Chasing the Scream

The book talks discusses how the war on drugs began, how we misunderstand addiction, and how countries that have ended their war on drugs have been impacted. We have a lot of misconceptions about drug use. A LOT.

The start of the war on drugs, according to the book, revolved around three people: Harry Anslinger, Billie Holiday, and Arnold Rothstein.

According to the author, "the main reason given for banning drugs - the reason obsessing the men who launched this war - was that blacks, Mexicans, and Chinese were using these chemicals, forgetting their place, and menacing white people." Black people were public enemy #1 and the chief users of dangerous substances according to Harry. Ironically his agents used drugs in tandem with those they were trying to incriminate and also spiked innocent people's drinks with drugs for their own purposes. Not the best bunch. Apparently they could use drugs and be stand up citizens because they were doing it in order to arrest others who did it. Unsurprisingly they didn't target white drug users. So, much of the war on drugs was about racism.

But racism wasn't even all of it. As throughout history, power played a crucial role in the war on drugs.

Turns out, Harry Anslinger's officers supported the war on drugs because they were being paid off by the mafia. While there has been no evidence of Anslinger's involvement in the mafia plots and his motives were likely pure fanaticism, his officers were involved. The mafia wanted sole control of the drug trade because they could increase the cost of drugs by a thousand percent if they were made illegal. The mafia charged a dollar for morphine that was produced at two cents at the time. That's 50 times the cost. Coincidentally, here is an article from The National Library of Medicine about medical companies being able to charge 50 times the cost of life-saving medicine.

A doctor named Henry Williams, who once stated that people who used drugs were valueless, was the one who realized what was going on. He started to investigate Harry Anslinger when his brother was arrested for prescribing opiates, a legal prescription at the time, along with 20,000 other doctors doing the same. 95% of those doctors were convicted for doing something legal. Henry was upset not only because his brother was arrested, but because morphine at the time was used routinely at all levels of society in small doses. The good news was that in his search for truth, Henry eventually repented from his views on drug users, eventually making large efforts to help them. The bad news is that his personal investigation concluded that not only was the war on drugs creating an illegal smuggling ring, but it also made those who used the drugs unable to afford them, leading them to be involved in other criminal activities. "'The United States government, as represented by its anti-drug officers,' Henry explained, had just become 'the greatest and most potent maker of criminals in any recent century.'" The war on drugs created the dangerous culture surrounding drug use by making it illegal and unaffordable. Previous to banning drugs, not only were drugs not a big deal, but people didn't have to commit crimes to get them.

Anslinger then used the wave of fear around Communism to claim that China was secretly trying to undermine America's society by infusing it with drugs, a claim that his agents negated but Anslinger ignored. Many countries disagreed and refused to ban substances until Anslinger's agents started threatening economic repercussions and the cessation of trade with America. Anslinger's dogmatic and completely delusional perspectives almost single-handedly pushed the world to ban drugs along with the United States. I should mention that he was committed to a mental institution after he started claiming that addiction was contagious the same way a virus is, his paranoia having reached unprecedented levels.

When confronted with facts that went against his ideas, Anslinger would go on the attack and, when disproven, would go on diatribes attacking the characters of the doctors that challenged him. One of the doctors that refuted him said that Anslinger "[has] led this country to treat scientific questions the way such matters were handled in the Middle Ages."

There are many fallacies about drug use according to studies on drugs. Let me go over a few of them mentioned:

Want to know another fallacy? Only humans seek drugs. Apparently many animals and insects, when given the option, seek drugs. The book says that water buffalo in Vietnam typically don't eat the opium plants, but after they were traumatized, they would eat the opium plants. Consider how this same principle applies to humans. Trauma among addicts is rampant. Addiction isn't primarily biological, it's primarily psychological. Addicts need treatment, not punishment. They need community, not isolation. They need purpose, not more trauma.

Let's talk about other countries' experience with changing their perception and treatment of drug use and see what happened.

John Marks, a doctor in Liverpool, Britain, set out to study what worked for an anti-drug campaign directed by Margaret Thatcher. He noticed that most people who used heroin were normal, law abiding citizens when they were prescribed heroin from a clinic as opposed to buying heroin off the streets which can be mixed with all kinds of substances including brick dust, coffee, bleach crystals, or anything else they feel like throwing in there. Turns out, pure heroin doesn't destroy the body like we are told. More importantly though, those that received heroin from a clinic led normal, stable lives with jobs and families and everything. John decided to experiment with this further and offered heroin as a prescription to see if street addicts could also maintain a normal life. Turns out they can. Oh, and crime in the area fell 93%.

