Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction – Johann Hari
Written by Elisa Garbil – 02.05.2025
Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari takes us beyond headlines and criminal statistics to confront a far more complex and urgent truth: our global drug policies are not just failing and they are actively producing harm. While it may seem a departure from previous discussions on extremism or gender inequality, this book reveals another dimension of risk that is just as systemic, just as urgent, and just as globally destabilising. Johann Hari tries to uncover a different approach, one that lies in tolerance, treatment, and helping others.
There are in reality two drug wars going on: there is the war on drugs, where the state wages war on the users and addicts, and there is the war for drugs, where the criminals fight each other to control the trade.
Johann Hari – Chasing the Scream
From opioid epidemics in North America to cartel violence in Mexico, and the criminalisation of addiction across much of the Global South, Chasing the Scream forces us to ask: what are the real drivers of drug-related harm, and what kind of risk environment are we sustaining by upholding prohibitionist models?
Since the Reagan-era escalation of the “War on Drugs,” States have spent billions militarising police forces, criminalising users, and exporting drug war logic across borders. But as Hari demonstrates, the real consequences are:
- Escalating violence in fragile states,
- Mass incarceration and racialised injustice,
- Public health crises with inadequate responses,
- And international distrust in the legitimacy of U.S.-led policy.
Prohibition creates a system in which the most insane and sadistic violence has a sane and functional logic. It is required. It is rewarded.
Johann Hari – Chasing the Scream
What we often call “drug crime” is, in fact, a policy outcome, a function of criminalisation, black markets, and institutional neglect.
It isn’t the drug that causes the harmful behaviour – it’s the environment.
Johann Hari – Chasing the Scream
Hari’s book is a compelling call for a paradigm shift, one that reframes drug use not as a moral failing or criminal threat, but as a symptom of systemic exclusion, which is often rooted in trauma, poverty, or social fragmentation.
Addiction is a disease of loneliness.
Johann Hari – Chasing the Scream
The real risk lies not in substances themselves, but in the conditions of hopelessness, alienation, and abandonment that fuel addiction. In addition, the environment we grow up in plays a huge role. Your friends, your parents, family trauma, your education, and the location play a role in how you grow up. Don’t get me wrong, it is not a given, many people grow up differently even if they have very similar backgrounds, but, if you grow up with drugs being more available to you, you are more inclined to take them. If we allow for a society that helps people with addiction, with harmful thoughts, with problems they feel they can’t get out of, we would be able to help a whole lot more people than banishing them to the outskirts and seeing them as filth because of addiction. Addicts do not want to become addicts, they are merely trying to get away from something: feelings, memories, the present. Ensuring we have a society that allows people to get drugs safely, no matter the strengths, would allow people to slowly get out of addiction. Allowing them to have stable housing and a community would lead to less loneliness, it would lead to less theft. Ensuring that people can get the help they need so desperately will help us as a society as a whole.
These are not individual failings, they are public policy failures, and in many cases, they are international governance failures. Countries that have experimented with alternative frameworks, like legal regulation, harm reduction, safe injection sites, or housing-first policies, have shown promising outcomes. They have noticed reduced overdoses, lower crime, higher recovery rates. But the inertia of punitive drug policy remains dominant, especially where political narratives prioritise control over care.
In a world where non-traditional security threats, for example pandemics, mass migration, and inequality, are recognised as strategic risks, addiction and drug policy must be part of the equation. Hari’s work helps illuminate:
- The link between prohibition and transnational organised crime;
- The criminal justice risks of mass incarceration;
- The public health consequences of stigmatised addiction;
- And the geopolitical consequences of enforcing prohibition through economic coercion.
The US government has approached Mexico with the same threat as the cartels – plata or plum. Silver or lead. We can give you economic ‘aid’ to fight this war, or we wreck your economy if you don’t.
Johann Hari – Chasing the Scream
This is not just a social issue. It’s a question of human rights, public trust, and system stability. If your crisis response frameworks, ESG assessments, or public policy recommendations do not account for drug policy reform, they are overlooking a key risk vector in global security.
In a true democracy, nobody gets written off. Nobody gets abandoned. Nobody’s life is declared to be not worth living.
Johann Hari – Chasing the Scream
Whether you agree with decriminalisation, partial legalisation, or full regulatory control, Hari’s Chasing the Scream is a vital resource. It challenges us to reassess not just the outcomes of current policies, but the values and assumptions underpinning them. In systems thinking, we often say: the structure determines the outcome. This book shows exactly how that plays out in the lives of millions, and why a new structure is long overdue.
