On Reality Asserts Itself, Mr. Hari tells Paul Jay that the conventional understanding of drug addiction is wrong, and alternative drug policy in Portugal and Canada can lead the way.
This is an episode of Reality Asserts Itself, produced March 6, 2015.
STORY TRANSCRIPT
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to The Real News Network. Itâs Reality Asserts Itself, and Iâm Paul Jay. Weâre continuing our interview now with Johann Hari, whoâs published a book heâs been working on for the past three years called Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. Johann has been a columnist for The Independent in London for nine years, and heâs written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, and lots more. Thanks for joining us again.
JOHANN HARI, WRITER AND JOURNALIST: Great to be with you, Paul.
JAY: So one of the things you try to explore in your book which I thought was quite interesting is the relationship of addiction to trauma. I mean, a lot of addiction seems to be almost a form of self-medication, people that are growing up in circumstances that are so unlivable. Talk a bit about that.
HARI: This blew my mind. I didnât know any of this before I set off. And as we talked about before, I have a very personal investment in this. You know, we had very bad drug addiction in my family. And if you had said to me four years ago, say, what causes heroin addiction, I would have looked at you like you were a little bit stupid and I wouldâve said, well, heroin causes heroin addiction. And for 100 years now weâve been told a story about addiction that is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it seems like our common senseâit almost seems stupid to say it, right? So we think if you and me and the next 20 people who walk past this studio used heroin for 20 days, because there are chemical hooks in the heroin, at the end of that 20 days our body would physically need heroin, and thatâs what addiction is, right? Thatâs what we believe. The first thing that pricked my awareness that it may not be true as what was explained to me by a doctor. If you and me step out here today and, God forbid, we get hit by a car and we break our hip, weâll be taken to hospital, we would be given a lot of diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin, much better heroin than the heroin youâd score on the streets in Baltimore, âcause itâs 100 percent pure, as opposed to the street heroin, which is going to be, like, 5 to 10 percent pure. Youâll be given that diamorphine for a really long time, right? Itâs happening in every hospital. Anyone watching this anywhere in the developed world, thatâs happening in a hospital near you: people are being given a lot of heroin. You will have noticed your grandmother wasnât turned into a junky by her hip operation, right?
JAY: I must say, though, when my mother was in the hospital late in life and they were so worried about addiction, they sometimes did leave her in pain, they were so afraid of how much they gave her.
HARI: Itâs horrendous. Yeah. Itâs based on a complete misconception about addiction. There are massive studies of this that show that medical use virtually never causes addiction. The reason, I discovered, isâI learned from talking to an incredible man called Bruce Alexander. Heâs a professor in Vancouver who explained to me, the old theory of addiction, the one that we all implicitly believe, comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. Theyâre really simple experiments. If your viewers are feeling a little bit sadistic, they can try them themselves. You get a rat and you put it in a cage and you give it two water bottles. One is just water and one is water laced with heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will very rapidly become addicted to the drugged water and will almost always kill itself, right? There you go. Addiction. In the â70s, Bruce comes along and says, well, hold on a minute. Weâre putting the rat in an empty cage. Itâs got nothing to do except use the drugs. Letâs do this differently. So Bruce built âRat Parkâ. Rat Park is like heaven for rats, right? Itâs good loads of cheese, itâs got loads of friends, it can have loads of sex, itâs got loads of colored balls and tunnels and everything rats like, right? And theyâve got both the water bottles, theyâve got their drugged water and theyâve got their normal water. And they try both, of course, âcause they donât know whatâs in them. But hereâs the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they donât like the drugged water. They hardly ever use it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use it in a compulsive way that looks like addiction. Thereâs a very interesting human example of this I can give in a minute. Thereâs loads of human examples. I actually think in Baltimore we are surrounded by them. But what Bruce says is this shows that both the right-wing theory of addiction and the left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. The right-wing theory of addiction is itâs a moral failing, you indulge yourself, youâre a hedonist. The left-wing theory is you get taken over, your brain gets hijacked, all of that. But Bruce says itâs not immorality, itâs not your brain; itâs your cage. Addiction is an adaptation to your environment. Why do people living shitty, disconnected lives, where theyâve got no meaning and theyâre cut off from all the people around them become much more likely to become addicts than happy, connectedâ. We could be drunk now, right? Set aside the drug laws. You and me, these mugs, they could be full of vodka, right? Theyâre not. Why are we sober now? Because weâve got something we want to do. Weâve got meaning of our lives.
