Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari

life.”

    This isn’t an argument against Gabor’s discoveries. It’s a deepening of them. A kid who is neglected or beaten or raped—like Chino’s mother, or Billie Holiday—finds it hard to trust people and to form healthy bonds with them, so they often become isolated, like the rats in solitary confinement, and with the same effects.
    Professor Peter Cohen, a friend of Bruce’s, writes that we should stop using the word “addiction” altogether and shift to a new word: “bonding.” 28 Human beings need to bond. It is one of our most primal urges. So if we can’t bond with other people, we will find a behavior to bond with, whether it’s watching pornography or smoking crack or gambling. If the only bond you can find that gives you relief or meaning is with splayed women on a computer screen or bags of crystal or a roulette wheel, you will return to that bond obsessively.
    One recovering heroin and crack addict on the Downtown Eastside, Dean Wilson, put it to me simply. “Addiction,” he said, “is a disease of loneliness.”

    Rat Park seems to fill some of the holes in our understanding of addiction, but at first glance, it still leaves at least one. What about the heroin famines?
    Miserable people will seek altered mental states to numb the pain. That much makes sense. But the heroin addicts Bruce was working with on the Downtown Eastside weren’t actually taking heroin during the period when the port of Vancouver was successfully blockaded. They weren’t altering their mental states in any physical sense—but they carried on with the junkie behavior, injecting empty powders into their arms. Why?
    Bruce realizes that in all his months and years interviewing addicts about their lives, they had been telling him the answer all along. “People explained over and over before I got it,” Bruce tells me.
    Before they became junkies, these young people were sitting in a room alone, cut off from meaning. Most of them could hope at best for a McJob with a shrinking minimum wage—a lifelong burger-flip punctuated by watching TV and scrimping for minor consumer objects. “My job was basically to say—why don’t you stop taking drugs?” Bruce says. “And one guy explained to me very beautifully. He said, ‘Well, think about that for a minute. What would I do if I stopped taking drugs? Maybe I could get myself a job as a janitor or something like that.’ ” Compare that, he said, to “what I’m doing right now, which is really exciting. Because I’ve got friends down here and we do exciting things like rob stores and hang around with hookers.” Suddenly you are part of a world where, together with other addicts, you are embarked on a crusade—a constant frenetic crusade to steal enough to buy the drugs, dodge the police, keep out of jail, and stay alive.
    If your problem is being chronically starved of social bonds, then part of the solution is to bond with the heroin itself and the relief it gives you. But a bigger part is to bond with the subculture that comes with taking heroin—the tribe of fellow users all embarked on the same mission and facing the same threats and risking death every day with you. It gives you an identity. It gives you a life of highs and lows, instead of relentless monotony. The world stops being indifferent to you, and starts being hostile—which is at least proof that you exist, that you aren’t dead already.
    The heroin helps users deal with the pain of being unable to form normal bonds with other humans. The heroin subculture gives them bonds with other human beings.
    This seemed odd and jarring when I first heard it. The life of a street addict is horrific. You can be culled at any moment by a bad batch, hypothermia, rape, the police. Like Bruce, I had to keep turning this theory over and over in my mind, and applying it to the addicts I knew, until I saw it.
    Remember: when the actual heroin was gone, they carried on acting as heroin addicts. The horrifying fact is