Can we end the war on drugs?

A LITTLE over a year ago, voters in my home state of Washington, along with Colorado, legalized marijuana. Oregon and Alaska soon followed suit, along with the country of Uruguay.

For a child of the 1980s--schooled by DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) counselors who assured me that a single puff of a joint would inexorably result in a lifetime of heroin addiction--the results of legalization have been decidedly anti-climactic. Hardly a violent drug-fueled orgy in sight. Could it be that we are finally witnessing the beginning of the end of the war on drugs?

This is the question explored in Johann Hari's riveting new book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.

By Hari's estimation, the drug war has been raging in this country for over a century--beginning with the Harrison Act of 1914, which outlawed cocaine and heroin. Yet 100 years later, through successive waves of escalation, there is little evidence that we are "winning" this war by any conceivable measure: the amount and availability of drugs, the number of addicts and the crime associated with the drug trade have skyrocketed, while millions have been imprisoned and killed in the process.

Hari set out to understand how and why this war came into existence, what it has achieved and whether there is an alternative. In the course of his investigation, which took him across nine countries over three years, he discovered, "It turns out that many of our most basic assumptions on this subject are wrong. Drugs are not what we think they are. 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."

IN AN engaging narrative format, Hari focuses in on the stories of individuals, through whose lives we come to understand the perpetrators, victims and resisters to the drug war--in some cases, all three at once.

One figure that looms large is Henry Anslinger, the original architect of the war on drugs. Anslinger took over the fledgling Federal Bureau of Narcotics in the wake of the end of Prohibition, which ended in 1933, and sold his crusade with a deluge of unscientific propaganda and racist hysteria--including a years-long vendetta against legendary jazz singer and addict Billie Holiday.

While many of his wilder claims would no longer be taken seriously, Anslinger's basic attitude towards drugs and drug users is still common wisdom today: Drugs are bad, they hijack your brain and make you do terrible things. The only way to stop this is to isolate and punish addicts, and ultimately get rid of the supply of drugs.

Yet a strange thing happened when drugs were outlawed--and not just in the U.S., thanks to Anslinger using the fear of Communism to enforce similar policies across the entire globe. As with alcohol, prohibition only pushed the sale of drugs onto the black market and under the control of organized crime.

In fact, it is now documented that one of Anslinger's agents who carried out the raids to shut down doctors in California prescribing heroin to their patients was on the payroll of a drug ring. "They wanted the drug war," Hari writes. "They wanted it so badly, they would pay to speed it up."

Notorious gangsters like Arnold Rothstein oversaw the first wave of the drug trade through a combination of brute terror and bribery at all levels of government. Fast-forward to the present day and the gruesome results of a massive illegal drug market is plain to see. Writing of the cartels in Mexico, Hari observes:

If you are the first to kill your rivals' relatives, including their pregnant women, you get a brief competitive advantage: people are more scared of your cartel, and they will cede more of the drug market to you. Then, every cartel does it: it becomes a part of standard practice. If you are the first to behead people, you get a brief competitive advantage. Then every cartel does it...And on it goes.

Prohibition...creates a system in which the most insane and sadistic violence has a sane and functional logic. It is required. It is rewarded.

IN BETWEEN the prohibitionists and drug lords lies the bulk of the human fodder for the drug war. Many are drafted as foot soldiers from a young age--like former New York youth gang leader turned activist Chino Hardin, a transgender man whose mother was an addict and whose father was the cop who raped her.

Others are simply caught in the crossfire--Tiffany Smith, quite literally, while playing on her front porch at the age of six. In Mexico, Marisela Escobedo Ortiz marched for days in the hot sun to protest the fact that her daughter's murderer--a member of a powerful drug gang--was not brought to justice. She was shot in the head outside the home of the governor of the state of Chihuahua.

As Hari writes, "When you picture the seventy thousand dead, don't picture a drug dealer, or a drug user--picture Marisela. She is more representative."

But what of the drug users? Isn't drug addiction a problem that must be addressed? Hari turns to this question in the second half of the book. One of the more harrowing chapters details his visit to the Tent City open-air prison of Sheriff Joe Arpaiao (a protégé of Harry Anslinger), in which prisoners--mostly nonviolent drug offenders--are treated worse than animals.

This may be a harsh extreme, but it is not uncommon. Indeed, the whole logic of the drug war dictates that the cure to addiction is isolation and punishment. If your loved one refuses to give up their addiction, you are advised to cut them out of your life for fear of "enabling" them. If you are denied access to jobs and shelter because of addiction, you will be arrested for sleeping on the street. There is no evidence that this approach works: In fact, it usually has the opposite effect.

A growing body of evidence points to an entirely different way of understanding addiction and how to address it. In the first place, the vast majority of drug users do not become addicted--some 90 percent. So the idea that addiction is caused primarily by a physical reaction to chemical substances is not convincing. Hari provides a wealth of compelling research to suggest that drug addiction is not a cause, but a response to trauma and inhumane conditions.

