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Chapter 16
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Chasing the Scream, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Drug Legalization and U.S. Policy
Addiction and Human Connection
Prohibition and the Cycle of Violence
Stories and Human Psychology
Summary
Analysis
When Hari starts his research, Portugal has the world’s most progressive drug laws. But then, the tiny country of Uruguay and two U.S. states fully legalize cannabis for the first time. Hari visits Uruguay and interviews its eccentric president, José Mujica, to understand the effects of legalization. During Uruguay’s dictatorship, Mujica spent more than two years imprisoned at the bottom of a well. He coped by talking to himself and befriending frogs and insects.
Hari returns to the Americas to look at how a select few governments have gone even further than Portugal, by legalizing marijuana and creating regulated markets for its sale. While none of these governments have established public health programs as comprehensive or successful as Portugal’s, they do show how better drug policy can address the supply side of the equation as well as the demand side.
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After his father’s death, Mujica spent his childhood selling flowers in Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo. When he was in university, the country fell into a deep crisis, and the army started planning to overthrow the government. Mujica and his wife joined a guerilla group that gave food and weapons to the poor. The police shot him, then imprisoned and tortured him and his wife until the dictatorship fell 13 years later.
Mujica’s remarkable backstory shows that, like all the other drug reformers Hari has profiled so far, he was a dreamer and an underdog before he rose to power and changed the future of drug policy forever.
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In 2009, Mujica was elected president. But instead of embracing the presidential lifestyle, he continued living on his farm, donated most of his salary to the poor, and took the bus to work. He legalized abortion, same-sex marriage, and marijuana. Drug cartels were eyeing Uruguay as part of a potential trafficking route to Europe. Mujica’s team studied the evidence and realized that the best way to stop the cartels would be to legalize drugs. But he had to overcome the two factors that had always made legalization impossible: U.S. influence and popular opposition. Fortunately, U.S. states were already legalizing marijuana, and Mujica quickly convinced the Uruguayan public to back legalization, too.
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The most famous drug legalization activist in history was Timothy Leary, the militant Harvard professor who famously promoted using drugs like LSD and defying social norms during the 1960s counterculture movement. But Mujica consulted with the English scientists Danny Kushlick and Steve Rolles, who wanted to legalize drugs for the opposite reasons as Leary: to prevent young people from using them and maintain political stability. During his reporting career, Hari befriended them.
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Kushlick and Rolles believe that modern societies already have the framework they need to legalize drugs. They point out that tobacco and alcohol were once prohibited around the world, until governments realized that legalization is safer. Today, tobacco is legal, but modern societies still view smoking as harmful and unpleasant. This social pressure has greatly reduced tobacco use in the last half-century. Kushlick and Rolles suggest treating less harmful drugs, like marijuana, the same way as alcohol and tobacco. Meanwhile, they suggest integrating more harmful drugs, like heroin, into the existing medical prescription system.
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Under legalization, Kushlick and Rolles suggest, users would get pure drugs from doctors, pharmacists, and regulated stores—rather than adulterated drugs from dangerous criminal gangs. Just like the end of Prohibition in the 1930s U.S., drug legalization would dramatically reduce crime and violence. Kushlick calls legalization “a drama reduction program” because the drug trade would become, above all, boring and tedious. The difference between decriminalization and true legalization is whether the government regulates the supply of drugs.
Understandably, many people fear that legalization will increase drug use—which could increase addiction, overdoses, and young people’s risk of using drugs. Hari discovers that the scientific evidence on this question is mixed. For instance, when the Netherlands decriminalized marijuana, drug-use rates didn’t increase. But when it allowed cafés to sell marijuana, use did significantly increase, including among young people. However, marijuana use is still less common in the Netherlands than in the U.S. or in the EU as a whole. Moreover, many people switched from alcohol to marijuana, so when alcohol use is included, legalization actually reduced overall drug use in the Netherlands.
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On the other hand, the available evidence strongly suggests that in the U.S., Prohibition decreased both casual drinking and serious alcoholism by 10 to 20 percent. Put simply, many people prefer not to break the law, and Prohibition made it much harder to find alcohol. Hari argues that drug reformers must admit that legalization will probably cause “a modest but real increase in [drug] use.”
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While legalization may increase drug use in general, it will dramatically reduce the harm associated with drug use—which is more important. First, legalization will help teenagers. Years ago, when a 12-year-old asked him for help buying liquor, the undercover cop Fred Martens realized that it’s much easier for American kids to get marijuana, pills, and heroin than liquor because the U.S. strictly regulates alcohol vendors. Legalization will put the same requirements on other drugs, and therefore dissuade underage people from using them.
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Next, the evidence is less conclusive about whether legalization will reduce drug addiction. Alcohol Prohibition in the U.S. suggests that it won’t, while Portugal’s experience suggests that it will. In particular, Portugal shows that investing in effective treatment programs is the key to reducing long-term addiction.
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Finally, the evidence from Vancouver and Geneva suggests that legalization will also dramatically reduce overdoses, for two reasons. First, it will give users access to unadulterated drugs, so they actually know what dose they are taking. Second, the iron law of prohibition suggests that lower-dose drugs will be more available and more popular after legalization.
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Yet Hari still struggles to convince himself that all drugs should be fully legalized. What about powerful drugs like meth and crack? Should they be openly available, and would doctors ever prescribe them? While these substances only represent five percent of the overall illegal drug market, they’re still controversial. Some drug reformers think they should remain banned, while others believe that people should have the right to take any drug they want, even if it harms them. And others propose that these drugs should only be available in regulated clinics, like the safe injection sites in Vancouver and Switzerland.
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But Hari still worries about crack and meth. As a child, he learned that crack and meth are so powerful that nearly everyone who uses them becomes an addict. However, the pioneering drug researcher Dr. Carl Hart has found that only a minority of crack and meth users—about 20 percent—ever become addicted. Hari scarcely believes this when Hart first tells him. But later, he remembers that trauma and isolation are much more responsible for addiction than the chemical hook in drugs. Whereas the drug war spreads trauma and isolation in order to fight the chemical hook, legalization exposes a few more people to the chemical hook in order to reduce trauma and isolation.
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Hari concludes that readers should assess their values and “draw up a balance sheet” to decide whether to support legalization. After three years of research, he has one very good evidence-based argument against legalization: it will modestly increase drug use. Meanwhile, there are several good evidence-based arguments for legalization. It will crush drug gangs around the world, which will significantly reduce violence. It will make it harder for teenagers to access drugs, it will reduce overdoses, and it will free up resources for addiction treatment programs. Perhaps most importantly, it will turn addicts and prisoners into productive members of society. Of course, the pros and cons might vary for different drugs.
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Following Kushlick and Rolles’s recommendations, Mujica’s government made it legal for Uruguayans over 21 to buy marijuana in pharmacies and grow it in their homes. This policy isn’t a radical historical anomaly—rather, drug prohibition is the anomaly. In the future, Hari hopes, people will learn to view prohibition as a century-long failed experiment. Hari recalls his visit to President Mujica’s shack on the outskirts of Montevideo. Mujica and his wife both tell Hari that by owning fewer material things, people can learn to focus on what really matters: winning freedom for themselves and others.
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