Johann Hari is announcing the launch of his new book, Chasing the Scream, about the ‘war on drugs’:
It is now 100 years since drugs were first banned – the opening shot in a drug war that continues to this day. As this centenary approached, the award-winning journalist Johann Hari set off on an epic three-year, 30,000-mile journey into the war on drugs to uncover its secrets – and he found that everything we have been told on this subject is wrong. Drugs are not what we think they are. Addiction is not what we think it is. And the drug war is not what we have been told it is for all these years.
Hari reveals his startling discoveries entirely through the true stories of people across the world whose lives have been transformed by this war – all told with the compulsiveness of a thriller. 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. Hari discovers that at the birth of the drug war, Billie Holiday was stalked and killed by the man who launched this crusade – while at the end of the drug war, a brave doctor has led his country to decriminalize every drug, from cannabis to crack, with remarkable results.
In ‘Chasing The Scream’, you will begin to see what we have really been chasing in our century of drug war – in our hunger for drugs, and in our attempt to destroy them.
Like I have stated earlier, the so-called ‘drug war’ is an assault on civil liberties and no government has no business telling it’s citizens what they can or cannot do with their bodies (as long as they don’t hurt anyone else, of course).
I have a lengthy to read list, but I guess this book can make it to the top positions, even when it is being lauded by people I have in extremely low regard, such as Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein.
(Image: lewishamdreamer via photopin cc)
