Johann Hari And Other Drugs

"Drug Addiction is not what we think it is."

Johann Eduard Hari (born 21 January 1979) is a British writer and journalist who wrote columns for The Independent (London) and The Huffington Post and made contributions to other publications.

In 2011, he was suspended from The Independent after charges of plagiarism. He also publicly apologised for making improper edits to several of his critics' Wikipedia pages under a pseudonym.

He is the author of two books ;

Johann Hari (2015). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-620-408902.

Johann Hari (2002). God Save the Queen?. Icon Books. ISBN 978-1-84046-401-6.

In his discussion on his book "Chasing the Scream" he talked of what made him go behind this subject and his take on addiction from what he learned through his journey.

"It’s now a hundred years since drugs were first banned. And four years ago, nearly four years ago, when I started writing the book, I realized we were coming up to the centenary, and I wanted to think about this for quite a personal reason. One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to, and there was a lot of addiction in my family. And I kind of realized that there were loads of really basic questions that I just didn’t know the answer to about this subject. Why did we start kind of going to war against drug users and addicts in the first place? Why do we continue, even though a lot of people think it doesn’t work? What really causes drug use and drug addiction? And what are the alternatives? And so, I didn’t want to do that. I thought part of the problem with this whole debate is we talk about it in such an abstract way, you know? Like we talk like we’re at a philosophy seminar, and we talk about how the world should be. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to talk about real people whose lives were changed one way or another.

So I ended up going on this kind of big journey across nine different countries and meeting a really fascinating range of people, from a transsexual crack dealer in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to a scientist who spends a lot of time feeding hallucinogens to mongooses to see if they like them—they do, but only in very specific circumstances—and to the only country that’s ever decriminalized all drugs, from cannabis to crack, with really striking results. And the book is really the story of how I discovered that almost everything we think we know about this subject is wrong. Drugs are not what we think they are. Addiction is not what we think it is. The drug war is certainly not what we’ve been told it is. And the alternatives aren’t what we think they are."

Below is the link by TED talk where Johann Hari explains to us why everything we think about addiction may be wrong and proves his theory.

#people #video