chasing the scream

by Johann Hari

find recordings of interviews et al:

http://www.chasingthescream.com/

About the Book

[so.. would love to read this book. but i’m library\ing it. so i just recommended it.. and i got a notice that i reached my limit for recommending books for the library. i’m sure i haven’t recommended over 5. ugh. – tried again.. now it’s saying not available..]

notes/highlights:

..what if you found a way to step back and look, for once, at the entire painting (of this drug thing)?…. this journey would end up taking me across nine countries 5 and thirty thousand miles, and it would last for three years.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 53, 61-62). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Drug addiction is not what we have been told it is. The drug war is not what our politicians have sold it as for one hundred years and counting. And there is a very different story out there waiting for us when we are ready to hear it—one that should leave us thrumming with hope.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 68-70). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

When he grew into a man, this boy was going to draw together some of the deepest fears in American culture— of racial minorities, of intoxication, of losing control— and channel them into a global war to prevent those screams . It would cause many screams in turn. (Harry Anslinger, 1930)

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 99-101). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Arnold Rothstein (filled with rage) & Billie Holliday (filled with song) – 1930s

When Harry and Arnold and Billie were born, drugs were freely available throughout the world. You could go to any American pharmacy and buy products made from the same ingredients as heroin and cocaine. The most popular cough mixtures 11 in the United States contained opiates, a new soft drink called Coca-Cola was made from the same plant as snortable cocaine, and over in Britain, the classiest department stores sold heroin tins for society women. But they lived at a time when American culture was looking for an outlet for its swelling tide of anxiety— a real, physical object it could destroy, in the hope that this would destroy its fear of a world that was changing more rapidly than their parents and grandparents could ever have imagined. It settled on these chemicals . In 1914— a century ago—they resolved: Destroy them. Wipe them from the earth. Set yourself free.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 123-128). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

When Billie Holiday stood on stage, 12 her hair was pulled back tightly, her face was round and shining in the lights, and her voice was scratched with pain. It was on one of these nights, 13 in 1939, that she started to sing a song that would become iconic:

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 132-135). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

After that, Anslinger became obsessed with the Mafia, at a time when most Americans refused to believe it even existed . This is hard for us to understand today, but the official position of every official in U.S. law enforcement until the 1960s—from J. Edgar Hoover on down— was that the Mafia was a preposterous conspiracy theory, no more real than the Loch Ness Monster.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 194-197). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Several discharged American sailors were brought to him to be shipped home because they had become addicted to heroin. Harry stared into their skeletal faces 43 and found that the hatred he felt as a small boy was only swelling. This, he promised himself, would be stopped.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 209-211). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

For the rest of his life, Anslinger believed that if he had gotten the president’s plea through only a little earlier, “a decent peace might have been written, 47 forestalling any chance for a future Hitler gaining power, or a Second World War erupting.” It was the first time Harry felt that the future of civilization hung on his actions, but it would not be the last.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 221-224). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

(towns flattened, people shooting up people) Civilization, he was beginning to conclude, was as fragile as the personality of that farmer’s wife back in Altoona. It could break. After this, and for the rest of his life, 51 Harry retained a deep sense that American society could collapse into wreckage just as quickly as Europe’s had.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 233-235). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Harry announced to his bosses that there was a way to make prohibition work: Use maximum force. Send the navy to hunt down smugglers along the coasts of America. Ban the sale of alcohol for medical purposes. Massively increase prison sentences for alcohol dealers until they were all locked up. 56 Wage war on booze until it was only a memory. In just a few years, Harry made the leap from being a competent if frustrated prohibition agent in the Bahamas to running a Washington, D.C., department.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 242-246). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

But almost overnight, he began to argue the opposite position (against marijuana) . Why ? He believed the two most-feared groups 60 in the United States— Mexican immigrants and African Americans— were taking the drug much more than white people, and he presented the House Committee on Appropriations with a nightmarish vision of where this could lead.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 261-264). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

marijuana made you “loco.” Nor was he the only one pushing them in the United States —the press loved these stories, especially the mass media owned by William Randolph Hearst. But for the first time , Anslinger gave them the backing of a government

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 293-295). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

He ramped up his campaign. The most frightening effect of marijuana, Harry warned, was on blacks. It made them forget the appropriate racial barriers 85 —and unleashed their lust for white women.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 319-321). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

He wrote to all the agents he had sent to follow them, and instructed: “Please prepare all cases in your jurisdiction 105 involving musicians in violation of the marijuana laws. We will have a great national round-up arrest of all such persons on a single day. I will let you know what day.” His advice on drug raids to his men was always “Shoot first.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 358-361). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“How do you best act cruelly?” her friend Yolande Bavan asked me in 2013. “It’s to take something that’s the dearest thing to that person away from them.” Billie had been able to survive everything —but this? “You despair because you have no control. You can’t do the thing that is a passion and that you made your livelihood at, and that has brought joy to people all over the world,” Bavan says. Billie was finally silenced.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 506-509). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

He called Judy Garland, another heroin addict, in to see him. They had a friendly chat, 181 in which he advised her to take longer vacations between pictures, and he wrote to her studio, 182 assuring them she didn’t have a drug problem at all.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 533-535). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

When he discovered that a Washington society hostess he knew 183 —“ a beautiful, gracious lady,” he noted— had an illegal drug addiction, he explained he couldn’t possibly arrest her because “it would destroy . . . the unblemished reputation of one of the nation’s most honored families.” He helped her to wean herself off her addiction slowly, without the law becoming involved.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 535-538). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The main reason given for banning drugs 184 —the reason obsessing the men who launched this war— was that the blacks, Mexicans, and Chinese were using these chemicals, forgetting their place, and menacing white people.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 542-544). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Harry told the public that “the increase [in drug addiction] is practically 100 percent among Negro people,” 186 which he stressed was terrifying because already “the Negro population . . . accounts for 10 percent of the total population, but 60 percent of the addicts.” 187 He could wage the drug war— he could do what he did— only because he was responding to a fear in the American people. You can be a great surfer, but you still need a great wave. Harry’s wave came in the form of a race panic.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 547-551). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Cocaine was, it was widely claimed in the press at this time, turning blacks into superhuman hulks who could take bullets to the heart without flinching. It was the official reason why the police across the South increased the caliber of their guns.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 557-559). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

