Intoxicology
Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
Bloomsbury, 400pp, £18.99, ISBN 9781408857830
reviewed by Stuart Walton
'Of the making of books about drugs these days, there seems no end,' said Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian, opening a review of my own contribution to the field 14 years ago. And nor should there be. While the amorphous terminology never changes, drugs – by which we might mean the entire field of intoxication practices, licit and illicit – go on multiplying as fast as freelance laboratories can alter their molecular structures to produce new compounds. Meanwhile, the ancestral substances that reach back into the planet's protozoic antiquity, or at least as far back as their 19th-century synthetic concentrations, are as insistently, widely used as ever, despite the global convulsions of a policing industry whose congregation for the doctrine of the faith is the Drug Enforcement Administration operating out of Arlington, Virginia.
At the opening of the 21st century, it looked to the anti-prohibitionist point of view as though the best that could be hoped for was the state of de facto decriminalisation that existed in urban areas of the UK, where police had finally decided there were better things to do with their time than prosecute low-end retail consumers of controlled substances. A decade and a half on, and a millenarian moment seems to be approaching, as metropolitan and national jurisdictions, from Vancouver to Portugal, Switzerland and Uruguay, have embarked on the task of unravelling the greatest legislative disaster unleashed on free peoples in the past century.
The field of study to which I gave the name of intoxicology is still hidebound by debates about the law, which can only understandably gain in traction at indications that hairline cracks in the whole rotten edifice are not only beginning to widen into fissures, but that the alternative arrangements being put in place are working at least as well, if not even better than, liberalising exponents might have hoped. It isn't much surprise, then, that a new slew of books about the drug war has been appearing lately, the latest entrant in the field from the British journalist Johann Hari.
Hari means it. The book is accompanied by a website, chasingthescream.com, at which visitors can not only find audio clips of the interview material used, but also sign up to a mailing list and 'get involved' in other ways in bringing down the pillars of the temple. This is multi-platform activism for our interesting times.
The narrative opens at the outset of enforcement, when Harry Anslinger was appointed the first, and eventually longest-serving, director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, an agency that emerged from the corruption-riddled enforcement organisation of the Prohibition years, which he had also headed. Although Anslinger was eventually to recant his belief in alcohol prohibition, noting that abstinence cannot practically be enforced on those who don't see the need for it, he failed to learn the lesson with regard to drugs. At the fag-end of his career, he was instrumental in getting the agency to supply pharmaceutical heroin to Senator Joe McCarthy, who held a metaphorical gun to Anslinger's head by saying that if he had to go to criminal gangs to get it, he would, whatever subsequent scandal might transpire at his exposure. Where McCarthy's threat succeeded, a whole swathe of society failed to persuade Anslinger to see sense, and he continued to spout the official pabulum that all drugs were evil, and their users subhuman garbage.
Hari has conducted a mass of diligently pursued research for this book, talking to seemingly everybody from poor Mexicans who have lost loved ones amid the psychotic violence of gang warfare to the recently retired president of Uruguay, José Mujica. The author himself bulks large in the ruminations, partly because he and people close to him have been dysfunctional users of various substances, but also because he makes exhaustive attempts at every turn to think himself into the lives of his various respondents. The rhetorical effect of this will be cumulatively tiring and obstructive to many readers, and the intention to construct a heuristically elaborated argument, in which the author moves from reflexive scepticism to agonised ambivalence to final Damascene enlightenment, seems coy and not entirely sincere.
That said, the arguments and findings are rigorously, if not always flawlessly, aired. With regard to legalisation proposals, Hari suggests that cannabis, ecstasy, cocaine and other 'party drugs' should be openly saleable. Riskier materials such as the concentrated stimulants, crack and meth, should be made available in 'safe regulated spaces' with a contingent of willing doctors on hand to supervise the users, while heroin should only be supplied by GPs to those already addicted. This raises the obvious logical conundrum as to how anybody would get addicted to heroin in the first place, if not through being supplied by the very criminal gangs these policies are designed to put out of business. Then again, one wonders how many potential users of crack or meth would actually want to go to a safe regulated space to smoke it, as opposed to, say, a party with their mates, or else just remain on the sofa. And where do the users of potent hallucinogenics, LSD, DMT and mushrooms, go?
