"I'll give you a staggering quote," says British author and journalist Johann Hari. "When Michelle Leonhart, who's the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in America, was asked about the fact that 60,000 innocent people have died in a drug war in Mexico in the last seven years, the words she used was it was 'a sign of success' in the war on drugs. And you just think: that should be a fucking scandal!"
Leonhart's alarmingly dumb and shockingly inhumane quote appears on page 141 of Hari's recently published second book, Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. Its original source (a BBC News report) is cited in the near 60 pages of explanatory notes at the end. Meanwhile all of the audio interviews that the 36-year-old writer personally conducted as part of his rigorous research are available to hear on a specifically constructed website.
There's a good reason for this somewhat OTT transparency. Four years ago, Hari – an award winning journalist with The Independent – found himself neck deep in shit after he was discovered to have plagiarised other people's work, misrepresented that material he got from interviews, and anonymously spread malicious falsehoods about other journalists via Wikipedia. The scandal led to him being stripped of his 2008 Orwell Prize and, ultimately, to his departure from The Independent.
We're sitting in the breakfast room of Brooks Hotel the morning after his appearance at the International Literature Festival in Dublin. A somewhat nervous-looking, bespectacled and baby-faced man, wearing a large 'Votail Tá!' badge (he was once named 'Gay Journalist of the Year' by Stonewall), Hari doesn't want to discuss these matters this morning. "I fucked up," is all he'll offer, shrugging defensively.
Given the scale of the abuse he received at the time, it's perfectly understandable that he doesn't want to go there. Still, while has no shortage of unforgiving media detractors, he also obviously has many high profile supporters. There's a veritable blitzkrieg of blurbs on the books cover from the likes of Noam Chomsky ('Wonderful'), Elton John ('Stunning'), Stephen Fry ('Brilliant') and Naomi Klein ('Thrilling').
"Some of them are friends of mine," he admits. "A lot of them are people who really believe in this issue. Like Elton John obviously had an addiction problem that he’s talked about publicly, as did Russell Brand who also endorsed the book. But you know, drugs are already effectively decriminalised for rich people, right? Elton and Russell were never going to go to prison. When they develop drug problems, they’re given a lot of love and support to turn their lives around. That’s exactly what everyone should get.
“I’m not revealing any secrets when I say it’s been reported that a relative of David Cameron’s, for example, developed a very, very bad drug problem,” he continues. “David Cameron didn’t pick up the phone and ring the police. He made sure his relative went to a nice expensive rehab centre, and was given loads of love and support to turn his life around. We all need for the people we love to be given compassion and care, and turn their lives around. Well, that’s what everyone should get, not just rich people.”
Sadly, as Chasing the Scream repeatedly reveals, that’s just not the way this crazy old world works. Hari spent three years visiting nine countries researching, travelling 30,000 miles on a quest to interview addicts, dealers, doctors, scientists, lawmakers, politicians, assassins, prisoners, Mexican cartel members, and various others involved in, or affected by, the War on Drugs. You can’t blame him for wanting to absent himself from the UK for a while, but did he write such a demanding book as a form of penance for his media sins?
“No, I wanted to write the best book I could,” he insists. “I’d fucked up. But I deliberately didn’t think about the book in those terms. It was a subject I was fascinated about, and I wrote it for those reasons. And obviously I wrote it to the highest factual standard that I could. I recorded everything, all the audio is online. People can listen to the more than 400 quotes on the website.” Did he think of turning to drugs himself at the height of the scandal?
“Uh, no definitely not... the opposite,” he smiles, tightly. “I realised we were coming up to 100 years since since drugs were first criminalised, and I thought of myself as someone who knew quite a lot about the subject because we’d had drug addiction in the family. One of my earliest memories was of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. Obviously I didn’t understand why then. As I got older I understood why.
“Also I’d written about it a lot as a newspaper columnist but when I thought about the centenary, I suddenly realised there’s just loads of really basic questions I don’t know the answer to – like why were drugs banned in the first place 100 years ago? Why do we carry on with this approach even though it seems obviously to be failing? What are the actual alternatives like in practice? And what really causes drug use and drug addiction? And I started reading stuff, and I was not finding the answers in what I was reading, so I decided to go and try and find the answers for myself.”
The result, he reckons, is “more a book of stories than a book of arguments.” Chasing The Scream’s title refers to [founding commissioner of the US Treasure Department Federal Bureau of Narcotics] Harry J. Anslinger’s disturbing childhood encounter with a morphine addicted farmer’s wife in the hysterical throes of cold turkey. Hari maintains that the war on drugs started in that moment.
Although obviously quite a nasty Machiavellian piece of work, who viewed addicts as subhuman (seeing her as a legitimate target, Anslinger essentially stalked and killed jazz singer Billie Holiday), there’s at least an attempt to understand what drove the man in the book. Did Hari have sympathy for America’s self-appointed drugs czar?
“That’s a good question,” he muses. “No one’s asked me that. I kind of do. I think the only way the war on drugs can continue is because we’ve de- humanised the people at its heart, right? We’ve de- humanised addicts, we’ve de-humanised dealers, we’ve de-humanised cops, we’ve de-humanised people that live on the supply route countries. And Anslinger was like one of the pioneers of this de- humanisation.
“He didn’t regard African-Americans as human. He didn’t regard addicts as human. And I guess I really wanted to not do it in reverse. I think part of the job about the drug war is re-humanising all these people.
“So Anslinger was a dark and complex figure. I think he’s the most influential person no one’s ever heard of. You know, he’s the first man to use the phrase ‘War on Drugs’, he’s the creator of the modern drug war. I think what he did to Billie Holiday is horrific, and then what he did to the world is horrific, but he was a human being like everyone. I think we should understand him, where he came from, because you can’t really argue against people if you don’t understand where they’re coming from.”
Given the relatively recent legalisation of marijuana in certain US states, does Hari
think that America will now start to change its internationally influential, and undeniably disastrous, draconian stance on illegal drugs?
“It already is if you look at the way Colorado and Washington voted to legalise cannabis,” he says. “It’s now sold legally in licensed stores. Fascinating result. That is 55 per cent of people voted for the legalisation. It’s now been a year since it’s been
in practice and support for the legalisation has gone up to 67 per cent. Because when people see it in practice, they realise that things they’re frightened of don’t happen. I think that’s really crucial.”