He knew that to secure his bureau’s future , he needed a high-profile victory, over intoxication and over the blacks, and so he turned back to Billie Holiday.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 586-587). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The personality test given to all applicants on Anslinger’s orders found that he was a sadist. 205 He quickly rose through the bureau’s ranks.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 601-602). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“Where else [but in the Bureau of Narcotics] could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage 219 with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?” He may well have been high when he busted Billie for getting high.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 629-631). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The drug war was born in the United States— but so was the resistance to it. Right at the start, there were people who saw that the drug war was not what we were being told. It was something else entirely. Harry Anslinger wanted to make sure we would never put these pieces together.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 717-720). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

While Harry Anslinger was raging against the Mafia in public, he was, in fact, secretly working for them. The drug war had been created, Henry said, for one reason and one reason alone. The Mafia paid Harry Anslinger to launch his crusade because they wanted the drug market all to themselves. It was the scam of the century. 6 And it was about, at last, to be exposed.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 731-734). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The Williams brothers had watched as Anslinger’s department created two crime waves. First, it created an army of gangsters to smuggle drugs into the country and sell them to addicts. ….Second, by driving up the cost of drugs by more than a thousand percent, the new policies meant addicts were forced to commit crime to get their next fix.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 790-794). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

prior to – Johann tells of drugs being second nature for cures.. much like aspirin.. with no addictions. ie: readily available when needed

“The United States government, as represented by its [anti-drug] officers,” Henry explained, had just become “the greatest and most potent maker of criminals in any recent century.” 23 And every time Harry Anslinger created new drug criminals, he created new reasons for his department to be saved—and to grow.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 797-800). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

(via Edward Williams) The order and calm that had existed before narcotics prohibition started to return to their neighborhoods. The mayor of Los Angeles 26 came out and celebrated the clinic as a great gift to the city , and the local federal prosecutor announced that these clinics accomplished “more good . . . in one day than all the prosecutions in one month.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 810-813). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Some twenty thousand doctors were charged with violating the Harrison Act alongside Edward

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 828-829). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

accusation: At the start of the drug war, the man who launched the drug crackdown in California did it because he was paid to— by the drug dealers themselves 54 . They wanted the drug war. They wanted it so badly, they would pay to speed it up.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 880-882). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

There is no evidence that Anslinger ever worked for the Mafia,

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 888-889). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The book (drug addicts are human beings) contained a prediction. If this drug war continues, Henry Smith Williams wrote, there will be a five-billion-dollar drug smuggling industry in the United States in fifty years’ time. He was right almost to the exact year. 58 The story of the Williams brothers, and all the doctors who were crushed alongside them , was so successfully wiped from America’s collective memory that by the 1960s, Anslinger could say in public that doctors had always been his allies in the drug war.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 903-907). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Drug prohibition would work— but only if it was being done by everyone, all over the world 8 . So he traveled to the United Nations with a set of instructions for humanity: Do what we have done. Wage war on drugs. Or else. Of all Harry’s acts, this was the most consequential for us today.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 936-939). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The public wanted to be told that these deep, complex problems— race, inequality, geopolitics— came down to a few powders and pills, and if these powders and pills could be wiped from the world, these problems would disappear.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 965-966). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Immediately after he finally stood down, an investigation by a special team from the Internal Revenue Service found that the bureau was not free from corruption, leading historian John McWilliams to claim that, “the bureau itself was actually the major source 16 of supply and protector of heroin in the United States.” Anslinger had been too busy chasing doctors, jazz singers, addicts, and Chinese dragons to see there were drug dealers in front of him all along.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 974-978). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

the World Series. … 1919 when, against all the odds and every prediction, the Cincinnati Reds beat the far-and-away favorites, the White Sox. …the reason emerged: Rothstein had paid eight White Sox players to throw the match. All eight players were charged with fraud— and all were mysteriously acquitted.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1089-1092). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

For his system to work, Rothstein had to invent the modern drug gang.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 1110). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

At this moment, the heroin clinics are being shut down by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics across the United States. This is a hinge point in history. It is the moment when the control of drugs is transferred to the most dangerous people. As the result of the Harrison Act and its subsequent hard-line interpretation by Harry’s bureau, it is passing from Henry Smith Williams and his colleagues to Arnold Rothstein and his thugs. It wasn’t by the law of nature. It was by political decree.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1117-1119). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The World newspaper 29 reported: “For every $ 1000 spent in purchasing opium, smuggling it into the country and dispensing it, those at the top of the pyramid collect $ 6000 or more in profit .” Arnold soon discovered that when you control the massive revenue offered by the drug industry, individual police and politicians are easy to buy. His profit margins were so vast he could outbid the salaries cops earned from the state. “The police,” a journalist wrote in 1929, “were as gracious to him 30 as they were to a police commissioner.” This is why every time Arnold Rothstein was caught committing violence, the charges “mysteriously” vanished.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1123-1129). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

He did to law enforcement what he did to the World Series: he turned it into a performance the watching public believed was real, when it was in fact a puppet show . Enough of the players on the field worked for him to guarantee his success every time.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1136-1137). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

It was only a year after I first learned about this, on the streets of the deadliest city in the world, Ciudad Juárez, that I realized the significance of that moment. This was the bullet at the birth of drug prohibition , and nobody knows where it came from, even now.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1227-1229). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The drug war analyst Charles Bowden says there are in reality two drug wars going on: there is the war on drugs, where the state wages war on the users and addicts, and then there is the war for drugs, 64 where the criminals fight each other to control the trade. The war for drugs was launched in earnest in the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan as Arnold Rothstein lay bleeding.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1232-1236). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The key players in the war continue to be either Anslingers or Rothsteins— the prohibitionist and the gangster, locked together in a tango unto the far horizon. The policy of prohibition summoned these characters into existence, because it needs them. So long as it lives, they live.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1244-1246). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

We think the violence is the product of the drugs. But in fact, it turns out this is only a tiny sliver of the violence . The vast majority is like Chino’s violence— to establish , protect, and defend drug territory in an illegal market, and to build a name for being consistently terrifying so nobody tries to take your property or turf. Professor Paul Goldstein of the University of Illinois conducted a detailed study in which he and his team looked at every killing identified as “drug-related” in New York City in 1986. It turned out 7.5 percent of the killings took place after a person took drugs and their behavior seemed to change. Some 2 percent were the result of addicts trying to steal to feed their habit and it going wrong. And more than three quarters— the 6 vast majority— were like Chino’s attacks. They weren’t caused by drugs, any more than Al Capone’s killings were caused by alcohol. They were, Goldstein showed, caused by prohibition. Just as the war on alcohol 7 created armed gangs fighting to control the booze trade, the war on drugs has created armed gangs fighting and killing to control the drug trade. The National Youth Gang Center 8 has discovered that youth gangs like the Souls of Mischief are responsible for between 23 and 45 percent of all drugs sales in the United States. I discussed this one afternoon with Chino, and he nodded. He explained the gang didn’t exist only to sell drugs, but “it gives the gang way more power.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1357-1369). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

[ she] traded freedom for sex.” Was that common then? “It’s common now,” he says in 2012.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1396-1397). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Chino wasn’t a psychopath, but the prohibition system we have created required him to be one to play his role in it. So he drugged himself into psychosis.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1543-1544). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Had his life been shaped by a policy decision that didn’t have to be made, and didn’t have to continue?

