About this item
New York Times BestsellerIt is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned in the United States. On the eve of this centenary, journalist Johann Hari set off on an epic three-year, thirty-thousand-mile journey into the war on drugs. What he found is that more and more people all over the world have begun to recognize three startling truths: Drugs are not what we think they are. Addiction is not what we think it is. And the drug war has very different motives to the ones we have seen on our TV screens for so long.In Chasing the Scream, Hari reveals his discoveries entirely through the stories of people across the world whose lives have been transformed by this war. 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.
About the Author
Johann Hari is an award-winning British journalist and playwright. He was a columnist for The Independent and the Huffington Post, and has won awards for his war reporting. His work has also appeared in the , the , the , the , the , the (Britain's main gay magazine) , the and a wide range of other international newspapers and magazines. Hari describes himself as a "European social democrat", who believes that markets are "an essential tool to generate wealth" but must be matched by strong democratic governments and strong trade unions or they become "disastrous". He appears regularly as an arts critic on the BBC Two programme Newsnight Review, and he is a book critic for Slate. He has been named by the Daily Telegraph as one of the most influential people on the left in Britain, and by the Dutch magazine Winq as one of the twenty most influential gay people in the world. After two scandals in 2011 involving plagiarism and malicious editing of Wikipedia pages, Hari was forced to return the prestigious Orwell prize he had won in 2008, and lost his position at
