by Johann Hari
I kept returning to the UN pledge to build a drug-free world. There was one fact, above all others, that I kept placing next to it in my mind. It is a fact that seems at first glance both obvious and instinctively wrong. Only 10 percent9 of drug users have a problem with their substance. Some 90 percent of people who use a drug—the overwhelming majority—are not harmed by it. This figure comes not from a pro-legalization group, but from the United Nations Office on Drug Control, the global coordinator of the drug war. Even William Bennett,10 the most aggressive drug czar in U.S. history, admits: “Non-addicted users still comprise the vast bulk of our drug-involved population.”
This is hard to dispute, yet hard to absorb. If we think about people we know, it seems about right—only a small minority of my friends who drink become alcoholics, and only a small minority of the people I know who use drugs on a night out have become addicts.
But if you think about how we are trained to think about drugs, this seems instinctively wrong, even dangerous. All we see in the public sphere are the casualties. The unharmed 90 percent use in private, and we rarely hear about it or see it. The damaged 10 percent, by contrast, are the only people we ever see using drugs out on the streets. The result is that the harmed 10 percent make up 100 percent of the official picture. It is as if our only picture of drinkers were a homeless person lying in a gutter11 necking neat gin. This impression is then reinforced with the full power of the state. For example, in 1995, the World Health Organization12 (WHO) conducted a massive scientific study of cocaine and its effects. They discovered that “experimental and occasional use are by far the most common types of use, and compulsive/dysfunctional [use] is far less common.” The U.S. government threatened to cut off funding to the WHO unless they suppressed the report. It has never been published; we know what it says only because it was leaked.
As I write this, I feel uncomfortable. The 10 percent who are harmed are most vivid to me—they are some of the people I love most. And there is another, more complex reason why I feel awkward writing about this. For anybody who suspects that we need to reform the drug laws, there is an easier argument to make, and a harder argument to make.
The easier argument is to say that we all agree drugs are bad—it’s just that drug prohibition is even worse. I have made this argument in debates in the past. Prohibition, I said, doesn’t stop the problem, it simply piles another series of disasters onto the already-existing disaster of drug use. In this argument, we are all antidrug. The only difference is between prohibitionists who believe the tragedy of drug use can be dealt with by more jail cells in California and more military jeeps on the streets of Juárez, and the reformers who believe the tragedy of drug use can be dealt by moving those funds to educate kids and treat addicts.
There’s a lot of truth in this argument. It is where my instincts lie. But—as I try to think through this problem—I have to admit it is only a partial truth.
Here, I think, is the harder, more honest argument. Some drug use causes horrible harm, as I know very well, but the overwhelming majority of people who use prohibited drugs do it because they get something good out of it—a fun night out dancing, the ability to meet a deadline, the chance of a good night’s sleep, or insights into parts of their brain they couldn’t get to on their own. For them, it’s a positive experience, one that makes their lives better. That’s why so many of them choose it. They are not suffering from false consciousness, or hubris. They don’t need to be stopped from harming themselves, because they are not harming themselves. As the American writer Nick Gillespie puts it: “Far from our drugs controlling us, by and large we control our drugs; as with alcohol, the primary motivation is to enjoy ourselves, not to destroy ourselves . . . There is such a thing as responsible drug use, and it is the norm, not the exception.”13
So, although it is against my instincts, I realized I couldn’t give an honest account of drug use in this book if I talked only about the harm it causes. If I’m serious about this subject, I also have to look at how drug use is deeply widespread—and mostly positive.
Professor Siegel’s story of buzzing cows and tripping bees is, he believes, a story about us. We are an animal species. As soon as plants began to be eaten by animals for the first time—way back in prehistory, before the first human took his first steps—the plants evolved chemicals to protect themselves from being devoured and destroyed. But these chemicals could, it soon turned out, produce strange effects. In some cases, instead of poisoning the plant’s predators, they—quite by accident—altered their consciousness. This is when the pleasure of getting wasted14 enters history.
All human children experience the impulse early on: it’s why when you were little you would spin around and around, or hold your breath to get a head rush.15 You knew it would make you sick, but your desire to change your consciousness a little—to experience a new and unfamiliar rush—outweighed your aversion to nausea.
There has never been a society in which humans didn’t serially seek out these sensations. High in the Andes16 in 2000 B.C., they were making pipes through which they smoked hallucinogenic herbs. Ovid said drug-induced ecstasy was a divine gift. The Chinese were cultivating opium by A.D. 700. Hallucinogens and chemicals caused by burning cannabis were found in clay pipe fragments from William Shakespeare’s house.17 George Washington18 insisted that American soldiers be given whiskey every day as part of their rations.
“The ubiquity19 of drug use is so striking,” the physician Andrew Weil concludes, that “it must represent a basic human appetite.” Professor Siegel claims the desire to alter our consciousness is “the fourth drive”20 in all human minds, alongside the desire to eat, drink, and have sex—and it is “biologically inevitable.” It provides us with moments of release and relief.