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 1600). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

What if it doesn’t have to keep playing out, generation after generation? What if there is another way?

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1637-1638). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

When the government war on alcohol stopped, the gangster war for alcohol stopped. All that violence— the violence produced by prohibition— ended.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1642-1643). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Professor Jeffrey Miron 17 of Harvard University has shown that the murder rate has dramatically increased twice in U.S. history— and both times were during periods when prohibition was dramatically stepped up. The first is from 1920 to 1933, when alcohol was criminalized. The second is from 1970 to 1990, when the prohibition of drugs was dramatically escalated.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1652-1655). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Milton Friedman calculated that it caused an additional ten thousand murders a year in the United States. That’s the equivalent of more than three 9/ 11s every single year. Professor Miron argues this is an underestimate. Take the drug trade away from criminals, he calculates, and it would reduce the homicide rate in the United States by between 25 and 75 percent.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1657-1659). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

And at every level, there is a war on drugs, a war for drugs, and a culture of terror, all created by prohibition.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 1726). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Her officers all knew they could seize the property of anyone they arrested for drug offenses to be auctioned off, with much of the proceeds— usually 80 percent— going straight back into the local police budget.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1745-1747). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

If you arrest a large number of rapists, the amount of rape goes down. If you arrest a large number of violent racists , the number of violent racist attacks goes down . But if you arrest a large number of drug dealers, drug dealing doesn’t go down.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1827-1829). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Whenever her force arrested gang members, it appeared to actually cause an increase in violence, especially homicides. ..

“So what happens is we take out the guy at the top,” Leigh explains, so “now, nobody’s in charge, and [so the gangs] battle it out to see who’s going to be in charge.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1841-1844). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

It is hard to be Harry Anslinger with your eyes and your mind open.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 1882). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The 1993 National Household Survey 10 on Drug Abuse found that 19 percent of drug dealers were African American, but they made up 64 percent of the arrests for it. .. In 1993, …South Africa imprisoned 853 black men per hundred thousand in the population. The United States imprisons 4,919 black men per hundred thousand (versus only 943 white men). …at any given time, 11 40 to 50 percent of black men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five are in jail, on probation, or have a warrant out for their arrest, overwhelmingly for drug offenses.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1890-1897). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Leigh was— as she would see later— acting as part of a racist machine, against her own intentions.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1903-1904). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

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.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1915-1917). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

We humans are good at suppressing our epiphanies, especially when our salaries and our friendships depend on it.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1924-1925). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Neither can see the other side’s ghosts. They can only hate.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1933-1934). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

once you have been busted 13 for a drug offense— at fifteen or seventeen or twenty— you are virtually unemployable for the rest of your life.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1942-1943). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

You will be barred from receiving student loans. You will be evicted from public housing. You will be barred from even visiting public housing.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1943-1945). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“When I was a police officer nobody ever trained me on the collateral consequences of marijuana arrests.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1948-1949). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Leigh decided to help very people she had been busting and breaking before. She set up a low-cost legal clinic called Just Advice, where she and her students fight to have the arrest records of accused drug offenders expunged any way they can. She writes to universities imploring them to provide access to scholarships to students with drug convictions. She defends drug users in court.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 1953-1954). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The United States now imprisons more people 16 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. It is now so large that if all U.S. prisoners 17 were detained in one place, they would rank as the thirty-fifth most populous state of the Union. From the liberal state of New York to the liberal state of California, the jailing and torture of addicts is routine. To pick just one kind: the Justice Department estimates that 216,000 people are raped in these prisons every year. (This is the number of rape victims, not the number of rapes—that is far higher.) As the writer Christopher Glazek has pointed out, this means that the United States is almost certainly the first society in human history where more men have been raped 18 than women.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 2123-2130). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Many of the prison guards who put Marcia Powell in an exposed cage in the desert and ignored her screams are still at work today.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 2262). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

sixty thousand people had been killed in five years. That 90 percent of the cocaine 4 used in the United States passed through here every year. That Mexican drug cartels make between $ 19 and $ 29 billion 5 every year from U.S. drug sales alone.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 2276-2278). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

I was beginning to feel we were all enmeshed together— the subjects of the drug war, and its logic— in a long, densely connected global chain. The impulse to repress, I suspected, had given birth to all this, but I wanted to see how.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 2321-2322). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Just as Chino had explained to me what life is like inside a street gang, I wanted to understand what life is like inside a cartel, but I kept being told this was impossible. The cartels kill anyone who talks to outsiders.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 2326-2327). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

If your cartel controls that interstate highway, you control the flow of billions of dollars. If your enemies control it, they can strip you of your livelihood. That is a recipe for a war.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 2368-2369). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“A lot of people here [in the United States] want to be an attorney, a lawyer, a judge, a firefighter, a policeman. Over there [on the U.S.-Mexico border] they worship the Zetas. The little kids [say] ‘I want to be a Zeta when I grow up.’

