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News
Street Roots • Aug. 21-27, 2015
Street Roots • Aug. 21-27, 2015
News
Page 9
“THE BIGGEST MORAL ISSUE ABOUT THE WAR ON DRUGS'
BY EMILY GREEN
STAFF WRITER
fter spending a hundred years and a
trillion dollars fighting the war on
drugs, there’s one thing we know for
certain: Prohibition isn’t working.
In his captivating new book, “Chasing the
Scream: The First and Last Days of the War
on Drugs,” London-based journalist Johann
Hari argues that the very problems the war
on drugs aims to eradicate — cartels, gangs,
drug-related violence and addiction — are only
exacerbated by drug prohibition.
Inspired by addicts in his personal life, Hari
set out to answer what he says are some very
basic questions about the drug war and
addiction.
His three-year journey took him across
30,000 miles and into 12 countries. Critics.are
calling the resulting book an entertaining and
powerfully compelling argument for drug
policy reform.
A
Em ily G reen: Can you explain how the War
on Drugs started what you refer to in your book
as the war for drugs?
Jo h a n n H ari: If you and me decided after
this interview that we wanted to go and steal
a bottle of vodka and went to the local liquor
store and they caught us, that liquor store
would call the police. That liquor store doesn’t
need to be violent or intimidating; they have
the power and the force of the law backing
them up. If you or I decided we wanted to
steal some cocaine and your local seller of
that substance caught us, obviously they can’t
call the police. The police would arrest them,
so they have to be violent and intimidating
toward us. They would have to attack us to
protect their property rights. Now, obviously,
if you’re a drug dealer, you don’t want to be
having a fight every day, so what you have to
do is establish a reputation for being so
terrifying that no one will dare to take you on.
Milton Friedman calculated there are
10,000 additional murders every year in the
United States as the result of this dynamic.
If you want to understand what happens to
that violence after the drug war ends, ask
yourself, “Where are the violent alcohol
dealers today?” Does the head of Smirnoff go
and shoot the head of Heineken in the face?
Of course not, but under alcohol prohibition,
that’s exactly what happened. We went from
having it controlled by criminals and in the
illegal market to having it controlled by
licensed and regulated sellers in the current
market, and the violence went away.
This is the biggest moral issue about the
war on drugs. One hundred and sixty
thousand people have been killed or
disappeared in Mexico over the past eight
years as the result of this dynamic.
E.G.: From your interviews with members of
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, who are
all either current or former law enforcement
officials, what did you fin d to be the prevailing
reason they came to the conclusion that the way
we’re fighting drugs right now is not the right
way?
J.H.: One of the people I most admire is
this cop in Maryland called Leigh Maddox.
Her best friend, Lisa, was murdered by what
Leigh believed was a drug gang. So she signed
up to destroy the drug gangs. She went after
everyone she could. She would bust people
just for smoking a single joint. She was like
the drug war dream girl. And yet Leigh
started to notice a couple of things. One is
that they only ever w en t and arrested African
Americans.
One of her colleagues, Matthew Fogg, went
to his boss and — I’m paraphrasing — he said,
“Hey boss, how come we only ever go to black
neighborhoods to do'drug busts? I’m pretty
sure white people use drugs as well.” And his
boss said something like, “Well of course they
do, but white people get lawyers, and white
people know journalists and judges, and they
.make a fuss, so we’ll go for the low-hanging
fru it”
Leigh isn’t a racist, so she was disturbed by
that, to say the least. Also Leigh noticed if
you’re a cop and you arrest a pedophile, the
next week there will be less children being
abused in your neighborhood. If you arrest a
rapist the next week the rate of rape will go
down. If you arrest a drug dealer, Leigh
noticed two things: Firstly, there’s no fall in
drug dealing, but even more than that, she
noticed there is actually an increase in
violence — the murder rate would go up.
Drug dealers establish a patch by violence,
and they control it through violence, right? If
you come along and knock out that dealer,
what you do is you (start) a war for control of
that patch in which there’s going to be a lot of
violence.
That doesn’t mean that we should leave
drug dealers to do what they want to do. What
we should do is bankrupt them. When drugs
are restored to the legal market, where they
used to be in the United States until they
were banned a century ago, you bankrupt the
criminal gangs.
E.G.: How is the war on drugs affecting drug
addicts?
J.H.: It turns out that addiction is not what
we’ve been told it is. We think that if you and
support
clinics, where if you were an addict, you could
go to the clinic and you’re given your heroin
E.G.: What are some o f the things we’ve
legally. You have to use it in the clinic.
learned from alcohol prohibition that support the
I went to this clinic in Geneva. The addicts
argument for legalizing drugs?
don’t look anything like any addicts you’ve
ever seen in the United States. Most of them
J.H.: Look at the murder rate in the United
have jobs, they don’t look sick in any way;
States in the 20th century. It massively goes
they don’t have any wounds or abscesses.
up when alcohol prohibition is
A lot of the things we
introduced, and it massively falls
associate with heroin
when alcohol is legalized again, and
addiction are in fact the
it massively rises again with the big
result of the prohibition
intensification of drug prohibition in
of heroin addiction. For
E.G.: What are some examples of
the 1970s.
