When you write a book, it’s like writing a message in a bottle and tossing it into the ocean – you know the likelihood is that nobody will ever find it, and it’s hard to picture the people who might. I’ve known plenty of people who spent years writing important books, only for virtually nobody to ever read them. So I was conscious, all through the three-and-a-half years I was writing Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, that I was most likely writing primarily for myself and for the people I love.

I was OK with that, because I was impelled on this writing journey for a very personal reason – a series of questions I needed to answer. One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. I didn’t understand why then, but as I got older, I realised we had addiction in my family. As I began writing, I knew we were coming up to a century since the world first went to war against drug users, addicts and providers, and I wanted to know – why? What really causes drug use and drug addiction? What are the alternatives in practice? There was one person I love in particular who was close to killing himself with crack and heroin. I needed to know if the addicts I loved could be brought back to me, and how.

In search of answers, I ended up going on a 30,000-mile journey, to a dozen countries. I don’t want to get all Oprah on you, but one of the main things I realized is that the best journeys in life aren’t where you find yourself – they’re where you find other people.

I met so many people on the road who taught me to think differently about this – from a transgendered former crack dealer in Brooklyn, to a Canadian scientist who discovered what really causes addiction, to a hitman for the deadliest Mexican drug cartel, to the doctor who led his country to decriminalise all drugs. (You can listen to my interviews with all these people, and everyone quoted in the book here.)

The book is their stories. They taught me, in their different ways, that when we give in to our anger towards addicts, or drugs – and there’s some of it in all of us – the problem only gets worse; and when we choose a deep kind of love, the results can be amazing.

But once the book was sealed and sent, I thought the journey was over. If the fate of almost all books is to be ignored, I suspected that would be especially true of mine, because of some serious things I had done wrong several years before. Then a weird thing happened: a few pieces I wrote about the book – especially this one, explaining the real causes of addiction - went viral. And then people began to respond, all over the world, to the stories and arguments in the book.

Police officers arrest a suspected drug dealer in Baltimore, Maryland. Photograph: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

One of the first public events I did was in Baltimore – ground zero for the drug war, and a place where I had spent time researching Chasing the Scream. After I had spoken, a woman came up to me at the signing. She said softly that her brother was an addict, and she hadn’t seen him in seven years. She had read my book, she said, and it made her think she shouldn’t be angry at her brother; she should be angry at the persecution of addicts. That’s why she was taking him out for lunch next week.

Since that evening in Baltimore, talking to people about the book has taken me on a journey almost as epic as the one it took to write the book in the first place – from Los Angeles to Medellín, from Oslo to Mexico City. The range of responses has been wild and raucous. But two things struck me everywhere. The first is how similar the debate is across the world. Drug prohibition is a global war, and it has predictable effects everywhere it is tried. On South African radio, people cried the same tears as others did on phone-ins thousands of miles away.

The second thing that struck me is how hungry people are to hear about the alternatives. There is a deep awareness that what we’ve been doing isn’t working – but people wanted to know what the alternatives could possibly be. What happened when Portugal decriminalised all drugs, and transferred the money they used to spend on making addicts’ lives worse to making their lives better? Did they really reduce injecting drug use by 50% that way? Why did Switzerland legalise heroin, and did they reduce deaths on legal heroin to zero? How?

But beyond those obvious similarities, I could sense there was something else lying beneath so many of the questions I was asked – although it took a while for me to realise what it was.

An anti-drugs officer guards workers as they destroy coca-leaf plantations in Nariño province, Colombia. Photograph: Jose Gomez/Reuters

One of the ways the “war on drugs” works is that it makes the people it is destroying feel that it is all their fault. It does this to drug users, drug addicts, drug sellers and the people who live in the supply route countries. It makes them feel they are dirty and defective, and soaks them in shame. Chasing the Scream – and the people I met for it – told them a story that said they shouldn’t feel this way. On the contrary: they should be loved. And more: often, they were heroes, for surviving, and resisting. “It’s the first book,” one recovering addict told me in Washington DC, “that made me feel I shouldn’t be ashamed.”

Shame is spread everywhere except where it's deserved – on the people who have been imposing this war for 101 years

A few weeks ago, I told an audience in Colombia that the world owed them an apology – for inflicting this war on them. A young woman stood up, and said nobody had ever said that to them before. They had always been made to feel the opposite – that they owed the world an apology. She looked startled. Shame, I realised at that moment, is spread everywhere in this global war except in the direction where it’s deserved – the people who have been imposing this war on the world for the past 101 years, even though the evidence has been clear for a long time that it’s not the best way.

As I write this, a lot of the memories of the past year are a bit of an adrenaline blur, but I think there are a few moments that I’ll always remember. They are tied together by one of the central themes of Chasing the Scream: connection. I was taught by the people I met – and by the growing scientific evidence – that we are all more vulnerable to addiction now because we are increasingly isolated from each other, and from the things that give us meaning. As I say in the book, the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety; it is connection.