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 2376-2378). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

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.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 2490-2491). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Indeed, “sometimes the police escort you to do an assassination . . . The same police kidnaps a person and takes them to the cartel.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 2499-2500). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

in Juárez, it is believed that 60 to 70 percent 38 of the economy runs on laundered drug money, while drug money represents a vastly smaller fraction of the U.S. economy. Nothing can withstand this force.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 2506-2508). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

the police were finally honest with her. “If he’s with the Zetas, we’re not going to be able to do anything, because they run the state,” they told her. “If we do a bust, it’s because they allow us to do it.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 2701-2702). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

First the drug dealers bought immunity from the drug laws. Then they bought the law itself. By joining the Zetas somewhere along the line, Sergio had placed himself above the law. This is what the desire to repress drugs has wrought.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 2708-2710). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Those searching for the disappeared disappear; those seeking justice for the murdered are murdered, until the silence swallows everything. This is all happening in a city with a Walmart and a Pizza Hut and several KFCs.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 2725-2726). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“Mexico is not deciding this policy . . . This war, this criminalization strategy, is imposed by the U.S. government.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 2758-2759). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

In 2012, not longer after Marisela was killed, Michele Leonhart, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said that the level of violence and death in Mexico is in fact “a sign of success 22 in the fight against drugs.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 2785-2787). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

United Nations says the war’s rationale is to build “a drug-free world 1 —we can do it!” U.S. government officials agree, stressing that “there is no such thing 2 as recreational drug use.” So this isn’t a war to stop addiction, like that in my family, or teenage drug use. It is a war to stop drug use among all humans, everywhere. All these prohibited chemicals need to be rounded up and removed from the earth. That is what we are fighting for.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 2799-2803). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Only 10 percent 9 of drug users have a problem with their substance.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 2841-2842). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

in 1995, the World Health Organization 12 (WHO) conducted a massive scientific study of cocaine and its effects. They discovered that “experimental and occasional use are by far the most common types of use, and compulsive/ dysfunctional [use] is far less common.” The U.S. government threatened to cut off funding to the WHO unless they suppressed the report. It has never been published; we know what it says only because it was leaked.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 2852-2855). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Many years and many thousands of miles from there, the memory of these infant screams would help Gabor— once he had become a doctor himself—to make a crucial discovery about the nature of addiction. He asked himself: How did the Jewish babies know they were in terrible danger? Why did they scream?

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 2990-2992). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

ah. Gabor..

called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, written by Gabor Maté.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 3014). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

they would never be kicked out or lectured to. Instead, they would be offered a room of their own, and— whenever they wanted it— staff who would sit with them, and listen to them, and try to love them. That was all. “Our method is— be a human being with other human beings,” Liz tells me. “Be there for them. Don’t judge.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3056-3058). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Most of them have never sat down with a person who wanted to listen to their life story sympathetically.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3065-3066). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Gabor was finding that virtually all his patients fit this description. And then it occurred to him. Could it be that these hard-core addicts were all terribly damaged before they found their drugs? What if the discovery of drugs wasn’t the earthquake in their life, but only one of the aftershocks?

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3083-3085). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“nothing is addictive in itself. It’s always a combination of a potentially addictive substance or behavior and a susceptible individual. So the question we need to keep asking is— What creates the susceptibility?”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3103-3104). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause, 20 of personal and social maladjustment.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3122-3123). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

It’s not a spasm of irrationality. It meets a need. It takes away the pain, for a while.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 3159). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

These addicts— they have been in car crashes of the soul.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 3220). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“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,” Gabor would tell me.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3235-3236). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

she was a success, because she knew she was loved.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 3264). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The real pain of withdrawal is the return of all the psychological pain that you were trying to put to sleep with heroin in the first place.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3322-3323). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

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.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3358-3359). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

there were more 17 heroin addicts serving in the U.S. Army than there were back home in the United States.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3375-3376). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Senator Robert Steele: “The soldier going to South Vietnam today runs a far greater risk of becoming a heroin addict than a combat casualty.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3378-3380). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

the war ended. the addicts came home… 95 percent of them, within a year, simply stopped.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 3387). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Bruce came to believe, was found in one idea above all 24 others— dislocation. Being cut off from meaning. He began to set out his ideas in an extraordinary book called The Globalization of Addiction.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3407-3409). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“Addiction,” he said, “is a disease of loneliness.” – Dean Wilson – recovering addict

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 3432). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

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.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3446-3449). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

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.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3451-3452). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Robert DuPont. He is the founder of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which funds 90 percent of all the research into illegal drugs in the world.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3465-3466). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

this was the most distinguished expert on the matter, speaking at a conference with these ideas at its very heart. But when I asked him the most basic questions about how this relates to the wider environment, he said—in a friendly way— that he’s never really thought about them… (hadn’t heard of Gabor or Bruce or their findings..)

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3483-3485). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Professor Carl Hart at Columbia University is one of the leading experts in the world on how drugs affect the brain. He tells me that when you explain these facts to the scientists who have built their careers on the simplistic old ideas about drugs, they effectively say to you: “Look, man— this is my position. Leave me alone.” This is what they know. This is what they have built their careers on. If you offer ideas that threaten to eclipse theirs —they just ignore you. I ask Professor Hart: Can our central idea about drugs really be as hollow as that? “Can it be as hollow? I think you have discovered— it is as hollow as that . . . Look at the evidence. It’s hollow . . . It’s smoke and mirrors.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3490-3495). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Carl Hart

when i asked – why do these persist – w/scientific findings (like Gabor, Carl, Bruce) …Hart tells me, 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?

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3497-3498). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

There is a powerful political brake on exploring these deeper truths. (nida – 90% of funding) – And that, it turns out, is what happened to Bruce. Once the nature of their findings became clear, the money for the Rat Park experiment provided by his university was abruptly cut off, before the team had a chance to investigate many of the questions it raised.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 3505-07). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

sounds like mincome et al

“It’s amazing to discover that something which is so centrally believed is false. – Bruce

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3510-3511). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

all his findings were disregarded, as if they had never happened. “That evidence like this can be so completely disregarded. It’s amazing.” – Bruce

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 3513). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Stop thinking only about individual recovery, he argues, and start thinking about “social recovery.” – Bruce

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3548-3549). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

It is no longer: How do we stop addiction through threats and force, and scare people away from drugs in the first place? It becomes: 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?

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3550-3552). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

another way

We haven’t been able to reduce addiction, it occurs to me, because we have been asking the wrong questions.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3553-3554). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

our biggest addiction, as a culture, is buying and consuming stuff we don’t need and don’t even really want…. the idea of consuming less, in fact, fills us with panic. All this stuff, Bruce believes, is filling the hole where normal human connection should be. (worse than the drug war)

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3559-3560). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

curious about what % of chemical causing addiction: cigarette smoking is one of the strongest addictions: it is ranked on pharmaceutical addictiveness scales alongside heroin and cocaine. It is also the deadliest. 33 Smoking tobacco kills 650 out of every hundred thousand people who use it, while using cocaine kills four. 35 And we know for sure what the chemical hook in tobacco is— it’s nicotine.

The Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of nicotine patch wearers were able to stop smoking. .. only one explanation : something is going on that is more significant than the chemicals in the drug itself.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3573-3585). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

With the most powerful and deadly drug in our culture, the actual chemicals account for only 17.7 percent of the compulsion to use.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3590-3591). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Physical dependence occurs when your body has become hooked on a chemical, and you will experience some withdrawal symptoms if you stop— ….. Addiction is the psychological state of feeling you need the drug to give you the sensation of feeling calmer, or manic, or numbed, or whatever it does for you.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3593-3596). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

That’s why you can nurse addicts through their withdrawal pains for weeks and see the chemical hooks slowly pass, only for them to relapse months or years later, even though any chemical craving in the body has long since gone. They are no longer physically dependent— but they are addicted.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3599-3601). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

we’re still operating out of Newtonian physics in an age of quantum physics. Newtonian physics is very valuable, of course. It deals with a lot of things— but it doesn’t deal with the heart of things.” – Gabor

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3603-3604). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Nobody knew how to cope with an open wound like Walton: he was like a scream in the middle of a dinner party.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3645-3646). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Ethan Nadelmann, one of the leading drug reformers in the United States, had explained: “People overdose because 8 [under prohibition] they don’t know if the heroin is 1 percent or 40 percent . . .

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3767-3769). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

explain— That’s us. We are the people you are talking about. How can we answer your fears? How can we be good citizens? There was a look of amazed disgust on people’s faces . They had never had a conversation with the people they were raging against.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 3788). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize– winning economist who was the pope of the neoliberal right, and a leading critic of the drug war.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3905-3906). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

using figures from the British Columbia coroners’ office, that drug -related fatalities were down by 80 percent in this period. To find a rise in life expectancy this drastic, you’d have to look to the end of wars— which is what this is.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 3944-3945). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

with drug injection sites

.. they’ve got on to [the government] saying, ‘What’s this about somebody in Liverpool giving out crack cocaine? Close it down immediately!’

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4189-4190). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

In all the time Dr. Marks had been prescribing, from 1982 to 1995 , 51 he never had a drug-related death among his patients . Now Sydney, the Liverpool docker, went back to buying adulterated crap on the streets and died.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4194-4196). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Of the 450 patients 52 Marks prescribed to , 20 were dead within six months, and 41 were dead within two years. More lost limbs and caught potentially lethal diseases. They returned to the death rate for addicts under prohibition: 10 to 20 percent, 53 similar to smallpox.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4197-4200). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

(John Marks after his exile): “Whatever gave [you] the idea folk in authority operate according to reason? Your trouble is you’re being rational.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4210-4211). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Ruth Dreifuss – first female president of Switzerland and the first Jewish president of Switzerland. Even more significant , she would become the first president in the world since the 1930s who decided to run not away from drug reform, but toward it. She dedicated her presidency to sitting with addicts, listening to addicts, defending addicts— and getting them a legal supply of their drugs. (influenced by John Marks)

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4234-4237). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

She found that sex workers, if you arm them with condoms and information, are actually “very good public health agents. But you have to trust them. You have to accept their job. So prevention begins with respect.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4254-4256). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

would they choose sex as work if they didn’t have to work? if money weren’t an issue? – deeper still – no?

It had been discovered a few years before in Switzerland that there was a clause in Swiss law that allowed heroin to be given to citizens, provided it was part of a scientific experiment….   So Ruth said— Okay, we are going to have a really large experiment.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4262-4264). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

a people experiment. rat park for 7 billion people. let’s.

This is an emergency, she explained , and in emergencies, you take dramatic steps.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 4268). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Suddenly, his constant scrambling for his drugs was taken away, and he had a day ahead of him he had to fill. He tells me patients here “have to reinvent our lives. We have to reinvent the imagination.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4291-4293). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

or just be quiet enough to find/listen to it again. no?

everyday. groundhog day. new day. ness. equity. the revolution: instigating utopia (rat park) everyday.

okay, what am I going to do now?” It’s hard to do this , after being addicted for so long, but Jean says “the pain I have now isn’t the pain of a sickness . It’s the pain of being reborn.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4295-4297). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

detox

But within a few months, most addicts stop asking for more and choose , of their own free will, to stabilize their doses. 64 After that, “most of them want to go always down,” explains the psychiatrist here, Dr. Rita Manghi.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4308-4310). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

trust people. spaces of permission. time and space. lag time.

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.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4313-4314). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“This program,” Jean says, “gives you the chance to recover the control you have lost,” step by step, day by day.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4317-4318). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

what we all need. no?

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. Users can stay on this program for as long as they want, but the average patient will come here for three years, and at the end of that time, only 15 percent are still using every day.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4323-4326). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“doubts are rising,” and people are eager to hear about the rational alternatives.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 4391). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Dreifuss

How could it be, I asked myself, that opiate prescription worked so well in Switzerland but was proving to be a disaster in the United States? Is this just a deep cultural difference? Or is there a flaw in the Swiss model that I’m not seeing?

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4408-4410). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Meghan Ralston, an expert on prescription drugs with the Drug Policy Alliance, with Professor Bruce Alexander back in Vancouver, and with Dr. Hal Vorse, a medical doctor who treats prescription drug addicts in Oklahoma City, that I began to understand what was really happening. Between them, these three experts raised three different questions that forced me to see the prescription drug crisis in a radically different light.

1\ When do the worst problems associated with Oxycontin and Vicodin, the ones you see on the news, start? When do the addicts start to hold up pharmacies to get their next batch, or prostitute themselves, or start overdosing on a massive scale?

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4410-4416). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The United States, she (Meghan) explained, doesn’t have a Swiss-style policy of prescribing Oxycontin or Vicodin or other opiates to addicts. In fact, it has the precisely opposite policy. If I am an American who has developed an Oxycontin addiction, as soon as my doctor realizes I’m an addict, she has to cut me off. She is allowed to prescribe to treat only my physical pain— not my addiction. Indeed, if she prescribes just to meet my addiction, she will face being stripped of her license and up to twenty-five years in jail 84

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4417-4421). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

We have to build a society that looks more like Rat Park and less like a rat race.

rat park

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4447-4448). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

2\ Why did the prescription drug crisis radically accelerate in the past decade?

