Johann Hari: 'The opposite of addiction isn't sobriety – it's connection'

The author of Chasing the Scream on his anxiety about writing a book, and the 30,000-mile journey of recognition and shared stories it took him on, from the drug war ‘ground zero’ in Baltimore to Colombia and Mexico

When you write a book, it’s like writing a message in a bottle and tossing it into the ocean – you know the likelihood is that nobody will ever find it, and it’s hard to picture the people who might. I’ve known plenty of people who spent years writing important books, only for virtually nobody to ever read them. So I was conscious, all through the three-and-a-half years I was writing Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, that I was most likely writing primarily for myself and for the people I love.

I was OK with that, because I was impelled on this writing journey for a very personal reason – a series of questions I needed to answer. One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. I didn’t understand why then, but as I got older, I realised we had addiction in my family. As I began writing, I knew we were coming up to a century since the world first went to war against drug users, addicts and providers, and I wanted to know – why? What really causes drug use and drug addiction? What are the alternatives in practice? There was one person I love in particular who was close to killing himself with crack and heroin. I needed to know if the addicts I loved could be brought back to me, and how.

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