Take, for instance, the famous ad campaign in the 1980s featuring a rat in a cage that repeatedly drank from a bottle with cocaine until it dropped dead. Psychologist Bruce Alexander decided to rerun this experiment, but with a twist. One group of rats was placed alone in their cages, as before, with only the drugs. Another group was placed in something he called Rat Park--a large open space with plenty of food, toys and other rats to play with. The latter group showed little interest in the drug. As Hari writes:

So the old experiments were, it seemed, wrong. It isn't the drug that causes the harmful behavior-- it's the environment. An isolated rat will almost always become a junkie. A rat with a good life almost never will, no matter how many drugs you make available to him. As Bruce put it: he was realizing that addiction isn't a disease. Addiction is an adaptation. It's not you--it's the cage you live in.

A number of real-life experiences in drug reform bear out this hypothesis and point to alternatives to the disaster of the drug war.

In Vancouver, British Columbia, drug addicts organized themselves to demand safe injection sites, reducing drug-related fatalities by 80 percent. In Liverpool in the 1980s, legalized prescriptions for drugs drastically reduced crime, fatalities and drug use itself--until it was shut down. A similar policy in Switzerland saw the same dramatic results. In Portugal, all drug use was decriminalized in 2002, and resources redirected to providing mental health care and jobs for recovering addicts.

Most recently, of course, we've seen the first steps in the U.S. toward outright legalization--at least of marijuana, in a few places. All these examples give cause for hope, for Hari, that with continued pressure, the drug war may indeed be on its way out.

YET IN finishing this book, I was left feeling that there was a piece missing from the puzzle. Hari makes a compelling case for why the drug war is a catastrophe and many well-reasoned arguments for ending it, much of which will not be too surprising to readers

But when it comes to why this ill-begotten war has dragged on for so long, his explanations too often retreat into psychoanalysis. For instance, although he acknowledges the officially sanctioned racism which led to the first wave of drug prohibition, he then shifts the culpability to a collective "we": "I suspect this impulse is there in all of us. 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."

This may be true as far as the effectiveness of propaganda. But for most people in this country--and certainly internationally, where U.S. drug policy has been imposed at the point of a gun--the problem lies not with the darker angels of our collective nature. The main obstacle to a sane drug policy is not, as Hari suggests at times, finding the best ways to convince more conservative voters and politicians of the reasonableness of this approach.

In fact, all the factual arguments in favor of continuing the drug war have been crumbling for quite some time, including in the court of popular opinion. Yet, despite these few recent breakthroughs, the war drags on. Why?

Hari does not at all deny the racist nature of the drug war, and discusses how this operates even when those carrying it out don't consider themselves to be racist. One revealing quote from a commanding officer illustrates this point well. In explaining why they target minority neighborhoods even though wealthy white people are just as likely to use and sell drugs, the commander states:

If we go out and we start targeting those individuals, they know judges, they know lawyers, they know all of the big folks in government. If we start targeting them, and their children, you know what's going to happen? We're going to get a phone call, and they're going to shut us down...There goes your overtime. There's the money that you're making. So let's just go after the weakest link.

Hari approvingly cites Michelle Alexander's essential book The New Jim Crow, but he doesn't seem to have fully absorbed her structural argument. As Alexander makes clear, the war on drugs is not a misguided policy, but a tool for institutionalizing inequality--for Black people in particular, but ultimately, for everyone.

This helps to explain why in Washington, for instance, rich white men are now getting even richer selling legal weed, while thousands of poor Black people continue to rot in jail for having done the exact same thing. In Colorado, despite the legalization of marijuana, Blacks are still disproportionately arrested for crimes related to marijuana sale, possession and use. Elsewhere, the homeless are ticketed for marijuana possession at higher rates.

What does it say about the limits of drug reform that releasing those incarcerated for the sale of marijuana was not even considered? Not to mention, what would happen if all those people were released? What kind of life would be waiting for them in a society in which our prison system has become a substitute for a social safety net?

Just as the key to treating addiction is addressing the underlying trauma, ending the drug war necessarily involves tackling the underlying problems it "solves," however dysfunctionally--in this case, a profoundly unequal and alienating society, where people must be kept in cages, physically and psychologically, to preserve the profits of the few.

Hari does recognize that a bigger change is needed, and rightly points to these recent reforms as a possible opening for this. After praising humane alternative programs for treating addicts, he goes on to say:

But that's only the first step: it's the bandage that stops the hemorrhaging. Then you need to have a deeper strategy--one that stops the wounds from forming in the first place. To do that, you need to change the culture so people find it less unbearable. We have to build a society that looks more like Rat Park and less like a rat race.

At its heart, Chasing the Scream is about asserting the humanity of those caught in the cage of the drug war, and a faith in their ability to act collectively to break free of it. Describing the activists in the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, he writes:

When you are confronted with historical forces that seem vastly bigger than you--like a war on your people that has lasted nearly a hundred years--you have two choices. You can accept it as your fate and try to adjust to being a pinball being whacked around a table by the powerful. Or you can band together with other people to become a historical force yourself--one that will eventually overwhelm the forces ranged against you.