The public tends to think of all drug users as addicts, Johann Hari notes in Chasing the Scream, but in reality, just 10 percent are. The other 90 percent are recreational users who don’t get addicted—and who arguably gain more from drugs than they lose. The public’s misconception stems from the common but disproven assumption that drugs themselves are the primary cause of drug addiction. While drugs are certainly addictive, leading researchers have shown that individual psychological issues like trauma, dislocation, and loneliness play an even greater role in causing addiction. These researchers have also found that, with the proper treatment, any addict can stop using drugs and live a healthy, productive life. (Sometimes, they can even be healthy and productive without quitting drugs.) Anyone who takes the scientific and public health evidence about addiction seriously, Hari argues, will conclude that the best solutions to addiction are empathy, support, and love—not violence and stigma.
Scientific evidence disproves the conventional “drugs-hijack-brains” story about addiction. This story is repeated everywhere, from schools and television to the scientific community, where a majority of drug researchers study drugs’ physical effects on the brain—but only a minority study how these chemical effects actually contribute to addiction. Among this minority, the evidence is clear and consistent: while drugs have powerful, addictive biochemical effects, nobody becomes a drug addict because of these effects alone. For instance, when researchers gave cigarette smokers nicotine patches, only 17 percent quit smoking. This shows that the core of smokers’ addiction isn’t their chemical dependence on nicotine, but rather their psychological dependence on the habit of smoking. Since nicotine is among the most addictive drugs known to humankind, this experiment suggests that addictive chemicals aren’t the main cause of drug addiction.
Instead, addiction is really a response to psychological pain—particularly to childhood trauma, social isolation, and dislocation (or feeling that one’s life is meaningless). First, animal studies strongly suggest that drug use has evolved as a response to pain. Psychologist Ronald K. Siegel has found that virtually all animals willingly consume psychoactive plants when they’re in pain. Similarly, Bruce Alexander has found that stress determines whether rats choose drugs: isolated rats with nothing to do drink large quantities of morphine, while rats with an enriching environment full of food, games, and friends choose not to drink it. This suggests that drug use is largely a reaction to one’s environment. The doctor Gabor Maté has found that the same applies to humans: they turn to drugs when their environments aren’t enriching. He tells Hari that all of his patients are coping with deep psychological pain, often because severe childhood trauma has left them unable to bond with other people. (They bond with drugs instead.) Thus, addicts generally use drugs to deal with their isolated, painful lives, which lack the kind of deep human connections and life goals that make most people’s lives meaningful. In fact, Bruce Alexander even argues that modern society has worsened drug use by uprooting people and disconnecting them from others. Often, drugs make this even worse—especially under prohibition, which makes procuring and using drugs incredibly dangerous. This can create a vicious cycle: drugs cause serious problems in addicts’ lives, but drugs are also their only tool for coping with these problems. For instance, crack dealer Chino Hardin only started smoking crack to cope with his fear of being killed in a gang shootout, his shame about hurting others, and his violent, broken relationship with his crack-addicted mother Deborah. This shows how, once people choose to cope with their problems through drugs, they often spiral downward into even worse problems.
Viewing addiction as a lack of human connection, rather than a brain disease, leads to solutions very different from the drug war (which criminalizes drug users). First, on a society-wide level, this view of addiction encourages approaches like Portugal’s—which focuses on integrating drug users into society by helping them form relationships, join communities, and develop practical and emotional skills. Whereas the drug war’s approach often worsens addicts’ pain by severing the few human connections they still have, Portugal’s helps them overcome addiction by giving them the resources to form new connections. Similarly, on a smaller scale, Gabor Maté and Liz Evans’s Portland Hotel Society shows how organizations can address addiction by building human connections. Whereas drug war programs ordinarily require addicts to quit drugs before they can get benefits, the Portland Hotel Society gives Vancouver addicts no-strings-attached housing and psychological support. In the long term, this makes it possible for them to quit drugs—or at least live more dignified lives. But people don’t need to dedicate their lives to medicine or public health to make a difference—Hari also shows how individuals can help the addicts in their lives by applying addiction research. When Hari learns that his ex-boyfriend has relapsed on heroin and crack, he remembers that addiction is a response to disconnection, so he resists his urge to stage a punitive intervention for his ex. Instead, Hari patiently sits with him, offering him company and support, in order to strengthen their connection. In fact, Hari also applies the theory to help himself: after his research, he overcomes his own pill addiction by learning to seek out loved ones whenever he feels the urge to take drugs. These examples all show that regardless of how much power a person has, they can use human connection as a tool to heal addiction.
Hari argues that many people are fighting a version of the war on drugs in their heads: they struggle to choose between the instinct to punish addicts and the instinct to embrace and support them. The right answer, he concludes, is support. Punishment and marginalization cannot stop addiction or violence—only consciously reintegrating drug users into society can. Thus, the best weapon against drugs is not force but love. Even on the smallest of scales, it can make a vast difference.
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Addiction and Human Connection ThemeTracker
Addiction and Human Connection Quotes in Chasing the Scream
“That one act of human compassion…I went into her cell and started talking to her. And all my shit stopped.”