An animation scripted by Johann Hari.

So it seems strangely fitting that the book led me to all sorts of connections I could never have imagined. There are some examples that flicker through my mind most strongly as I write this.

Here’s the first. My book is being translated into Farsi, among other languages. I asked my Iranian translator, Kambiz Tavana, why he was doing it – it’s going to have to be smuggled into Iran, so he’s taking a real risk.

He was inspired to do it, he said, by the story in the book of a man called Bud Osborn. Bud was a homeless street addict in Vancouver, and he was watching his friends die all around him of overdoses. He decided to organise a group of street addicts, to persuade the city to transform its approach to addicts, and open the first safe injection room in North America. After years, they even won over the city’s rightwing mayor – and reduced deaths from overdose in Bud’s neighbourhood by a remarkable 80%. Of all the people I got to know for Chasing the Scream, Bud was perhaps the one I admired the most, but I never expected to help his activism bounce 6,500 miles to Iran. It taught me that courage and compassion can be contagious.

Across the world, we are all trying to deal with the same pain, afraid for the people we love in the same way

Here’s the second. At the launch for my book in Mexico City, hosted by the Instituto Mexicano para la Justicia, I was joined by two politicians who made the case for ending the drug war and choosing a legal, regulated market for drugs instead. Once the event was over, Sofia García – one of the leading figures in the Institute – mentioned to me in passing that the politicians had both needed armed guards to come to this event. The one thing the cartels fear – more than anything else – is a regulated, legal market. As she said that, I thought about how bluntly those politicians had argued for really stopping these criminals. These murderers could come after them any time, long after I had jumped on a plane back to the US. But they did it anyway, because it’s the right thing to do.

Police officers guard seven tons of seized cocaine in Lima, Peru. The drugs originated in Mexico and were bound for Europe. Photograph: Ernesto Benavides/AFP/Getty Images

The third example was perhaps the smallest event I’ve done. When you speak at the brilliant Brisbane Writers’ festival, in addition to the main gig, they ask you to drive a few hours to a small local library to talk there too. About 12 people turned up, and I talked a little. And then the audience started to talk. They had all, in different ways, been touched by addiction. I saw some of them were understandably tempted to cut off the addicts in their lives, to cauterise the pain. Instead, they were taking a risk; the risk of loving, instead of deadening their feelings. I thought about how I was on the other side of the earth, and we were all trying to deal with the same pain, afraid for the people we love in the same way, seeking the same hope.

So my message in a bottle washed up on shores I could ever have pictured – Iranians inspired by homeless Canadians; Mexican politicians accompanied by armed guards, and Australians weeping for their addicted relatives.

But you know – I think if it had only washed up with that first woman in Baltimore, and the addicted brother she was taking out for lunch, it would all have been worth it.

You can follow Johann on Twitter and visit the book’s Facebook page.



Extract from Chasing the Scream

When Billie Holiday stood on stage, her hair was pulled back tightly; her face was round and shining in the lights; her voice was scratched with pain. It was on one of these nights, in 1939, that she started to sing a song that would later become iconic: Southern trees bear a strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.

Before, black women had – with very few exceptions – been allowed on stage only as beaming caricatures, stripped of all real feeling. But now, here, she was Lady Day, a black woman expressing grief and fury at the mass murder of her brothers in the south.

“It was extremely brave, when you think about it,” her goddaughter Lorraine Feather told me. At that time, “every song was about love. You simply did not have a piece of music being performed at some hotel that was about the killing of people – about such a sordid and cruel fact. It was not done. Ever.”

And to have an African American woman doing such a song? About lynching? But Billie did it because the song “seemed to spell out all the things that had killed” her father, Clarence, in the south. The audience listened, hushed.

That night, Lady Day was ordered by the authorities to stop singing this song. She refused. Her harassment by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics began the next day. Before long, it would play a crucial role in killing her.

More about Chasing the Scream

Hari’s run of compelling latter-day characters takes us from a transsexual reformed dealer in Brooklyn to a bereaved mother in Mexico, and on in turn to an array of would-be reformers who have tried to offer an alternative to the war’s self-defeating logic. Most breathtaking is the tale of a punitive anti-drug regime in Arizona that took the life of Prisoner 109416 – AKA Marcia Powell – a fortysomething crystal meth addict who in May 2009 was left outdoors in a metal cage for four hours in searing heat by prison officers encouraged to believe that addicts had rendered themselves subhuman. – John Harris

Read the rest of the review

Buy the book

Chasing the Scream is published by Bloomsbury at £9.99 and is available at the Guardian Bookshop at £7.99.