Quotes from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“It isn’t the drug that causes the harmful behavior—it’s the environment. An isolated rat will almost always become a junkie. A rat with a good life almost never will, no matter how many drugs you make available to him. As Bruce put it: he was realizing that addiction isn’t a disease. Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you—it’s the cage you live in.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“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.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“punishment—shaming a person, caging them, making them unemployable—traps them in addiction. Taking that money and spending it instead on helping them to get jobs and homes and decent lives makes it possible for many of them to stop.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“The opposite of addiction isn't sobriety. It's connection. It's all I can offer. It's all that will help [you] 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.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“for each traumatic event that happened to a child, they were two to four times more likely to grow up to be an addicted adult.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“More than 50 percent of Americans have breached the drug laws. Where a law is that widely broken, you can’t possibly enforce it against every lawbreaker. The legal system would collapse under the weight of it. So you go after the people who are least able to resist, to argue back, to appeal—the poorest and most disliked groups. In the United States, they are black and Hispanic people, with a smattering of poor whites.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“the core of addiction doesn’t lie in what you swallow or inject—it’s in the pain you feel in your head. Yet we have built a system that thinks we will stop addicts by increasing their pain. “If I had to design a system that was intended to keep people addicted, I’d design exactly the system that we have right now,”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“Ethan Nadelmann, one of the leading drug reformers in the United States, had explained: "People overdose because [under prohibition] they don't know if the heroin is 1 percent or 40 percent...Just imagine if every time you picked up a bottle of wine, you didn't know whether it was 8 percent alcohol or 80 percent alcohol [or] if every time you took an aspirin, you didn't know if it was 5 milligrams or 500 milligrams.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“When Billie Holiday came15 to London in the 1950s, she was amazed. They “are civilized about it and they have no narcotics problem at all,” she explained. “One day America is going to smarten up and do the”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“It took me a while to see that the contrast between the racism directed at Billie and the compassion offered to addicted white stars like Judy Garland was not some weird misfiring of the drug war—it was part of the point.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause,20 of personal and social maladjustment.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“Wouldn’t it be better to spend our money on rescuing kids before they become addicts than on jailing them after we have failed?”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“Most addicts here, he says, come with an empty glass inside them;66 when they take heroin, the glass becomes full, but only for a few hours, and then it drains down to nothing again. The purpose of this program is to gradually build a life for the addict so they can put something else into that empty glass: a social network, a job, some daily pleasures. If you can do that, it will mean that even as the heroin drains, you are not left totally empty. Over time, as your life has more in it, the glass will contain more and more, so it will take less and less heroin to fill it up. And in the end, there may be enough within you that you feel full without any heroin at all.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“For anybody who suspects that we need to reform the drug laws, there is an easier argument to make, and a harder argument to make. The easier argument is to say that we all agree drugs are bad—it’s just that drug prohibition is even worse.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“child abuse is as likely to cause drug addiction as obesity is to cause heart disease.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you—it’s the cage you live in.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“How do we start to rebuild a society where we don’t feel so alone and afraid, and where we can form healthier bonds? How do we build a society where we look for happiness in one another rather than in consumption?”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“If your problem is being chronically starved of social bonds, then part of the solution is to bond with the heroin itself and the relief it gives you. But a bigger part is to bond with the subculture that comes with taking heroin—the tribe of fellow users all embarked on the same mission and facing the same threats and risking death every day with you. It gives you an identity. It gives you a life of highs and lows, instead of relentless monotony. The world stops being indifferent to you, and starts being hostile—which is at least proof that you exist, that you aren’t dead already. The heroin helps users deal with the pain of being unable to form normal bonds with other humans. The heroin subculture gives them bonds with other human beings.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“The United States now imprisons more people16 for drug offenses than Western European nations imprison for all crimes combined. No human society has ever before imprisoned this high a proportion of its population.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“Prohibition—this policy I have traced across continents and across a century—consists of endlessly spreading downward spirals. People get addicted so we humiliate and shame them until they become more addicted. They then have to feed their habit by persuading more people to buy the drugs from them and become addicted in turn. Then those people need to be humiliated and shamed. And so it goes, on and on. But in Portugal after the drug war, the state helped people to get better, and then those people helped more people to get better, and then they helped still more people to get better—and so the downward spiral of the drug war has been replaced by a healing ripple that spreads slowly out across the society.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“With a few of his colleagues, he built two sets of homes for laboratory rats. In the first home, they lived as they had in the original experiments, in solitary confinement, isolated except for their fix. But then he built a second home: a paradise for rats. Within its plywood walls,11 it contained everything a rat could want—there were wheels and colored balls and the best food, and other rats to hang out with and have sex with. He called it Rat Park.12 In these experiments, both sets of rats had access to a pair of drinking bottles. The first bottle contained only water. The other bottle contained morphine—an opiate that rats process in a similar way to humans and that behaves just like heroin when it enters their brains. At the end of each day, Bruce or a member of his team would weigh the bottles to see how much the rats had chosen to take opiates, and how much they had chosen to stay sober. What they discovered was startling. It turned out that the rats in isolated cages used up to 25 milligrams of morphine a day, as in the earlier experiments. But the rats in the happy cages used hardly any morphine at all—less than 5 milligrams. “These guys [in Rat Park] have a complete total twenty-four-hour supply” of morphine, Bruce said, “and they don’t use it.” They don’t kill themselves. They choose to spend their lives doing other things. So”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“Harry Anslinger is our own darkest impulses, given a government department and a license to kill.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“The first tugs towards prohibition were about power, and purity of belief. If you are going to have one God and one Church, you need to stop experiences that make people feel that they can approach God on their own.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“The Conservative government decided to “merge” John’s clinic with a new health trust, run by evangelical Christians who opposed prescription on principle. The patients panicked, because they knew what being cut off would mean—a return to abscesses and overdoses and scrambling for drugs from gangsters.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“July 6, 1927, edition of the New York Times: MEXICAN FAMILY GO INSANE.57 It explained: “A widow and her four children have been driven insane by eating the Marihuana plant, according to doctors who say there is no hope of saving the children’s lives and that the mother will be insane for the rest of her life.” The mother had no money to buy food, so she decided to eat some marijuana plants that had been growing in their garden. Soon after, “neighbors, hearing outbursts of crazed laughter, rushed to the house to find the entire family insane.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“His eyes flashing, Leary13 evangelized on a cascade of TV shows that he was the founder of a new religion, with cannabis and LSD as its sacraments. These drugs should, he said, be given to twelve-year-olds so they can “fuck righteously14 and without guilt”—and to prove the point he gave them to his own young teenage15 children, even as they went slowly insane.16”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“Prohibition, Bourgois explains in his writing, creates a system in which the most insane and sadistic violence has a sane and functional logic. It is required. It is rewarded.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“the drug had been proven by scientists to be safer than alcohol. He wanted to prove it again. So he sat next to several large cases of beer, a fake joint in his hand and a real joint in his pocket. For every hit the mayor took of alcohol, Mason pledged, he would take a hit of marijuana—and we would see who died first.7”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“When alcohol was legalized again in 1933, the involvement of gangsters and murderers and killing in the alcohol trade virtually ended. Peace was restored to the streets of Chicago. The murder rate fell dramatically,25 and it didn’t rise so high again until drug prohibition was intensified in the 1970s and ’80s.”
― Johann Hari, quote from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

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