example, abscesses and
approaches to drug use that have
When you ban a drug, whether it’s
wounds — they don’t
proven to be more effective than
alcohol, marijuana or cocaine,
happen when you give
criminalization?
obviously you can’t do any health
people heroin legally;
and safety inspections on criminals.
those are just the result
J.H.: In 2000, Portugal had one
One of the results is the product
of the impurities that are
of the worst drug problems in the
becomes radically more dangerous.
put in it by drug dealers.
developed world. They arrested and
“Chasing the
Alcohol poisoning was absolutely
Do you know how
imprisoned more people, and every " I would say
Scream:
The
First
endemic during alcohol prohibition.
many
deaths
from
year the problem got worse.
to anyone
and Last Days of For example, on one occasion, 500
overdose they’ve had in
They decided to set up a panel of reading this,
people died of alcohol poisoning in
these heroin clinics in
scientists and doctors to look at the
the War on
who thinks
Wichita, Kan.
Switzerland since they
best evidence, and they agreed in
Drugs”
the drag war
A significant number of the drug-
began this experiment 10 by Johann Hari
advance they would do whatever
Is a catas
related deaths in the United States
years ago? Not a single
these scientists and doctors
are the result > particularly drugs
one.
recoriimended. So they went away
trophe ta t
like Ecstasy — (of) the contamination
The most striking
and looked at all the evidence,
thinks, What
thing is, when you’re a heroin addict in the drug because of prohibition. And clearly
which included Rat Park, and they
c a u l do?' Yon and you go to these clinics, you can
those'deaths cease when you have a legal and
came back and they said:
can't think of stay on that heroin program for
regulated product, and we know that from all
“Decriminalize all drugs from
your whole life if you want to, and
the evidence in places that have legalized.
cannabis to crack — but take all the a more pow
At the moment, we don’t have a choice
erless person you set your own dose. But the vast
money we used to spend on
arresting and imprisoning and
in our culture majority of addicts chose, over time, about whether drugs exist; we have a choice
between w hether they’re controlled by violent,
shaming addicts and punishing
than a home to reduce their dose and eventually
murderous, criminal cartels and gangs, who
stop.
users, and spend it instead on
less street ad
pay no taxes and who sell to children and
Because as the chaos of being a
turning their lives around.”
dict, and be
cause all sorts of chaos and sell us shitty,
street user ends — the constant
They did do some residential
cause of what scramble to get your drug. Because
contaminated products, or they could be
rehab and psychological support,
you’re given a safe, legal
controlled by doctors and pharmacists who
but the biggest things they did had
Bnd started,
pay a large amount of tax, sell the cleanest
prescription, the women stop
nothing to do with th a t They set up thousands of
prostituting themselves, the men
possible product, don’t carry out any acts of
a huge program of job creation for
people who
stop committing property crime,
violence or aggression.
addicts. The goal was to make sure
would have
they start to get back to a normal
that every addict in Portugal had
died lived."
E.G.: P omf book makes a solid argument for
life, and as they become more
something to get out of bed for in
legalizing drugs such as marijuana, heroin and
the morning, and what they found is
JOHANN HARI connected to the society, they don’t
cocaine. B ut when it comes to drugs such as
need their connection to their drug
that as they got back into
meth and crack, I felt like the solutions weren’t
meaningful work and had a bit of
as much.
quite as obvious. Since writing this book, have
control over their lives, they were
you developed your thoughts on the question of
E.G.: And what would you say to people who
much more likely to rebuild connections.
what to do with meth and crack any further?
say they don’t want their tax dollars going to
It’s now been 15 years since this
supply addicts with drugs?
experiment began, and the results are in.
J.H.: Fifteen percent of the people who use
Injecting drug use is down in Portugal by 50
meth become meth addicts, according to the
J.H.: When you prescribe heroin to people
percent. Deaths from overdose are massively
research by Carl Hart at Columbia University.
down, HIV transmission among drug addicts is who have very serious addiction problems,
You have to ask yourself, what’s happening
the crime rate massively falls. (In
massively down, street crime is massively
Switzerland), it was a 93 percent fall in
with that 15 percent that become addicted?
down, and one of the ways you know this has
It’s not that they use the drug more; it’s pain,
burglary. That frees up all those police hours
worked so well is that virtually nobody in
isolation and disconnection.
and all that time. It’s expensive to deal with
Portugal wants to go back. There are six big
It’s an important question about what
property crime. If your only concern is your
political parties; none of them want to reverse
regulatory structure we can put in place for
tax dollars, this saves loads of money.
this policy.
meth and crack. No one believes, and I
I also would say, because addicts are human
certainly don’t, that they should be legal the
beings and they need our love and
E.G.: In your book you talk about some
compassion. And someone who looks at
way that marijuana or alcohol are legal. No
clinics where doctors are prescribing heroin to
heroin addicts and thinks, “Well I wouldn’t do
one thinks there should be a crack aisle at
heroin addicts. Can you explain how this
CVS. That would be grotesque.
that; what a fool,” to me that’s a bit like
practice actually helps drug addicts?
