Law of Attraction Magazine October, 2015 | Page 53

Th e Li k el y Cau se o f A d d i ct i o n Has
Been Di sco v er ed ,
an d It Is No t W h at Yo u Th i n k
By Johann Hari
t is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned -and all through this long century of waging war on drugs,
we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers
and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained
in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It
seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years
ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing
The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to
figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it
too. But what I learned on the road is that almost
everything we have been told about addiction is wrong -and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we
are ready to hear it.
If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a
lot more than the drug war. We will have to change
ourselves.
I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met
on my travels. From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday,
who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on
drugs stalked and helped to kill her. From a Jewish doctor

who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby,
only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man.
From a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was
conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by
his father, an NYPD officer. From a man who was kept at
the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing
dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected President of
Uruguay and to begin the last days of the war on drugs.
I had a quite personal reason to set out for these
answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to
wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. Ever
since then, I have been turning over the essential
mystery of addiction in my mind -- what causes some
people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until
they can't stop? How do we help those people to come
back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives
developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a
relationship with a heroin addict. I guess addiction felt
like home to me.
If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the
start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot,
and said: "Drugs. Duh." It's not difficult to grasp. I thought
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