Thousands of people were streaming in to a ten-day festival in September where they were planning—after a long burst of hard work—to find some chemical release, relaxation, and revelry. They found drugs passed around the crowd freely, to anybody who wanted them. Everyone who took them soon felt an incredible surge of ecstasy. Then came the vivid, startling hallucinations. You suddenly felt, as one user put it, something that was “new, astonishing,21 irrational to rational cognition.”
Some people came back every year because they loved this experience so much. As the crowd thronged and yelled and sang, it became clear it was an extraordinary mix of human beings. There were farmers who had just finished their harvest, and some of the biggest celebrities around. Their names—over the years—included Sophocles, Aristotle,22 Plato, and Cicero.
The annual ritual23 in the Temple at Eleusis, eighteen kilometers northwest of Athens, was a drug party on a vast scale. It happened every year for two thousand years,24 and anybody who spoke the Greek language was free to come. Harry Anslinger said that drug use represents “nothing less than25 an assault on the foundations of Western civilization,” but here, at the actual foundations of Western civilization, drug use was ritualized and celebrated.
I first discovered this fact by reading the work of the British critic Stuart Walton in a brilliant book called Out of It, and then I followed up with some of his sources, which include the work of Professor R. Gordon Wasson, Professor Carl Ruck, and other writers.26
Everyone who attended the Eleusinian mysteries was sworn to secrecy about what happened there, so our knowledge is based on scraps of information that were recorded in its final years, as it was being suppressed.27 We do know that a special cup containing a mysterious chemical brew of hallucinogens would be passed around the crowd,28 and a scientific study years later seemed to prove it contained a molecular relative of LSD taken from a fungus that infested cereal crops and caused hallucinations.29 The chemical contents of this cup were carefully guarded for the rest of the year. The drugs were legal—indeed, this drug use was arranged by public officials—and30 regulated. You could use them, but only in the designated temple for those ten days. One day in 415 B.C., a partygoing general named Alcibiades smuggled som
e of the mystery drug out and took it home for his friends to use at their parties. Walton writes: “Caught in possession31 with intent to supply, he was the first drug criminal.”
But while it was a crime away from the Temple and other confined spaces, it was a glory within it. According to these accounts, it was Studio 54 spliced with St. Peter’s Basilica—revelry with religious reverence.
They believed the drugs brought them closer to the gods, or even made it possible for them to become gods themselves. The classicist Dr. D.C.A. Hillman wrote that the “founding fathers” of the Western world
were drug users,32 plain and simple: they grew the stuff, they sold the stuff, and more important, they used the stuff . . . The ancient world didn’t have a Nancy Reagan, it didn’t wage a billion-dollar drug war, it didn’t imprison people who used drugs, and it didn’t embrace sobriety as a virtue. It indulged . . . and from this world in which drugs were a universally accepted part of life sprang art, literature, science, and philosophy . . . The West would not have survived without these so-called junkies and drug dealers.
There was some political grumbling for years that women were behaving too freely during their trances, but this annual festival ended only when the drug party crashed into Christianity. The early Christians wanted there to be one route to ecstasy, and one route only—through prayer to their God. You shouldn’t feel anything that profound or pleasurable except in our ceremonies at our churches. The first tugs towards prohibition were about power, and purity of belief. If you are going to have one God and one Church, you need to stop experiences that make people feel that they can approach God on their own. It is no coincidence that when new drugs come along, humans often use religious words to describe them, like ecstasy. They are often competing for the same brain space—our sense of awe and joy.
So when the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and brought the Empire with him, the rituals at the Temple at Eleusis were doomed. They were branded a cult and shut down by force. The new Christianity would promote wine only in tiny sips.33 Intoxication had to be sparing. This “forcible repression34 by Christianity,” Walton explains, “represents the beginning of systematic repression of the intoxication impulse in the lives of Western citizens.”
Yet in every generation after, some humans would try to rebuild their own Temple at Eleusis—in their own minds, and wherever they could clear a space free of local Anslingers.
Harry Anslinger, it turns out, represented a trend running right back to the ancient world.
When Sigmund Freud first suggested that everybody has elaborate sexual fantasies, that it is as natural as breathing, he was dismissed as a pervert and lunatic. People wanted to believe that sexual fantasy was something that happened in other people—filthy people, dirty people. They took the parts of their subconscious that generated these wet dreams and daydreams and projected them onto somebody else, the depraved people Over There, who had to be stopped. Stuart Walton and the philosopher Terence McKenna both write that we are at this stage with our equally universal desire to seek out altered mental states. McKenna explains: “We are discovering35 that human beings are creatures of chemical habit with the same horrified disbelief as when the Victorians discovered that humans are creatures of sexual fantasy and obsession.”
Just as we are rescuing the sex drive from our subconscious and from shame, so we need to take the intoxication drive out into the open where it can breathe.36 Stuart Walton calls for a whole new field of human knowledge called “intoxicology.”37 He writes: “Intoxication plays,38 or has played, a part in the lives of virtually everybody who has ever lived . . . To seek to deny it is not only futile; it is a dereliction of an entirely constitutive part of who we are.”
After twenty-five years of watching stoned mice, drunken elephants, and tripping mongooses, Ronald K. Siegel tells me he suspects he has learned something about this. “We’re not so different from the other animal life-forms on this planet,” he says.
