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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2015

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction and Part 1, Chapters 1-4

Part 2, Chapters 5-7

Part 3, Chapters 8-10

Part 4, Chapters 11-13

Part 5, Chapter 14-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

Reform: Drug Laws

Reform is an overarching theme throughout Chasing the Scream. A broad term, reform typically means to make changes within an institution or practice. In the book, reform applies solely to laws surrounding drug regulation. The first example is in Chapters 5 and 6, in which two combatants on the drug war’s front lines both shift their focus to activism to fight for changes in the law. Chino Hardin was a drug dealer and gang leader but later began organizing a community of activists to apply pressure for the closure of child prisons like the one where he was incarcerated years before. Leigh Maddox was a Baltimore police captain who enthusiastically supported the drug war but quit the force after realizing that marijuana laws are racially biased and the current system of prohibition only leads to additional violence and more drug dealers on the streets. Hari argues that she “began to see that her work in fact kept them in business and made them more deadly” (93). After quitting police work, Maddox became an attorney and now works to have marijuana arrests expunged from offenders’ records.

The theme of reform is central throughout the final few chapters of Chasing the Scream. These chapters detail various changes to drug laws that around the world. Chapter 14 tells the story of Bud Osborn, a poet and heroin addict who founded Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), a group dedicated to preventing overdose deaths. While VANDU did not change laws in terms of legalization, it was successful in opening a medically supervised safe injection site in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver and drastically lowering overdose deaths. Of VANDU’s reform movement, Hari writes that “when you are confronted with historical forces that seem vastly bigger than you—like a war on your people that has lasted nearly a hundred years—you have two choices. You can accept it as your fate and try to adjust to being a pinball being whacked around a table by the powerful. Or you can band together with other people to become a historical force yourself—one that will eventually overwhelm the forces ranged against you” (200).

Over the last 25 years, several reforms around the world have changed drug laws. When Ruth Dreifuss was serving as the first female president of Switzerland in the late 1990s, she pioneered a program that allowed addicts a legal prescription for heroin, while also ensuring that they attempted recovery through other routes. Hari argues that “she would become the first president in the world since the 1930s who decided to run not away from drug reform, but toward it” (217). The reform in Portugal in 2001 went further than anyone could have imagined. The country decided to decriminalize all drugs entirely. The decision came about because of the depth of Portugal’s addiction problem: One of every 100 citizens had become a criminal based on existing drug laws. Hari argues that “nothing has to stay the same. If a dogma is not working, no matter how strong and immovable it seems, you can cast it aside and start anew” (235).

The Complexities of Addiction

Another primary theme in Chasing the Scream is addiction. In the book’s introduction, Hari acknowledges that some of the people closest to him are addicted to drugs, and he has concerns that he has become addicted to stimulants himself. He explains that he has been “oddly drawn to addicts and recovering addicts” but also argues that “drug addiction is not what we have been told it is” (3). Hari’s internal conflict of feeling simultaneously repulsed and sympathetic toward addicts is a common by-product of the war on drugs. He explains that all around the world, the drug war taught us to treat addicts as criminals, shame them, and persuade them to stop, even as we learned that addiction is far more complex than we thought. In the first half of the book, Hari explores how criminal drug dealers have exploited addiction, while the second half focuses on broad questions about what addiction really is and what causes it.

In Chapter 12, Hari explains that his beliefs about addiction were the common ones throughout the world. He explains these beliefs as the pharmaceutical theory of addiction, which states that “some substances are so chemically powerful that if you use them enough, they will hijack your brain” (155). In other words, addiction “is the result of repeated exposure certain very powerful chemicals” (155). The aspect of this theory which does not seem to make sense is why most patients who are prescribed powerful opiates after surgery or injuries quit with no problem even after extended use. Gabor Maté, a doctor who works with addicts in the Downtown Eastside area of Vancouver, has developed a theory that answers this question. Based on his decades of research, Maté has made the case that previous trauma plays a major role in addiction. He argues that “nothing is addictive in itself. It’s always a combination of a potentially addictive substance or behavior and a susceptible individual” (159). Hari explains that Maté’s theory “means that child abuse is as likely to cause drug addiction as obesity is to cause heart disease” (160).

The notion that drug addiction is the result of factors other than just chemicals directly contradicts much of what the war on drugs has been about—and should thus lead to new ideas concerning prohibition. The theme of addiction is the central focus in Chapter 13 as well, which introduces Bruce Alexander, a Canadian psychologist. Alexander conducted an experiment in the early 1970s that seemed to refute the entire basis for the pharmaceutical theory of addiction. Alexander placed multiple rats together in a cage, along with food and activities. The rats received the option of water spiked with morphine or regular water, and they almost always rejected the morphine. However, rats isolated in cages alone did just the opposite. The experiment became known as Rat Park, and its conclusion was that social factors such as environment and bonding have a significant influence on addiction. Hari argues that “addiction is adaptation. It’s not you—it’s the cage you live in” (172).

The Role of Race in Drug Prohibition

Race is a secondary theme in Chasing the Scream, but it has played a major role in drug prohibition throughout history. Hari details in Chapter 1 how the war on drugs began after the passage of the Harrison Act in 1914 and how its architect, Harry Anslinger, used race as a fear tactic to galvanize public support for prohibition. When Anslinger became the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930, one of his first moves was to add marijuana to the banned list along with the narcotics that the Harrison Act covered. This move occurred even though Anslinger previously reached the conclusion that marijuana was not addictive and did not lead to violent crime. Hari argues that Anslinger’s opinion changed because “he believed the two most feared groups in the United States—Mexican immigrants and African Americans—were taking the drug much more than white people” (15). In his propaganda campaign against marijuana, Anslinger resorted to racist fears of miscegenation, warning that the drug made Black people “forget the appropriate racial barriers—and unleashed their lust for white women” (17).

Anslinger’s statements were shocking even by most standards in the 1930s, but they were effective in establishing total drug prohibition as the law of the land. Hari points out that today’s reasonable arguments in support of drug prohibition were not the ones in use when the drug war began. The primary reasons that authorities offered for drug prohibition focused on race. Hari describes the racial fears about Asian immigrants and opium that led to the passage of Harrison Act as the “Yellow Peril.” A little more than a decade later, fears about Mexican immigrants, African Americans, and marijuana led to its inclusion on the banned list. Hari refers to fear tactics like these as “race panic” yet points out that “Harry Anslinger did not create these underlying trends. His genius wasn’t for invention: it was for presenting his agents as the hand that would steady all these cultural tremblings” (28).

The theme of race is also a central focus in Chapter 6. The chapter tells the story of Leigh Maddox, a Baltimore police officer who reached the rank of captain. Maddox became a cop after gang members murdered her closest friend and for many years as an officer enthusiastically supported the war on drugs. In fact, she used to instruct her officers to make as many drug arrests as they could regardless of the circumstances. However, after reflecting on how busting drug dealers only created more drug dealers and realizing that the racial makeup of busted drug dealers was racially biased, Maddox quit the force. As Hari explains, she knew that drug use was evenly dispersed among racial groups and that statistics showed only 19% of drug dealers were African American, yet they made up 64% of the arrests for it. Hari argues that “it’s easy to assume Harry Anslinger’s prejudices at the birth of the drug war were just a product of their time, long since discarded. Leigh was discovering they are not. The race panics that drove the early drug war have not burned out” (93).