Harry Anslinger employed Joe Arpaio in 1957 to be an agent in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and he rose through the bureau over decades. Since 1993, he has been the elected sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. He was eighty when I met him, and about to be elected to his sixth consecutive term. His Stetson, his shining yellow lawmaker’s badge, and his sneer have become national symbols of a particular kind of funhouse-mirror Americana, and his hefty chunk of Arizona, home to nearly four million people, is now Harry Anslinger’s last great laboratory. Sheriff Joe has built a jail that he refers to publicly as his “concentration camp,” and presidential candidates flock here during election campaigns, emerging full of praise. Anslinger said addicts were “lepers” who needed to be “quarantined,” and so Arpaio has built a leper colony for them in the desert.
“[Marcia] was an addict…Addiction can be overcome with proper help. It ain’t a jail thing.” He believes the solution was to get her into “a mental hospital—that’s probably what would have helped her. Get her whatever she needs—Xanax, morphine, to get her chemical imbalance right…Get her on the right meds. Show her some respect. Give her some working skills. Get her a GED so when she comes out she has a place, like a woman’s shelter, [can] get a job…Give her respect, that’s how it’s supposed to be.” [...] “If you’re calm and cool and know you’ve got a life ahead of you that’s going up the steps…if you know you’re going up in the world, you’re going to stay going up in the world.”
All we see in the public sphere are the casualties. The unharmed 90 percent use in private, and we rarely hear about it or see it. The damaged 10 percent, by contrast, are the only people we ever see using drugs out on the streets. The result is that the harmed 10 percent make up 100 percent of the official picture. It is as if our only picture of drinkers were a homeless person lying in a gutter necking neat gin.
I knew what caused addiction before I even left London. We all do. As a culture, we have a story about how addiction works, and it’s a good one. It says that some substances are so chemically powerful that if you use them enough, they will hijack your brain. They will change your neurochemistry. They will give you a brain disease. After that, you will need the drug physically. So if you or I or the next ten people you pass on the street were to use an addictive drug every day for the next month, on day thirty, we’d all be addicts. Addiction, then, is the result of repeated exposure to certain very powerful chemicals.
When I looked at the people I love who have become addicts, that is what I believed had happened to them.
One night, Hannah came back to the Portland shaking, with blood seeping from a blow to her head. “I remember picking her up and holding her in my arms like a little child” and carrying her to her room, Liz told me. Hannah stammered that she had been beaten and raped. “And I remember just listening to her say to me, over and over again, ‘It’s my fault. I deserve this. It’s my fault. I’m a bad person.’” And on the little table beside Hannah, there was her alcohol, and her heroin, and a needle. And Liz—who has never wanted to use drugs—looked at them and looked at Hannah and thought:
“Which of these things on your bedside table can I give you to take your pain away?”
“And that was the moment I understood what addiction did for people,” she tells me.
If your environment is like Rat Park—a safe, happy community with lots of healthy bonds and pleasurable things to do—you will not be especially vulnerable to addiction. If your environment is like the rat cages—where you feel alone, powerless and purposeless—you will be.
Professor Peter Cohen, a friend of Bruce’s, writes that we should stop using the word “addiction” altogether and shift to a new word: “bonding.” Human beings need to bond. It is one of our most primal urges. So if we can’t bond with other people, we will find a behavior to bond with, whether it’s watching pornography or smoking crack or gambling. If the only bond you can find that gives you relief or meaning is with splayed women on a computer screen or bags of crystal or a roulette wheel, you will return to that bond obsessively.
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.
“To see people’s faces and how they changed—they saw, I have worth, I have value. I’m able to help somebody else. I’m no longer just what they call me in the newspapers. […] If we’re off demonstrating, we’re having board meetings deciding what to do, and thinking about what our next actions could be, how is so and so doing, how can we help so and so because he got busted again—all that’s taking you away from just being totally fixed on ‘I got to get a drug, I got to get a drug, drug drug drug.’”
Suddenly, the slightly depressing debate at the start of the drug war between Harry Anslinger and Henry Smith Williams—prohibition forever versus prescription forever—seems bogus. But in this clinic, they have discovered that that isn’t the real choice. If you give hard-core addicts the option of a safe legal prescription and allow them to control the dose, the vast majority will stabilize and then slowly reduce their drug consumption over time. Prescription isn’t an alternative to stopping your drug use. It is—for many people—a path to it.
I didn’t threaten to sever the connection: I promised to deepen it.
As I write this, he is passed out on my spare bed. […] I looked him just now, lying there, his face pallid again, and as I stroked his hair, I think I understood something for the first time. The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection. It’s all I can offer. It’s all that will help him in the end. If you are alone, you cannot escape addiction. If you are loved, you have a chance. For a hundred years we have been singing war songs about addicts. All along, we should have been singing love songs to them.
I try now to picture Harry as the first dose of opiates washes through his system and it makes him still and calm. What does he think in that moment? Does he think of Henry Smith Williams and Billie Holiday and his order to his agents to “shoot first” when they saw drugs? Does he think of the scream he heard all those years before as a little boy in a farmhouse in Altoona, and of all the people he had made scream since in an attempt to scrub this sensation from the human condition—or does he, for a moment, with the drugs in his hand, hear, at last, the dying of the scream?
