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Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari (Bloomsbury, £18.99)

This book exposes the senseless harms and collateral damage of the so-called “War on Drugs”, from the perspective of a series of tragic and disturbing personal narratives. The lack of evidence of the war having worked, alongside massive evidence of failure, are detailed with a frightening clarity.

As an expert in this field, I was impressed by the details of the historic background to the present situation. I had forgotten how that war in the US in the 1950s turned on its own doctors, even incarcerating some of them because they continued to help their heroin addicts by prescribing opioids so that they could avoid turning to the criminal black market. The UK maintained a very effective prescribing policy for 20 more years, holding the number of heroin addicts down to just a few thousand. Then, when, for petty party-political reasons, this policy was abolished in the early 1970s, addicts turned to the illegal market. This led to a massive increase in heroin use, with 300,000 users by the 1990s. It has been estimated that every heroin user needs to introduce 25 others to addiction to pay for their own habit — a massive selling pyramid, all of which is untaxed and unmonitored.

The interview with Ruth Dreifuss, the former president of Switzerland, lucidly explains how a rational and humane approach can be accepted even in a country seen as traditionally conservative. It should give us all hope that wise leaders with the courage to confront international orthodoxy can make significant changes in policy that benefit all members of society. A lesson for the UK perhaps?

At the core of the book are the personal narrative chapters — stories of individuals who have themselves suffered the harms of the drug war or seen their families ravaged. Some of the tales are so horrific as to be scarcely believable. An American woman murdered in an Arizona prison by a vicariously punitive regime, during a “third-strike” life sentence for possession of minute amounts of cannabis, for example. Or a Mexican mother whose daughter was viciously butchered by a minor player in the terrible cartel war that currently rages across northern Mexico — her story of how she attempts to locate her daughter and bring the murderer to justice is heart-rending and makes real the deep perversion of the police and justice systems that the war on drugs inevitably produces. This collateral damage is the most prominent and saddening aspect of the drugs war.

And why do we have the war in the first place? Hari gets right to the core in his analysis of the founding father of the whole business, the former Federal Bureau of Narcotics head Harry Anslinger. This autocrat came to be the second-most powerful man in the US when he was appointed to lead the special police campaign during the alcohol- prohibition era in the 1920s. The public and politicians realised that prohibition was not a viable approach to controlling alcohol, so within a few years moved to remove the ban. This presented Anslinger with a serious threat to his status, so he came up with a solution — replace alcohol prohibition with that of other drugs.

Starting with cannabis in the 1930s and then moving on to heroin in the 1950s and cocaine and crack in the 1980s, he created hysteria about the threat of other drugs to maintain funding of the bureau. Anslinger’s lies have, 50 years, on resulted in an international war on drugs throughout the world, killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people and magnified harms hugely.

Chasing the Scream is a remarkable book. It is moving and articulate and impossible to put down. Read it and demand our politicians take note!

David Nutt is professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London and author of Drugs Without the Hot Air: Minimising the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £15.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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