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4450-4451). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The answer doesn’t lie in access. It lies in agony. Outbreaks of drug addiction have always taken place, he proved, when there was a sudden rise is isolation and distress— from the gin-soaked slums of London in the eighteenth century to the terrified troops in Vietnam.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4466-4468). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

3\ Why are so many people starting with Oxycontin and Vicodin and ending up using heroin?

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4486-4487). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Prohibition always narrows the market to the most potent possible substance. It’s the iron law. (if have to smuggle it.. more bang for buck, ie: liquor banned – most sold went to hard liquor) .. Oxy is three times more expensive than heroin—

The war on drugs makes it almost impossible for drug users to get milder forms of their drug— and it pushes them inexorably toward harder drugs.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4511-4538). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

the old drug war story— the chemical is to blame, and if only we could eradicate the chemical, we could eradicate the problem. It is a tempting story, because it is so simple— and allows us to avert our eyes from how much of this problem was created not by pills, but by people.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4539-4541). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

the Swiss heroin experiment, combined with Rat Park, offers us the best answer not only to heroin, but to the prescription drug crisis, too.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 4542). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

throw in people experiment – for 7 billion issues.. crises..  no?

One afternoon, in the heroin clinic in Geneva, I told one of the psychiatrists there, Dr. Manghi , about how this story had all happened before, long ago, in Los Angeles. Heroin was prescribed; people got better; then it was shut down. Then again, much later, in Liverpool: heroin was prescribed; people got better; then it was shut down. She stroked her wooden necklace, thinking. “It’s like relapse in addiction,” she said. “It might look discouraging. But at every relapse, you learn something new.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4544-4547). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The people of Lisbon have a relaxed gaze, but it is always present, sipping its coffee, seeing you.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4559-4560). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

And so Portugal was learning a lesson that would flood into this story…

Nothing has to stay the same. If a dogma is not working, no matter how strong and immovable it seems, you can cast it aside it and start anew.

..Two and a half decades later, at the start of the twenty-first century, João helped lead Portugal to do something remarkable, and unprecedented. “It is,” he tells me when we meet in 2013, the “result of all the processes that began in ’74,” the day he saw flowers overwhelm a tyranny.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4600-4603). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“It was very frustrating,” he says, to see a patient fight really hard to get clean only to hear him say: “What kind of life am I going to have now? I am unprepared, I have no place to go.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4645-4647). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

So in 2001, in Portugal, the persecution of drug users and addicts officially ended. The new law stipulated that recreational drug users “should, above all, 11 not be labeled or marginalized,” and addicts should be approached by the state exclusively “to encourage him or her to seek treatment.” It was no longer a crime to possess enough drugs for ten days’ personal use. It’s important to understand that while it was no longer illegal to use and possess drugs, it was not legal to sell them.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4661-4666). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The police don’t go looking for drug users anymore, but if they stumble across you, they will write you a ticket that requires you to come here the next day . The job of the Dissuasion Commission 16 is only to figure out whether you have a drug problem. You can be honest with them, because nothing you say or do here will ever get you a criminal record.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4689-4692). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“It’ll be very difficult,” he says, “for you to be caught” twice. If you are, though, the Commission can level small fines— 80 euros is the norm, making it “the most expensive joint the guy ever had, but you could say it’s a fairly symbolic thing,”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4712-4714). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“using drugs is only a symptom of some suffering, and we have to reach the reasons” that make addicts want to be out of their heads much of the time…We have to work [on] the trauma in your life, and only then can you change the way you deal with it.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4726-4727). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

2 needs

I try to picture Chino’s mother here, learning to figure out how she feels, at last.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 4740). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

1\ Once you take those first courageous steps to Taipas or a center like it, the government will prioritize getting you a job with a decent wage, away from the world where you used drugs. “They want to be a part of the society,” he tells me. “We can’t [tell] them to behave as a normal citizen and deprive them . . . of a role in society: having a job, having work, having a salary.” His aim is to give them something to lose.

(so govt give hefty yr long tax break to anyone who employs them)

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4745-4749). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

or – even – something else to do.. w/o money at all.. for anyone.. a job for money will cycle back around to not knowing how to feel.. no? unless. it’s the thing you can’t not do.

2\ If, however, you are not ready to move away from using drugs, you will be given a different kind of support. (housing project where you are given supervised drugs)

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4760-4761). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

3\ help to the hardest-to-reach addicts— the people who live on the streets, or in abandoned housing. As we walked through ragged half-houses made of rubble and the battered housing projects, these social workers told me that before João’s drug revolution, people ran from them. Now, they run toward them. Addicts come forward, to replace their needles, to chat,

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4783-4785). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

At first,… offering clean needles, and collecting the dirty old ones. …They gave advice on where you should inject yourself to stay as safe as possible, and on how to avoid disease . Then, discreetly, they started to explain that there was a way out, if you wanted it.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4804-4807). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Now that the punishments were gone, people like Sergio were— tentatively— starting to listen. (from police beating you to psychologists offering help)

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4808-4809). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Yes, I kept thinking— things are better for addicts. I expected that. But what about for kids? I am very close to my nephews and my niece— this book is dedicated to them— and for all the horrors of the drug war, my biggest worry about ending it has always been that more kids might end up using drugs. This would damage them in all sorts of ways, but here’s just one: there is strong scientific evidence that persistent cannabis use affects how adolescent and teenage brains develop, and can permanently lower their IQ.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4823-4827). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Two highly respected and impartial bodies have studied the outcomes: the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), and the British Journal of Criminology. They have no horse in this race. Their role is solely to figure out what actually happened.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4872-4874). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“Portugal is the only of these nations (spain & italy) to have exhibited declines” in problematic drug use.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 4887). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“we don’t see a drug addict as a [criminal] anymore. He’s someone that needs help. And everyone thinks it. Then they consider themselves sick people— they don’t consider themselves [to be] against the society.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4892-4894). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

In the years since heroin was decriminalized in Portugal, its use has been halved there— while in the United States, where the drug war continues, it has doubled.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4898-4899). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“I don’t think [people in poor neighborhoods ] see the police now as enemies. I think this is important. This is different.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4914-4915). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

there is no kind of ideological [debate anymore] because it has nothing to do with ideology. What happened here worked,” he explains. “What happened here was a good result and the statistics we have prove it. There is no ideology in this . . . Now everyone, conservatives or socialists, accepts the situation.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4922-4925). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

It has turned out, it seems, that strengthening people’s internal resistance to drugs works a lot better than trying to terrorize them away from drugs with force. The alternative works. And the best proof is that virtually nobody in Portugal is arguing for a return to the old ways.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4927-4929). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

it was startling to see how decriminalization had become the common sense of the country. People described the idea of busting users and addicts with puzzlement, as if it were a strange medieval practice from the distant past.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4931-4932). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

In the United States alone, legalizing drugs would save $ 41 billion a year currently spent on arresting, trying, and jailing users and sellers, according to a detailed study by the Cato Institute. 31 If the drugs were then taxed at a similar rate to alcohol and tobacco, they would raise an additional $ 46.7 billion a year, according to calculations by Professor Jeffrey Miron of the Department of Economics at Harvard University. That’s $ 87.8 billion next year, and every year.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4951-4955). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

true. and what if money even became irrelevant.. either way.. crazy not to do.

