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

fair, later, when I read through the scientific literature, I realized this is not a failing of DuPont’s. It seems to be standard for scientists in this field, even the very best. They overwhelmingly focus on biochemistry and the brain. The questions Bruce and Gabor look at—how people use drugs out here on the streets—are ignored. Nobody, I kept being told, wants to fund studies into that.
    Why would this be? Professor Carl Hart at Columbia University is one of the leading experts in the world on how drugs affect the brain. He tells me that when you explain these facts to the scientists who have built their careers on the simplistic old ideas about drugs, they effectively say to you: “Look, man—this is my position. Leave me alone.” This is what they know. This is what they have built their careers on. If you offer ideas that threaten to eclipse theirs—they just ignore you. I ask Professor Hart: Can our central idea about drugs really be as hollow as that? “Can it be as hollow? I think you have discovered—it is as hollow as that . . . Look at the evidence. It’s hollow . . . It’s smoke and mirrors.”
    But why, then, do these ideas persist? Why haven’t the scientists with the better and more accurate ideas eclipsed these old theories? Hart tells me bluntly: Almost all the funding for research into illegal drugs is provided by governments waging the drug war—and they only commission research that reinforces the ideas we already have about drugs. All these different theories, with their radical implications—why would governments want to fund those?
    Eric Sterling is the lawyer who wrote the drug laws for the United States between 1979 and 1989. When every major drug law was being drafted, he was at the table shaping it into words. When I met him in his Maryland office, he told me that if any government-funded scientist ever produced research suggesting anything beyond the conventional drugs-hijack-brains theory, he knows exactly what would happen. The head of NIDA would be called before a congressional committee and asked if she had gone mad. She might be fired. She would certainly be stopped. All the people conducting the science for NIDA—and remember, that’s 90 percent of research on the globe into illegal drugs—know this.
    So they steer away from all this evidence and look only at the chemical effects of the drugs themselves. That’s not fake—but it’s only a small part of the picture. There is a powerful political brake on exploring these deeper truths.
    And that, it turns out, is what happened to Bruce. Once the nature of their findings became clear, the money for the Rat Park experiment provided by his university was abruptly cut off, before the team had a chance to investigate many of the questions it raised. Years later, Bruce was told by a senior figure at the University that that was because they found it embarrassing. Something so far outside the conventional understanding of addiction seemed crazy.
    To a sober-minded military brat raised in a conservative family, the experience of Rat Park and the heroin famines was startling, and it changed how Bruce saw the world. “It’s amazing to discover that something which is so centrally believed is false. It’s just false,” he said to me.
    At first he expected that his findings would blast open the field of addiction science and start a whole slew of investigations into how it really works. He was ready for “a ticker tape parade,” he says. Instead, all his findings were disregarded, as if they had never happened. “That evidence like this can be so completely disregarded—it’s amazing,” he says. “I suppose you could say it’s poisoned my entire outlook on life.”
    Nobody has ever received funding to replicate the Rat Park experiment.

    As I walked the streets of Vancouver trying to digest all this, I began to think again about the very beginning of this story, and I saw something I had not seen before.
    There were