Chasing the Scream

In the early 1970s, Bruce Alexander was a young professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. He was told by the faculty to teach a course called Social Issues that nobody else wanted to take on. He knew the biggest social issues of the day were the Vietnam War and heroin addiction, and he couldn't go to Saigon, so he headed to the Downtown Eastside. He went wearily, planning to learn just enough to explain it to his students, and no more.

The same parade of addicts that Gabor Matè would see years later passed before him on the streets, and he thought of them just as Batman had taught him to- as zombies whose minds have contracted to the single drooling dimension of their drug.
Since Bruce was trained in family therapy, he figured that the best way to bring himself up to speed would be to provide counselling to addicts at a local treatment agency.

One of his first patients was Father Christmas. Every year this man was employed at the local shopping centre, where he would arrive in a helicopter, climb down a rope ladder, ho-ho-ho at the local children, use some smack backstage, and then promise to grant their wishes. Bruce persuaded for Father Christmas to invite his parents in for family therapy, since behind the beard and reindeer he was only twenty-three. The parents were terrified their son would die; the son felt he couldn't stop. And one day, they were discussing his work as a smacked-out Santa, and they all began to laugh helplessly.
Something about this pricked at Bruce. He had been taught to believe addicts were incapable of self-reflection yet this young man could see the absurdity of his situation clearly. There was a humanity in his laughter that Bruce had not expected to hear.

He continued to interview addicts in depth. Like Matè, he could see that childhood trauma was a crucial factor. But he was also discovering facts that were deeply confusing to him and, at first glance, to all. There were big chunks of time in the 1970s in which the Canadian police managed to blockade the port of Vancouver so successfully that no heroin was getting into the city. We know this because the police tested the 'heroin' being sold on the streets and found it actually contained zero percent of the drug: it was all filler and contaminants. So the war on drugs was, for some significant stretches, being won here.

It is obvious what should have happened during these heroin droughts. The heroin addicts should all have been plunged into physical withdrawal and them weeks later, awoken to find they were free from their physical dependency.
But Bruce was finding something really weird instead. There was no heroin in the city- but the addicts were carrying on almost as before. They were still scrabbling desperately to raise the money to buy this empty cocktail. They weren't in agonizing withdrawal they weren't getting gut-wrenchingly sick. They thought the 'heroin' they were buying was weak, to be sure, but the core of their addiction didn't seem to be affected. Nothing had changed.

Review of Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari. Published by Bloomsbury.

Continue to The Cunning of Bill →