While Chasing the Scream focuses primarily on global drug policies and their worldwide effects, Johann Hari also tries to show how these policies operate on an individual level. Not only can drug use and drug policy make or break individual lives, but they’re also fundamentally driven by individual, often imperfect decisions. For instance, addicts take drugs that they know will harm them in the long term, and governments continue to arrest and incarcerate drug users, despite knowing that this doesn’t reduce drug use or drug-related violence. Throughout his book, Hari asks why powerful people keep making such counterintuitive drug policy decisions. He concludes that it’s because, for the most part, people really think in terms of stories and not logic. Instead of analyzing the evidence to find the truth, they choose the story that feels truest to them. This informs Hari’s strategy as a writer: in each chapter, he addresses one dimension of the drug war through one person’s life story. Because humans think in terms of stories, Hari concludes, journalists and drug reformers must replace misleading stories about drugs and the people who use them with more compelling and accurate alternatives.
The war on drugs shows that politicians, the public, and even scientists don’t make major decisions based on rational analysis—rather, they decide according to stories. The “drugs-hijack-brains” story has completely dominated the public debate about drug policy. Hari opens his first chapter with the story at the heart of the drug war: as a child, Harry Anslinger heard his neighbor’s wife screaming because she needed drugs. He quickly decided that drugs make many people “emotional, hysterical, degenerate, mentally deficient and vicious.” Even when doctors, scientists, and fellow government officials showed Anslinger that this story was wrong, he stuck to it. He even famously told UN diplomats, “I’ve made up my mind [about drugs]—don’t confuse me with the facts.” This is the clearest possible illustration of how individuals and their biases—not research and facts—have driven consequential drug policy. In fact, Anslinger’s story—that drugs must be stopped because the powerful chemicals in them make people irreversibly violent, stupid, and antisocial—has become the basis for U.S. drug policy as a whole. It has even become the public’s standard explanation for drug addiction and justification for the drug war (Hari admits that he, too, believed it when he started his research).
While the scientific evidence shows that drugs don’t harm the vast majority of people who use them, the idea that they inevitably harm everyone has become powerful common sense. Thus, in drug policy, fiction came to trump fact. Perhaps most strikingly, Anslinger’s story became common sense among most drug researchers, too—even though the best scientific evidence actually contradicts it. Specifically, most of these researchers study drugs’ neurochemical effects, then simply assume that these effects are the sole cause of addiction. However, when researchers like Bruce Alexander have compared multiple possible causes for addiction, they have found that chemicals are much less significant than individual psychological factors like a history of trauma. Thus, while their own work suggests that drugs are merely the symptom of a deeper, underlying problem, most drug researchers continue with the story they’re used to: that drugs themselves are the problem.
Because stories structure the way people think about drug policy, Hari argues that we need better stories about drugs, drug users, and the drug war—ones that are both truer and more compelling than “drugs-hijack-brains.” Hari notes that everyone involved in the war on drugs—with the exception of drug traffickers—has the same goals: they want to reduce deaths, fight addiction, and protect young people from harm. In other words, the “drug warriors” who hope to crush the drug trade through force ultimately want the same thing as the reformers who propose de-escalating the drug war, defunding law enforcement, and decriminalizing drug use. The only difference between these groups is which stories they believe about drugs. The “drug warriors” believe that drugs hijack brains, so they propose eradicating drugs. In contrast, the reformers believe that drug use is a symptom of a deeper problem, so social policy should address the root causes of drug use, not drug use itself. Clearly, then, turning “drug warriors” into reformers requires getting them to switch stories. Hari uses Portugal’s top drug cop, João Figueira, as an example of how this can work. Figueira strongly opposed Portugal’s plans to decriminalize drugs, but when they went into effect, he saw overdoses, HIV infections, and drug-related crime all fall dramatically. He realized that he was wrong and became a decriminalization advocate. Thus, Hari suggests that drug reformers should strive to help “drug warriors” make the same change as Figueira by offering them persuasive, true stories about the drug war’s failures and the potential of decriminalization and legalization.
Of course, Hari aims to give readers precisely these stories in his book. This is why he humanizes the drug war by focusing on individuals’ experiences of it. He interviewed 16 law enforcement agents, but he writes about just one: Leigh Maddox. Similarly, he profiles just one drug dealer (Chino Hardin), one case of tragic cartel violence (Rubi Fraire and her mother Maria Escobedo), and one successful drug activist (Bud Osborn). Perhaps most importantly, to capture the great potential of decriminalizing and legalizing drugs, he tells the story of just two Portuguese addicts, Antonio Gago and Sergio Rodrigues, who overcame addiction and started performing outreach work to other addicts. These stories don’t provide a comprehensive, holistic picture of the war on drugs, but they do give readers clear, memorable examples of where the drug war has gone wrong. Ultimately, researchers, policymakers, and activists can choose which story they want to tell about the drug war. Many will still choose “drugs-hijack-brains,” but Hari offers a compelling alternative—one that better fits the available scientific evidence and offers a far brighter future for addicts and the victims of the war on drugs.