The next logical fallacy that most people fall into is the slippery slope fallacy, the idea that if drug use remains unchecked, then users will use it forever. Also incorrect. John found that "most addicts simply stopped of their own accord. They mature out of addiction... possibly because the stresses and strains of life are becoming stabilized for them and because the major challenges or adulthood have passed.'" "They usually do so after around ten years of use." So most drug users don't use forever and naturally phase out of use.

Wouldn't drug users use as much as humanly possible if it's freely available? Also no. They often do ask for more to start, but "within a few months, most addicts stop asking for more and choose, of their own free will, to stabilize their doses. After that, 'most of them want to go always down.'" A similar study in Switzerland showed that the average time that addicts remained in a free access program was three years with only 15% of users using it everyday after the three years elapsed. Turns out that most drug users stop using when it's legalized. Also HIV transference among drug users fell from 68% of new infections to about 5%. Oh, and crime fell dramatically yet again.

Wouldn't everyone become an addict if everyone has access to drugs? Nope. Ironically, drug use fell when it became widely available. The prevalence of heroin users went from 207.54 drug users per 100,000 people to 15.83. Free access dramatically decreased drug use. The theory to explain this is that addicts try to make money to fuel their addiction and, therefore, cut the drugs they have with other substances and try to sell it to others. If drugs are available to everyone, they don't need to try and make a quick buck by convincing others to buy drugs from them. Addicts were "94.7 percent less likely to sell drugs than before their treatment." Also, the statistics about getting addicted are skewed in the public eye. Carl Heart at Columbia University studied people who have tried crack and the percentage that became addicted, a drug whose reputation for abuse precedes it. Only 20% of users ever became addicted. That's for crack. Most other drugs are far less addictive.

A fiscally conservative person may think, "well I don't want to pay for drug users to get high." Guess what? It's actually cheaper than trying to prevent the crimes occurring from banning their use. The study in Switzerland found: "The program costs thirty-five Swiss francs per patient per day, but it spares the taxpayer from having to spend forty-four francs a day arresting, trying, and convicting the drug user. So when people ask, 'Why should I pay for this?' the pragmatic Swiss answer is: This doesn't cost you money. It saves you money." You'd be paying more money for drug users to not get high and increase crime in your area as a result. It's both financially beneficial and socially beneficial. Plus it's humanitarian as less people are dying and, instead, becoming productive members of society. There are literally zero losses except for one's prejudice and pride at being wrong.

The experiment in Liverpool expanded due to its success. Want to guess what happened? Two things.

First, the crime rate decreased yet again. Shoplifting experienced such a massive decrease that department chains openly thanked the policy and sponsored a world conference on treating addiction. Things were going great.

Second, America stepped in and told Britain to stop giving out drugs legally. They stopped.

What would happen if drugs were decriminalized entirely? Portugal gives us the answer. The use of drugs barely increased from 3.4% to 3.7% of the population. Legalization almost didn't change the population's drug habits at all. Problematic drug users went down from 100,000 to 50,000 meaning the amount of addicts decreased by half. HIV from drug use fell from 52% to 20%. The countries that continue the drug war haven't seen decreases in drug users, they've seen increases. In America, drug use has increased by quite a bit as this article shows. Know what's also interesting? For Portugal, both of the two conservative parties and two liberal parties completely agree on keeping things the same. They aren't interested in going back to criminalizing drugs because of the good results and statistics. It's just science. The Dutch also legalized weed but their citizens still use less on average than Americans; 5% compared to 6.3%. 21% of Dutch teenagers have tried marijuana while 45% of American teenagers have. How is it that more teenagers in America tried a substance that's illegal than teenagers who have legal access? Legalization actually makes access harder because access is regulated.

Here are some more facts for you. The United States alone spends 41 billion per year on legal actions to arrest and jail users. If drugs were taxed at the same rate as other legal drugs, namely alcohol and tobacco, it's estimated that it would make 46.7 billion a year. So basically we could have 87.8 billion dollars each year to help addicts rather than punish them which doesn't even include all of the various statistical benefits we've already given about decreased use, crime rates, HIV rates, and saving lives.

Here are the author's arguments for legalization in his own words:

One last point: The drugs we have legalized, alcohol and tobacco, are two of the most deadly drugs on Earth. Both have been proven to be extremely harmful and addictive yet they're legal. In a study by Britain's leading medical journal to determine how likely a drug is to harm you as well as how likely that drug is to make you harm others, alcohol was #1 with a score of 77 (not sure how that was determined). It was followed by heroin at 55, crack at 54, and meth at 32. Alcohol was rated at 2x more harmful than meth, both to oneself and others, yet we are scared of meth? How does it make sense to legalize those and not drugs that are scientifically less harmful such as weed? The logic really isn't adding up for any of our drug policies in the United States.