“I never felt any kind of condemnation, and that helped me to open up my life and my heart a little bit more.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 4981). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

with nothing to prove.

communities where addicts can live and be helped to rebuild their lives over a period of years. This, at last, was the shoe that fit Antonio. Living at a center called Team Challenge in idyllic green fields on the outskirts of Lisbon, surrounded by the quiet whir of wind farms, he learned for the first time how to trust.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4984-4987). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“It taught me to talk— talk to the person that we all have inside,” he told me years later.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5019-5020). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

self-talk.

organized into different “pillars,” all operating separately— so that if one pillar was captured , the movement would live on. José and his wife Lucia belonged to pillar number 10. They lived underground and spent their time being bundled from one safe house to the next , planning operations— until one day, as Mujica was waiting to meet a contact in a bar, suddenly, something hit him in the chest. The police shot him six times, 7 but they didn’t let him die. They needed him as a hostage, to discipline his comrades. Mujica does not talk about the torture he endured while in prison, but some of the other survivors from that time told me about what happened to them.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5047-5053). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

and ah. José Mujica..

Mujica had just been elected president of Uruguay. He announced that he would not be moving into the Presidential Palace. He would be staying right here, in his shack, for his full five-year term. He would be giving 90 percent 11 of his income to the poor and living on $ 775 a month. And as for the presidential limousine—no, thanks. He would take the bus.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5068-5071). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

States, several states were poised to vote to fully legalize marijuana— to allow it to be grown and sold to adults, as we’ll see later. And he resolved to persuade his people to do likewise. In solitary confinement, he tells me, he had learned “that life is a fine thing—[ so] above and beyond everything , we have to defend life . . . We shouldn’t sacrifice a generation in the name of a dream.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5084-5086). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

They are a pair of English policy wonks called Danny Kushlick and Steve Rolles. Danny had been working for years with prisoners on probation, and he was sick of watching his clients die of overdoses. Steve was a scientist investigating the effects of ecstasy, who stood with a clipboard taking notes at raves and noticed that people on ecstasy were much more friendly and less violent than the alcohol drinkers he was used to. It was startling , he says, to see the police round them up and take them off to the cells. Together, Danny and Steve formed a group called the Transform Drugs Policy Institute, to answer a question nobody else in the world was answering in any detail: In practice, on your street, what does legalization mean? If we end the drug war, how will drugs be distributed? Who will be allowed to use them? What would change? I have been discussing these issues with Danny and Steve for nearly ten years now, and they have become my friends.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5113-5120). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Today, the trade in drugs consists of unknown gangsters selling unknown chemicals to unknown users, in the dark. That is the definition of a free-for-all.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 5123). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

At its heart, legalization is, Danny tells me, “a drama reduction program. Because all the excitement, the salaciousness, the sexiness of drugs is very much in their prohibition, not their regulation.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5156-5158). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

If more people use them, won’t more people become addicted? Won’t more people overdose ? And won’t more kids get hold of drugs? If you are thinking of moving beyond decriminalization into legalization, these are the central questions that have to be answered.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5169-5170). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

I have complained in this book that the people who support the drug war sometimes use propaganda to promote their cause, so it’s important that I resist the temptation to produce propaganda of my own. Those of us who have come to believe we should end the drug war have to be candid. The evidence suggests there will probably be a modest but real increase in use. Some significant share of that will be people transferring from alcohol, but probably not all of it. It should be acknowledged: one of the successes of prohibition that it probably does hold down drug somewhat. (use of marijuana safer than alcohol)

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5218-5221). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

It is not drug use that worries us, but the harms caused by drug use. And the evidence about these harms is quite striking. Legalization slightly increases drug use—but it significantly reduces drug harms.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5225-5227). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

the people who sell alcohol in our culture have a really strong incentive not to sell to teenagers: if they do, they lose their license and their business. The people who sell other, prohibited drugs in our culture have a really strong incentive to sell to teenagers: they are customers like everybody else. If we legalize, there will be a barrier standing between our kids and drugs that does not exist today. This isn’t theoretical; the societies that have tried this have shown it to be the case.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5245-5246). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

He talked me through the best scientific evidence, which he later expanded on in his book High Price. He showed me that the evidence is that, of the people who have tried crack , just 3 percent have used it in the past month, and at most 20 percent were ever addicted at any point in their lives.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5305-5306). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Carl Hart

the drug war increases the biggest drivers of addiction— isolation and trauma— in order to protect potential users from a more minor driver of addiction, the chemical hook . If we legalize, somewhat more people will be exposed to the chemical hook in drugs— but the even larger drivers of addiction, trauma and isolation, will be dramatically reduced.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5319-5321). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

In the column arguing against legalization, I wrote that drug use will probably go up. It won’t be massive— we know that from both of the historical precedents— but it will be real. Some people today refuse to take drugs because it is a crime to do it, and because they fear either getting arrested or buying from criminals in alleyways. The day after legalization, this reason for reservation will no longer be there. That is a significant drawback. I searched very hard for other arguments to put in this column. I couldn’t find any, but you may have some: please e-mail them to me.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5331-5333). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

another drawback – more distraught used-to-be dealers.. if we don’t have a mechanism in place for them as well.. ie: something else to do… none of us are free if one of us is chained. so something else will probably surface… until they’re needs are met. ie: it sounded like a lot of dealers don’t use.. so their drug is money/power.. how are we replacing that?

As a result, the culture of terror that currently dominates whole neighborhoods and countries— from Brownsville, Brooklyn, to Ciudad Juárez— will gradually abate. (This happened after the end of alcohol prohibition.) The murder rate will significantly fall. (This also happened after the end of alcohol prohibition .) Enormous amounts of police time will be freed up to investigate other crimes.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5336-5338). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

using end of alcohol prohibition.. where crime was reduced… is a case in point … perhaps.. of crime resurfacing – when some other drug/addiction comes along.. no? how to stop the cycle of addiction – rather than just of drugs.. right..?

