Book review: Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

Compelling. Evocative. Persuasive. Whether you are opposed to the war on drugs, fully support it, are undecided or just uninformed, it is worth your time to read this investigation in to how the war started, who its victims are, and whether it is just making things worse. Even before I read Johann Hari's recent book (published this year (2015)), I believed that drug prohibition had many of the ill effects as alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, with no better chance for success. (Crime, smuggling, corruption, police brutality, poison deaths - all with little effect on usage.)  Hari comes to the same conclusion, looking at the U.S. experience from 1914 to 2014, and at the experience of other countries, notably Switzerland, Portugal, and Uruguay, which have to varying degrees, ended the war on drugs - and seen drug abuse decline as a result.

Hari's subject is controversial, as is Hari himself (he lost his position as popular columnist over plagiarism charges, no doubt one of the reasons he is so careful to document sources in this book).

Hari humanizes his subject, and in particular its victims. Even the drug dealers, mob bosses, and cartel hitmen appear as humans, to the dismay perhaps of those seeking still to divide the world into black and white, good and evil. (Indeed, from the book it appears the only person for whom Hari has no sympathy is the late Dr. Timothy Leary.)

You need not accept Hari's thesis that addiction stems primarily from isolation to perceive that his examples of decriminalization and legalization as successfully reducing the harmful effects of drug use are, at least in their settings, valid. Or vice-versa. The War on Drugs -- Nancy Reagan's facile "Just Say No," "This your brain on drugs," DA.R.E., and harsh raids and punishments you wouldn't inflict on a rabid dog -- has failed. What was that definition of insanity?

Book Review: Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I, by Michael S. Neiberg

Did you know:

a) most Europeans did not want a general war in 1914?
b) most Europeans did not expect the war to last more than a few weeks or at most months after it did start?
c) war causes privation, and seeing the dead and wounded from war is emotionally painful?

If your answer to all three is "yes" - skip Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I, by Michael S. Neiberg.