Overwhelmingly, though, Hari is on surer dialectical ground. The social benefits that have been shown to result from decriminalisation are inarguable. Economic crime and enforced prostitution decrease when the trade in intoxicants is taken out of the hands of cartels, but so too does the spread of new users, since those existing users who don't resort to robbery to fund their addiction, but finance it by selling on an adulterated portion of their own heroin, no longer have the incentive to establish new customers. When substances are made illegal, what the racket then deals in is the most cost-effective alternative, concentrated versions of the original precursors that will realise the greatest return, just as alcohol Prohibition substituted bootleg whisky and gin for the weak beer that had been the most popular drink in the US. All this could be rapidly brought to an end.
What Hari is chiefly concerned with throughout this argument is addiction, and he makes a very important distinction between physical dependency and the psychological addiction so often brought on by damaged childhoods and adult loneliness. Many of the counter-intuitive findings about addiction, from its environmental roots to the widely unsuspected fact that most hard-core addicts eventually give up of their own accord, are explained with graphic clarity, if with far too much direct address to the reader. The UN's own drug control agency concedes that no more than 10% of all use of proscribed substances is dysfunctional, but now as always that 10% hog the limelight. They are, after all, the people in whose name the killings are carried out, whether by teenage gunmen in Ciudad Juárez or by federal narcotics agents in a democratic polity.
With respect to all the blighted souls and courageous reformers (many have been both) to whom Hari spoke in the course of researching this polemic, there is a little too much retailing of personal histories and not enough actual argument. When the arguments are put, they are powerful and meticulously considered, and their occasional oversights not detrimental to the libertarian case as a whole.
A curious final aspect of the book is that, despite being produced by a British journalist for a British publisher, it is written in American English, by which I don't just mean the standard requirement for phonetic spellings, but the locutions and grammatical structure too. Thus does the thin end presage the wedge. No explanation is given for this, and to judge from recent online audio clips, the author's lengthy sojourn in the US hasn't apparently bequeathed him the west coast drawl in which the text is composed. The misleading effect is created that he is ventriloquising for someone else, an impression from which the 'journalistic controversy' in which he embroiled himself a few years ago, hinted at here in a passing footnote, might profitably have warned him away.
At the opening of the 21st century, it looked to the anti-prohibitionist point of view as though the best that could be hoped for was the state of de facto decriminalisation that existed in urban areas of the UK, where police had finally decided there were better things to do with their time than prosecute low-end retail consumers of controlled substances. A decade and a half on, and a millenarian moment seems to be approaching, as metropolitan and national jurisdictions, from Vancouver to Portugal, Switzerland and Uruguay, have embarked on the task of unravelling the greatest legislative disaster unleashed on free peoples in the past century.
The field of study to which I gave the name of intoxicology is still hidebound by debates about the law, which can only understandably gain in traction at indications that hairline cracks in the whole rotten edifice are not only beginning to widen into fissures, but that the alternative arrangements being put in place are working at least as well, if not even better than, liberalising exponents might have hoped. It isn't much surprise, then, that a new slew of books about the drug war has been appearing lately, the latest entrant in the field from the British journalist Johann Hari.
Hari means it. The book is accompanied by a website, chasingthescream.com, at which visitors can not only find audio clips of the interview material used, but also sign up to a mailing list and 'get involved' in other ways in bringing down the pillars of the temple. This is multi-platform activism for our interesting times.
The narrative opens at the outset of enforcement, when Harry Anslinger was appointed the first, and eventually longest-serving, director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, an agency that emerged from the corruption-riddled enforcement organisation of the Prohibition years, which he had also headed. Although Anslinger was eventually to recant his belief in alcohol prohibition, noting that abstinence cannot practically be enforced on those who don't see the need for it, he failed to learn the lesson with regard to drugs. At the fag-end of his career, he was instrumental in getting the agency to supply pharmaceutical heroin to Senator Joe McCarthy, who held a metaphorical gun to Anslinger's head by saying that if he had to go to criminal gangs to get it, he would, whatever subsequent scandal might transpire at his exposure. Where McCarthy's threat succeeded, a whole swathe of society failed to persuade Anslinger to see sense, and he continued to spout the official pabulum that all drugs were evil, and their users subhuman garbage.
