A few weeks ago, somebody asked me a strange question, and at first I was a little bit offended.
It is now a century since drugs were first banned in the US and Britain, and as this anniversary approached, I set off on a three-year, 30,000-mile journey to try to understand what the war on drugs is really all about. I had a quite personal reason for setting off on this quest. One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. As I got older, we had serious drug addiction in my family, and I had an on-off relationship with a guy who was sinking into crack addiction.
My journey – described in my book ‘Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs’ – allowed me to get to know some people I could never have imagined at the start, from a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn, to a hit-man for the deadliest drug cartel in Mexico; from a scientist who feeds hallucinogens to mongooses, to the only country in the world to ever decriminalize all drugs, from cannabis to crack. They taught me that almost everything we have been told about this subject is wrong. Drugs are not what we think they are. Drug addiction is not what we think it is. And the drug war is not what it has been portrayed as on our TV screens for so long.