When he sees people raging against all drug use, he is puzzled. “They’re denying their own chemistry,” he says. “The brain produces endorphins. When does it produce endorphins? In stress, and in pain. What are endorphins? They are morphine-like compounds. It’s a natural occurrence in the brain that makes them feel good . . . People feel euphoric sometimes. These are chemical changes—the same kind of chemical changes, with the same molecular structures, that these plants [we use to make our drugs] are producing . . . We’re all producing the same stuff.”
Indeed, he continues, “the experience you have in orgasm is partially chemical—it’s a drug. So people deny they want this? Come on! . . . It’s fun. It’s enjoyable. And it’s chemical. That’s intoxication.” He seems for a moment to think back over all the animals guzzling drugs he has watched over all these years. “I don’t see,” he says, “any difference in where the chemical came from.”
This is in us. It is in our brains. It is part of who we are.
But this leaves us with another mystery. If the drive to get intoxicated is in all of us, and if 90 percent of people can use drugs without becoming addicted, what is happening with the 10 percent who can’t? What is different about them? It is a question I had been circling all my life. As I looked for experts who might be able to answer this question, I discovered that a disproportionate number of them seemed to be clustered together—in just a few blocks of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, in Canada.
Chapter 12
Terminal City
Ever since I was a child, I have been asking myself: What causes addiction? What is addiction? I had heard many explanations over the years. It’s a moral failing. It’s a disease. It’s carried in the genes. I believed this was, ultimately, a mystery—but when I arrived in Canada, I learned that a small band of dissident scientists has been uncovering the answers to my questions, almost unnoticed, for several decades now.
Their findings were so radically different from anything I had been told before that it took some time to absorb what they were really saying.
The story of how they came to their discoveries began in the last days of the Holocaust, when a Jewish mother smuggled her baby out of a ghetto.
Judith Lovi awoke from a dream that her parents were being murdered, to find that her breast milk had dried up. Her four-month-old baby, Gabor, was crying. He cried all the time. She had grown up as the daughter of a wealthy doctor, but now she was alone, crammed into a building with over a thousand people, all infested with lice, and there was shit smeared on the floor because the toilets were overflowing.
She knew she was not allowed out onto the streets until the afternoon, because when you were a Jew in the Budapest ghetto in 1944, walking out your door any earlier could get you shot. By then, the only milk1 she could buy for her baby would be sour.
She had married Andor just a few months ago, but now he was gone. He had been taken as a forced laborer. He might have been digging ditches for the Hungarian army or he might have been dead. She had no way of knowing. The only reason she woke up in the morning—the only reason she went on—was to look after her son, in the hope she could somehow get him out. But she doubted it. She believed that, at the age of twenty-four, she was going to be killed, along with her child.
Judith was right about her parents: at just about that time, they were being murdered. The last time she had seen them was on a train platform in Budapest.2 She had wanted to go back to their town with them, but her father told her, by some instinct, not to leave the city. All around them, 80 percent of the country’s Jews were being rounded up and exterminated with remarkable efficiency. Her parents and sister were seized after they got home and sent to Auschwitz. As the Red Army troops began to besiege Budapest, the Nazis started taking Jews from the ghetto down to the river and shooting them outright.
Judith called the doctor because she was afraid that Gabor’s endless crying meant he was sick. “I’ll come,3 of course,” the doctor told her, “but I should tell you—all my Jewish babies are crying
.”
Many years and many thousands of miles from there, the memory of these infant screams would help Gabor—once he had become a doctor himself—to make a crucial discovery about the nature of addiction. He asked himself: How did the Jewish babies know they were in terrible danger? Why did they scream?
One day, Judith noticed that another woman in the ghetto was being visited by a Christian friend. She thrust Gabor at him and begged: Get him out of here. She gave this anonymous Christian the address of a place outside the ghetto where her friend was hiding, and she begged him to take her child there.
Without her baby, Judith was entirely alone, but she believed he, at least, would survive. Three weeks later, the Russian army liberated Budapest from the Nazis, and she quickly reclaimed her child. A year after that, she found Andor, weighing just ninety pounds and wearing a German army uniform because it was the only clothing4 he could find. But it turned out his experience—of profound danger, of separation from his mother at a crucial moment—shaped the brain of baby Gabor in ways that would affect him for the rest of his life.
When Gabor was fifteen, his family finally made it out of Europe, to Vancouver, the farthest dot on the map of distant North America. There, Gabor was going to find a different kind of ghetto—and in it, two people who, along with him, would begin to solve the mystery of how you make an addict.
I knew what caused addiction before I even left London. We all do. As a culture, we have a story about how addiction works, and it’s a good one. It says that some substances are so chemically powerful that if you use them enough, they will hijack your brain. They will change your neurochemistry. They will give you a brain disease. After that, you will need the drug physically. So if you or I or the next ten people you pass on the street were to use an addictive drug every day for the next month, on day thirty, we’d all be addicts. Addiction, then, is the result of repeated exposure to certain very powerful chemicals.