I can’t support a policy that sacrifices people like Chino Hardin and Marcia Powell and Marisela Escobedo in order to prevent people who want to use drugs from taking them. I don’t want to live in that world

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5351-5352). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Maybe, Mujica tells me, this policy will fail— but what we are doing now under prohibition “is a failure every day.” It is hard to see, he says, how the new policy could fail worse.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5360-5361). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Mujica “would be different if he weren’t kept prisoner,”

Lucia tells me, “because he had so much time to think, it became clear to him what was important in life.”

ginormous..

He learned “to live with light baggage in jail. He learned that happiness doesn’t come from what you have, but from what you are.”Later, when I speak to him on the telephone, Mujica tells me: “If I have too much luggage, too much property, too many material goods, that makes me worry I have to defend this stuff— then in that case I will not have time left to take care of the things I really love, and then I lose my freedom.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5372-5376). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

exactly. more than a drugs issue. the need for us all to have time and space to think. what matters most is figuring out what matters most. everyday. let’s try that model.

..in a philosophical mood. “I am seventy -eight years old,” he says. “I had a dream of changing the history of man— the possibility of creating a humanity where men don’t exploit each other. A utopia that we call socialism. We thought it was much closer in time . . . Many decades have gone by, and without renouncing our dreams, we learned that the impossible takes a bit longer.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5376-5379). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

unless – it no longer does. Johann.. we can make this happen in José’s time..

In Colorado and Washington State, two small bands of friends and allies decided to get the question of whether to legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana onto their states’ ballots, so everyone could vote on it— and within seven years, they had won. I resolved to track down the people who achieved this 1 and find out how they did it. And here’s the surprising thing. The different campaigns, it turns out, have different explanations. The men who led 2 the victory in Colorado disagree with the women who won in Washington.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5386-5390). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

7 yrs is too long to wait today. we can do better.

Busting weed was the priority for her bosses, and it carried a mandatory jail sentence—while domestic violence didn’t. In that moment, she made a promise to herself.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5451-5452). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Mason had noticed academic research that shows men are eight times more likely 17 to attack their partners after drinking, but no more likely to do it after smoking cannabis.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5479-5481). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

wanted posters of John Hickenlooper, the mayor of Denver, explaining that he had made his fortune selling a more harmful drug and so— logically— he should be busted too.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5484-5485). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

He (Mason) would never make an argument for ending the prohibition of marijuana in which you could simply replace the word “marijuana” with the word “methamphetamine.” He would never solely say, for example, that marijuana prohibition is a waste of resources, or empowers criminal drug gangs, or that it burns through money that could be used for better causes— because if that’s true for marijuana, why not meth?

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5491-5494). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

(Tonia) It’s precisely because they are risky that we need to take them back from the gangsters and cartels, and hand them to regulated stores— and use the tax money we gain to pay for prevention and treatment.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5527-5529). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

In Washington, the model was built on the conviction that marijuana causes harm and we need to counteract those harms. So they decided to earmark the tax revenue from selling marijuana for drug prevention programs in schools and drug treatment for addicts. In Colorado, they didn’t— the money is going toward building new schools instead. In Washington, the legalization legislation introduces a strict new ban on driving while stoned. In Colorado , they resisted this proposal . In Washington, you are not allowed to grow it at home. In Colorado, you are.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5532-5536). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Anslinger had to create hysteria about the drug in order to ban it; isn’t an essential part of undoing the ban undoing the hysteria?

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 5579). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

He found that one drug was quite far ahead of all the others. It had a harm score of 72. The next most harmful drug was heroin— and it had a harm score of 55, just ahead of crack at 54 and methamphetamine at 32. It wasn’t even close. The most harmful drug was alcohol.  – Nutt

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5627-5629). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

until we debunk this “mythical view of drugs,” he says, we will be stuck forever in Anslinger’s war. – Hart

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5642-5643). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Over the next few decades, there will be campaigns that test both of these messages. Some will try to change how we think about drugs, and some will only try to change how we think about the drug laws. Which will succeed? Soon we will know.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5653-5654). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

really..? decades..? that’s not soon. enough.

As Barbara speaks, all the killing— from Arnold Rothstein to Chino’s gang to the Zetas —is being replaced by contracts. All the guns are being replaced by subordinate clauses. All the grief is being replaced by regulators and taxes and bureaucrats with clipboards.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5687-5688). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

bored is fine. bored by policy.. perhaps not so much. no?.. there’s addiction in that. pluralistic ignorance.. get us right back to where we were.. we can do better..

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.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Location 5745). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

For a hundred years we have been singing war songs about addicts. All along, we should have been singing love songs to them.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5746-5747). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

your own song.. ness

When this comes, I try to remember what I learned from Bruce Alexander and Bud Osborn. You don’t need a chemical; you need a connection . So I go to the people I love and sit with them. I listen to them. I try— as hard as I can— to be present in that moment, not someplace in the past or future.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5755-5757). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

It isn’t right. It shouldn’t be this way— and it doesn’t have to be.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5760-5761). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

You are going to win . It will happen slowly, in tiny increments, day after day, year after year, and there will be long stretches when it seems that you are losing. But person by person, you will win this argument. You will get there. You will win.”

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5785-5786). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

has anyone won yet..? i don’t think so…

Nobody ever believes the drug war should be waged against somebody they love. Even Harry Anslinger turned into Henry Smith Williams when confronted with an addict he cared about.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 5836-5837). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

__________

movie adaptation of book

Johann Hari (@johannhari101) tweeted at 4:00 PM on Wed, Oct 16, 2019:
It’s really exciting to see how, with every day of filming, the script for the movie adaptation of my book Chasing The Scream evolves.
(https://twitter.com/johannhari101/status/1184589855701065731?s=03)

I am beyond excited that Paramount is releasing the movie adaptation of my book Chasing The Scream on February 12th next year. As Executive Producer I am biased but I think it’s really powerful https://t.co/R0oYUNAMhX
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/johannhari101/status/1309218004778049537

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rat park ness

2 needs – deep enough.. for all of us..

hari addiction law

hari present in society law

hari rat park law

lost connections

Bud Osborn – down here

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