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

that, as Bruce puts it, “it’s a lot better to be a junkie than to be nothing at all, and that’s the alternative these guys face—being nothing at all.” So when the heroin was cut off, “They maintained the essence of their heroin addiction—which is a subculture addiction.” When you have been told you are a piece of shit all your life, embracing the identity of being a piece of shit, embracing the other pieces of shit, living openly as a piece of shit—it seems better than being alone. 29
    As one addict told Bruce: “This is a life. It’s better than no life.”

    As I listened to Gabor and Bruce, I wanted to be persuaded—but part of me was skeptical. What is the opposite side of the argument here? This isn’t what I was taught at school. It is not what most of us believe. No matter how persuasive they seemed, there was still part of me that kept thinking— obviously it is the chemicals that cause addiction. It’s common sense.
    The best man to provide a rebuttal, it seemed to me, was 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. He is a highly distinguished scientist, and the man who created many of the metaphors that help us to understand drugs today. I tracked him down at the World Federation Against Drugs conference in Stockholm, Sweden. Over two days, I milled among antidrug activists from across the world. DuPont is a tall, thin, genial man from Ohio, and he delivered the knockout speech of the conference—an eloquent rallying call for the drug war, summing up a conference 30 that warned that chemicals can hijack your brain and cause chemical slavery.
    He agreed to let me put to him some of the possible holes in the theory, and as we spoke, he listened intently. I started by asking how many of the negative effects of drugs he believed are driven by their pharmacological component. He looked at me blankly. “As opposed to . . . ?” And there was a silence.
    I mentioned childhood trauma, and isolation. He continued to look blank. “I think the environment is really important,” he said—and then named only one environmental factor: whether drugs are legal or not. Drug use must be kept as a crime, or it will explode. I tried to press him on other factors, but this was the only one he would acknowledge.
    I was a little thrown by this, and so I asked him a different question. The institute you set up says drugs make the addict into a chemical slave—that the chemicals take you over—but I am trying to figure out how that fits with the studies suggesting that most addicts simply stop. How is that slavery? Frederick Douglass didn’t just walk off the plantation one day. DuPont looked quizzical, and thought about this. “Your point is well taken—I’ve never thought about it quite this way. There’s an absolute quality to the slavery of two centuries ago. This,” he said, “is more of a nuanced slavery.”
    We smiled at each other, a little awkwardly. What, I asked, about the other key metaphor promoted by the organization he founded—of a hijacking? Most hijackings don’t end with the hostages choosing to walk away from their captors. “Oh, yes,” he says. “It’s a question of partial hijacking. That’s a good point too.”
    I felt a little baffled. These are the central metaphors on which the standard theory of addiction is built, and 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. This is the man who set up the main center for drug research in the world, and it was plain he hadn’t actually heard of these alternative theories. He didn’t seem to know who Gabor or Bruce were, or what people like them have shown in their studies.
    To be