold Rothstein. (This is exactly what happened to the alcohol trade during Prohibition, just a decade before.) Nevertheless, courageous doctors like Edward and Henry Smith Williams continued treating drug addicts by prescribing them clean, controlled, medical-grade doses of the substances they were addicted to. But Anslinger turned against them and got their clinic shut down.
By the time Anslinger died, every country in the world had agreed to treat drug producers, traffickers, and users as criminals. Over the last century, Hari argues, several generations of people have stepped up to fill these pioneers’ shoes: the brutal enforcer (Anslinger), the sadistic gangster (Rothstein), the benevolent doctor (the Williams brothers), and the humiliated, persecuted addict (Holiday).
In the next two parts of his book, Hari shows how the drug war continues to fuel extraordinary violence by looking at some of the people who are filling these shoes now. He starts with Chino Hardin, a former Brooklyn crack dealer who explains how his old job relied on “a culture of terror.” This is because, in the black market, the only way to win power and respect is by terrifying everyone else into submission. Next, Hari interviews Leigh Maddox, a former Baltimore police officer who quit when she realized that arresting and prosecuting people for drug crimes did far more to deepen racial inequality than to reduce drug trafficking or addiction. Hari also notes how the drug war kills innocent people, like six-year-old Tiffany Smith, who got caught in the middle of a gang shootout. Meanwhile, the drug war’s harsh legal system drags addicts deeper into addiction and despair. One of these addicts, Marcia Powell, had quit using drugs and built a stable life for herself, before a years-old warrant for 1.5g of marijuana upturned her life. She relapsed, ended up in the notorious Phoenix sheriff Joe Arpaio’s tent city—an outdoor jail in the desert that he proudly calls a “concentration camp” for addicts—and died of extreme heat exposure after the guards ignored her pleas for help.
Just across the border in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, a group of young people led by Juan Manuel Olguín are trying to fight the extreme drug violence by dressing up as angels and staging public protests. Meanwhile, the cartels keep killing with impunity because they have bought out the state government. They hire hitmen like Rosalio Reta, who joined the Zeta Cartel as a teenager and was paid handsomely to kill the cartel’s rivals. He’s in prison today, but only because he turned himself in to avoid getting murdered. Others aren’t so lucky—including the nurse and mother Marisela Escobedo, whose daughter Rubi Fraire mysteriously disappeared with her boyfriend one day in 2008. The Juárez police refused to investigate the case because the boyfriend, Sergio Barraza, belonged to the Zeta Cartel. Even after admitting to killing Fraire, Barraza was acquitted at trial. And then the key witness against him, a young man named Angel, was mysteriously murdered. When Escobedo dropped everything to protest the government’s failure and seek justice for her daughter, she was murdered, too—right in front of the state capitol building.
In his next section, Hari examines the science of addiction. He begins with Ronald K. Siegel’s work on intoxication in the animal kingdom, which shows that we have all naturally evolved to seek out mind-altering chemicals in response to pain. Vancouver doctor Gabor Maté has found an extreme version of this pattern among addicts: they use drugs to cope with childhood trauma, shame, and social alienation so severe that they cannot bear it sober. Of course, the war on drugs makes all of these factors worse, so Maté argues that it fuels addiction rather than solving it. Bruce Alexander, a psychologist who also works in Vancouver, wholeheartedly agrees. In his famous “Rat Park” experiment, Alexander found that rats choose to take drugs if they’re isolated in their cages—but not if they have friends, toys, and food available. He believes that drug addiction is a response to disconnection and dislocation: when people lack meaningful relationships, strong roots in a place, and a sense of purpose in life, they often take refuge in drugs. Of course, the kind of childhood trauma that Maté studies makes the kind of disconnection that Alexander studies much more common. So do modern Western capitalist societies, which have left their members lonelier and more disconnected than ever before. Thus, Maté and Alexander’s research explains why a small minority of drug users (around 10 percent) turn into serious addicts. Contrary to the popular “drugs-hijack-brains” theory of addiction, their research suggests, drug abuse is more often a symptom of serious emotional problems than a cause.
In the final section of Chasing the Scream, Hari surveys the political alternatives to the war on drugs. In Vancouver, the activist Bud Osborn started organizing drug addicts and demanding more progressive policies. Their group, VANDU, got representatives into the city government and even convinced the conservative mayor Philip Owen to help them build the first safe injection site in North America. In England, the doctor John Marks began prescribing safe medical heroin to addicts, and drug-related crime and illness all but disappeared in his area. And in Switzerland, president Ruth Dreifuss applied Marks’s idea on a national scale by creating a system of government-run heroin and methadone clinics that achieved the same effects.
Meanwhile, in 2000, Portugal implemented the world’s most progressive, wide-reaching drug policy: total decriminalization. Led by the addiction doctor João Goulão, Portugal simply stopped arresting drug users and started offering them resources, treatment, and housing instead. Hari’s visit to Portugal is the key turning point in the book: it shows him that there really is a viable solution to the war on drugs. Everything that got worse under drug prohibition—like addiction, overdoses, HIV infections, teen drug use, drug-related crime, and police violence—significantly improved under decriminalization.
But Hari knows that it’s possible to take drug policy even further, so he looks at places that have fully legalized marijuana in recent years. He starts with Uruguay, where president José Mujica worked with drug policy experts Danny Kushlick and Steve Rolles to legalize and regulate marijuana (just like tobacco and alcohol). While studies show that legalization does increase the number of people who try drugs, Hari notes, it also makes all drug uses significantly less likely. Thus, Hari thinks that Uruguay’s policy was clearly worth it, although readers may or may not agree. Finally, in his last chapter, Hari looks at the U.S. states of Colorado and Washington, which were the first in the nation to legalize recreational marijuana in 2012. Colorado activist Mason Tvert’s campaign focused on the scientific evidence that alcohol is far more dangerous than marijuana, while Washington activist Tonia Winchester, a former prosecutor, focused on explaining how the drug war ruins young people’s lives and entrenches racial inequality. While both campaigns succeeded, Hari suggests that Winchester’s offers a more sustainable solution for future efforts to legalize and regulate all illegal drugs.
In his brief conclusion, Hari returns to London, where he learns that his relative is no longer using drugs, but his ex has recently relapsed. Hari remembers what his research has taught him: “the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection.” Rather than staging an intervention, he offers his ex friendship and a place to visit and detox from his drug binges. Hari ends with a curious anecdote: Harry Anslinger died high on morphine, which he was taking for chest pain. Hari wonders if, in those final moments, Anslinger finally saw the folly in the war on drugs—and whether modern societies are ready to do the same today.
