Chasing the scream the first and last days of the war on drugs

It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned in the United States. On the eve of this centenary, journalist Johann Hari set off on an epic three-year, thirty-thousand-mile journey into the war on drugs. What he found is that more and more people all over the world have begun to recogniz...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Hari, Johann (Author)
Format: Books Print Book
Language:English
Published: New York, New York : Bloomsbury, 2015.
Edition:First U.S. edition.
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Summary:It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned in the United States. On the eve of this centenary, journalist Johann Hari set off on an epic three-year, thirty-thousand-mile journey into the war on drugs. What he found is that more and more people all over the world have begun to recognize three startling truths: Drugs are not what we think they are. Addiction is not what we think it is. And the drug war has very different motives to the ones we have seen on our TV screens for so long. In Chasing the Scream, Hari reveals his discoveries entirely through the stories of people across the world whose lives have been transformed by this war. They range from a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn searching for her mother, to a teenage hit-man in Mexico searching for a way out. It begins with Hari's discovery that at the birth of the drug war, Billie Holiday was stalked and killed by the man who launched this crusade--and it ends with the story of a brave doctor who has led his country to decriminalize every drug, from cannabis to crack, with remarkable results. Chasing the Scream lays bare what we really have been chasing in our century of drug war--in our hunger for drugs, and in our attempt to destroy them. This book will challenge and change how you think about one of the most controversial--and consequential--questions of our time.
Physical Description:389 pages ; 25 cm
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references (pages 361-373) and index.
ISBN:9781620408902
1620408902
Author Notes:Johann Hari is the author of Lost Connections . He was twice named Newspaper Journalist of the Year by Amnesty International UK. He has written for the New York Times , the Los Angeles Times , and others, and he is a regular panelist on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher . His TED talk, "Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong," and the animation based on it have more than twenty million views. Hari lives in London.