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Stories and Human Psychology ThemeTracker
Stories and Human Psychology Quotes in Chasing the Scream
Anslinger had his story now. He announced on a famous radio address: “Parents beware! Your children…are being introduced to a new danger in the form of a drugged cigarette, marijuana. Young [people] are slaves to this narcotic, continuing addiction until they deteriorate mentally, become insane, [and] turn to violent crime and murder.”
Billie didn’t blame Anslinger’s agents as individuals; she blamed the drug war itself—because it forced the police to treat ill people like criminals. “Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn’t treat them,” she wrote in her memoir, “then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs.”
It is easy to judge Harry Anslinger. But if we are honest, I suspect that everybody who has ever loved an addict—everybody who has ever been an addict—has this impulse in them somewhere. Destroy the addiction. Kill the addiction. Throttle it with violence. Harry Anslinger is our own darkest impulses, given a government department and a license to kill.
As I researched this book, I traveled a long way from the farm fields of Pennsylvania—but at every step, I began to feel I was chasing the scream that terrified little Harry Anslinger all those years ago, as it echoed out across the world.
Henry Smith Williams assumed that Anslinger—and prohibition—were rational, like him. They were not. They are responses to fear, and panic. And nobody, when they are panicking, can see the logical flaws in their thought.
Harry worked very hard to keep the country in a state of panic on the subject of drugs so that nobody would ever again see these logical contradictions. Whenever people did point them out, he had them silenced. He had to make sure there was no room for doubt—in his own head, or in the country—and no alternative for Americans to turn to.
Whenever any representative of another country tried to explain to him why these policies weren’t right for them, Anslinger snapped: “I’ve made up my mind—don’t confuse me with the facts.”
And so Thailand caved. Britain caved. Everyone—under threat—caved in the end. The United States was now the most powerful country in the world, and nobody dared defy them for long. Some were more willing than others. Pretty much every country has its own minority group, like African Americans, whom it wants to keep down. For many, it was a good excuse. And pretty much every country had this latent desire to punish addicts. “The world belongs to the strong,” Harry believed. “It always has and it always will.” The result is that we are all still stuck at the end of the barrel of Harry Anslinger’s gun.
It is a natural human instinct to turn our fears into symbols, and destroy the symbols, in the hope that it will destroy the fear. It is a logic that keeps recurring throughout human history, from the Crusades to the witch hunts to the present day. It’s hard to sit with a complex problem, such as the human urge to get intoxicated, and accept that it will always be with us, and will always cause some problems (as well as some pleasures). It is much more appealing to be told a different message—that it can be ended. That all these problems can be over, if only we listen, and follow.
There would be many more bullets, but I was going to learn on my journey that Arnold Rothstein has not yet died. Every time he is killed, a harder and more vicious version of him emerges to fill the space provided by prohibition for a global criminal industry. Arnold Rothstein is the start of a lineup of criminals that runs through the Crips and the Bloods and Pablo Escobar to Chapo Guzman—each more vicious because he was strong enough to kill the last.
[…]
And I was going to see that, like Rothstein, Harry Anslinger is reincarnated in ever-tougher forms, too. Before this war is over, his successors were going to be deploying gunships along the coasts of America, imprisoning more people than any other society in human history, and spraying poisons from the air across foreign countries thousands of miles away from home to kill their drug crops.
But on I-95, Leigh began to see the act of pulling over a car to search it in a new way. Once, she saw this scene as a soldier in a just war approaching the enemy. Now she sees it as a meeting of people who are surrounded by ghosts. As he approaches the car, the police officer has ranged behind him the ghosts of all the cops he has known, “all the funerals he’s been to, all the people who’ve been killed in traffic stops—because it’s a lot,” she says. And then “there’s also this poor black kid” in the car. Sitting in the passenger seats behind him are his ghosts—all of his relatives and friends who have been killed in police raids or vanished into the American prison system.
Neither can see the other side’s ghosts. They can only hate.
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.
We all—the vast majority of drug warriors, and the vast majority of legalizers—have a set of shared values. We all want to protect children from drugs. We all want to keep people from dying as a result of drug use. We all want to reduce addiction. […] When we move beyond the drug war, we will be able to achieve those shared goals with much greater success.
At the start of my journey, I set out to find an answer to a contradiction within myself, and within our culture—between the impulse to be compassionate to addicts, and the impulse to crush and destroy our addictive impulses. Now, at last, I see—and really feel—that it is not a contradiction at all. A compassionate approach leads to less addiction. […] This isn’t a debate about values. It’s a debate about how to achieve those values.
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?