As recently as the 1950s, housewives used
looking at someone who’s had their legs cut
to be prescribed meth as a diet aid. Now I’m
off because they were in a terrible car crash,
J.H.: Switzerland’s had a huge heroin
and saying, “Well, what an idiot, I would never
not in favor of going back to that system, but
problem, and they tried American-style
if you think that meth is this drug that
have my legs cut off.” Well no, you weren’t in
crackdowns, and the problem just got worse
a car crash. Addicts have been in car crashes
and worse. Bear in mind, this is a very
See DRUG WAR, page 10
of the soul, and they need our love and
conservative-country; they decided to start
severely neglected to being molested to losing
a parent.
What it found is that for every one of these
terrible things that happens to you when you
are a child, you are two to four times more
likely to grow up to be an injecting drug user.
And if six of those things happen to you as a
kid, you are 4,600 percent more likely to grow
up to be an adult injecting drug
user than someone who had none
of those traumatic experiences.
Violence is inevitable when the drug
market is controlled by criminals rather
than regulators, author Johann H ari
argues in 'Chasing the Scream'
PHO TO BY M A R G A R ITO PEREZ/REUTERS
Chalk outlines were drawn for a 2011 protest against the war on drug cartels in Cuernavaca, Mexico, to represent people killed. In “Chasing the
Scream,*. Johann Hari tells the stories o f a woman who paid with her life for speaking out against cartels and a man who turned himself in after years
o f working as a cartel hit man. In the past eight years, 160,000 have been killed or have disappeared in Mexico as a result drug war, Hari says.
me and the next 20 people that walked past
your office all used heroin together for 20
days, on day 21, we’d all be heroin addicts
because there are chemical hooks in heroin
that our bodies would start to physically need,
and at the end we’d have this ravenous
craving, and that’s what addiction is.
If I stepped out of thisinterview now and I
get hit by a truck and I break a hip, I’ll be
taken to hospital (in the U.K.) and I’ll be given
loads of a drug called diamorphine, a medical
term for heroin. It’s much stronger than the
heroin you get from a drug dealer on the
street because what the dealer sells is very
heavily contaminated.
You’ll be given that heroin in hospital for
quite a long time, and if what we think about
addiction is right, what should happen? Some
of those people, at least, should become
addicts, exposed to all the same chemical
hooks as your addicts on the street.
This has been studied very closely, and it
doesn’t happen. Your grandmother was not
turned into a junkie by her hip replacement
operation.
I only really began to understand it when I
went to Vancouver (B.C.) and interviewed
Bruce Alexander, a professor of psychology.
He explained the theory of addiction we have
in our heads comes, in part, from a series of
experiments that were done earlier in the
20th century. You get a rat, and you put it in a
cage, and you give it two water bottles. One is
just water, and the other is water laced with
either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the
rat will almost always prefer the drugged
water and almost always kill itself. So there
you go — there’s our theory of addiction.
But in the ’70s, Professor Alexander comes
along and he says, “Well wait a minute, we’re
putting these rats in an empty cage. They’ve
got nothing to do except use these drugs!” So
he built a cage that he called “Rat Park,”
which is basically heaven for rats. It’s got
cheese, colored balls, tunnels. It’s got loads of
friends, (the rats) can have loads of sex, and
it’s got both the water bottles: the normal
water and the drugged water.
But this is the fascinating thing: In Rat
Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They
almost never use it. None of them ever use it
compulsively. None of them ever overdose.
There’s loads of human examples I talk about
in the book, but I think the core insight from
this is that we’ve been thinking about
addiction in the wrong way.
Human beings have an innate need to bond
and connect, and when we’re happy and
healthy, we’ll bond and connect with each
other, but if we can’t do that because we’re
isolated or traumatized or beaten down by life,
we’ll bond and connect with something that
gives us a sense of relief. That might be
heroin; that might be alcohol; that might be
gambling; that might be pornography.
The war on drugs is based on the idea that
the way that you stop people from becoming
addicted is you take addicts and you punish
them and you make them suffer in order to
make them stop. Suddenly, when you
understand that pain and suffering are the
causes of addiction, the idea of imposing more
pain ceases to make sense.
A doctor called Gabor Maté said to me, “If
you want to design a system that would make
addiction worse, you design the war on
drugs.”
E.G.: Wfozf are some of the ingredients for
making a drug addict in the first place?
J.H.: The large element is isolation, pain
and trauma.
Totally legally, I could be drinking vodka
now — you could be drinking vodka now. You
and I probably have enough money in the
bank that we could both drink vodka for the
next month.
You’re not going to do that, and I’m not
going to do that because we want to be
present in our lives. We’ve got jobs we love;
we’ve got people we love; we’ve got books we
want to read; we’ve got TV shows we want to
watch.
The core of addiction is about not being
able to bear to be present in your life. Now
there’s lots of different things that can make
your life so painful that you can’t bear to be
present One example where we have very
strong evidence that it has a huge causal
relationship with drug addiction is childhood
trauma.
“The Adverse Childhood Experiences
Study” looks at a whole range of terrible
things that can happen to a kid, from being