JAY: Yeah, we choose not to.
HARI: Yeah. Weâve got [incompr.] bad choice. Weâve got purpose in our lives and weâve got things we want to be present for.
JAY: No, but Iâm saying the choice comes from that. We donât feel some desperate need to do self-medicate.
HARI: Exactly. Exactly. And a really good human example happened to be happening exactly the same time as the Rat Park experiment, by coincidence. Itâs called the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, 20 percent of American troops were using heroin regularly, right? And if you look at the news stories from the time, thereâs a massive panic. Theyâre thinkingââcause they believe the old theory of addiction, theyâre thinking, my God, weâre going to have hundreds of thousands of junkies on the streets of the United States when the war ends. What happens? They come home and the overwhelming majority just stop. They go to rehab, they donât go into withdrawal, they stop, because if youâre taken out of a hellish pestilential jungle where you donât want to be, you could be killed at any moment, youâre not with the people you know, and you go back to your nice life in Wichita, Kansas, with your friends, your family, and your job, itâs the equivalent of being taken out of the first cage and put into the second cage. Now, this has massive implications, partly for the drug war, âcause the drug warâI think widerâthe drug war is based on the idea that chemicals cause the problem and we need to physically eradicate these chemicals from the world. If in fact most of the people, the vast majority of people who use those chemicals donât become addicted, if in fact you need a whole other component going on, well, then it makes much more sense to deal with that problem. And thereâs a country that does this. I actually think it has much wider implications. You know, you look at history, there are moments when addiction spikes, right? The Native Americans suffer genocide. The traumatized survivors overwhelmingly become addicts. Right? In England in the 18th century, people are driven off the land, out of the countryside, into these disgusting urban slums. The gin craze happens, right? And thatâs regarded as the crack of its day. Gin is regarded as this thing that hijacks you and takes you over. Why does crack happen in the â80s? The destruction of industrial America, the destruction of the factories, the destruction of organized labor. Why do you get the meth epidemic in the â80s and the â90s? You had the destruction of rural America under Reaganism. Why are we seeing and an oxy crisis now? Whatâs happened since 2008 that might be causing a lot of distress, panic, and pain? So there is an underlying continuity where you see a spike in distress, and weâve created a society where a significant number of our fellow citizens, including some people I love, canât bear to be present in their lives. If we want them to be present in their lives, we have to make reality a lot better and we have to think about the fact that a hyper-individualistic, hyper-capitalist consumer-based society leaves a lot of people feeling that life just ainât worth being present in.
JAY: I wish we had more time. So weâre going toââcause thereâsâIâm going to plug the book. I donât always flog the book, but here Iâm flogging the book. Itâs really worth going into. We have a few more minutes. So where are some places they are trying to make reality a little more livable, particularly with more rational drug laws? And is it working?
