Jabberwocky
Frumious Bandersnatch
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On July 9, 2001, the British newsweekly New Statesman published a column by a 22-year-old named Johann Hari titled “Just You Wait Until I Grow Up.” It began with Hari’s announcement that he’d celebrated his recent graduation from Cambridge University “with a few tabs of Ecstasy and the odd line of coke.” After that casual boast, Hari argued that the legalization of narcotics was not only inevitable but would save lives, create a more just society and help rectify “the disengagement of young people from politics.”
Less than two years after that essay appeared, Hari was hired as a columnist for The Independent, and drugs and drug policy were subjects he returned to repeatedly as he ascended to the upper ranks of British political punditry. Around the time he won the prestigious Orwell Prize for political journalism, in 2008, Hari was also filing regular dispatches for The Huffington Post, making him one of the rare political writers with followers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Then, in the summer of 2011, it all came crashing down. First, Hari was caught inserting quotations into his interviews from his sources’ books and their interviews with other journalists. Then, he was accused of inventing quotes in one of his award-winning stories. Finally, he copped to using a pseudonym — “David r from Meth Productions” — to lionize himself and trash his critics on Wikipedia.
In the three years since then, Hari has mostly stayed silent — but, as he makes clear when describing the international travel he undertook while working on “Chasing the Scream,” he has not been idle. The genesis of this project, he explains early on, can be found in his personal experiences with drugs and drug addiction, including a relative’s bottoming out on cocaine, an ex-boyfriend trading his heroin addiction for a crack habit, and Hari’s own propensity for gobbling “fistfuls of fat white narcolepsy pills” to help him write. “I had been taught how to respond — by my government, and by my culture — when you find yourself in this situation,” he writes. “It is with a war.” In an effort to find out where this war began, and to try to figure out when and how it will end, Hari embarks on a voyage of discovery that takes him across nine countries and 30,000 miles.
“Chasing the Scream” begins with mini-profiles of three Americans Hari views as archetypes for the modern-day war on drugs: Harry Anslinger, the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962; Arnold Rothstein, a Jewish gangster in New York City in the 1920s; and Billie Holiday, the transcendent jazz singer who died in 1959 in a hospital room that had recently been raided by Anslinger’s agents. The conclusions Hari draws from these sections often feel forced: In the pages to come, law enforcement officers are invariably described as Anslinger’s descendants, and murderous drug dealers are time and again compared to Rothstein. Still, Anslinger, Rothstein and Holiday serve as potent examples supporting Hari’s central theses: that the racism exhibited in the war on drugs was a primary factor in its founding; that the world’s default approach to drug use and abuse was put in place without regard for evidence or logic; and that the people who profit most from drug criminalization are criminals.
Hari is on surer footing when he writes about current events, and the most powerful parts of the book are his vivid sketches of combatants in the drug trade. Hari’s empathy and keen eye for detail bring a disparate group of characters to life, including a former drug dealer and gang leader from Brooklyn transitioning from living as a woman to living as a man, and a teenager in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, who dresses up as an angel to highlight the savage butchery that has made that border city one of the most dangerous places on earth. It’s a testament to Hari’s skill as a writer that the most discomposing portrayal is of Marcia Powell, a mentally ill drug addict whom he never had the chance to meet. On May 19, 2009, while in the custody of the Arizona Department of Corrections, Powell was placed in an outdoor, uncovered cage in 106-degree heat. She remained there for more than four hours. Hari describes what happened next: “After the guards finally called an ambulance, the paramedics tried to take her temperature. Their thermometers only go to 108 degrees; she was that hot, or hotter still. Her internal organs had cooked, as if in an oven. . . . The autopsy found that her body was badly burned. Her eyeballs were, it was later explained, ‘as dry as parchment.’ ”
The second half of “Chasing the Scream” is largely made up of Hari’s attempts to identify the causes of and most effective treatments for drug addiction. Unfortunately, his misunderstanding of some of the basic principles of scientific research — that anecdotes are not data; that a conclusion is not a fact — transforms what had been an affecting jeremiad into a partisan polemic.
The first tip-off that Hari might be in over his head comes when he describes how “a small band of dissident scientists” had uncovered the answers he was looking for after working “almost unnoticed, for several decades.” Hari starts with Gabor Mate, a Hungarian-born Canadian physician whose theories about how the roots of addiction (and lots of other things to boot) can almost always be found in childhood trauma are, in fact, quite well known. To support his portrayal of Mate as a fringe renegade, Hari acts as if a rigid, deterministic model of addiction as a purely physical disease is almost universally accepted; if anything, the opposite is true. Even more problematic is Hari’s wholesale acceptance of Mate’s reductionistic approach when, in fact, there’s a significant body of work demonstrating its shortcomings.
The next researcher to benefit from Hari’s credulousness is Bruce Alexander, a Canadian psychologist who believes that drugs are not the cause of drug addiction. Alexander is best known for his “Rat Park” experiments in the 1970s, which were designed to demonstrate that rats in stimulating, social environments would not become addicted to morphine while rats in cramped, metal cages would. Hari explains why Alexander’s views have not been universally embraced by making the preposterous assertion that “when we think about recovery from addiction, we see it through only one lens — the individual.”
A few pages later, Hari is talking to a Welsh psychiatrist named John Marks, who is a proponent of providing prescription narcotics to addicts. Hari supports Marks’s claims by referring to “research published in the Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh” but then buries in the notes the fact that it was Marks himself who was the author of that research. Sometimes, Hari’s unquestioning acceptance of what these researchers say is unintentionally comical: At one point, he quotes Alexander explaining that drug addicts don’t get clean because they would rather spend their time doing “exciting things like rob stores and hang around with hookers.”
When Hari was first caught pilfering from other journalists, he wrote that he was “bemused” that anyone felt using quotes given to another reporter amounted to plagiarism. But the only way such a practice would be acceptable is if the reporting component of a journalist’s job amounted to nothing more than stenography. By not looking at the research of Mate, Alexander and Marks through a critical lens, Hari makes it easier for critics to dismiss them outright. That is a shame: While each man pushes his conclusions to extremes unsupported by data, their underlying message — that harm reduction is the most rational and humane approach to drug use and abuse — is, in fact, backed by copious research. Hari might not be passing off other people’s work as his own anymore, but he still seems to be looking for quick fixes.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/books/review/chasing-the-scream-by-johann-hari.html?_r=0
