John Marks, a young psychiatrist in 1980s Liverpool, was given the dull job of looking after heroin addicts on prescription. But he was conscientious and set out to understand what worked for them. He discovered they were doing much, much better than street junkies - they had jobs, stable families and weren’t criminals. So he did what Hippocrates would have wanted and expanded the program massively. Even as unemployment was ravaging the city, HIV rates, criminality and street prostitution all fell. Militant Tendency, who controlled the city, disapproved because he gave the masses the opiates that forestalled revolution. And when the US DEA found out what he was up to, the Conservative government was pressured to abolish his programs. His clinics were handed over to evangelical Christians who could be trusted to deliver to the masses their alternative opiate from the pulpit.
This is typical of the stories that fill Johann Hari’s powerful diatribe against the war on drugs: heartbreaking stories of unloved addicts; brave reformers who go against the orthodoxy, and a toxic alliance of ruthless criminals and conservative Americans who thwart progress.
The war on drugs, on Hari’s reading, has been a long nightmare of a trip. Prohibition is the life-blood of vampiric criminal organisations that hold addicts, small-time dealers, downtown neighbourhoods, bent policeman and whole narco-states in their violent embrace. Prisons which mirror the nastiness of the bad guys are chock-a-block with members of the lowest rungs of the drug economy. The arteries of the legal system are all clogged up by the war. If you’ve suffered petty theft, the likelihood is you are another victim. And if someone you love is among the 10% of hard drugs users who becomes addicted, you want just two things: first, that they stop; and, second, if that’s too much to ask for, that they be safe - both of which, Hari plausibly argues, are made much less likely by prohibition.