HARI: It blew my mind. If Iâm completely honest, I put off going to the places where the solutions are being tried, because I thought, if it doesnât work there, if I go there and it doesnât work, this will be the most depressing book ever written. But actually I was totally blown away by what I discovered. In the year 2000, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin. They had a worse drug problem than Baltimore. And every year they tried the American way. They crack down harder, they punish people more. And every year the problem got worse. And one day the prime minister and the leader of the opposition got together and they said, look, letâs just set up a panel of scientists and doctors to figure out what the hell weâll actually do with this, and letâs agree in advance that weâll abide by whatever they recommend. So they just took it out of politics âcause the crisis was so bad. The panel comes back and says, decriminalize everything, from cannabis to crack. Butâand this is the crucial second pointâtake all the money we currently spend on arresting drug users, trying drug users, imprisoning drug users, take all that money and spend it on incredibly good drug treatment. And thatâs not what we generally think of when we think of drug treatment in America and Britain. Part of it is residential rehab and psychological support, which is great. And they do do that. But, actually, the biggest part of it was learning the lesson of Rat Park. It was reconnecting addicts with the society. And the biggest part of it was just subsidize jobs. Say you were a smack addict, right? Your life fell apart. You used to be a mechanic. Once youâre ready, theyâll go to a garage and theyâll say, if you employ this guy for a year, we will pay half of his wages. So just the goal was to make sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of bed for in the morning, had a purpose and meaning in life. And the results have beenâthe results are in. Itâs been nearly 15 years, 14 years now. Injecting drug users down by 50 percent, five-zero percent. Every study shows addiction is massively down, overdoses massively down, HIV transmission is massively down among addicts. And one of the ways you know itâs been such a successâone of the most moving interviews I did was with a guy called JoĂŁo Figueira, who was the leader of the opposition to the decriminalization, who was the top drug cop in Portugal. And he said a lot of the things that a lot of your viewers would be perfectly reasonably thinking. Surely if you decriminalize all drugs, thereâll be a massive increase in use, thereâll be chaos. And what he said to meâIâm paraphrasing, his exact words are the book, but he said, everything I said would happen didnât happen and everything the other side said would happen did. And he talked about how he actually felt ashamed that heâd spent 20 years before the decriminalization arresting and harassing drug users, and actually there was a much better way, and he hoped the whole world followed his example. I donât want to get too Billy Graham on you, but I do kind of feel like Iâve seen the future and it works. You know? This is something that could be done here in the United States. Now, the Portuguese model is not perfect. Theyâve decriminalized use. But they havenâtâthereâs no legal access to the drugs. So what youâve dealt with isâthe crudest way to put it is they donât have Orange Is the New Black anymore, but they still have Breaking Bad. You still have to go to armed criminal gangs to get your drugs.
JAY: Oh. So thereâs no heroin maintenance program, this sort of thing.
HARI: Theyâve got methadone maintenance. I went to countries where they had in fact legalized, as opposed to decriminalizedâvery interesting example in Switzerland. Iâm a Swiss citizen as well as a British citizen, through my father. And Switzerland is a really right-wing country. My Swiss relatives makeâthey make Mike Huckabee look like Bernie Sanders, right? These are really right-wing people. And they voted in referenda by huge majorities to legalize heroin. Itâs fascinating. And they did it for a very simple reason. The way it works is, if youâre a heroin addict in Switzerland, go to a doctor, and if they believe youâre a heroin addictâand they almost always doâtheyâll send you to a clinic. You go every morning and you can inject your heroin there. Theyâll give you the heroin, and you inject it there. You canât take it out with you. And the results have been incredible. Burglary massively fell. Street prostitution just ended. Muggings and street robbery massively fell. Disease transmission massively fell. Swiss people didnât vote for this, âcause theyâre lovely and compassionate towards drug users. I have an uncle who, when I said to him I was writing a book about the drug war and drug addicts, he said, oh, I know what we should do about drug addicts: we should make them dig their own graves and then shoot them into the graves. Is that what your book will say? And I had to say, not quite. This is like Utah voting to legalize heroin, not San Francisco voting. And, crucially, you cut out the dealers. Theyâre gone. That kindâ.
JAY: So thereâs great material on Swiss, Portugal. You have some other examples. And we only have a couple of minutes left. So two things. Why has this been almost ignored by mainstream media in the United States, these examples? You still have tons of reporting on drug busts and this and that. Like, the media itself still so buys into the underlying assumptions of the war on drugs. But also, why in jurisdictions, other European jurisdictions, or a place even like Canada, other places, why arenât other people adopting this? Whatâs holding all this back?