Hari has conducted a mass of diligently pursued research for this book, talking to seemingly everybody from poor Mexicans who have lost loved ones amid the psychotic violence of gang warfare to the recently retired president of Uruguay, José Mujica. The author himself bulks large in the ruminations, partly because he and people close to him have been dysfunctional users of various substances, but also because he makes exhaustive attempts at every turn to think himself into the lives of his various respondents. The rhetorical effect of this will be cumulatively tiring and obstructive to many readers, and the intention to construct a heuristically elaborated argument, in which the author moves from reflexive scepticism to agonised ambivalence to final Damascene enlightenment, seems coy and not entirely sincere.
That said, the arguments and findings are rigorously, if not always flawlessly, aired. With regard to legalisation proposals, Hari suggests that cannabis, ecstasy, cocaine and other 'party drugs' should be openly saleable. Riskier materials such as the concentrated stimulants, crack and meth, should be made available in 'safe regulated spaces' with a contingent of willing doctors on hand to supervise the users, while heroin should only be supplied by GPs to those already addicted. This raises the obvious logical conundrum as to how anybody would get addicted to heroin in the first place, if not through being supplied by the very criminal gangs these policies are designed to put out of business. Then again, one wonders how many potential users of crack or meth would actually want to go to a safe regulated space to smoke it, as opposed to, say, a party with their mates, or else just remain on the sofa. And where do the users of potent hallucinogenics, LSD, DMT and mushrooms, go?
Overwhelmingly, though, Hari is on surer dialectical ground. The social benefits that have been shown to result from decriminalisation are inarguable. Economic crime and enforced prostitution decrease when the trade in intoxicants is taken out of the hands of cartels, but so too does the spread of new users, since those existing users who don't resort to robbery to fund their addiction, but finance it by selling on an adulterated portion of their own heroin, no longer have the incentive to establish new customers. When substances are made illegal, what the racket then deals in is the most cost-effective alternative, concentrated versions of the original precursors that will realise the greatest return, just as alcohol Prohibition substituted bootleg whisky and gin for the weak beer that had been the most popular drink in the US. All this could be rapidly brought to an end.
What Hari is chiefly concerned with throughout this argument is addiction, and he makes a very important distinction between physical dependency and the psychological addiction so often brought on by damaged childhoods and adult loneliness. Many of the counter-intuitive findings about addiction, from its environmental roots to the widely unsuspected fact that most hard-core addicts eventually give up of their own accord, are explained with graphic clarity, if with far too much direct address to the reader. The UN's own drug control agency concedes that no more than 10% of all use of proscribed substances is dysfunctional, but now as always that 10% hog the limelight. They are, after all, the people in whose name the killings are carried out, whether by teenage gunmen in Ciudad Juárez or by federal narcotics agents in a democratic polity.
With respect to all the blighted souls and courageous reformers (many have been both) to whom Hari spoke in the course of researching this polemic, there is a little too much retailing of personal histories and not enough actual argument. When the arguments are put, they are powerful and meticulously considered, and their occasional oversights not detrimental to the libertarian case as a whole.
A curious final aspect of the book is that, despite being produced by a British journalist for a British publisher, it is written in American English, by which I don't just mean the standard requirement for phonetic spellings, but the locutions and grammatical structure too. Thus does the thin end presage the wedge. No explanation is given for this, and to judge from recent online audio clips, the author's lengthy sojourn in the US hasn't apparently bequeathed him the west coast drawl in which the text is composed. The misleading effect is created that he is ventriloquising for someone else, an impression from which the 'journalistic controversy' in which he embroiled himself a few years ago, hinted at here in a passing footnote, might profitably have warned him away.