HARI: Well, Canada hasâand I tell the story ofâperhaps the most inspiring story in the book, I think, for me, anyway. It was the story of a man called Bud Osborn. But Iâll try to tell it quickly. Bud Osborn was a homeless street addict on the streets of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, which had the worst concentration of addicts in North America. And he was watching his friends die all around him. People would use behind dumpsters so the police wouldnât see them. But, of course, if the police canât see you and you OD, no one can see you die. And Bud thought, Iâve got to do something about this. But he also thought, Iâm a homeless junkie; what can I do? And he had a really simple idea. Bud just said, why donât we arrange the addicts? And he got them together and he said, when weâre not usingââcause, of course, most people arenât using most of the timeâletâs just patrol the alleyways, and when we spot someone OD-ing, weâll call an ambulance. Really simple. They did it. And within a few months, the overdose rates started to really fall, which was great in itself. But the addicts started to thinkâit affected how the addicts thought of themselves, and they thought, oh, maybe weâre not the pieces of shit everyone says we are. Maybe weâre people who can save lives. They started to turn up at public meetings about the addict problem, and theyâd sit at the back, and after a while theyâd put up their hand and go, I think youâre talking about us. Is there anything we could do differently? And sometimes people were angry. Some people would say, well, you leave your needles lying around. And Bud was like, fine; weâll go and pick up the needles; itâs okay. So they started doing that as well. Then Bud learned that in Frankfurt in Germany, theyâd opened legal injecting rooms, where you could go and use your drugs, and it massively brought down the overdose rate. And they said, right. Weâve got to have this never happen in North America since Anslinger began. Weâve got to have this. So they started stalking the mayor of Vancouver, a man called Philip Owen, who was a right-wing businessmanâpicture Mitt Romney, basicallyâwho said that addicts should be taken and detained at a local military base. After two years, they followed Philip Owen everywhere he goes, carrying a coffin, and it says something like, who will die next, Philip Owen, before you open a safe injecting room? And they do this. And two years go by, theyâre a bit demoralized. And one day, totally to his credit, Philip Owen just says, who the hell are these people?
JAY: And he getsâI know the story. And he gets won over to this. But they donât do heroin maintenance program.
HARI: They do. So he goes and meets a load of addicts on the Downtown Eastside. He opens the first safe injecting room in North America. Amazing. And itâs been ten years now, and the results are incredible. Overdoses down by 80 percent. They started the first heroin maintenance program in North America, the NAOMI program. Average life expectancy in Vancouver has improvedâsorry, in the Downtown Eastside, has improved by ten years since they started that. Thatâs crazy figures. I mean, you donât get figures like that except at the end of a war.
JAY: They are doing heroin maintenance now.
HARI: Theyâre doing heroin maintenance. And, you know, it was really moving to me. Bud died last year, and he was only in his early 60s, but heâd been in a homeless addict during the drug war. It takes a toll on you. And when he died, they sealed off the streets of the Downtown Eastside where he had lived as a homeless person. And there were loads of people in the crowd for his memorial. And a lot of them knew that they were alive because of what heâd begun. And what I would say to any of your viewers who are watching thisâand you think, you know, this is such a big issue, thereâs nothing we can do, we all feel powerless sometime, I want to say to those people, you are so much more powerful than you know. Bud was a homeless street addict. Itâs hard to think of a more disempowered person in our society. He started a revolution that saved thousands of peopleâs lives. The Canadian Supreme Court has now ruled, as a direct result of his activism, that addicts have an inalienable right to life, and that includes a safe injecting space, right? Theyâre never going to be able to take that back now. We can end this thing. The one thing you can say about the drug war in its defense is we gave it a fair shot, right? Weâve done this for 100 years. Alternatives are being tried all over the world. They work. You know? And weâve just got toâyou talk about how the media doesnât cover this. How do these things ever change? People band together. Through activism we demand a change, right? A hundred street addicts managed to do it in Vancouver. You know, I was just in New York, staying near the Stonewall Inn. In 1963, a bunch of drag queens gathered there. Two thousand years, gay people have been treated as disgusting. The defenders of gay people in 1963 said theyâre sick. But that was the way of defending them was to say theyâre not evil, theyâre sick, right? That was the pro-gay position. Some of those people lived to see the introduction of gay marriage, something they didnât even ask for in 1963. It would have seemed like you or me saying, we want to live on the moon and smoke crack there. You know, like, it would have seemed crazy. Things get unimaginably better if people demand them. And Iâm actually incredibly optimistic about this. The drug war is a disaster. Virtually no one defends it. The alternatives work incredibly well. I think weâre going to live to see these this change.
JAY: Okay. Well, thanks very much for joining us.
HARI: Thank you so much for having me.
JAY: Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. Thanks very much for joining us on Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network.
